Category: Government

Refusenik Sharansky Argues That Palestinians Have Human Rights but Not the Right to Murder Jews

(p. A15) An Israeli politician and human-rights advocate, Mr. Sharansky was once the best-known refusenik—a name for Soviet Jews who were denied permission to emigrate to Israel. In February 1986, he became “the first political prisoner released by Mikhail Gorbachev.” He served as a cabinet minister in every Israeli government from 1996 to 2005, including a stint as Ariel Sharon’s deputy prime minister from 2001 to 2003.

Before emigrating to Israel, he spent nine years in Soviet prisons accused of treason. He’s 75 but jokes that he’s 66: “My nine years in prison don’t count.”

. . .

Mr. Sharansky abhors Oslo. Still regarded in some circles as the touchstone of Israeli-Palestinian compromise, the agreement handed control of Palestinian land to Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority in the belief that he would be able to subdue Hamas. “I’m not against compromises with the Palestinians,” Mr. Sharansky says. “I’ve said I’m for a two-state solution from the moment I came to Israel. I want Palestinians to have the same rights as I, but they should never have an opportunity to destroy me.”

At Oslo, he says, Israel foisted “a ruthless dictator on the Palestinians. We told them, “Like it or not, he will be your leader.’ With [Bill] Clinton and all the free world, we gave Arafat the power to destroy all the beginnings of freedom of the Palestinian people and helped build a generation of haters.” Mr. Sharansky says it’s “absolutely ridiculous” that a “fifth generation” of Palestinians lives in refugee camps, but he says “their leaders are to blame. And the free world, that gives money to these leaders—a lot of money.”

Mr. Sharansky is certain that Israel’s security can be assured only by a free Palestinian society, in which people “enjoy a normal life, normal freedom, the opportunity to vote and have their own human rights.” In “The Case for Democracy” (2004), he wrote: “I remain convinced that a neighbor who tramples on the rights of its own people will eventually threaten the security of my people.” The book was published a year before Israel “disengaged” from the Gaza Strip, withdrawing the army and forcibly uprooting Jews who had settled there.

That decision led Mr. Sharansky to resign from Sharon’s cabinet. Arafat had failed to tame Hamas, and Mr. Sharansky believed Gaza would be taken over by the terrorist group, whose ideology is “suicide for the sake of destroying the state of Israel.” He resigned before disengagement took effect, because he didn’t want to “take responsibility for the fact that we, by our own hands, were creating the biggest terrorist base in the Middle East, and that missiles will come one day to Ashkelon,” a coastal city less than 10 miles from the Gaza border.

For the full interview, see:

Tunku Varadarajan, interviewer. “THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW; A Refusenik in a Country at War.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Oct. 28, 2023): A15.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the interview has the date October 27, 2023, and has the title “THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW; Opinion: A Refusenik in a Country at War.” In the original the word “refusenik” was italicized in the body of the interview.)

Natan Sharansky’s book mentioned above is:

Sharansky, Natan. The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror. New York: PublicAffairs, 2004.

Americans Buy SUVs, Rejecting Limited Space in Their Vehicles

(p. A6) Not all consumers think of the energy consumption and environmental benefits the same way, especially in the U.S. While EV sales accounted for 15% of the global car market last year, that was only 7.3% in the U.S.

Meanwhile, smaller vehicles, or sedans, lost a lot of ground in the U.S. market over the past decade. In 2012, sedans accounted for 50% of the U.S. auto retail space, with SUVs at just over 30%, and trucks at 13.5%, according to car-buying resource Edmunds. By 2022, U.S. sedan share dropped to 21%, while SUVs hit 54.5% and trucks grew to 20%.

“People don’t want to be limited by their space in their car,” said Eric Frehsée, president of the Tamaroff Group of dealerships in southeast Michigan. “Everyone wants a 7-passenger.”

For the full story, see:

ALEXA ST. JOHN, Associated Press. “Big Cars Erase Gains from Cleaner Tech.” Omaha World-Herald (Wednesday, Nov. 29, 2023): A6.

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Nov. 28, 2023, and has the title “Buyers go for bigger cars, erasing gains from cleaner tech. EVs would help.”)

Planners of Megaprojects Almost Always Over-Promise and Under-Deliver

(p. B5) Bent Flyvbjerg is an expert in the planning and management of “megaprojects,” his name for huge efforts that require at least $1 billion of investment: bridges, tunnels, office towers, airports, telescopes and even the Olympics. He’s spent decades wrapping his mind around the many ways megaprojects go wrong and the few ways to get them right, and he summarizes what he’s learned from his research and real-world experience in a new book called “How Big Things Get Done.”

Spoiler alert! Big things get done very badly.

They cost too much. They take too long. They fall too short of expectations too often. This is what Dr. Flyvbjerg calls the Iron Law of Megaprojects: “over budget, over time, under benefits, over and over again.”

The Iron Law of Megaprojects might sound familiar to anyone who has survived a home renovation. But when Dr. Flyvbjerg dug into the numbers, the financial overruns and time delays were more common than he expected. And worse. Much worse.

His seminal work on big projects can be distilled into three pitiful numbers:

• 47.9% are delivered on budget.

• 8.5% are delivered on budget and on time.

• 0.5% are delivered on budget, on time and with the projected benefits.

. . .

Humans are optimistic by nature and underestimate how long it takes to complete future tasks. It doesn’t seem to matter how many times we fall prey to this cognitive bias known as the planning fallacy. We can always ignore our previous mishaps and delude ourselves into believing this time will be different. We’re also subject to the power dynamics and competitive forces that complicate reality, since megaprojects don’t take place in controlled environments, and they are plagued by politics as much as psychology. Take funding, for example. “How do you get funding?” he said. “By making it look good on paper. You underestimate the cost so it looks cheaper, and you underestimate the schedule so it looks like you can do it faster.”

For the full review, see:

Ben Cohen. “SCIENCE OF SUCCESS; 99% of Big Projects Fail. Lego Is the Fix.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, February 4, 2023): B5.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date February 2, 2023, and has the title “SCIENCE OF SUCCESS; 99% of Big Projects Fail. His Fix Starts With Legos.”)

The book under review is:

Flyvbjerg, Bent, and Dan Gardner. How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything in Between. New York: Currency, 2023.

Disabled Civil Rights Leader Removed from Audience of “The Color Purple” Because the Chair He Brought Fails to Comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act

Presumably the Reverend William J. Barber II knows what chair designs reduce the chronic pain he feels from the ankylosing spondylitis he has endured “for almost 40 years.” He has what Hayek called “local knowledge” that is not possessed by the government legislators and enforcers of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Regulations keep individuals from using their local knowledge, with results that can be outrageously unfair.

(p. A15) AMC Theaters has apologized to the Rev. William J. Barber II, a civil rights leader, after he was escorted from a Greenville, N.C., theater after employees refused to allow him to use a chair he needs to manage a painful medical condition, he said.

Mr. Barber, 60, was attending a Tuesday afternoon screening of “The Color Purple” with his mother, Eleanor Barber, 90. He said he tried to use the chair, which an assistant carried for him, by placing it in an area reserved for handicapped seating, saying he had done so before in theaters, at Broadway plays and even on a visit to the White House.

He said a theater employee told him that he would not be able to use the chair, which looks like a small stool, because it did not comply with guidelines in the Americans with Disabilities Act.

. . .

Mr. Barber has a condition called ankylosing spondylitis, and walks slowly with the aid of a cane. He said the disease attacks his joints “like a guided missile” and has forced him to live with chronic pain for almost 40 years. “I describe it like that because it’s a war to live with it,” he said.

He added that people with disabilities often fight invisible battles that can be difficult for people not living with disabilities to understand.

For the full story, see:

Clyde McGrady. “Rights Leader Gets Apology For Removal From Theater.” The New York Times (Saturday, December 30, 2023): A15.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Dec. 28, 2023, and has the title “AMC Theaters Apologizes to Civil Rights Leader Removed From Movie Theater.”)

“People’s Experience with the D.M.V.” Teaches Them “the Government Is Plodding, Slow”

(p. B1) The film “Leave the World Behind” centers on the idea of mistrust and how easy it is for humans to lose empathy for one another when faced with a crisis. It is at once unnerving, misanthropic and bleak, and, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, it’s produced by Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company, Higher Ground.

. . .

(p. B5) While Mr. Obama was no stranger to Hollywood — since his early days of campaigning for the presidency he found a welcoming audience among the show business elite — he has found that working in this business has taken some getting used to.

“It’s ironic that the private sector is made out to be this hyper-efficient thing, and the government is plodding, slow,” he said. “I think part of it is ideological and part of it is people’s experience with the D.M.V.”

For the full story, see:

Nicole Sperling. “Reimagining Storytelling, Obama Style.” The New York Times (Friday, December 8, 2023): B1 & B5.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Dec. 7, 2023, and has the title “Obamas’ Vision for Hollywood Company: ‘This Isn’t Like Masterpiece Theatre’.”)

Milken’s Junk Bond Innovation “Opened Up Cheaper and More Efficient Financing”

(p. A15) In “Witness to a Prosecution,” Mr. Sandler, a childhood friend who was Mr. Milken’s personal lawyer at the time, walks the reader through Mr. Milken’s 30-plus year legal odyssey, beginning in 1986 with the federal government’s investigation, followed by his indictment, plea bargain, and prison term, right through to his pardon by President Donald Trump in 2020. The author tells a convincing and concerning story of how the government targeted a largely innocent man and, when presented with proof of that innocence, refused to turn away from a bad case.

. . .

After reading Mr. Sandler’s account, I no longer believe in Mr. Milken’s guilt, and neither should you. The author argues that most of what we know about Mr. Milken’s misdeeds is grossly exaggerated, if not downright wrong. What the government was able to prove in the court of law, as opposed to the court of public opinion, were mere regulatory infractions: “aiding and abetting” a client’s failure to file an accurate stock-ownership form with the SEC, a violation of broker-dealer reporting requirements, assisting with the filing of a false tax return. There was no insider-trading charge involving Mr. Boesky or anyone else, because the feds couldn’t prove one.

. . .

When you digest the reality of the case against Mr. Milken, you find that much of it was nonsense. As Mr. Sandler puts it: “The nature of prosecution and the technicality and uniqueness of the regulatory violations . . . certainly never would have been pursued had Michael not been so successful in disrupting the traditional way business was done on Wall Street.”

. . .

The junk-bond market he helped create has opened up cheaper and more efficient financing to many more companies than it ever destroyed. What started as a $10 billion market is now standing at around $1.4 trillion.

For the full review, see:

Charles Gasparino. “The Milken Story Revisited.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, Dec. 18, 2023): A15.

(Note: ellipses between paragraphs added, ellipsis internal to penultimate quoted paragraph in original.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date December 17, 2023, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘Witness to a Prosecution’ Review: The Milken Story Revisited.”)

The book under review is:

Sandler, Richard V. Witness to a Prosecution: The Myth of Michael Milken. ForbesBooks: Charleston, South Carolina, 2023.

British Colonial Authorities in India “Eased Out” Vaccine Innovator

(p. 19) The story of Waldemar Mordechai Wolff Haffkine, little told in the West beyond the world of bacteriology and within the annals of Judaica, is thrilling in its nobility and verve, and it might have better served Schama’s purpose had he devoted the entire book to the tale of a man he so clearly adores.

. . .

He was born in Odessa in 1860, and as a teenager was set to defending his community from the endless Russian pogroms. In time he moved to Switzerland and then to France, where he trained at the Pasteur Institute and, after studying paramecium, threw his energies into the scourge of cholera. He treated himself with an experimental vaccine and took off to India in 1893 to see how it worked.

That it did, brilliantly, and by today’s reckoning his invention saved millions. His more remarkable eventual success came five years later with a vaccine for eradicating bubonic plague.

Schama — by his own admission no biologist — describes the painstaking method of making a plague vaccine with enthralling technical precision. He writes of the gentle and respectful means of extracting the noxious fluids from the swollen buboes that dangled in the intimate parts of the infected and the dying; of the subsequent culturation process, in ghee-covered flasks of goat broth — no cow or pig could be used, since the vaccines would be given to Hindu and Muslim alike — and then of the nurturing of the resulting silky threads that held the trove of bacilli, ready to be injected.

Notwithstanding Haffkine’s immense contribution to India’s public health, the British colonial authorities, haughty and racist by turn, eventually wearied of the man. Their own means of dealing with infection had, after all, relied on brawn and bombast — the wholesale destruction of villages, the eviction of natives, the smothering of everything with lime and carbolic acid. Such schemes had generally failed, and it irritated the burra sahibs that a foreigner, and moreover a keen adherent to an alien belief, could succeed where they had not.

And so Haffkine was eased out, first from his Calcutta laboratory across to Bombay, and then out of the empire’s crown jewel altogether. He later went to Lausanne, where he would spend his final years.

For the full review, see:

Simon Winchester. “The Vaccinator.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, November 5, 2023): 19.

(Note: ellipsis added. In the original only the words “burra sahibs” are in italics.)

(Note: the online version of the review was updated Oct. 28, 2023, and has the title “Not All Heroes Wear Capes. Some Prefer Lab Coats.”)

The book under review is:

Schama, Simon. Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines, and the Health of Nations. New York: Ecco Press, 2023.

The Orthodox Establishment Did Not Understand Michael Milken’s Brilliantly Disruptive Innovations

(p. C13) I . . . ended [the year] with . . . with Richard Sandler’s “Witness to a Prosecution: The Myth of Michael Milken.”

. . .

Mr. Milken’s brilliance led to investments in companies that the “establishment” ignored. When those companies generated outsize returns, there was more interest in trying to find wrongdoing than in understanding his innovative approach to investing.  . . . disrupting established orthodoxies is difficult and . . . the rules established by social structures are riddled with biases that can end up undermining the public good.

For the full review, see:

Nina Rees. “12 Months of Reading: Nina Rees.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, December 9, 2023): C13.

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

(Note: the online version of the review has the date December 8, 2023, and has the title “Who Read What in 2023: Political Voices and Policy Makers: Nina Rees.”)

The new book on Michael Milken praised above is:

Sandler, Richard V. Witness to a Prosecution: The Myth of Michael Milken. ForbesBooks: Charleston, South Carolina, 2023.

A book on Milken that I found convincing many years ago is:

Kornbluth, Jesse. Highly Confident: The Crime and Punishment of Michael Milken. New York: William Morrow & Co., 1992.

Nebraska Interest Cap Regulation Reduced Consumer Payday Loan Options

(p. A1) Nebraska’s payday lenders have all shut down in the two years since voters capped the interest rate they could charge.

The last handful gave up their delayed-deposit services business licenses in December [2021], according to records kept by the Nebraska Department of Banking and Finance.

Just six months earlier, there had been 19 such businesses.

. . .

. . ., Ed D’Alessio, executive director of INFiN, a national trade association representing delayed-deposit businesses, said the closures were predictable, based on the experience of other states that have imposed similar rate caps.

“Nebraska’s 36% rate cap on delayed-deposit loans was never about consumer protection,” he said. “It was about activists’ thinly veiled desire to eliminate a regulated service valued by many.

“But Nebraskans’ need for credit did not go away. Instead, they have been left with fewer options for managing their financial obligations,” D’Alessio said.  . . .

Payday loans, also known as cash advances, check advances or delayed-deposit loans, are a type of short-term, high-cost borrowing that people use to get small amounts of immediate cash.

For the full story, see:

Martha Stoddard. “Payday Lenders Disappear From State After Rate Cap.” Omaha World-Herald (Tuesday, Sept 13, 2022): A1-A2.

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

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Oct. 18, 2023 [sic], and has the title “Payday lenders disappeared from Nebraska after interest rate capped at 36%.”)

Cancer “Vaccines Are Probably the Next Big Thing”

(p. A5) “Vaccines are probably the next big thing” in the quest to reduce cancer deaths, said Dr. Steve Lipkin, a medical geneticist at New York’s Weill Cornell Medicine, who is leading one effort funded by the National Cancer Institute. “We’re dedicating our lives to that.”

For the full story, see:

ARLA K. JOHNSON, Associated Press. “Vaccine Against Cancer Could Be Closer Than Ever.” Omaha World-Herald (Sunday, July 9, 2023): A11.

(Note: bracketed date added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Nov 2, 2023, and has the title “The next big advance in cancer treatment could be a vaccine.”)

Biden’s Centrally Planned Cancer “Moonshot” Funds Surgery as Key to a Cure

(p. A5) WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden’s administration on Thursday [July 27, 2023] announced the first cancer-focused initiative under its advanced health research agency, aiming to help doctors more easily distinguish between cancerous cells and healthy tissue during surgery and improve outcomes for patients.

The administration’s Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, or ARPA-H, is launching a Precision Surgical Interventions program, seeking ideas from the public and private sectors to explore how to dramatically improve cancer outcomes in the coming decades by developing better surgical interventions to treat the disease.

. . .

The initiative could markedly improve cancer treatments and make scientific breakthroughs that have as yet unknown applications, said Arati Prabhakar, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology.

“What’s true is that many cancer treatments still start with surgery,” she told The Associated Press in an interview. “So being really smart and attacking and developing new technology to make that first step better could really revolutionize how we are able to treat cancer for so many Americans.”

For the full story, see:

ZEKE MILLER Associated Press. “Cancer Research Initiative Part of Biden ‘Moonshot’.” Omaha World-Herald (Friday, July 28, 2023): A5.

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

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Nov. 2, 2023, and has the title “Biden announces an advanced cancer research initiative as part of his ‘moonshot’ effort.”)