Archive for March, 2023

A Pause In Israel’s Judicial Changes, But At What Price?

Friday, March 31st, 2023

Since Israel’s founding in 1948, the U.S. and it have created a bilateral relationship based on tangible, steadily increasing security and economic interests, not just shared values. Israel has become a lynchpin in our efforts to achieve stability in the middle east (Our success in that regard has been dubious, at best). In fact, at the final presidential debate of the 2012 campaign season, President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney mentioned Israel some 30 times, more than any other country except Iran. Both candidates called the Jewish state “a true friend,” pledging to stand with it through thick and thin. And we’ve done that. Since the end of World War II, Israel has been the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance, assistance totaling more than $158 billion (non-inflation adjusted).

Unlike most democracies, Israel lacks a written Constitution, functioning, rather, under what are called “Basic Laws.”

The Basic Laws, enacted at various times between 1958 and 2018, number thirteen and are mostly rather vague. The 8th Basic Law, The Judiciary, enacted in 1984, lays out common sensible judicial requirements about honesty, transparency, judicial probity and process, and the like.

The Basic Laws place a heavy burden on the country’s judiciary and its Supreme Court, the High Court of Justice, making it the final arbiter. By nature, the Court is always involved in a tense relationship with its sister institution, the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. In this regard, both are critical pillars in Israel’s foundational house of democracy.

Four months ago, a coalition comprised of the conservative Likud Party and five other far right and ultra-orthodox Parties won a national election and returned Benjamin Netanyahu to power as Prime Minister for the sixth time, despite his standing trial in three current corruption cases for bribery, fraud and breach of trust. The coalition has a one vote majority with 61 seats out of 120 Knesset members.

Immediately upon taking control, the Coalition introduced a number of judicial law changes aimed at weakening the Supreme Court, chief among them one that would enable the Knesset to overrule Supreme Court decisions by a simple majority, which is currently what Netanyahu’s coalition enjoys. The reason for this seems to be that the Prime Minister’s coalition partners, without whom he cannot survive, blame the Court for stifling the establishment of new settlements in the West Bank and for being lackeys of the left. Their anger about this has been growing for years, but until now they have been unable to do anything about it. Entering a coalition with the weakened Netanyahu provides the opportunity they have long sought. If they are successful and this particular change were to become law, Israel’s Supreme Court would no longer be the “final arbiter.” Rather, it would serve at the pleasure of the Knesset.

This is a monumental change in the 8th Basic Law, in which Section 17 says,

“A verdict of a court in the first instance, may be appealed by right, save a verdict of the Supreme Court.” (emphasis added)

Further, Section 22, entitled, Stability of the law, reads,

“Emergency regulations do not have the power to change this law, to temporarily suspend its validity, or to subject it to conditions.”

Clearly, the authors of Basic Law 8 intended for the judiciary’s Supreme Court to be independent and unfettered.

The proposed judicial changes, like an oncoming train wreck, could be catastrophic for Israeli democracy.

Last week, the Knesset passed a portion of the proposed changes — a measure making it harder to remove Netanyahu, after which the prime minister announced his intention to take a more hands-on role in pushing the reforms, something he had guaranteed he would not do given the cited corruption charges and his ongoing Trials.¹

Hundreds of thousands of citizens have taken to the streets every weekend in protest. The Army, heavily dependent on highly-trained reservists, who have threatened not to obey orders if the judicial changes actually pass into law, has warned that national security is in serious jeopardy. All of Israel’s western allies have told Netanyahu he is making a terrible mistake by continuing to push for Knesset approval of the judicial changes.

Last Saturday, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who has become increasingly concerned that a growing number of reservists — including cyber warfare teams, pilots, and intelligence officers — have been skipping training duty in recent weeks because of the proposed changes, publicly urged Netanyahu to at least wait on the reforms until the Knesset returns from recess in a month, arguing pushing forward would make Israel vulnerable to attack. “This is a clear, immediate and tangible danger to the security of the state,” he said. “For the sake of our security, for the sake of our unity, it is our duty to return to the arena of dialogue.”

For this candid advice, Netanyahu promptly fired him.

The most vociferously far-right of his coalition partners, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, vowed to resign from the government if Netanyahu halts the judicial change plan. If Ben-Gvir resigned, the coalition would collapse, which would leave Netanyahu less protected with respect to his corruption charges.

That may have been the one-too-many straws that broke the enervated camel’s back. On Monday, in an address to the nation, Netanyahu announced a pause in the judicial change agenda. Not a stop; a pause, and only until the Knesset returns from its April recess. In his speech, Netanyahu blasted protesters for urging Reservists to avoid reporting for duty and Reservists for heeding that advice, saying, “The State of Israel can’t exist without the Israel Defense Forces, and the IDF cannot exist if there’s refusal to serve. Such refusal will be the end of our country.”

It would appear that Netanyahu’s coalition partners have him right where they want him. Before Mondays “pause” speech Ben-Gvir announced he would not resign and that he had agreed to back Netanyahu’s call for a pause in exchange for the Prime Minister’s promise to create an Israeli “National Guard” under Ben-Givr’s control.

This was confirmed when Ben Gvir circulated a letter to media outlets, signed by Netanyahu, in which the prime minister promised to raise the issue of forming such a body within the National Security Ministry in the cabinet meeting two days from now. Achieved through nothing but extortion, what would a new National Guard mean when placed under the control of Israel’s most far-right cabinet extremist? It seems a terrible price Netanyahu is willing to pay to stay in power.

Left out of any of these discussions are the 1.6 million Arab citizens of Israel who make up 17.2% of the population. Whatever rules, compromises, or judicial changes come out of this mess will affect them in a tangible and meaningful way, which could be far more impactful than the current political hijinks.

My modest proposal is that Israel immediately get to work on writing a constitution, as most modern democracies have done. They could dust off the one John Adams wrote for Massachusetts in 1780. It’s the oldest in the world and the model for America’s. It has stood the test of time. If Netanyahu were to announce such a move, saying the judicial changes are on a longer pause pending completion of the draft constitution, the warring factions may see the benefit of open dialogue rather than polemical threats.

Call me Pollyanna.

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¹ Israel’s attorney general issued a sharp rebuke on Friday, warning that Netanyahu had broken the law by announcing his direct involvement in the overhaul while facing criminal charges — a stern statement that raised the specter of a constitutional crisis.

A Sad Update And One Sweet Diversion

Wednesday, March 29th, 2023

Once again, into the darkness

So, here we are again.

In Nashville two days ago, the U.S. suffered its 131st Mass Shooting of 2023. That’s 131 in 86 days, for a rate of 1.52 a day — thus far.

This was also another Mass Murder, the 13th of the year. What’s the difference?

The Gun Violence Archive, which began documenting gun violence in the U.S. in 2013, defines a mass shooting as a gun violence incident in which four or more people are killed or injured, excluding the suspect or perpetrator.¹

The FBI does not have a definition for mass shootings; rather, it tracks mass murders, which it defines as an incident in which four or more people are killed.  It includes gun violence, bombings or any other incident where four or more are killed. Mass Murder would statistically be a subset of Mass Shooting.

Consequently, in the first 86 days of 2023, there have been 131 mass shootings and 13 mass murders. The event in Nashville added to both categories.

Regardless of definitions, what really matters is that in the first 86 days of 2023, 10,009 people who were alive to welcome in 2023 on New Year’s Eve are now dead by gun violence, 4,267 by homicide; 5,742 by suicide.

Gun violence incidents rocketed to another level in America in 2020 as the Coronavirus gripped the country, and since then they have not slackened at all.

I have periodically been writing about gun violence since 2005, and most recently just two months ago in January of this year.

I’m not going to rehash what I’ve written previously. I urge you to read the column from this past January. It says it all — except for one thing. It doesn’t discuss the children. In yesterday’s obscene brutality, the obviously deranged shooter killed three nine-year-old children. They were Evelyn Dieckhaus, William Kinney, and Hallie Scruggs. Also killed were Mike Hill, 61, Katherine Koonce, 60, and Cynthia Peak, 61.

This is how bad things have become: guns kill more children than any other cause.

As I reported in May of 2022, the US dwarfs the 28 most economically developed countries in the 38-member OECD in deaths by firearms. Not only is our firearm death rate nearly 25 times higher than our OECD companions, our total homicide rate is eight times higher. In America, 98 people die by firearms every single day. In those other 28 OECD countries, with a combined population more than twice that of ours (712 million vs. 331 million), that number is 19.

I have found people to be mostly the same the world over. Many are smart; some are not. Many are wealthy; most are not. But we in America have two things other countries do not have: more guns than people and sky-high homicide rates.  The first leads to the second. Why? Because guns can kill fast and from a distance. It’s hard to outrun a bullet. Other methods often take some time during which a victim has a chance to run away. Countries with far fewer guns have far fewer homicides. Simple as that.

Rather than doing something about the root problem — 393.3 million guns — we’ll continue to nibble around the edges mistaking movement for progress. And more nine-year-old children will die.

What kind of allegedly enlightened society allows this to happen?

Only ours.

And now for a sweet diversion

Do you know what rheology is?

To save you the trouble of looking up the answer, I’ll tell you.

Rheology is the branch of physics that deals with the deformation and flow of matter, especially the non-Newtonian flow of liquids and the plastic flow of solids.

There. Now you know.

This is a story of rheology, an Oreo cookie, and how a couple of MIT kids may have too much time on their hands.

Graduate student Crystal Owens and undergraduate Max Fan set out to solve a cookie conundrum that I’m sure has baffled you forever: whether there is a way to twist apart an Oreo and have the filling stick to both wafers. For Owens, the research “was a fun, easy way to make my regular physics and engineering work more accessible to the general public.”

According to Fan, “There’s a fascinating problem of trying to get the cream to distribute evenly between the two wafers, which turns out to be really hard.”

In fact, they couldn’t do it. PhD candidate Owens, who studies the properties of complex fluids, said, “Videos of the manufacturing process show that they put the first wafer down, then dispense a ball of cream onto that wafer before putting the second wafer on top. Apparently that little time delay may make the cream stick better to the first wafer.”

In the lab, the research team subjected Oreo cookies to standard rheology tests (whatever they are) and found that no matter the flavor or amount of stuffing, the cream at the center of an Oreo almost always sticks to one wafer when twisted open. I have no idea how many of the failures were eventually consumed, but I think it would have been a shame to waste any of them. Maybe they had after work Oreo and Gator Aid² parties.

And to show you how MIT students go to lengths you’ve probably never dreamed of to solve a problem, Owens and Fan designed a 3D-printable “Oreometer” — a simple device that firmly grasps an Oreo cookie and uses pennies and rubber bands to control the twisting force that progressively twists the cookie open. Instructions for the tabletop device can be found here. They are marvelous, and I include them, because, you never know, you might want to try this at home.

So, what do you do after you’ve done a research study on Oreo cookies and built a 3D-printable Oreometer, to boot? Why, you publish a paper detailing your research.  On Oreology, the fracture and flow of ‘milk’s favorite cookie appears today in Kitchen Flows, a special issue of the journal Physics of Fluids.

Get your copy now.

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¹ Two other reputable non-profit organizations track gun violence in the U.S.: Everytown Research & Policy and the Giffords Law Center.

² Gator Aid is another wonderful creation invented in a University lab, in this case the University of Florida’s.

 

 

 

Has The Past Become Prologue Again?

Friday, March 24th, 2023

On 30 January 1933, the 85-year-old German hero of World War 1, President Paul von Hindenburg, appointed Nazi leader Adolph Hitler as Reich Chancellor, which was akin to being named Prime Minister. Hindenburg and his German Cabinet, many of whom shared Hitler’s Nationalist positions, thought they could control the loose-cannon Hitler better if he were in Government rather than out of it. Sort of like bringing the camel into the tent, where you hope he’ll spit out, rather than leaving him outside, where you know he’ll spit in.

Thirty-five days later, on 5 March 1933, a coalition of political parties led by the Nazis won the national parliamentary election.

Just as Hindenburg and his Cabinet thought they could control Hitler, so did his coalition party partners. They were all wrong. And, just like that, the 14-year Weimar Republic was dead.

Despite winning only 45% of the vote — 55% of the country having voted against them — the Nazis were now in charge, and within three months the coalition was a thing of the past, with every other political party in Germany having gone the way of the Wooly Mammoth. The Nazis, using what they called “coordination,” had banned them all.

Immediately, Hitler’s Storm Troopers, whose numbers had grown from 400,000 in 1932 to nearly 2 million in January of 1933 (they outnumbered the Jewish population by close to 4 top 1¹) amped up their brutal intimidation and persecution of Jews, Communists and homosexuals. According to the World Committee’s Brown Book, by the end of June they had murdered 43 Jews and severely beaten hundreds more, but the chroniclers point out these estimates are likely quite low.

The Prussian police force was the largest in Germany, and Hitler put Hermann Göring in charge of it. He immediately  populated it with unhinged Storm Troopers wearing police uniforms. They arrested anyone thought to be an “unreliable” German. This included Jews, members of the non-Nazi German press, intellectual elites, homosexuals, and more Jews. In fact, so many were arrested that the country’s prisons could not contain them all. The head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, solved that problem. On 20 March, just two weeks after the Nazis’ election victory, he announced to the press that “a concentration camp for political prisoners” would be opened at Dachau, just outside Munich. It was to be Germany’s first concentration camp and set an ominous precedent. Two days later, four police trucks ferried 200 of the Nazis’ newly ordained “criminals” to their swell new digs. The citizens of Dachau watched them go by.

Three weeks later, to show they meant business, Himmler’s guards took four Jews out of their cells, brought them outside, stood them against a wall, and shot all four dead.

Dachau, however, was not an improvised solution to an overcrowding problem. As far back as 1921, Hitler had declared that when they came to power, the Nazis would imprison German Jews in concentration camps along the lines of those used by the British in the Boer war.

But the Nazis did much more in the first three months of the Third Reich than round up their version of the usual suspects. They also eviscerated higher education. On 7 April 1933, the Reichstag, the German parliament now controlled by Hitler, passed the Enabling Act, which contained a civil service provision that provided for the dismissal of “politically unreliable” state employees. This was a catch-all phrase for Jews, Communists, non-Aryans, as well as  anyone who had had the temerity to criticize the Nazis. And since, unlike other countries, all colleges and universities were state-owned, that meant many of Germany’s best and brightest were now out of work and facing physical danger. This included 20 past or future Nobel laureates. Albert Einstein was one of them — Germany’s loss; Princeton’s gain. But the Nazis never cared.

And they did not stop with professors and scientists. On 10 May 1933, at the instigation of Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, German university students organized an “act against unGerman spirit” in nineteen university towns across the country. They compiled a list of “unGerman” books, seized them from all the libraries they could find, piled them up in public squares, and set them all alight. Goebbels joined the students at the Berlin burning, the biggest, telling them they were “doing the right thing in committing the evil spirit of the past to the flames.” One after another, books were thrown onto the funeral pyre of intellect.

We’re not burning books in America — yet, but we sure are banning them.

That is how it started in that most momentous of years, 1933, a year scholars have likened to the Jacobin Reign of Terror of 1793 and 1794 France.

But in reality, the Nazis’ rise to power began with a quickly-put-down revolution in Munich immediately following the end of World War 1. Right up to the very end, the German military and the Kaiser had convinced the German people the country was winning the war. The Armistice signed on 11 November 1918 came as a huge shock, and the people felt they had been betrayed or, as one man put it, “Knifed in the back by the ruling class.” Then came the Treaty of Versailles with its draconian terms of surrender.

Out of the shock and humiliation of that defeat, a small group of radical, fanatical zealots began to slowly poison the soul of what, at that time, was the largest and most advanced country in Europe. In the 14 years of the Weimar Republic between the end of the war and 5 March 1933, the Nazis gradually unleashed a cultural revolution that eventually became an unstoppable national revolution — which ended 12 years later, deep in the ground of a Berlin bunker.

The Nazis did not come to power overnight, but the circumstances of the 1920s and early 1930s sowed fertile ground for their eventual ascendancy. People wrote them off at the beginning. But an economic depression, tremendous bitterness over the perceived betrayal at the end of the war along with the humiliating terms of the Versailles Treaty, and one man of messianic and evil determination was all it took. And millions upon millions paid the price.

Americans knew what was happening in 1933 Germany. Our journalists covered it in detail, and our newspapers published what they wrote: the beatings, the discovery of Jews lying in gutters covered in blood, the book burnings. All of it. But we had our own problems back then, so nobody did a thing to help. Right here, it’s fair to ask, could anything have been done, by anyone, to reverse the unfolding terror. The behavior of the Nazis had been horrific, but the regime had been in power for only a few months. At the same time, the entire world was still in the midst of a global depression, and most countries looked upon what was happening in Germany as a German problem that Germans would fix. At that point, no one cared. Germans had done it to themselves and had walked into that biggest of bear traps with their eyes wide shut.

In America right now we are undergoing our own cultural revolution, and it has some of the same chaotic characteristics of the early 1920s in Germany. Of course it’s different, and we’ve built systems that we hope will withstand the current partisan fanaticism. But January 6th really happened, and it could have been catastrophically worse, just as Adolph Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch really happened in November 1923, ten years prior to his coming to power. We might want to note that, while 335 of the January 6th insurrectionists have been sentenced to prison thus far, Hitler and his putsch cohorts also went to prison.

It’s what happened afterwards that made all the difference.

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¹ According to the United State Holocaust Memorial Museum, there were approximately 523,000 Jews living in Germany in January, 1933.

 

Time And Time Again, It’s Hubris That Does Us In

Wednesday, March 22nd, 2023

Trying to follow, much less get your head around, America’s ongoing culture wars, ridiculous partisanship, and all the bile spouted repeatedly by hypocritical politicians is like being at a Rappers Convention. It’s constant chaos.

In the middle of that rancid daily lunacy, we might be forgiven for missing a significant milestone: This week marks the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. Make that the second invasion.

In January 1991, during the presidency of George H. W. Bush, the U.S. went to war with Iraq to free the country of Kuwait (and all its oil), which Iraq had invaded and taken over in August, five months earlier. America had 33 allies in the venture including most Arab states. Iraq had no allies. Not one.

After American and British airpower destroyed more than 30% of the Iraqi military’s capability, the ground operation, Operation Desert Sabre, brilliantly planned and executed under the leadership of Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, lasted all of 100 hours before Saddam Hussein was forced to accept a cease fire.

And that’s where it stopped. President Bush, General Schwarzkopf, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Colin Powell decided not to continue on to Baghdad, which frustrated a lot of hawkish politicians.

It was the right decision. The war had been won, Kuwait freed, and Hussein humbled and forced to agree to international inspections to root out any weapons of mass destruction he might have stockpiled. Moving on to Baghdad would have mired the U.S. down in a protracted slog, and the Arab allies would never have agreed, anyway. For that matter, it’s likely none of our allies would have agreed.

The 1991 invasion showed American leadership at its finest. The 2003 invasion, the second invasion, showed it at its worst, and we’ve been paying for it ever since.

President George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion demonstrated in vivid colors what hubris can do to otherwise rational people. After 9/11, our job was to capture Osama bin Laden and destroy al Queda. Nearly every country in the world was on our side. Then came the stupidity of Iraq.

Claiming without a shred of verified evidence that Iraq had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, — it didn’t — the Administration invaded. Soon, we had taken over the country. We were the dog who caught the bus.

Tragically, Bush did not have his father’s wisdom (remember “Mission Accomplished?”), and he and his neocon associates believed they could conquer and rebuild Iraq in the image of America, just as Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon had believed the same about Vietnam. All of these five presidents were catastrophically wrong.

Nearly three million U.S. soldiers deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan beginning in 2001. Twenty-five hundred are still in Iraq today. According to Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, more than 7,000 of our troops had died there by the end of 2019. Thousands more were wounded, many of those maimed for life.

Just as so many Americans now have experience fighting, dying and being wounded in the Middle East, I have experience in Southeast Asia, where more than 50,000 of my brothers in arms died in a hostile place.

Thirty-five years after I landed in Saigon and got to participate in one of America’s worst mistakes — until then, — President Bush and his Neocons  dropped us into another awful, no-win position. He and men with names like Cheney, Wolfowitz, Pearl, Kristol, et al, were blinded by the bright lights of “American exceptionalism.” Few, if any of them, had ever known a day of military service. They knew the right people and either had deferments, lots of them, or, like George Bush, were weekenders. Although it appears to have been fine for weekenders of Mr. Bush’s social and political status to skip those tiresome drills if they proved inconvenient.

A lifetime spent walking war’s sanitized sidelines, never hearing that unforgettable and very special sound a bullet makes as it whizzes past your ear,  may prevent one from appreciating the chaotic hell of war and from grasping how terrifying it really ought to be to rip men and women from the fabric of their families to face the horrifying prospect of fighting and dying in a strange land for a counterfeit cause.

The Iraq war has been a national nightmare, but what I always found most horrifying about it was that once we were in it nobody, especially the egotists who tossed us into that deepest of pits, ever had any idea of how to get us out of it, which is exactly the same thing that happened to us in Vietnam. Vietnam, where lessons should have been learned, but weren’t. Instead, they were swept under the nation’s political rug for posterity to trip over. And it did.

In the pantheon of man-made catastrophes, our wars in Vietnam and Iraq have been monumental achievements.

Happy anniversary.

 

The Calendar, The Nuts, And A Long-Ago Time In A Faraway Place

Monday, March 20th, 2023

No political punching today. This year’s terrific NCAA tournament (my bracket was busted in about a minute and a half) has put me in a good frame of mind.

So, let me tell you a story.

Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, a 23-year-old, newly minted, Infantry 2nd Lieutenant Airborne Ranger with my name spent a fair amount of time in a little woebegone country in Southeast Asia called Vietnam.

In Vietnam, I took command of a platoon of about 30 draftee soldiers, none of whom wanted to be there and all of whom never understood why they were. There were no college graduates among that lot, and a few never finished high school. They were America’s flotsam and jetsam, and they all knew it. I would grow to love every one of them.

Month after month, my guys and I patrolled the mountains in the north of South Vietnam, occasionally encountering North Vietnamese Regulars who were doing the same thing. Those were interesting meetings. We didn’t talk much when we met, but we did frequently have a somewhat frank exchange of views.

Our Platoon had some memorable moments in Vietnam, such as The March to the Sea, The Rescue, The Whistling Mortar Round, The Search for the Body That Turned Out to Be a Piece of Wood, and The Flying Flywheel. But those are stories for another day. For right now, for today, we’re telling the story of The Calendar and the Nuts.

Four months before the end of my first Vietnam tour, the Army promoted me to 1st Lieutenant, made me say “goodbye” to my guys, sent a Huey chopper to fly me out of the jungle, and gave me a staff job on Firebase Vegel in northern South Vietnam. A firebase was a temporary army camp built by the Corps of Engineers on top of a mountain. It supplied the troops in its area both logistically and militarily. And by “militarily” I mean weapons, ammunition, and helicopter gunship support and transportation. Firebases were cushier than the jungle, but often more dangerous, because they were stationery targets. That was made apparent to me a number of times in vivid ways.

My job on Vegel was to dream up crazy search and destroy operations for the “grunts” in the jungle, the crazier the better. I did my best to make them crazy enough to satisfy the Commanders, but not crazy enough to get our folks killed. It was not easy.

The Army of North Vietnam and their comrades in the south, the Viet Cong, were a determined foe. They were fighting with biblical devotion for a purpose they believed in — their country. They weren’t going anywhere until the war was over and they had won. We, on the other hand, were the political pawns, the shmucks who were there because we had to be, and none of us liked it all that much. Wasn’t our country. And all of us knew, with a fair degree of certainty, the date we were scheduled to go home — if we could stay alive long enough.

With two months to go in the country with the biggest mosquitos on earth, I began to get a bit anxious. I knew guys who had come to untimely ends with only a few days left, one, a good friend, within three hours of leaving. So, realizing I needed a diversion to take my mind off things, I decided to create one — my very own 60 day, Short-Timer’s Calendar.

I confess while deep in the jungle in the 1960s my admiration for and envy of Hugh Heffner knew no bounds. Consequently, my Short-Timer’s Calendar was the centerfold of the June 1970 Playboy magazine. To build the Calendar, I enlisted the aid of my Battalion Commander Bulldog Carter (that’s right, Bulldog), and Buck Kernan, my partner who went on to become a Lieutenant General, like his father before him. The three of us divided the luscious photo into 60 puzzle-like areas counting down from 60 to one. The trajectory of the progression became increasingly lascivious.

Thereafter, we held a nightly, candle-lit ceremony in the bunker occupied by Buck and me.

⏺⏺⏺

But before I describe the ceremony, I have to tell you about the Macadamia nuts.

During Vietnam, soldiers who were unfortunate enough to find themselves in that hellhole were allowed a ten-day R&R (Rest and Relaxation) vacation, usually a little after the mid-point of their tour. Unmarried soldiers usually went either to Bangkok, Thailand, or Australia.

Most of the time the married folks went to Hawaii to meet their wives. So, when my turn came, I hopped a plane at Da Nang airbase halfway up the coast of the South China Sea and flew off to meet my wife, Marilyn, in Honolulu.

When we first checked into our hotel and got to our room, we discovered the hotel had left a small jar of macadamia nuts for us. Up until then I had never tasted a macadamia nut in my life, but once I tossed the first one down the gullet, I was hooked. I subsequently learned Hawaii is noted for its macadamia nuts. There’s even a Macadamia Nut Visitor Center somewhere on Oahu.

You may forgive me for saying with the exception of the inside of our hotel room and the balcony outside it on Waikiki Beach, the one with a beautiful view of Diamond Head up the coast, we never did see much of Hawaii for the first four or five days.

But toward the end of the R&R, after we’d come up for air, seen the sights, sampled the beach, and done the obligatory Don Ho nightclub show, we went to the PX (Post Exchange) at Scofield Army Barracks and bought a large jar of Macadamia nuts for me to take back to Vietnam. In Vietnam, little things became luxurious delicacies.

The next day, Marilyn and I boarded our separate planes, she to return to the civilized world of Massachusetts, and me to head back to something completely different.

⏺⏺⏺

Back to the ceremony.

The bunker assigned to Buck and me had a single bunk bed. There was only one bed, because Buck and I took 12-hour shifts in the Operations Center, where we prevented the dominos from falling and kept the world safe for democracy. One of us would end his shift, head to the bunker, wave as he passed the other guy, and crash into the bed.

Every night, at 2000 hours — 8 p.m. to you — the three of us, Bulldog, Buck and I, would gather in the bunker. I had scrounged a small table which I had placed against the wall to the side of the bed. I had lovingly pinned Miss June to the wall above the table. At the appointed hour, I would light the two candles I had placed on each side of the table under the pin-up. I would open the jar of Macadamia nuts, which occupied a special spot in the center of the table, and hand each of my comrades one nut, taking one for myself. We would then spend a moment in quiet reflection, meditating on the bounty before us, after which I would, with a red marker purloined from the Ops Center, X-out that day’s descending number on Miss June’s tantalizing body.

We would then eat the nuts.

We did that for 59 consecutive nights. Fifty-nine red Xs covered Miss June. We were down to ONE! On the final night, we held a special ceremony, inviting the Battalion XO, the other six staff officers, the Battalion Sgt. Major, and the Chaplain, Father McBride, into the bunker, which became almost as crowded as the stateroom scene in “Night at the Opera.” We gave everyone a Macadamia nut that night, and, to great applause, I placed the last red X on Miss June’. Even Father McBride smiled.

Then, in a service worthy of priestly ordination, I passed the jar of Macadamia nuts to Buck — who, because he still had six weeks to go, later on would replace my centerfold with his centerfold and continue the tradition. We retired my centerfold to a place of prominence on the side wall of the Ops Center, where it looked down on all the guys, and where Bulldog could see it every day, its 60 red Xs pointing the way to his bit of heaven back in the U.S. Six weeks later, Buck’s would hang his beside it.

The next day, I choppered south, boarded a chartered Pan Am plane with about three hundred other happy survivors, and flew home to what we called “the world.”

Since then, Macadamia nuts have occupied a special place in my heart.

Updates On Recent Stories I Covered

Friday, March 3rd, 2023

Israel’s judicial crisis continues as far right bills advance in Knesset

In mid-February I wrote about Israel’s descent into judicial chaos.

Israel had gone through three elections in late 2022 to elect a new government. To regain power, the historically conservative Likud Party, headed by Benjamin Netanyahu, joined in a coalition with five right-wing and religiously conservative parties, some of which are hugely influenced, perhaps dominated, by Israel’s ultra-Orthodox community, known as the Haredim. The coalition won the third election, and Netanyahu became Prime Minister for the sixth time. Six days after the election the government filed bills in the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, to severely limit the power of the country’s Supreme Court in that:

  1. A simple majority in the Knesset, 61 votes out of 120, would have the power to annul Supreme Court rulings. This would enable the government of the day to pass legislation without fear of it being struck down. It is called the “override” provision, in that the Knesset could override a Supreme Court ruling;
  2. The Supreme Court’s ability to revoke administrative decisions by the government on the grounds of “reasonability” (what would a reasonable person say about this?), would end, significantly decreasing judicial oversight; and,
  3. For the Supreme Court to strike down a Knesset-passed law would require 80% of the court’s 15 judges voting for such a ruling. But even if that were to happen, a simple Knesset majority could “override” the ruling.

At the time I wrote about this there was a singular complication: Benjamin Netanyahu is on trial, actually three trials, for corruption. If he is convicted of anything and appeals, the coalition government could override any Supreme Court ruling. Some might say this places Netanyahu at the mercy of his coalition partners.

Update

In order for these measure to become law requires passing three readings in Knesset committees. Last week, in a long and tense plenary session, the combined bill passed its first reading in the Knesset. Yesterday, the Knesset’s Constitution Committee advanced the bill for its second reading.

The judicial crisis was only made worse last Sunday when, in revenge for the killing of two Jewish Israeli brothers as they drove through the West Bank town of Hawara, near the city of Nablus, a mob of Jewish settlers attacked the town, torching 36 homes and 15 cars. The Palestinian Red Crescent reported one death and 98 Palestinians wounded in the attack. Three ambulances were also destroyed.

The attack was met with a public outpouring of support from settler leaders and Knesset members. Moreover, the Israeli coalition Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, a firebrand of the first order, told the settlers, “Hawara must be destroyed.” It nearly was.

The U.S. condemned the violence in unusually strong terms. “Just as we condemn Palestinian incitement to violence, we condemn these provocative remarks that also amount to incitement to violence,” State Department spokesperson Ned Price said.

It does not seem too much of a stretch to conclude the new coalition government, with its uber-nationalistic sway, has emboldened the highly nationalistic settlers who continue to gobble up land and force Palestinians into ever more woeful conditions.

Israel’s other western allies, for example the UK and France, have also condemned Sunday’s violence and, along with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, have told Mr. Netanyahu—to his face—that the judicial reforms he is championing are a serious threat to the future of their relationship. So far, the Prime Minister and his coalition partners are calling their bluff.

At this point, it does not appear this situation will end well—for anyone.

Mississippi extends Medicaid postpartum coverage duration

In February, I wrote about maternal mortality in America. Bottom line: It’s the highest in the developed world. At that time, I wrote:

Federal law requires Medicaid to cover postpartum care for only 60 days following birth, which is one of the prime reasons for our lagging maternal mortality global performance. In the other OECD countries, mothers not only receive postpartum care for a year, they also average 51 weeks of paid maternity leave. (The U.S. is the only OECD country with no requirement for paid maternity leave.)

The  American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (ARPA) created an option for states to extend postpartum coverage for Medicaid beneficiaries from 60 days to a full year. Under the Act, the option was scheduled to expire in 2027. Under the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023, the 12-month extended Medicaid postpartum coverage option was made permanent. Now once states take up the option to extend the postpartum period from 60 days to 12 months, federal matching funds will continue to flow. Thus far, 35 states have already taken advantage of the option and the federal cash that goes with it.

Nine other states have legislation pending to follow the 35. Mississippi is one of them.

Update

I can’t tell you how happy I am to report that yesterday the Mississippi legislature passed the postpartum permanent extension, and Governor Tate Reeves signed it into law. Reeves had been opposed to the measure, but had a change of heart when he realized that a lot more babies were about to be born in Mississippi due to the repeal of Roe v. Wade and the state’s strict (to say the least) anti-abortion laws, which meant some mothers could die without the postpartum extension, and the politically astute Reeves did not want to be the one taking incoming fire for helping that to happen. To which I say: Whatever works.

Mississippi’s joining the postpartum extension club only happened because Division of Medicaid Executive Director Drew Snyder, whose department reports to the Governor and who for months has refused to take a stance on postpartum coverage extension (how medically courageous of him, eh?), wrote a letter on 27 February to House Speaker Philip Gunn voicing his newfound support for the legislation’s passage (notably, after his boss, Governor Reeves had his change of heart). Gunn had been vehemently opposed to the measure, believing it put the state in the awful position of expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, something he has vowed would never happen. In his letter, Snyder assured Gunn that permanently extending Medicaid postpartum coverage would not equate to expanding Medicaid a la the Affordable Care Act, and he urged the Speaker to come on board for all the reasons that had swayed Governor Reeves. You know, all those babies about to be born in Mississippi. He also reminded Gunn the state has a $3.1 billion surplus, the annual cost of the extension is pegged at $7.1 million, and the feds will chip in more than $35 million. Reading Snyder’s letter is like reading George Orwell.

Whatever the reasons, Mississippi has done the right thing.

Ely Lilly to drop the cost of basic insulin to $35 per vial

I have written a number of times about what I consider the obscene price of insulin for Type 1 diabetics. See here and here for the history of the discovery and how we got to this point. Bottom line, as I wrote in 2018, the three discovers of insulin, led by Frederick Banting, who won the Nobel Prize for it:

sold the patent to the University of Toronto for the princely sum of $3.00. When asked why he didn’t cash in on his discovery, Banting said, “Insulin is my gift to mankind.” With Banting’s blessing, the University licensed insulin’s manufacturing to drug companies, royalty free. If drug companies didn’t have to pay royalties, Banting thought they would keep the price of insulin low.

And they did. For decades.

But patents expire, and capitalism being what it is, people get greedy, and greed is why we have no generic, low-cost insulin today and why, over the past 20 years, insulin prices have risen anywhere from 800% to 1,157%, depending on the variety and brand. It’s why, lacking health insurance, some Type 1 diabetics have recently been driven to ration their precious insulin. Some of them have died.

Update

Yesterday, the Ely Lilly company, the first company to license Banting’s discovery, announced price reductions of 70% for its most commonly prescribed insulins and an expansion of its Insulin Value Program that caps patient out-of-pocket costs at $35 or less per month. In its press release, the company said it is:

  • Cutting the list price of its non-branded insulin, Insulin Lispro Injection…to $25 a vial. Effective May 1, 2023, it will be the lowest list-priced mealtime insulin available, and less than the price of a Humalog® vial in 1999.
  • Cutting the list price of Humalog® …, Lilly’s most commonly prescribed insulin, and Humulin® (insulin human) injection … by 70%, effective in Q4 2023.
  • Launching RezvoglarTM …injection, a basal insulin that is biosimilar to, and interchangeable with, Lantus® (insulin glargine) injection, for $92 per five pack of KwikPens®, a 78% discount to Lantus, effective April 1, 2023.

Lilly also said:

  • Effective immediately, Lilly will automatically cap out-of-pocket costs at $35 at participating retail pharmacies for people with commercial insurance using Lilly insulin.
  • People who don’t have insurance can continue to go to InsulinAffordability.com and immediately download the Lilly Insulin Value Program savings card to receive Lilly insulins for $35 per month.

This, of course, is marvelous news for the 1.3 million Type 1 diabetics in the country not on Medicare, which already has a $35 cap thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.

It is not an exaggeration to say insulin made Eli Lilly and Company and Novo Nordisk two of the top pharmaceutical companies in the world. It also hasn’t hurt the bottom line of Sanofi, the company that rounds out the insulin producing triumvirate and is the world’s fifth largest pharma by sales. I think it is a good bet these last two will quickly follow Lilly’s lead.

The greed of these three companies over the last two or three decades has hurt a lot of people, both physically and economically. Let’s hope this move by Lilly is the first step in making amends.