The World and Everything in It - August 30, 2021

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning!

California officials balance LGBT rights versus the rights of nonprofits fighting for victims of human trafficking.

NICK EICHER, HOST: That’s ahead on Legal Docket.

Also today the Monday Moneybeat, as the Federal Reserve takes on a bigger and bigger role in the economy, we’ll talk about the significance of the Fed chairman’s latest pronouncement.

Plus the WORLD History Book. Today, the 15th anniversary of the death of an Australian conservationist.

REICHARD: It’s Monday, August 30th. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

EICHER: And I’m Nick Eicher. Good morning!

REICHARD: Now the news. Here’s Kent Covington.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Hurricane Ida slams Louisiana, Mississippi » AUDIO: [SOUND OF HURRICANE]

One of the most powerful storms ever to hit the United States blasted ashore on Sunday.

Hurricane Ida slammed into Port Fourchon, Louisiana just before noon Central as a Category 4 storm with winds of 150 mph.

From there, the eye of the storm roared inland, passing just to the west of New Orleans on the exact same date that Hurricane Katrina ravaged the region 16 years ago.

As of this morning, some parts of the state are just beginning to assess the devastation while other parts of Louisiana are still bracing for Ida.

Gov. John Bel Edwards had this warning on Sunday afternoon.

EDWARDS: We can expect devastating impacts to continue for most of the next 24 hours or so as the hurricane passes through the state.

The storm is slamming Mississippi today as well.

Ida is expected to push northeast through the rest of the week, bringing strong winds and rain through Nashville and Charleston, all the way up to New England.

Biden pays respects to US troops killed in Afghanistan » President Biden stood witness with grieving families Sunday under a gray sky as soldiers carried 13 flag-draped caskets off a transport plane at Dover Air Force Base.

The president and first lady Jill Biden also met privately with family members of the soldiers killed in the suicide attack last week at the Kabul airport. The dead ranged in age from 20 to 31.

Also on Sunday, a U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan blew up a vehicle carrying explosives that the Pentagon said posed an imminent threat to the Kabul airport. Some reports stated several ISIS terrorists were inside the vehicle, but that is unconfirmed.

Meanwhile, the evacuation is ongoing at the airport. And Secretary of State Tony Blinken told ABC’s This Week…

BLINKEN: We have about 300 American citizens left who have indicated to us that they want to leave. We are very actively working to help them get to the airport, get on a plane, and get out of Afghanistan.

But with just hours remaining until the president’s and Taliban’s evacuation deadline, GOP Senator Lindsey Graham said from information he’s seen, he believes many Americans and allies will be left stranded.

GRAHAM: The parade of horribles are about to unfold. We’re leaving thousands of Afghans allies behind who fought bravely with us. We’re going to leave hundreds of American citizens behind.

He added that in his view, the war is not over, it has simply shifted to a new chapter—one that could again see violence return to American soil.

The chance of another 9/11 just went through the roof.

The State Department released a statement saying it had received “assurances” from the Taliban that people with travel documents would still be able to leave the country after August 31st.

U.S. airlifts aid to Haiti to reach hardest areas hardest hit by quake » In Haiti, U.S. military aircraft are now ferrying food, tarps and other supplies into another disaster zone.

Aircraft flying out of the capital, Port-au-Prince, arrived over the weekend in the southern peninsula. That as the focus of relief efforts shifts to the areas hardest hit by the Aug. 14th earthquake.

In the community of Jeremie, people waved and cheered as a Marine Corps unit descended in a tilt-rotor Osprey aircraft with pallets of rice, tarps, and more.

But most of the supplies were not destined for Jeremie. They were instead sent out to remote mountain communities where landslides buried homes.

Troops under the direction of Miami-based U.S. Southern Command have so far delivered more than 265,000 pounds of relief assistance.

Actor Ed Asner dies » Actor Ed Asner has died.

Asner was a journeyman actor until he was hired in 1970 to play newsman Lou Grant on The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

AUDIO: You know what? You got spunk! … I hate spunk!

The part brought Asner three best supporting actor Emmys on Mary Tyler Moore and two best actor awards for a spinoff titled Lou Grant. He went on to win four other Emmys.

On the big screen, he played Santa Claus in the hit 2003 film Elf. And in 2009, he was the voice of the elderly hero in the hit animated Pixar film, Up.

Ed Asner was 91 years old.

I’m Kent Covington. Straight ahead: state obstruction in the fight against human trafficking.

Plus, the end of the Roman Republic.

This is The World and Everything in It.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s The World and Everything in It for this 30th day of August, 2021. We’re so glad you’ve joined us today. Good morning! I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. It’s time for Legal Docket.

Today, a story of perseverance in the face of opposition.

Human trafficking is a world wide problem. Good people try to help, and yet they can face obstacles thrown down by governments seemingly beholden to politically correct ideology.

REICHARD: Take San Diego, California, for example. According to the FBI, San Diego is one of the worst regions in the country for human trafficking. Exact numbers are unknown, but estimates are up to 8,000 victims per year. Average age? Sixteen. One hundred percent of the area high schools in a recent study reported recruitment of some type, of their students, for sex trafficking.

EICHER: That’s where Grace Williams Lionello stepped up to help. She’s with Children of the Immaculate Heart, a charity that’s helped adult victims of trafficking for eight years.

Lionello saw the need to open a home for girls, a residential therapeutic program to help them re-establish their lives. A home for up to six girls who could stay for two years.

LIONELLO: I mean, we're talking about kids who have had just awful lives basically since the beginning often, you know, so it takes a long time. Rome wasn't built in a day, human souls take much longer to work on and much more delicate care. 

REICHARD: Lionello needed to apply for a license to operate the group home, which had broad local support in San Diego. But when it came time for the state to grant approval for a license, the process dragged on and on.

For starters, the state didn’t like the mission statement of the new group home.

LIONELLO: So it was a very simple statement about how we serve survivors of sex trafficking, through housing and rehabilitation services, as part of the church's mission to restore all things in Christ. Like that's literally all that it says. And so we got back a paragraph about it, which was longer than our statement itself, saying that it was offensive...That's what they told us.

More delays, more wrangling ensued. This, after spending over a half million dollars to prepare the building for the girls. Continuing on like that seemed pointless.

So Lionello sought legal help.

Enter Paul Jonna, special counsel for The Thomas More Society.

He described the meetings Lionello had with state officials.

JONNA: So they started posing hypotheticals to her like, well, what if these girls want to get abortions? What are you going to do? Are you going to take them to get abortions? What if they want contraception? What if they want transgender hormone therapy? What if - all these hypotheticals— designed to just stonewall her application and block it, and either force her to comply with their radical agenda, or keep her out of the industry.

Lionello was not going to cave.

LIONELLO: I can't in good conscience take, you know, a 15 year old or 17 year old or 12 year old or whatever, to get hormone treatment that might permanently change and damage her development. And then when she's 21, she decides she wants to have a kid? But now she can't. And she has facial hair and she doesn't like it. I'm not going to be responsible for that. And plenty of medical people don't want to be responsible for that, without any kind of religious reasons.

The state asked if she’d drive the children to LGBT Pride events. She said no, she couldn’t do that, either, and still follow the dictates of her faith.

But she offered alternatives such that the state could get what it wanted without her having to violate her conscience. Such as having a government caseworker drive the child.

LIONELLO: And the person, the licensing person who was there, told us repeatedly during that meeting, “You're just gonna have a problem with that religious thing. You're just gonna have a problem with that.”

A problem, or an opportunity.

LIONELLO: And guess what? We're a protected class, too, as a religious group. And so that's where Paul Jonna and his team stepped in.

So Jonna filed the lawsuit on behalf of Lionello and Children of the Immaculate Heart in 2019, alleging religious discrimination.

The lawsuit eventually prompted an offer to mediate, as it became clear legal arguments against Lionella weren’t the strongest.

JONNA: So, you know, one of the things they posed to her, for example, was, she had to accept males who identify as female in this female- only home. And by the way, these females have all been, as you know, obviously, sexually abused and sex trafficked, and now they're going to they, the state of California wanted them to share those rooms with males who just thought they were female. So, you know, that's an absurd example of something else they wanted her to do.

State officials pointed to state law that requires caregivers of foster youth to provide transportation to medical appointments, and also to provide age appropriate, medically accurate information about reproductive health care.

Jonna pointed out something to them:

JONNA: And, you know, they were referring to different laws that they thought forced her to do that. But the truth of the matter is, none of them actually forced her to do that. The laws give these minors some rights, obviously, and Grace and her team were never trying to deprive them of those rights, but they were trying to find ways that they can ensure the minors had the rights protected, but not by Grace and her team violating their faith.

Eventually, the state granted the license to operate the home for girls, a four bedroom home on two acres. “The Refuge” is now open to girls referred from probation or child welfare agencies.

Lionello says even though the culture is not on her side, the Constitution is, and that’s why she felt filing the lawsuit was the right thing to do. That brought about mediation, so the case could be resolved short of a trial.

LIONELLO: Our faith is not a set of rules imposed on us from the outside, right? Our faith is a relationship with a person, with Jesus Christ. The quote unquote, rules or commandments, those are things that are in accordance with our nature, so we're hurting ourselves when we don't follow that stuff and hurting other people.

That’s this week’s Legal Docket.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Unlike our Canadian friend we told you about last week—who didn’t seek permission to land his helicopter on someone else’s property—here’s a story of someone who did.

Earlier this month, that someone contacted Alison Webb to ask for permission to land a helicopter in her backyard in England.

The nearby airport was temporarily shut down so they needed someplace to land.

She agreed, reasoning that seeing a helicopter up close would be a memorable experience for her two kids. But she had no idea just how memorable it would be.

Aboard that helicopter was an unnamed VIP passenger. And when he emerged from the helicopter with the chopper blades still roaring overhead, she recognized him immediately.

She told the BBC—quote—“He went straight over to the children for a chat, then came over and elbow bumped us and said thank you very much. Then he said if the kids would like they could go up in the helicopter.”

The unnamed VIP was a famous A-list actor. He was in England shooting Mission Impossible 7.

Talk about memorable! It’s not everyday that Tom Cruise lands in your backyard and takes your family on a helicopter ride!

It’s The World and Everything in It.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Next up on The World and Everything in It: the Monday Moneybeat.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Financial analyst and adviser David Bahnsen joins us now for our weekly conversation and commentary on markets and the economy. David, good morning.

DAVID BAHNSEN, GUEST: Well, good morning, Nick, good to be with you.

EICHER: Jay Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve—the U.S. central bank—gave his much anticipated, much commented upon speech at Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Significant, not significant? Did he make news?

BAHNSEN: No, he just made David Bahnsen look pretty good. Because he said more or less what I've been saying for two months he was gonna say word for word. And, and that wasn't a big surprise. I think that the really upsetting thing here is the absolute obsession and fascination with what the head of our central bank was going to say, in one speech, on one day, at this luxury resort, because we just simply cannot sustainably have an economy that is so dependent upon what's happening out of the Federal Reserve. And, and so our national obsession with the central bank I consider to be unhealthy.

And the reasons I've laid out for that were not inflationary, and they were not conspiratorial, and they were not political. But I think that the fact that the heavy hand of the Central Bank and its stewardship is distortive. I think we become dependent on it. And I think it exacerbates inequity. And so those are my three categories of critique. But the fact that Chairman Powell basically said, we're looking to taper our quantitative easing, but we're not quite ready to do it yet. And we'll get more serious about it at the end of the year, and maybe it'll be the beginning of next year. Those are all things that more or less, I've been forecasting for some time. And he followed the script word for word.

EICHER: You mentioned our unhealthy obsession with pronouncements by the Fed, but isn’t there a sense that this obsession isn’t totally unreasonable if we’re expecting the Fed to prop up our economy or drive the economy?

BAHNSEN: Well, but see, things like quantitative easing are not driving the economy, the perception of the Fed and the way they intervene or distort the economy is very important. But the reality is that there's no such thing as an economy apart from human action, apart from the activities of entrepreneurs, and the free exchange between producers and consumers. And so that's what we believe the economy really is. And the more interventions that are there to try to smooth out difficult times, the more we distort that process - and this is not a new story.

It went to a whole ’nother level with COVID and went to a real whole ’nother level after the financial crisis. But we're now in kind of a more modern era where this is the expectation. And by the way, Nick, it's the expectation in every developed economy in the world: Japan, Europe, they're in the same boat. But the big announcement everyone's waiting on the Fed is what they're gonna do on quantitative easing and quantitative easing doesn't do anything substantively for the economy at all. It is merely a computer entry of more excess reserves at the banks, it isn't meeting more lending activity, it isn't leading to more production, it isn't meeting more concern. Better, it's just an intervention. So stock market traders have to bet on how other people are going to bet about it. But as far as our ability to go out and invest in a project and for the real organic activity that I talk about all the time on this show, No, I don't think it’s relative. And so that's what's upsetting is that you have folks that are unable to go forward with real projects, because they're waiting to see what the Fed may do and not do. That's the intervention that I consider unhealthy. And yet, I really believe it's not going anywhere. I think that what the very heavy role of the central bank in our economy now, I don't think we've seen the end of it by any means.

EICHER: Switching gears, in a sense, to the heavy role of federal spending in our economy. Congress pushed forward a bit, took the next step on the big budget resolution. The Wall Street Journal editorial page characterized it as a capitulation on the part of Democrat moderates in the House. How do you see it? Can you explain what happened on Capitol Hill last week?

BAHNSEN: Okay, so basically, the drama over last weekend and into Monday and Tuesday was that there were nine democrat moderates who are holding out that they were not going to the framework for budget resolution, basically just opening up the resolution didn't pass a final bill. But it's a necessary condition to opening what's called a reconciliation window. And so it's kind of sausage making. It's a little bureaucratic, but it's important procedural. The nine democrats said we want to know that they are going to vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill that the Senate has already passed. Before we agreed to move this forward. They wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post demanding that. But then, of course, the progressives are saying the opposite. We want to know that the Senate is going to pass the three and a half trillion spending bill before we agree to the infrastructure. So both sides were, the moderates and the progressives were taking opposite sides of what was effectively going to kill the deal. So what Speaker Pelosi ended up proposing was that they commit that they will vote on the infrastructure bill no matter what, September 27. And then that got the moderates to agree to go forward approving the budget resolution, the moderates had no choice because the fact of matter is, they were never going to really just hold the whole thing up at this stage, they can vote no on it, don't have the ability to say they're not going to do it if their infrastructure bill isn't passed, but trying to draw their line in the sand at this procedural level, was getting them hammered with the fundraising and with the you know, pushback from the powers that be in the Democratic house. A lot of the listeners here and myself personally, have plenty critical that could be said about Speaker Pelosi. But this is not a person who does not know how to navigate her power. She was always going to get what she wanted here. And she got it once again.

EICHER: David Bahnsen—financial analyst and adviser. He writes at dividendcafe.com. And that’s your Monday Moneybeat. Thanks David, appreciate it.

BAHNSEN: Thanks, as always, Nick. 

NICK EICHER, HOST: Next up on The World and Everything in It: The WORLD History Book. Today, the end of things: a farewell to a TV zoologist, London burning, and the final war of the Roman Republic. Here’s senior correspondent Katie Gaultney.

KATIE GAULTNEY, SENIOR CORRESPONDENT: Scandal in the Roman Republic: General Marc Antony has divorced his Roman wife, leaving her for Egyptian Queen Cleopatra. Now, Julius Caesar’s heir, Octavian, is challenging Antony for power off the western coast of Greece. Oh, and adding fuel to the gossip flames? Antony’s abandoned Roman wife is Octavian's sister. Those were the top headlines 2040 years ago. The drama came to a head with the final war of the Roman Republic—the Battle of Actium on September 2, 31 B.C.

ROME: Glorious news at Actium in Greece! The navy of our imperator, Octavian Caesar… has won a decisive victory over Queen Cleopatra and her slave, Mark Antony. The Egyptian fleet has been destroyed! (cheers)

That clip from the 2005 HBO miniseries “Rome.” Octavian and Antony had a history before they were brothers-in-law; they had been two of three co-rulers of Rome after Julius Caesar’s assassination. Cleopatra and Antony’s closeness worried Romans, who thought their ruler would deliver the kingdom into foreign hands.

Octavian declared war on Cleopatra—and Antony, by extension. Cleo and Tony cut and ran, returning to Egypt when the battle wasn’t going their way. Antony’s beleaguered naval forces surrendered a week later.

Octavian declared himself Caesar Augustus, signaling the end of the Roman Republic and the beginning of the Roman Empire.

HBO: To Rome! (cheers)

Moving from the fall of the Roman Republic to London burning. This week marks 355 years since the conflagration that ravaged Medieval London on September 2nd, 1666.

MUSIC: “The Tempest,” Matthew Locke

As the story goes, a breadmaker left some embers burning near his oven. The hot summer had dried out the wood and thatch construction that made up the closely packed buildings—and it was windy that night—so the baker’s mistake was a recipe for disaster.

The flames in some parts of the city burned hotter than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The Great Fire of London decimated an area a mile and a half wide along the River Thames—about a third of the city at that time. One hundred thousand people lost their homes. The blaze destroyed the old St. Paul’s Cathedral that had stood for nearly 600 years. Ruth Polling is an official London tour guide. She shared what eyewitnesses reported.

POLLING: The fire burnt so hot that another diarist, a man called John Evelyn, describes how the stones of St. Paul flew like grenades through the air as the building exploded and the lead from the roof melted, creating a stream down the streets of St. Paul’s.

The wind abated, and local authorities used gunpowder to bring down walls and buildings, creating firebreaks. They extinguished the fire four days later and began taking stock of the damage—and what needed to change.

Parliament passed the 1667 Rebuilding Act to eradicate conditions that fueled the fire’s rapid spread. Architecture and materials changed. That’s why so many of London’s old buildings are made of brick and stone. The aftermath of the fire also saw non-construction innovations: like the first insurance company, and the first fire hydrant system.

Moving from “goodbye to a city quarter” to “farewell to an entertainer.”

IRWIN: Yeah, I’ve been grabbed by crocs, pulled down into the water, I’ve had black mambas nearly clip me on the ear, boomslang near take my thumb out....

Zoologist and TV host Steve Irwin died 15 years ago, on September 4th, 2006. He was pierced in the chest by a stingray barb while filming a documentary in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

Irwin became a household name in the mid-1990s through his TV show, The Crocodile Hunter. For a decade, Irwin and his wife, Terri, showed audiences some of the world’s most feared creatures.

IRWIN: Now this is the red spitting cobra. They’re notoriously fast, and they have copious amounts of venom… [snake hiss] You’re all right, you’re all right…

He grew up trapping crocodiles and having close encounters with some of Australia’s most merciless wildlife.

IRWIN: You can’t afford to make too many mistakes. But I got all my digits, all my limbs. I’ve been very lucky, and that’s about the closest shave I’ve ever had.

He had plenty of close calls, but he always seemed to emerge relatively unscathed. That may be why his death shocked the world—particularly since stingrays are considered relatively docile creatures. He left behind his wife of 14 years and two children. Irwin’s daughter, Bindi, gave birth to her first child this year, and honored her late father through the baby’s name.

IRWIN: If there’s one thing that I, Steve Irwin, would want to be remembered for, it’s for passion, enthusiasm. Conservation is my job, my life, my whole persona.

That’s this week’s History Book. I’m Katie Gaultney.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Tomorrow: vaccination versus natural immunity. We’ll examine the similarities and the differences between recovering from COVID and getting a shot to help fight it.

And, a win for religious liberty. We’ll tell you about a ruling that upheld a Christian school’s right to hire Christian employees.

That and more tomorrow.

I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

The World and Everything in It comes to you from WORLD Radio.

WORLD’s mission is biblically objective journalism that informs, educates, and inspires.

Jesus said: Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives, do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.

Go now in grace and peace.

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