The World and Everything in It - June 29, 2021

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning!

A rare bipartisan vote in the Senate advances a bill that supporters claim will make the United States more competitive with China.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Also what’s going on with the delta variant of Covid around the world and is the United States ready to withstand it?

Plus, our next feature in our Summer Destinations series. This time, a visit to the Windsor ruins.

And WORLD founder Joel Belz reflects on being a peacemaker and standing for truth.

REICHARD: It’s Tuesday, June 29th. 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 with Kent Covington.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Iraq condemns U.S. airstrikes along Iraq-Syria border » The government of Iraq is condemning U.S. airstrikes within its borders this week, calling them a violation of Iraqi sovereignty.

The Pentagon says the strikes targeted “facilities used by Iran-backed militia groups” near the Iraq-Syria border.

Secretary of State Tony Blinken acknowledged Baghdad’s concerns, but said the operation was a defensive measure.

BLINKEN: Given these ongoing attacks that you referred to by Iran-backed groups targeting our interests in Iraq, he directed further military action—we’ve taken action previously—to disrupt and deter these attacks.

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said the militias were using the facilities to launch drone attacks against American troops in Iraq.

Kirby said U.S. forces targeted three facilities that militants were using both for operations and for storing and shipping weapons.

Militants in Iraq have vowed revenge.

Sunday's operation followed earlier airstrikes against Iran-backed militias in the border region back in February.

Search for survivors in condo collapse continues »  Rescue workers in South Florida say they still hope to find more survivors amid the wreckage of a collapsed condo tower. First responders and volunteers labored in the town of Surfside for a fifth day on Monday, sifting through the rubble, largely by hand.

Miami-Dade County Board of Commissioners Chairman Jose “Pepe” Diaz said for the families of the missing, the wait is agonizing.

DIAZ: It is very difficult to know that your loved one could still be alive and have the hope to believe that, and at the same time, just sit there and wait for that information to get to you.

But the search is a painstaking process. Underscoring the danger, a rescuer tumbled 25 feet down the pile on Sunday.

The official death toll now stands at 10 after officials recovered another body on Monday. More than 150 people are still missing.

U.S. Supreme Court sidesteps transgender case » A Virginia school board Monday lost its fight to keep single-sex restrooms and locker rooms divided between biological girls and boys. That as the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear its appeal. WORLD’s Kristen Flavin reports.

KRISTEN FLAVIN, REPORTER: Gavin Grimm, born female, began identifying as a male while attending high school in Gloucester County, Va. The principal initially allowed Grimm to use the boys restroom, but school policy required students to use facilities according to their biological sex. The school gave Grimm the option of a single-stall restroom, but Grimm sued for sex discrimination in 2015. Lower courts ruled in favor of Grimm in 2019 and 2020. And on Monday, the Supreme Court declined to hear the school board’s appeal.

Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas said they would have heard the case.

The justices did not give a reason, but historically, the Supreme Court only gets involved in cases in which appellate circuits disagree.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Kristen Flavin.

Biden works to nail down infrastructure deal » President Biden is redoubling efforts to push a bipartisan infrastructure deal across the finish line. The White House plans a public push highlighting the potential benefits for the economy.

PSAKI: To make the case to the American people, to the public, about how officials are working together to deliver for them.

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki heard there.

But just days after the president announced that he’d reached an agreement with a group of Republican lawmakers that pact appeared shaky.

President Biden stripped hundreds of billions in spending from his proposal to get Republicans on board. But Democrats are not abandoning those spending measures. They plan to simply move them, attaching them to a different bill.

Some top Democrats have said without that separate legislation also passing, they wouldn’t agree to a bipartisan infrastructure bill.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said Monday ...

MCCONNELL: What I’m asking the president to do is call on the majority leader and the speaker to deal with these issues separately.

Republicans say if Democrats insist on tying one bill to another, the infrastructure deal isn't really a bipartisan compromise, but a shell game.

The president says he is willing to sign a bipartisan bill into law, even if Democrats are unable to pass a separate spending bill.

S.Africa battling COVID-19 surge » COVID-19 cases are surging in South Africa. The government there has announced a new round of pandemic lockdowns and Australia may be next. WORLD’s Anna Johansen Brown has that story.

ANNA JOHANSEN BROWN, REPORTER: The delta variant, first discovered in India, appears to be driving South Africa’s recent spike in new cases.

That prompted new restrictions this week, including a ban on alcohol sales and an extended nightly curfew.

South Africa recorded more than 15,000 new cases on Sunday.

In the country’s most populous province of Gauteng, hospitals are running short of COVID-19 beds.

Only about 1 percent of South Africans are fully vaccinated.

Meantime, in Australia, health officials warn the country could be on the cusp of another national surge also fueled by the delta variant.

Sydney, the country’s biggest city, is now under lockdown with stay-at-home orders in place until at least July 9th.

Only about five percent of Australians are fully vaccinated.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Anna Johansen Brown.

I’m Kent Covington.

Straight ahead: President Biden reimagines a historic federal program.

This is The World and Everything in It.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Tuesday the 29th of June, 2021.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. First up today, competing with China. 

Earlier this month, the Senate passed the USICA—that’s the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act. It will pump money into research and development in a whole host of industries where Beijing is making its own rapid advancements.

REICHARD: The bill passed on a vote of 68-32—a rare show of bipartisanship this year so far.

That level of agreement must mean the bill is really necessary, right? Well, not necessarily. WORLD intern Josh Schumacher reports.

SCHUMER: When a bill passes 22 to 4 out of one of its major committees and 21 to 1 out of another, it is truly bipartisan.

JOSH SCHUMACHER, CORRESPONDENT: Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer is a big supporter of the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act. He says it will set the United States on a path to “out-innovate, out-produce, and out-compete the world in the industries of the future.”

SCHUMER: At its core, the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act is about maintaining America’s role as the global economic leader. Few issues could be more important.

The bill allocates more than $200 billion for various research and development projects—also known as “R&D”—with a focus on technology and scientific studies.

But is all that money really necessary?

LINCICOME: The issue is that U.S. R&D spending overall has actually just hit an all time high. Both as a total inflation adjusted dollar amount, and but also as a share of GDP.

Scott Lincicome is a scholar at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. He says U.S. R&D spending hit an “all-time high” in 2019. And that renders the USICA a solution in search of a problem.

LINCICOME: For the first time ever, the United States, collectively private and government, spent 3 percent of our GDP on R&D. Now, that doesn't sound like a ton but also remember we have a massive $21 trillion economy, give or take. So that's a lot of money. So, the underlying premise of the bill, that there has been a collapse in R&D spending, is just not true.

The USICA’s expenditures include $80 billion dollars slated for the National Science Foundation. Nearly $30 billion dollars of that is set aside for the creation of a new Directorate of Technology and Innovation. It’s supposed to support research into areas such as artificial intelligence and quantum science.

The bill also allocates $50 billion for semiconductor development. $10 billion goes to different university research programs. $17 billion goes to the Energy Department. And almost $18 billion is slated for the Pentagon. The department of commerce also receives $10 billion dollars for the creation of regional hubs to diversify research locations throughout the country.

And that’s just for starters.

MILLS: I think that the bill has become something of a it's trying to do many things and I think there are some worries that in doing that it may not do any one of them well.

Tony Mills is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He says the bill doesn’t just suffer from a sort of “existential crisis.” It’s also likely to exacerbate problems that already exist in the U.S. R&D sector.

MILLS: Is our R&D system currently operating optimally? I think a pretty clear answer to that is no, there are a number of things that we could be doing better. And yet those issues are not really part of the conversation about increasing funding for R&D.

According to Mills, the US R&D sector suffers from several systemic issues that the USICA doesn’t address. For example, administrative burdens placed on scientists in recent years have taken away from the time they would otherwise spend on research. He also says the publish-or-perish culture in the scientific community could be incentivizing researchers in problematic ways. He also mentions the problematic use of certain statistical methods.

MILLS: If we don't try to rectify some of these underlying problems, spending a lot more money may not get us what we want, it could actually end up exacerbating, some of the problems that we have.

And Cato’s Scott Linicome says all this new spending could also create some new problems.

LINCICOME: There is a big risk that the new federal funding will not actually supplement private funding but will crowd it out.

Lincicome believes private R&D funding is preferable to government funding. But he says the private sector might leave certain areas of research and development unfunded. Specifically in the area of basic research. That’s because it doesn’t yield clear commercial returns.

AEI’s Tony Mills agrees. He says if the government could compensate for the imbalances created by the private sector, that would yield a stronger R&D system in the long run.

MILLS: I think that there is a danger in trying to beat our foreign competitors at their game. I think one of the things that has made the United States research enterprise so successful has been its, its pluralism, by which I mean, it is composed of an admixture of public, private, nonprofit, governmental institutions, and laboratories, and so forth.

Mills argues that moving toward a largely federally funded R&D system might kill that unique advantage.

MILLS: If we want to be seeing more basic scientific research we're not likely to see a huge significant change on the private sector side, but it’s something the federal government could move the needle on, and I think it would give us a competitive advantage, generally, because that's something historically that we have done so I worry that this bill won't won't move us in the right direction, in that respect.

House lawmakers have a chance to address some of these concerns in their version of the bill. But it’s not clear that they will. No matter how the details shake out, it seems certain that a large increase in federal R&D spending is on the horizon. Much less certain is whether that will give American innovation a competitive advantage.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Josh Schumacher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Next up on The World and Everything in It, the delta variant of Covid.

While many countries are renewing their coronavirus lockdowns, Americans almost appear to be living in a bubble. Airports are packed. Shopping centers are bustling, and plates and dishes are clanking in restaurants across the country. With new cases at their lowest level since March of 2020, America is returning to normal.

NICK EICHER, HOST: But the extraordinarily infectious delta variant, which is wreaking havoc overseas, is now spreading in the United States. And some projections say the variant, first discovered in India, will soon be the dominant strain here.

REICHARD: So what is the state of America’s COVID recovery? And could the delta variant threaten it?

Here now to discuss is Dr. Chris Lindsell. He is a professor of Biostatistics and Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt Univ. Medical Center. Dr. Lindsell, good morning!

CHRIS LINDSELL, GUEST: Good morning. Thank you for having me.

REICHARD: Well, let’s start with a snapshot of where we are right now as compared to the start of this pandemic. Talk about new infections and death rates as between then and now?

LINDSELL: It's a very good question. The actual numbers are interesting and tell a story that is very different to the emotional and behavioral story that is being told on the ground. The numbers look as though we have substantial numbers of deaths still, and considerable numbers of infections. And yet the social and behavioral changes on the ground are very different. And in part I think it is because the American public in general are thinking a little bit differently about the pandemic. And they're seeing a decline in the cases from its peak, and they're not doing comparison against baseline. If we were to compare against baseline, we would realize that we still have a raging pandemic locally as well as globally.

REICHARD: A little under 60 percent of U.S. adults are now fully vaccinated. When we combine those who are vaccinated with those who are not but have prior infection … could we be getting anywhere close to the threshold for herd immunity?

LINDSELL: There are several things at play in this particular issue. The first is understanding how much immunity is conferred by an infection. We believe that being infected does result in some level of immunity. However, not all people who've been infected have the same level of immunity. And so we're just beginning to work through how infection and vaccination combined within an individual for immunity of the person. But as you say, we have a very large proportion of people who have been vaccinated or who've been infected. And so the underlying question of are we approaching herd immunity, again, it's a little bit difficult to answer the question truly because even if 80% of the population in one part of the United States were to be vaccinated, there are other parts where the vaccination rate is much, much lower. And so we will see across the country some areas where they may be achieving this herd immunity level and in other areas where the vaccination rates are low and herd immunity is really out of reach. So, across the country, some areas have already achieved it. Other areas are going to be a long, long way behind. But overall, in terms of the people who've been infected, whether or not they contribute to the herd immunity, we're just beginning to work that out and how much immunity they have.

REICHARD: So, the original strain that took hold in the United States is now a relatively small percentage of new infections, multiple variants have overtaken it. The delta variant is the one that’s now on the rise, and some experts are concerned about this. How effective are the U.S. vaccines against this variant? And should we be concerned about this strain?

LINDSELL: The data that we currently have on hand suggests that the vaccines we have are effective against the Delta variant. Precisely how effective and whether they’re as effective against the Delta variant as others, we're still unclear. But the data do suggest—and there was a publication late last week that really points at this—that there is a good vaccine effectiveness against the delta variant. Should we be concerned about it? We should be concerned about it the same way we're concerned about COVID itself. The Delta variant has much greater transmissibility and so passing between people is high. And so yes, I think we should be concerned about the Delta variant. It spreads quickly and it is dangerous. And even though the vaccines do appear to be effective against it, if you're unvaccinated, or you happen to be one of the unlucky people that has a breakthrough case, we should be worried about the Delta variant.

REICHARD: Health officials in India are voicing concern about a strain mutated from the delta variant. Can you tell us anything about that mutation?

LINDSELL: I don't have information on that particular mutation at this time. I do hear a rumor—and I will emphasize that it is rumor—that the mutations may be less susceptible to the vaccines. But again, I've seen no data to confirm that. However, in any pandemic, one should always be concerned about the new variants and the evolution of the virus, because there's always the potential that it will out evolve the pace of technology and the pace of medicine.

REICHARD: Okay, Dr. Chris Lindsell has been our guest. Dr. Lindsell, thanks so much!

LINDSELL: Thank you very much, Mary.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Well, people don’t always see eye to eye on what counts as beautiful or whimsical.

Just ask Florence Fang. She lives in a tiny suburb near San Francisco and has been locked in battle with the powers that be for years over the design of her house.

And it’s not just any old house.

It looks like Fred Flintstone’s house by design. Google it and you’ll see what I mean. You could call it bulbous, rounded, painted in primary colors, cartoon-y.

AUDIO: Yabba, dabba, do!

Local officials don’t share the enthusiasm.

AUDIO: Yabba, dabba, don’t.

Kind of like that.

Town officials declared the place an eyesore.

Fang hadn’t applied for permits to add stone-age landscaping and lawn ornaments of Flintstones’ characters—Fred himself, Dino the dinosaur, Betty and Barney, too—and so, naturally, lawsuits commenced. Suits and countersuits.

Well, this week, Fang and the city settled. Barney and Betty Rubble and the rest get to stay put, and Fang will apply for permits for future changes.

Fang is an immigrant from China and she explains, this is her way of expressing her patriotic fervor. The audio from NBC Bay Area TV:

FANG: This house represented America’s drive force.This house is, to me, all about America.

Sadly, so are disputes and lawsuits.

It’s The World and Everything in It.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Tuesday, June 29th. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Coming next on The World and Everything in It: The attraction of ruins. 

From Pompeii’s excavations to cliff dwellings in Colorado, historic ruins do fascinate us.

REICHARD: Maybe that’s because it’s a bit like time travel, transporting us to the past, making us consider life long ago. Continuing with our summer Destinations series, WORLD Senior Correspondent Kim Henderson recently visited just such a historical site. And brings us this story.

KIM HENDERSON, SENIOR CORRESPONDENT: The road to Mississippi’s Ruins of Windsor is remote and lonely. It winds through forests, banks of kudzu, and lengthening shadows. Then suddenly you’re here—face to face with a Southern Stonehenge.

SOUND: CAR ON GRAVEL

A group of visitors filing out from a jeep find themselves at a loss for words.

MAN: You can’t describe it. There’s just no way.

It is hard to describe what’s left of 29 Corinthian columns, most still towering 45-feet tall, each of them ravaged by time—160 years of it. Brick and mortar is eroding at their edges. Vines grow from crevices and cracks. Shrubby plants fracture the cast iron capitals.

In the gravel parking lot, a pair of Chicago natives takes in the scene with Lacey, their Cockapoo.

LUCY: It's unbelievable. It reminds me of Rome actually. I've been to Italy . . This is really beautiful.
KEVIN: I agree. I mean, it looks like you're in Rome. It's really cool looking. Very cool.

SOUND: NATURE

Wealthy planter Smith Coffee Daniell II once owned the 2,600 acres that made up Windsor Plantation. It took him two years to complete the main house, a multi-story mansion with 23 rooms. A local paper called Windsor the most magnificent residence in the state. Ironically, Mr. Daniell died just weeks after its completion in 1861. He was 34.

The story captivates Sandy Custer’s imagination.

SANDY: Just the idea to know that it was a house. There was life here. There was a family here. It was a very busy place, I'm sure. And probably very beautiful. Just no photographs of the original.

The Kentucky resident is up on Windsor’s history. She’s right—no photographs of the home exist.

How it looked before being destroyed by an accidental fire in 1890 was a mystery for a hundred years. But in 1991, authorities discovered a sketch of Windsor in a soldier’s diary housed in the Ohio State archives.

Sandy and her husband, Jack, have visited these ruins before.

SANDY: The last time we were here was probably 30 years ago. We’ve got slides. Back in slides day. Now we’re doing digital . . .

Jack taught university-level Latin and Greek. He calls Windsor a time capsule.

JACK: You look at this, it tells you essentially, “This is what was going on in the 1860s.” And it's an incredible sight to think about how this was once done and what all was involved in getting things here, building this thing and creating an edifice in the middle of nowhere right now . . .

The Custers are steamboat enthusiasts, which provides a tie to local lore.Windsor had a rooftop observatory. Legend says Mark Twain used it to watch the Mississippi River, and probably steamboats, in the distance.

Windsor’s backstory has other interesting pages. The Union army stopped here on the way to Vicksburg. Grant didn’t burn the house, which was later used as a Union hospital. But he did burn the barn.

And in 1957, Windsor’s desolate columns were featured in a major motion picture, Raintree County, starring Elizabeth Taylor.

MOVIE CLIP

Still, some visitors look beyond the outline of towering columns and note craftsmanship.

MAN: The architecture from way back then when they just, everything was done by hand is amazing. We have power tools now and can't produce anything like that. You know what I'm saying?

Jason, a marine engineer from Texas, walked the grounds, checking it out from all angles.

JASON: The columns are beautiful, and the iron work must have been fantastic to see.

Jamie Treadway is an oilfield worker who pays attention to detail.

TREADWAY DAD: Just imagine the time spent on one pillar still standing here. It must've taken months just to build one. There's no telling.

Treadway says he brought his children here because it’s important to teach them about the past. He makes them stop and look at the delicately carved pieces topping the columns.

CHILD: This must be a pretty big house.

Kevin Warren is visiting the ruins for the first time. He’s a new publisher in nearby Natchez, a historic city that’s learning to balance romantic notions of the antebellum South with tours that focus on slave narratives. He says the same should apply at Windsor.

KEVIN: It's important to know why it's here, who built it and that side of it. But I think it's also important to tell the other side of the story and what the plantation side of it means, because I think it gets lost on a lot of people.

SOUND: READING

While a mom reads a historic marker to her children, they lean against temporary fencing erected to protect visitors from falling debris. The state is funding work to preserve the site, and Michael Morris of Mississippi’s Department of Archives and History says stabilization efforts are underway.

MORRIS: There were 29 columns at one point. Some of the columns have already fallen and disappeared. If we don’t prioritize this project -- and for the Department of Archive and History it is a priority -- if we don’t tackle this issue we could lose more columns.

But the columns are completely open to the elements. Rain, wind, tornadoes. Restoration work can only slow the decaying process.

And that may be the real takeaway here at the Ruins of Windsor. Even man’s grandest projects will someday fall.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Kim Henderson in Claiborne County, Mississippi.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Tuesday, June 29th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Here’s WORLD founder Joel Belz.

JOEL BELZ, FOUNDER: Have you ever helped split a church? I don’t mean on purpose. I mean joining with others in making your point so vigorously that your church falls apart.

And I’m not referring primarily here to some time when you disagreed in the past with others over baptism, or the millennium, or who wrote the book of Hebrews.

I’m thinking more of the vigorous discussions we’ve had in recent months about masks, and vaccines, and presidential politics. I don’t remember any other time in my adult years when I’ve seen more local churches so fractured and worried about their very future existence.

These debates—or should we call them squabbles?—are by no means limited to smaller or mid-size churches. Even some once-vigorous mega-churches are stumbling and staggering these days.

Take it a big step farther and note how even entire denominations find themselves in a mode of debate where many of the participants fear the ripping apart of a once unified body. Headlines just a few weeks ago—even in the Wall Street Journal—raised the spectre of major rifts in the Southern Baptist Convention. Earlier this year, similar concerns arose within the much smaller Presbyterian Church in America. Meanwhile, the United Methodist Church is currently in the process of dividing between liberal and conservative factions that some observers say is too orderly to call a “split.”

To be sure, there may be very good reasons why splits and divisions seem more prevalent within conservative churches—whether we’re talking about smaller congregations or large denominations. Conservative churches, almost by definition, tend to be doctrinally fussier than their liberal or progressive counterparts. Liberals, almost by definition, tend to be a good bit more tolerant.

So as I near my 80th birthday later this summer, I find myself reflecting on where I’ve put my emphasis over a lifetime. Have I been more a church mender or a church splitter? Every time I’ve taken vows of membership or leadership, I’ve committed myself “to study the peace and the purity of Christ’s church.” When I’ve pursued purity, I’ve in effect put an emphasis on sound doctrine and teaching. When I’ve pursued peace, I’ve put an emphasis on what I have in common with other believers.

For the record, I think that in my lifetime I may have leaned a bit more toward the pure doctrine side and a bit less than I wish toward seeking peace with my fellow believers. But I’m thankful I serve an understanding and forgiving God, and that others can make up for my lack and shortcomings.

Every Christian believer has to make those same choices, to a greater or lesser degree. You do that when you decide where to put your membership, where to continue your support, what kind of pastor you will call, what kind of missionaries and educators you will support, and dozens of other decisions along the way.

And I hope WORLD readers and listeners will be known more and more as folks who are intentional along the way.

I'm Joel Belz. 

NICK EICHER, HOST: Tomorrow on Washington Wednesday: The White House as well as Senate Democrats and a handful of Republicans have agreed on a trillion-dollar infrastructure bill. We’ll talk about it.

And, we’ll visit a farm raising an unusual animal that’s gaining popularity with tourists.

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.

Today and tomorrow— that’s what’s remaining in our June Giving Drive. WNG.org/donate—thanks very much for whatever you can do to help.

Proverbs says, “Whoever conceals his transgressions will not prosper, but he who confesses and forsakes them will obtain mercy.”

Go now in grace and peace.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.