The World and Everything in It - October 20, 2021

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning!

President Biden’s approval ratings continue to fall. His press secretary blames Covid. But what’s really behind his lagging poll numbers?

NICK EICHER, HOST: That will be the first question today on Washington Wednesday.

Also today a WORLD Tour special report.

Plus, winged migration.

And WORLD commentator Janie B. Cheaney on how easy it is to find trouble when that’s all you’re looking for.

REICHARD: It’s Wednesday, October 20th. 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: China denies test of nuclear capable hypersonic missile » China is denying that it recently tested a hypersonic nuclear-capable missile.

The Foreign Ministry in Beijing said the launch involved a spacecraft rather than a missile and was designed to see if a space vehicle could be reused for peaceful space missions.

But the U.S. government says it was in fact a test of a very advanced and incredibly dangerous weapon.

Congressman Michael Waltz sits on the House panel that oversees the nation’s ballistic missile defense systems. He explains that a normal ballistic missile launches on a set trajectory and U.S. defenses can often intercept them.

WALTZ: It’s hard. It’s like shooting a bullet with a bullet. But these hypersonic missiles, imagine a maneuverable bullet that flies below our systems in space but above our systems on the ground.

China’s space program is run by its military and is closely tied to its agenda of building hypersonic missiles and other technologies that could alter the balance of power with the United States.

And GOP Congressman Mike Gallagher called it a very disturbing development.

GALLAGHER: I do believe that we were caught off guard here. As one source in the Financial Times article put it, ‘we have no idea how they did this’. That’s unacceptable for our $80-billion dollar a year intelligence community. We need to do better.

China's military advances have raised concerns in Washington. They comes as Beijing becomes increasingly assertive over its territorial claims on land and sea.

Rights activists urge boycott of Beijing Winter Olympics » AUDIO: [OLYMPIC TORCH]

A flame-lighting ceremony in ancient Olympia this week marked the beginning of the Olympic torch relay for the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing. But human rights activists are urging governments, sponsors and athletes to boycott the games. WORLD’s Kristen Flavin has more.

KRISTEN FLAVIN, REPORTER: Activists are calling the upcoming Winter Olympics China's—quote—“genocide games.”

Human rights groups are accusing the International Olympic Committee of granting legitimacy to rights abuses in China by allowing the Winter Games to go ahead in Beijing.

At a news conference in Athens, Mandie McKeown with the International Tibet Network said “We have yet again borne witness to the hypocrisy (of the IOC),", said at a news conference in Athens.

China has drawn international condemnation for its abuses against treatment Uyghur Muslims in the Xinjiang region. It’s also been criticized for its crackdown on protesters in Hong Kong and its policies toward Tibet and Taiwan.

But IOC President Thomas Bach stressed that the Games must be—his words—“respected as politically neutral ground.”

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Kristen Flavin.

U.S. says it will support Ukraine against Russia » Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin visited Ukraine on Tuesday and underscored Washington's support for the country's sovereignty against Russian aggression.

Russia’s annexation of Crimea and support for the rebels in eastern Ukraine has driven Moscow-West relations to post-Cold War lows.

The tensions rose once again earlier this year when Russia increased troop numbers near its borders with Ukraine, including in Crimea. Austin said Tuesday...

AUSTIN: We again call on Russia to end its occupation of Crimea, to stop perpetuating the war in eastern Ukraine, to end its destabilizing activities in the Black Sea and along Ukraine’s borders.

The Kremlin has described Ukraine's bid for prospective membership in NATO as a red line and a major threat to its security.

But Austin underlined that “no third country has a veto over NATO’s membership decisions.”

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy hailed the U.S. as the country's “chief partner in security and defense.”

U.S. expected to authorize mix-and-match COVID booster shots » The federal government is preparing to give a green light to mix-and-match COVID-19 vaccine booster shots. That according to a U.S. health official.

The FDA originally said people should only receive a second dose or booster of the same brand as their initial shot. But the agency is expected to lift that stipulation.

President Biden’s top medical adviser, Dr. Anthony Fauci commented on a recent study from the National Institutes of Health. It showed any booster combination increases antibodies. But one particular sequence showed the best results.

FAUCI: When you boost Moderna or Pfizer against the original J&J, you get a much higher antibody level.

The study has yet to be peer-reviewed.

Officials hope that the policy shift will improve access to booster shots and ease concerns about vaccine reaction. If someone had an adverse reaction to one shot, now they can try a different brand.

Haitian gang demands millions in ransom for kidnapped missionaries » A gang that kidnapped 17 members of a U.S.-based missionary group in Haiti has demanded a $17 million ransom for them. That according to Haiti's justice minister, as quoted by the Wall Street Journal.

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said again on Tuesday that the U.S. government is working to help free the missionaries.

PSAKI: The FBI is a part of a coordinated U.S. government effort to get the U.S. citizens involved to safety. Also the U.S. The Embassy in Port-au-Prince is coordinating with local authorities and providing assistance to the families to resolve the situation.

A wave of kidnappings prompted a protest strike that shuttered businesses, schools and public transportation in a new blow to Haiti's anemic economy.

I’m Kent Covington. Straight ahead: President Biden’s political woes.

Plus, seeking discernment over division.

This is The World and Everything in It.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Wednesday, the 20th of October, 2021.

You’re listening to WORLD Radio and we’re so glad you are! Good morning, I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. First up on The WORLD and Everything in It: President Biden’s lagging poll numbers.

The most recent Real Clear Politics average of polls has the president’s approval rating just under 44 percent. Fifty-two percent disapprove. Significant, given that as recently as August, the president had a positive approval rating.

But a series of crises, both foreign and domestic, appear to have taken a toll.

So what do the poll numbers really say about what’s gone wrong? And what will it take for the president to turn things around?

REICHARD: Here to talk about it is Karlyn Bowman. She’s the polling guru at the American Enterprise Institute and a distinguished senior fellow there. 

Karlyn, good morning!

KARLYN BOWMAN, GUEST: Good morning.

REICHARD: Well, Joe Biden’s been in politics since the 1970s as a senator and as a vice president. But he’s still fairly new serving as a president, in office for ten months now.

Voters often grant a honeymoon period for a new president. How long does that time period usually last?

BOWMAN: Well, it lasts for a shorter amount of time, it seems, with each new president in part probably because of social media. But Joe Biden's honeymoon is absolutely over. His summer slump was a difficult one for him. And I think Americans are deeply concerned about a number of issues right now and they don't see the president addressing them in the way they would like.

REICHARD: I’ve seen some polling that suggests Biden’s support among independent voters has dropped. What’s the significance of that?

BOWMAN: That's extraordinarily significant. Just to give you one marker, Gallup had him at over 60 percent among independents early in his tenure. That's now 37 percent. That's a very sharp drop. And I think the reason that we look so carefully at independents is because many Republicans and Democrats, their minds are already made up, whereas independents, that small group can be decisive in elections and in terms of an assessment of one's performance.

REICHARD: Two things happened around the time that the president’s approval ratings took a dive: One was the delta surge of COVID cases and the other was the bungled pullout of American troops from Afghanistan. Karlyn, how big of a toll have those crises taken on this White House?

BOWMAN: Both the Delta variant and the Afghan withdrawal have taken a very big toll. That's when we began to see the numbers move in a very significant direction. It's hard to know which was more important. They were both very important to the public. What we're seeing now is concern about COVID, and particularly the Delta variant is receding a bit that could perhaps create a slight uptick in the President's rating. But I think Afghanistan has still left a very sour taste in Americans mouths, in part because even though they thought it was the right thing to do—that American to withdraw—it was handled so badly, that it left a significant mark. And I think one of the things that news stories in the U.S. haven't pointed to yet is not only do we see a decline in his performance ratings, but we see a very significant decline on something that was a real strength for Biden during the campaign and that was his likability. Again, a significant decline among Independents, Democrats are holding pretty strong. Republicans have never been supportive. But on all sorts of qualities—likability, belief that he's honest and trustworthy, the belief that he's mentally sharp, all of these have taken a real hit in recent weeks. And so those kinds of things—the personal ratings—can act as a kind of cushion for bad performance ratings, but we don't see it right now.

REICHARD: The southern border with migrants pouring over it is another issue. Now that was going on even while Biden’s numbers still looked good. Has his handling of the southern border affected him, politically?

BOWMAN: Well, Americans do not believe that he has a situation under control. And they tend to agree with a lot of commentators from the region that suggest that they felt that Biden wanted them to come or that the borders would be open in a way they weren't under Donald Trump. So I think it has the potential to have a very big effect. There are a lot of issues like this—inflation is another one, the border crisis is another one—that could hurt Biden much more going forward, depending on how it's handled.

REICHARD: Let’s talk mandates now. Is the president’s push for large scale vaccine mandates in private companies affecting him politically, one way or the other, at this point?

BOWMAN: Well, you have about 58 to 60 percent support for the mandates in the abstract. Americans don't want to see workers who don't get vaccinated get fired. But now you have nearly 30 percent of Americans saying that there are mandates in their workplaces. And Gallup and several other pollsters, again, have shown around 58-60 percent for requiring employers of large companies to have their workers vaccinated overall. So that is, I mean, there's still about 35-37 percent opposition to the Biden proposals, but again, they do in most polls have majority support.

REICHARD: Well you know the White House is confident that if he could figure out a way to pass his $3.5 trillion dollar spending bill, that would turn his poll numbers around. Setting aside whether it’s actually a good idea to spend that money, I mean that’s more revenue than the government collected in 2020—would it be popular? And even if it is, would that repair Biden’s political brand?

BOWMAN: A big book political victory could help, but it's much harder to bring numbers up than to watch them go down. And, again, there is going to be opposition to this. But let's say Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema, the senators who have been most opposed to that price tag, let's say that they eventually sign on to whatever Biden wants. It could be a good victory, and it's possible it could boost his ratings. Americans want the federal government to do a lot, whether they want to spend this much money, or whether they think government can spend this much money effectively, are very big questions if you look at polling literature over time.

REICHARD: Do these polls give any clues as to what President Biden could do to improve voters’ assessment of the job he is doing?

BOWMAN: The polls really reflect presidential performance and so he's got to perform better. That's easy for me to say. But he needs to perform better going forward.

REICHARD: Is there anything you wish the public knew about polls, and this administration in particular and the media that maybe we don’t read about in the newspapers?

BOWMAN: Well, I don't think polls should ever be used to make policy. I think they're too crude or blunt an instrument for that purpose. But that said, they can tell you a lot about a complex society and that's what I think they're best suited to do.

REICHARD: Karlyn Bowman with the American Enterprise Institute has been our guest. Karlyn, thanks so much!

BOWMAN: Thank you.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: a World Tour special report. This week, Onize Ohikere reports on the crisis in Lebanon and how it’s affecting one of the region’s oldest Christian communities.

ONIZE OHIKERE, REPORTER: Last week, Boutros Wehbe sat inside the Beirut office of the Christian ministry Horizons International. The power was out again, and his phone battery had only 20 percent left. He had no idea when he could charge it next.

WEHBE: We haven't experienced this situation even during the war, the Civil War. So the situation is miserable. Really it's miserable.

Hourlong blackouts are already common in Lebanon, a country that has battled an economic crash since 2019. But earlier this month, the barely functional Zahrani power plant shut down for the entire day. Lebanon partially restored electricity a day later, but that did little to resolve the larger problem.

The country’s energy crisis spiraled in August when the central bank decided to end fuel subsidies. The nation’s currency has lost up to 90 percent of its value in the last two years, aggravating inflation and unemployment.

WEHBE: If you walk in the streets of Beirut you will see a very famous places or shops are closing. Closed because there's no customer. There's no people. They don't have the power of buying now.

Darren Duke is a senior research fellow at The Philos Project, a U.S.-based group that advocates for Christian communities in the Near East. He says nearly 80 percent of the Lebanese population lives in poverty.

DUKE: That means only two out of every 10 people you see on the streets are living above the poverty line, that's a that's a very substantial percentage of the Lebanese population.

That means many families can no longer afford to fuel the private generators they once relied on during power outages.

Some, like Wehbe, are looking for alternatives.

WEHBE: We are working now on solar system where we want to install this stuff. Yeah. Want to put it in our office. Because we need it. We need the power.

Horizons International provides physical and spiritual assistance to mostly refugee communities. Syrians living in the Bekaa Valley are having an especially hard time because they can’t afford the diesel that powers their heaters.

WEHBE: It's very cold area. Very, very cold. People, yeah there is lot of camps there for the Syrians. We go there and we we disciple the we we we give also food. We give also blankets.

The economic crisis and political instability are also fueling protests. Last week, six people died in the worst street violence Beirut has experienced in the last 10 years.

Amid so much upheaval, many people who can are leaving the country—including Christians. Darren Duke says that puts an important gospel foothold in jeopardy.

DUKE: This is a very ancient Christian community in Lebanon. They were established in the year 406 A.D. And the greater dream of Lebanon has always been that Christians could live there in peace, and practice their faith as a religious minority in a sea of Muslims. And if the Christian community is snuffed out, because of these dynamics, that will be a shame.

That’s this week’s World Tour. Reporting for WORLD, I’m Onize Ohikere in Abuja, Nigeria.

NICK EICHER, HOST: An Israeli scuba diver recovered an ancient object off the Mediterranean coast this week.

It was covered in barnacles but as he lifted the object to give it a closer look—it resembled a sword.

So the diver took it to antiquities experts who said it appears to be made of iron likely dating back 900 years.

Yaakov Sharvit is director of Marine Archaeology, audio from Huffington Post.

SHARVIT: We have to clean it. Maybe there is a name on it. Maybe there is decoration. And that : will also give us more information about the knight who hold this beautiful sword. 

Authorities think it’s possible the sword belonged to a knight of the crusades.

It’s The World and Everything in It.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Wednesday, October 20th. Thank you for joining us today.

Good morning. I’m Nick Eicher.

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

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: migration.

For many of us across the Northern Hemisphere, this is a common sound this time of year…

AUDIO: [GEESE FLYING SOUTH]

As the days get shorter—and cooler—many species of birds head to different climates for the winter. Some fly hundreds of miles, others thousands of miles.

EICHER: Why do they do it? And how do they know where to go without GPS? WORLD’s Paul Butler talked to some experts to find out.

O’DANIEL: Some birds can return to the exact same tree year after year, going thousands of miles away from that tree in the winter, and then returning in the spring to the same tree or the same yard.

PAUL BUTLER, REPORTER: Donna O’Daniel is a retired ornithologist, and wildlife biologist. Several years ago she explained to me the migration process and some of the original experiments trying to understand it.

O’DANIEL: And one of the earliest experiments was done by John James Audubon in 1803. He placed a silk thread on the leg of an Eastern Phoebe—and this was in the fall. The bird left and sure enough next spring, the same Phoebe came back with that silk thread on its leg.

Over her career O’Daniel studied birds in some pretty exotic locations, including Madagascar, and two south Pacific U.S. territories: the Johnston Atoll, and the Northern Marianas. Even in tropical climates, birds migrate. Why?

O’DANIEL: Well they migrate, basically, for three different reasons: The weather is one main factor in migration. The weather combined with the lack of food is a very motivating factor that you have. And one other reason why they migrate is to ensure reproductive success. For instance, the seabirds can't lay their eggs at sea, they need to nest on land. So during the nesting season, they migrate to land. So three different factors really why they migrate: weather, food and reproduction.

The migration pattern and distance covered is very different between species:

O’DANIEL: We have some North American migrants that nest in Canada and as far north as Alaska, and they go—some of them—to the southern U.S. Some of them go and spend the winter in Mexico. Some go as far as Central American countries and even South America. And the world class migrants, so to speak, go farther than that. The Arctic Tern that nests in the very high Arctic, goes clear to Antarctic waters. And that's one of those species of birds that go the farthest.

So how do they know where to go? Well, it depends...

O’DANIEL: They have found by doing scientific experiments that birds know where they're going by the sun. The diurnal migrants can adjust their migratory patterns depending on the position of the sun in the sky. And the nocturnal migrants can determine which direction to go by the position of the constellations in the night sky. They have determined that birds migrate by visual landmarks and even olfactory cues can be a source of knowledge of where they’re going.

Scientists long guessed that birds could also sense the earth’s magnetic field. More than 40 years ago, they discovered that some species have a built in compass of sorts:

PLOEGSTRA: Little bits of magnetite. In birds, it's in their beak...

Jeff Ploegstra is professor of Biology and Environmental Studies at Dordt University.

Magnetite is one of the most magnetic of all the naturally occurring minerals on Earth. The iron based mineral not only shows up in birds, but is common in other migratory species as well: like bees, bats, and some fish.

PLOEGSTRA: That does appear to play some role in their ability to detect magnetic fields, they're connected to neurons—the opthalmic nerve.

A more recent area of study focuses on what some call a kind of “sixth sense” in some birds. Though really it is just a hyper-developed fifth sense as they can see more of the electromagnetic spectrum than humans.

PLOEGSTRA: We know that birds also have a light dependent magnetoreception, so they can only detect and respond to these magnetic fields when there's light available. And this led to a whole line of investigation, basically looking at a group of molecules called cryptochromes.

Cryptochromes are pretty universal—and not just in animals as it turns out. They appear in plants and bacteria as well. These proteins are sensitive to blue-light.

PLOEGSTRA: Cryptochromes are similar to the molecules in our eyes, in some ways that when a photon of light hits these certain molecules, the molecule changes shape, and that actually, is part of what causes the impulse that we understand is light.

So migrating birds not only observe landmarks and the position of the sun and stars, but they have the ability to visibly perceive magnetic fields—though we don’t know what it looks like to them.

PLOEGSTRA: I think that's such an amazing sort of thing to consider how differently and uniquely we see the world because of how we're created versus how other things are uniquely adapted to their roles and interact with the world and are sort of uniquely created to perceive the world in the ways that are important for them to carry out the functions that they have in ecosystems in the larger picture of life.

Birds also can develop memories, so migration has a behavioral aspect as well. Taken together, the annual journey of migratory birds is a complex process not easily explained.

That brings us back to bird expert Donna O’Daniel. She says bird migration is just one more testimony to a creator. And as a life-long observer of birds, that deeply affected her faith.

O’DANIEL: We can't explain it. How can a tiny 3-gram bird cue into the Earth's magnetic field and the stars at night and the movement of the sun during the day? How can all of this have evolved? I find great comfort in the fact that God who created these birds to be able to migrate thousands of miles and he cares for them that much. We know that from the scriptures. In Matthew, Jesus said, You know, I care for the sparrows I know about each one that falls. God knows each bird that falls into the ocean into the Gulf of Mexico that runs out of fuel. And how much more He cares for us.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Paul Butler.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Wednesday, October 20th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Here’s WORLD commentator Janie B. Cheaney on our uncanny ability to find problems where none exist.

JANIE B. CHEANEY, COMMENTATOR: If it waddles like a duck, and quacks like a duck—is it a duck?

I think the biggest problem in public discourse today is the failure to make proper distinctions. You see it in the way words like “crisis” are tossed around like red flags at a Raiders game—what exactly constitutes a crisis? Any hot political issue is likely to get massaged and pounded until the public isn’t clear what we’re talking about. How often have you heard the words “critical race theory” in the last 12 months?

It’s hot enough; anybody who pays attention to the news now knows what CRT stands for, but they may not understand what it is.

Here’s an example that just came across my radar. Earlier this month two parents with children in the Katy, Texas, school district challenged the work of a popular children’s author. Jerry Craft is the author-illustrator of two graphic novels, New Kid and Class Act, both about the experiences of black kids transferring to an exclusive private school in New York City. One of the Katy ISD parents insisted that the books contained an unmistakable taint of critical race theory, while the other parent feared children would be “brainwashed” by the content. Due to these concerns, administrators postponed the author’s scheduled school visit while they review the books in question.

I appreciate the district’s response, which seems a marked contrast to other school districts in the news. But in this case, parental concerns are not justified. I chaired the committee that chose New Kid as a runner-up to WORLD’s children’s book of the year in 2020. I didn’t see critical race theory anywhere in it. Nor did I notice the white oppression that more liberal readers picked up. We tend to find what we’re looking for, but what I found was an honest and often hilarious depiction of middle-schoolers in transition, trying to bridge race and class divides even as clueless grownups try to “help.” White kids make groundless assumptions about black kids, but assumptions also happen in reverse. People are people, in other words—who knew?

The purpose of literature is to draw readers into other lives, thus expanding their own. I felt expanded by both of Jerry Craft’s semi-autobiographical novels, and wouldn’t hesitate to recommend them to anybody. I don’t know his ideology, but I do know something about his experience as a middle-schooler, which was in many ways different, but also similar, to my own.

CRT is an ideology, an academic theory that escaped the academy and burrowed into public schools by avenues like the New York Times’ 1619 Project and historical works by Ibram X. Kendi. It’s real, and it’s dangerous, but New Kid and Class Act don’t waddle or quack like CRT.

Ideology divides; experience connects. Christians, especially, must be careful to tell the difference.

I’m Janie B. Cheaney.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Tomorrow: Labor pains. We will hear from business owners struggling to find workers.

And, we’ll bring you the latest on the situation in Haiti, where armed gangs this past weekend kidnapped a group of Christian missionaries.

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.

The Psalmist wrote: The years of our life are seventy or even by reason of strength eighty; yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away...So teach us to number our days, that we may get a heart of wisdom.

Go now in grace and peace.

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