Whitcomb: AI and the Real You; Clinical Capitalism; Documents Drama, Cont.; Town/Gown; Jan. 6
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: AI and the Real You; Clinical Capitalism; Documents Drama, Cont.; Town/Gown; Jan. 6
“The Masonic Temple – white clapboard,
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTcolumns straight from some Egyptian opera set –
began in resolution, but settled
To something jaunty, accommodating time.’’
-- From “Time on Main,’’ by Mark Doty (born 1953), American poet
“An hour of winter day might seem too short
To make it worth life's while to wake and sport.’’
-- From “A Winter Eden,’’ by Robert Frost (1874-1963)
“Act as if you were already happy, and that will tend to make you happy.’’
Dale Carnegie (1888-1955), an American writer and lecturer, and the developer of courses in self-improvement. He was the author of How to Win Friends and Influence People
“Conversation is the enemy of good wine and food.’’
-- Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980), famed Anglo-American film director
Will we get a January thaw this year? We usually get one sometime in the last week and a half of the month, with temperatures in the ‘60s and a kind of spring fever taking over some of us, before what’s usually the snowiest month – February.
It’s heartening to see how quickly grass can turn green in sunny spots in the thaw, and snow drops bloom for a couple of days.
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Maybe they should change the name of this tourist attraction to Liability Lane.
But the big thing to watch in The City by the Sea is the redevelopment and, we hope, beautification, of the ugly North End.
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Perhaps on a brighter side, ChatGPT may soon erode Google’s business model and its near-monopoly. Consider that Microsoft will soon launch a version of its Bing search engine that uses ChatGPT.
Tourists vs. Recession
The country, including New England, will likely go into a recession this year, and unlike in the pandemic recession, the Feds can’t be expected to bail out the states. So the states better pump up their rainy-day funds. Rhode Island, for its part, should intensify its promotion of warm-weather tourism, especially in such nearby areas as Greater New York City, to get more sales tax revenue to help offset the decline in other tax revenue.
The Health-Care Biz
CVS Health Corp. is looking into buying Oak Street Health Inc., in what could be a $10 billion deal. As well it would: Oak Street operates primary-care centers for Medicare recipients, a rich market indeed. It has a growing empire of outlets in Rhode Island and elsewhere.
What would this further bolstering of CVS pricing power mean for patients, insurers and taxpayers? Are the likes of CVS and Walgreens getting too big and powerful?
This brings me to the spread of those highly lucrative medical-specialty outlets, owned by very profit-driven physicians, for dermatology, orthopedics, etc. I notice from looking at the bills that they send us that, while you’re usually seen by a physician assistant or nurse practitioner, not a physician, the high price of a 15-minutes-or-less appointment -- sometimes several hundred dollars – suggests that a physician has seen you.
Most patients don’t complain since the mass of taxpayers are paying for most of it via Medicare, with private-insurance providers paying for most of the rest, after your co-pays. But study your next bill. Out-of-control costs!
How do I invest in one of these money machines?
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The U.S. aviation shutdown last Wednesday, forced by a problem in an FAA system, reminded me of two things. One is the underfunding of such key federal services as the FAA. The other is that the absence of high-speed train service on such medium-length routes as New York to Chicago forces too many people to use our often-overwhelmed airline networks. In most other “advanced industrialized countries’’ high-speed trains reduce the need to fly such relatively modest distances.
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The heavily hyped and often maudlin coverage of Damar Hamlin’s near-fatal cardiac problem, with plenty of real and phony, or at least theatrical, emotion expressed by people who don’t actually know him, is ironic. The Buffalo Bills' safety was brought down by blunt force to his chest in this very violent sport. Violence between big guys is one the things that fans most like about pro football and is very profitable for team owners.
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There’s a very big, weird, and (to me) kitschy new sculpture on the Boston Common of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife, Coretta Scott King, embracing. Usually in such famous public parks, meant to be soothing, less is more, and adding structures undermines the sought-after pastoral effect. But I suppose the sculptural spectacle will draw many tourists, which will make The Common safer.
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The thing about such institutions, including Brown University, is that their leaders seem to feel, like company execs, that the institutions must constantly expand or die in the highly competitive private-education markets in which they operate.
But then Moses Brown and Brown University are businesses; they just don’t have to pay the taxes that “real” companies and individuals do. The executives of these “nonprofits” profit from impressive salaries and benefits, which of course, swell with the size of the institutions’ operations.
Moses Brown recently took out a big ad in the very upscale New Yorker magazine.
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It will be entertaining to watch New Hampshire do whatever is necessary to retain its status as having “the iconic first in the nation” presidential primary now that the Democrats want to give the title to South Carolina. However early the Palmetto State’s primary is scheduled, the Granite State’s will be earlier! Being first brings in a lot of news coverage, and thus money, to a “quaint” state known for its close-up civic participation and usually polite but thorough questioning of candidates.
Here is the stuff (as of Jan. 12) on the Biden and Trump classified documents stories, reporting on which has produced much false equivalence.
Politifact reported:
“Biden’s lawyers on Nov. 2 discovered about 10 documents, some with classification markings, at the University of Pennsylvania's Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, in Washington, D.C. Biden’s lawyers said they found the files in a locked closet and promptly alerted the National Archives, which took the materials Nov. 3” and handed them to the Justice Department for review.
And then last week, Biden aides found another batch of documents with classified marking at his house in Wilmington, Del., and turned them over to the National Archives for review by the Justice Department.
Atty. Gen. Merrick Garland assigned John R. Lausch Jr., the U.S. attorney in Chicago, who was appointed by Trump, to investigate the matter.
The New York Times reported: “Biden had periodically used an office at the center from mid-2017 until the start of the 2020 presidential campaign, and the lawyers were packing it up in preparations to vacate the space. The discovery was not in response to any prior request from the archives, and there was no indication that Mr. Biden or his team resisted efforts to recover any sensitive documents.’’
In any event, all the documents should have been stored securely at the National Archives from the start!
Now the Trump docs:
The FBI searched the former president’s imperial compound, Mar-a-Lago, in Florida last August and seized at least 12 unsecured boxes with classified materials. The seizure came after a 19-month effort to retrieve the documents.
Trump had been served with a grand jury subpoena demanding the return of the documents. After Trump’s lawyers handed over 38 classified documents in response, the FBI search recovered more than 100 additional classified documents that had not been turned over to authorities.
A discussion of how the cases are alike and different:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/11/trump-biden-classified-documents-serious-mar-a-lago
Few Republicans expressed concern about what Trump had stashed at Mar-a-Lago but they’re screaming about what was in Wilmington.
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Still waiting for a plausible -- and specific -- Republican proposal on how to stop all those desperate people, many fleeing for their lives, from trying to get into our country. Shoot them? Good for the NRA’s business! Electrify border fences?
Actually many GOP/QAnon/Nihilist demagogues want border chaos; it gives them delightfully incendiary campaign fodder.
Hit the link below for the Biden immigration-reform plan. How well would it work? Maybe a bit, amidst the chaos of so many people trying to come to America from nasty places South of the Border and elsewhere.
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Agribusiness oligarchs were among those who arranged for far-right rioters to storm government buildings in the Brazilian capital, Brasilia, on Jan. 8 to protest the fair-and-square election defeat of the authoritarian former President Jair Bolsonaro, a Trump admirer. The oligarchs hate the new president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, in part because he has vowed to stem the Bolsonaro-backed deforestation of the Amazon Basin (aka “The Earth’s Lungs”) for large-scale monoculture and mining.
Bolsonoro and Trump are classic cases of the creation of a cult of personality in which an extreme narcissist/charismatic dictator, or would-be dictator, spews easily proven lies that his addled followers want to believe because they have invested so much of their emotions and sense of meaning in him. It worked well for Hitler and, for a long while, the German industrialists who helped finance his coming to power.
The attack on Brazil’s democracy reminded me of the billionaire funders of Trump and his disciples who helped enable his cult’s treasonous attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 and have relentlessly pushed disinformation about elections. Their aim is to increase their money and power through their helpers in Congress.
Appropriately, the first thing that the very narrow GOP/QAnon House majority did on finally taking office was to file a bill to take away funding for 87,000 IRS agents in an effort to slash investigation of wealthy tax cheats, the sort of people many congressional Republicans obey. The IRS has been intentionally understaffed for years because GOP hates it. Of course, poorer people would have to help make up the lost revenue, if we want the government to keep operating as the general public apparently wants it to.
The rich benefit more than anyone else from federal programs that provide physical infrastructure, educate present and future employees, boost research and maintain social-safety nets that reduce disorder, not to mention the rule of law, which protects private property, and defense against foreign enemies. Too bad so many are willing to do ruthless, anti-democratic things, or simply to engage in outrageous tax evasion, to avoid paying their fair share.
We can also look forward to GOP/QAnon efforts to slash health, environmental, financial and other regulations to please their donors.
Did the Trump tax cuts pay for themselves?
Meanwhile, in good news for the likes of Putin admirer U.S. Rep. George Santos (R.N.Y., or is it R-Kremlin?), the GOP/QAnon plans to try to eviscerate the House Office of Congressional Ethics. Somebody else will have try to find out where Santos got a mysterious $700,000, which given the disturbing stuff we already know about him, would be more important than, say, where Rep. Seth Magaziner (D.-R.I.) got a mysterious (but probably parental) $800,000 back when he ran for state treasurer; we’d still like to know that.
Best in the Neighborhood
A gentleman active in the Rhode Island Jewish community wrote me to politely complain about an item I wrote about the authoritarian-minded and ethically challenged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in which that I hadn’t mentioned how much, much worse are the governments in the adjoining states – all at various levels of tyranny and kleptocracy. Well, true, though many of us had hoped for someone better than Netanyahu in the Mideast’s only real democracy. Will it stay that way?
It really is a nasty neighborhood! Yes, I’ve been there.
Seismic Stories
What a tour is Far & Away -- Reporting from the Brink of Change: Seven Continents, Twenty-Five Years! This is Andrew Solomon’s deeply informed and empathetic book of travel essays written over more than two decades, from Russia to Rio to Romania to Myanmar to Afghanistan to Libya to China to South Africa and other problem points. The range of people he talks with and reports on is impressive amidst the sometimes violently perilous places he puts himself in, especially given his self-professed anxiety and occasional severe depression. But there’s humor and entertaining absurdity, too.
The one thing that most of these places have in common is that they were undergoing great cultural and political change, sometimes for the better. But the book was published in 2016. Things look worse now, as tyranny and corruption is in a growth phase in much of the world.
But then, as Mr. Solomon notes in the book: “History is rife with waves of joyful transformation followed by descent into horror.’’ And then, we hope, out again.