Whitcomb: At Altitude; Modes of Ocean Energy; America’s Civic-Slob Crisis; Corpse Processing
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: At Altitude; Modes of Ocean Energy; America’s Civic-Slob Crisis; Corpse Processing
“In a well guarded arena of open water surrounded by
lesser and greater craft which, sycophant, lumbering
and flittering follow them, they appear youthful, rare
as the light of a happy eye, live with the grace
of all that in the mind is feckless, free and
naturally to be desired….”
-- From “The Yachts,’’ by William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), American poet, physician and critic
“It’s not tragedies that kill us; it’s the messes.’’
-- Dorothy Parker (1893-1963), American critic, poet and satirist
"This false and reckless insistence that the former president won the 2020 presidential election has laid waste to Americans' confidence in their national elections. More alarming still is that the former president pledges that his reelection will not be 'stolen' from him next time around, and his Republican Party allies and supporters obeisantly pledge the same."
-- Retired U.S. Appeals Court Judge J. Michael Luttig, a conservative Republican who advised former Vice President Mike Pence on how to handle Trump’s demand that he remain in office despite losing the 2020 election.
New Englanders tend to think more about heading toward the crowded seashore than to the mountains in the summer. I prefer the latter.
While I probably shouldn’t do it now (heart disease), I loved climbing in the White Mountains. They aren’t very high as mountains go – the highest, Mt. Washington, rises to only 6,288 feet above sea level -- but they have grandeur, in part because they have above-the-tree-line acreage, which affords climbers great views, though I read that with global warming the tree line is rising. And in the quasi-tundra above 4,500 feet, there are interesting plants, including delicate flowers otherwise only found in the Arctic.
Another joy of climbing is the camaraderie of fellow climbers, always happy to chat and provide advice: “That way is easier”. “Incredible views around that huge boulder.” “Watch out! It’s slippery!’’ “See the eagle!” And if you use the Appalachian Mountain Club’s “huts’’ to stop and have lunch or spend the night, you might strike up friendships with fellow hikers, many of whom come from far away. Some even bring along a bottle of wine to add to the festivities; they’re often Quebecois. People usually seem friendlier on mountains, at least in my experience.
You see some pretty strange things up there and not just such phenomena as weirdly and colorfully lit cloud formations.
Black flies are a particular menace in the late spring in northern New England. Years ago, a friend of mine and I spotted an older gent who looked familiar coming along the ridge of the Franconia Range. But the guy we knew had white hair. This man’s was red. Then we discovered that his hair was red from the blood from fly bites.
Also strange is some folks’ ridiculous outfitting, such as those who wear sneakers instead of proper hiking footwear. They usually deeply regret the sneakers, even if they don’t suffer a bad fall or sprained ankle as a result of wearing them.
Current From Currents
The more varieties of renewable power the better --- to slow the rapid heating of the world from burning fossil fuels and to reduce the power of petrostate dictators like Putin. So it’s been pleasant to read about Japanese heavy-machinery maker IHI Corp.’s development of a huge turbine that converts the energy in ocean currents at 100 to 160 feet deep into electricity. Other maritime nations, like Japan, are exploring various ways of harnessing energy from the sea, including tidal and wave power.
New Englanders are exploring these technologies in various projects.
Hit these links to look at some projects:
https://www.mreconewengland.org/
and:
https://acadiacenter.org/maine-company-looks-to-tidal-power-as-renewable-energys-next-generation/
Another interesting technology is Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC), which produces electricity by using the temperature difference between deep cold ocean water and warm surface waters, but that might not be that useful off New England – unless the Gulf Stream starts hugging us.
When looking at the proposed minor-league soccer stadium in Pawtucket, a project that, of course, the developers want state and local government to help finance, Rhode Islanders should ask themselves: Would the tax money benefit them far more if, say, it was put into improving the state’s mediocre public schools – mediocrity that current and potential businesses complain about – and/or drawing with tax incentives high-wage, high-value-added manufacturers and/or research and development firms to the state? Or financing housing for poor people? (The list goes on….)
Indeed would funding the stadium help anybody other than soccer fans, the stadium’s low-paid employees and the rich developers?
As for the soccer fans, there are innumerable opportunities to see good players around here at the high school and college level. Or you can spend some bucks and watch the New England Revolution a few miles up the road at Gillette Stadium.
You might take a look at how the new Worcester Red Sox stadium has been working out:
https://www.fieldofschemes.com/category/minor-leagues/minor-league-baseball/worcester-triple-a-team/
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Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee probably won’t, but should, veto an irresponsible bill allowing Providence to borrow $550 million to pay off some of its $1.2 billion unfunded pension liability. That only 4 percent of the city’s registered voters voted on the measure, which, thanks to the municipal unions’ turnout drive, won 70 to 30 percent, means that there’s no credibility with this thing. That turnout was so low bespeaks America’s slob civic culture.
Take a look at what happened in Springfield:
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A campaign flyer from Providence mayoral candidate Brett Smiley promises that if elected his regime will be “recruiting and retaining the best, most diverse teachers’’. How about the best teachers—period?
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It’s amazing to me that some people support letting, er, “former males’’ compete in girls' and women’s sports. Given the basic physiological facts that’s grossly unfair.
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It’s also amazing to me that the creepy “fat-testing” of North Kingstown High School athletes by former coach Aaron Thomas went on for two decades.
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Why do very rich people tend to move next door to other very rich people – e.g., in Newport? To show that they’re big shots too.
Earth to Earth
“If this is dying then I don’t think much of it.’’
-- Lytton Stratchey (1880-1932), English writer
I enjoy walking through most graveyards, of which New England has many beauties. Wandering around gorgeous garden cemeteries, such as Swan Point, on the East Side of Providence, and Mt. Auburn, on the Watertown-Cambridge, Mass., line, can be soothing, even amidst the memento mori. Actually, giving yourself frequent reminders of death can be healthy: It’s focusing!
But many cemeteries are running out of space because people keep dying – very thoughtless of them. One of the challenges is that many families still want their loved ones’ corpses preserved with chemicals and put into coffins in burial vaults or at least concrete-lined, which take up a lot of room for a very long time. I think that’s related to survivors’ varying levels of denial of death. There’s this (to me) weird idea that somehow preserving that organic, decaying thing called a dead body fends off the person’s annihilation. (I see the decay and disappearance of the body as simply its return to what we all came from – ultimately space dust. Call it recycling.) But I realize, as a former churchgoer, that Christians are told to believe in the resurrection of the body.
Cremation is much better than standard burials, though it requires burning natural gas. Take your loved ones’ ashes home with you in a bag and put them in a vase; they won’t mind. Then in a few or many years, someone will probably forget where that vase is, or even whose ashes are in it.
Then there are the environmentally admirable decisions to compost the remains or use hydrolysis to reduce remains to their elements. A gift to Nature. Yes, this goes against some folks’ feeling that the dead body still contains some supernatural life – a feeling that’s been very profitable for the funeral/burial industry.
There’s a widening mortality gap between the Red States and the Blue States, reports Kaiser Health News. For instance, it says:
“The researchers, for instance, pointed to a previous study showing that ‘more liberal’ state policies on tobacco control, labor, immigration, civil rights, and environmental protections were associated with better life expectancy, whereas ‘more conservative’ state policies — such as restrictions on abortion and less stringent gun laws — were associated with lower life expectancy among women.
“Left-leaning states were also more likely to enact policies, such as Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, which sought to widen the safety net for vulnerable populations. Of 12 states that have not expanded their Medicaid programs, nine have Republican governors and 10 voted for former President Donald Trump in 2020’’.
Red States are generally run by people whose main aim is to please business interests/campaign contributors via low taxes (except for regressive sales taxes) and light or no regulation as opposed to improving the socio-economic conditions of the mass of people. But the latter, drawn to appeals (smoke screen?) based on such cultural matters as religion and guns, keep these interests in the driver’s seat. That reminds us yet again of H.L. Mencken’s famous line that “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.’’
I’d add that Blue States also tend to fund public education much better than Red Ones. That’s germane to the stuff above and to the fact that Blue States tend to be richer than Red ones.
But then social indices across the board in most Red states are worse than in Blue states. The more Trumpian they are, the worse the numbers – to wit, welcome to Mississippi, Kentucky and West Virginia!
To read the report, please hit this link.
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From the czars to Stalin to Putin, Russia continues to be a curse.
Joe Biden has done about as well as anyone could in the circumstances, though his age and soft-spokenness are held against him. Of course, he’s made mistakes. No president is Superman. And being the leader of a semi-democracy/plutocracy as huge, complicated and disputatious as America is quite a trial.
He came into office during a terrible pandemic, the response to which was grossly mismanaged by the most corrupt and dangerous administration in American history, one whose lies, demagoguery and grifting continue to poison our political system. That’s despite the efforts of Biden, a man of basic decency and goodwill, to, as they say in that syrupy phrase, “let the healing begin’’. It can’t as long as many millions of Americans embrace the fascism led by a dictator-worshipping, violence-promoting traitor, con man and thief and his suck-up entourage.
Biden’s administration pumped a lot of relief money into Americans’ wallets in the American Rescue Plan Act. It was too inflationary, but if you go back and review what happened, you can see that policymakers felt that they had to take the risk of higher inflation to ward off depression. And of course, the Trump regime had also sent massive quantities of cash to consumers in 2020. Terrible unemployment now or possible high inflation in the future seemed to be the unpleasant choice. Thus many consumers have been awash in cash and seized by overwhelming desires to buy stuff – needed and unneeded – that had been thwarted in the worst of the pandemic-caused shutdowns.
Meanwhile, the Fed kept the easy-money spigot open, as it mostly had – often irresponsibly -- for a quarter of a century in order to ward off a recession or depression as well as to please Wall Street. This policy also raised the risk of a surge in inflation.
Still, Biden’s administration pushed through a much-needed public-infrastructure law – the first such achievement in decades -- that, by making the country more efficient and competitive, will tend to reduce inflation over the next few years.
As the pandemic eased and people left their caves there was the inevitable surge in demand even as COVID-connected supply bottlenecks have continued to slow manufacturing and shipping, driving up prices. The recent Chinese COVID eruption has slowed price and supply relief yet again.
Then came Putin’s rape of Ukraine, fed to some extent by the dictator’s calculation that America and the West, in general, wouldn’t respond as strongly as they have. In an open-ended crisis as potentially dangerous as the Cuban Missile Crisis, Biden has provided careful and effective leadership.
The invasion by fossil-fuel-financed Russia has caused a surge in energy prices amidst already high, pandemic-snapback demand for oil and natural gas products and U.S. fossil-fuel companies’ production cutbacks – and record profits.
Biden, an old-fashioned lunch-pail Democrat, has faced some of the most daunting challenges of any president. Voters ought to cut him some slack, but most won’t. That would require that they do some reading and understand what has actually happened and what he, or any president, has the power to affect. They’d rather watch TV, kinda like those Providence voters above who won’t take a half hour to research a crucial public issue that affects them and 20 minutes to vote on it.
Here are current world inflation rates:
https://www.axios.com/2022/06/13/inflation-rates-around-world-us-china-eu-japan
Hit this link for a discussion of America’s fragile democracy:
https://theconversation.com/what-those-mourning-the-fragility-of-american-democracy-get-wrong-153813
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I’m curious how and why the unshaven (but not really bearded) look among young men took hold, even in some stodgy occupations.
That appearance would have made many men unemployable in white-collar jobs not that many years ago. We used to call it the “Yasser Arafat look” after the late Palestinian leader/terrorist (1929-2004)
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The announcement of the death of the big city in the wake of COVID-19 was premature. Consider that more households are now moving into Manhattan than were moving in before the pandemic, Bloomberg News reports, with moving-company data provided by Melissa, an address-analytics company.
“New York City had one of the largest declines in the first stage of the pandemic and one of the fastest rebounds,” Rob Warnock, a senior researcher at the rental search platform Apartment List, told Bloomberg. Many people are still drawn to urban energy.
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The Autobiography of Leonard Woolf (1880-1969), the brilliant British political theorist, author, publisher and civil servant (and husband of novelist Virginia Woolf), is riveting both because he was a powerful and idiosyncratic writer and because of the fascinating people – some famous, some obscure – among whom he lived in war and peace. His ability to understand and describe other people and his unblinkered view of himself create a model of autobiographical and historical writing.