Whitcomb: Burn, Baby, Burn; Newport Water; Entertainment Unto Death
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: Burn, Baby, Burn; Newport Water; Entertainment Unto Death
Two evils, monstrous either one apart,
Possessed me, and were long and loath at going:
A cry of Absence, Absence, in the heart,
And in the wood the furious winter blowing.
Think not, when fire was bright upon my bricks
And past the tight boards hardly a wind could enter,
I glowed like them, the simple burning sticks,
Far from my cause, my proper heat, my center.
Better to walk forth in the murderous air
And wash my wound in the snows; that would be healing,
Because my heart would throb less painful there,
Being caked with cold, and past the smart of feeling.
Which would you choose, and for what boot in gold,
The absence, or the absence and the cold?
-- “Winter Remembered,’’ by John Crowe Ransom (1888-1975), American poet
“The greatest thing in family life is to take a hint when a hint is intended—and not to take a hint when a hint isn’t intended.’’
-- Robert Frost (1874-1963), American poet
“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.’’
-- Richard Feynman (1918-1988), American theoretical physicist
Now that we’re in very late January, you can see the ice on sidewalks and roads melting faster than a couple of weeks ago as the sun grows stronger. But it’s been warmer in Anchorage, Alaska, than in Providence. What a gray, boring January we’ve had around here!
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Providence and many other places in New England have historic districts, often in affluent neighborhoods, that mandate very tight building controls to control how structures can look. These can make it difficult to add housing, and are one more reason, in addition to zoning and other layers of regulation, that housing is so expensive. And American laws (including tax laws) and ordinances generally go against building “affordable housing.’’
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Will Newport residents have to stock up on bottled water? Trucks have been dumping stuff – apparently without authorization -- near Easton’s Pond, the city’s primary water supply, water from which was never all that good anyway. No wonder that stronger stuff has long been so popular in The City by the Sea.
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Jerome Larkin, M.D., runs the Rhode Island Health Department, a job that has proven to be remarkably temporary for most, while starring in the play All My Sons, at The Little Theater of Fall River. Should we look at it this way: Are all big public jobs part of show business?
Dr. Larkin’s taking time for his theatrical career comes as the RSV virus and other illnesses have been spreading and as we may be facing a bird-flu pandemic. But the show must go on! As Irving Berlin wrote: “There’s No Business Like Show Business.’’
Hear Ethel Merman belting out the song:
A study showing a decrease in social encounters of pedestrians along the streets of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia over recent decades suggests rising anomie, which is one factor in the rise of fascism in the United States.
Perverting Public Information
The Trump administration is moving to distort and/or hide government data it sees as being politically problematic for the regime in general and for its dictator in particular. It plans to politicize what has been the professional and nonpolitical collection and analysis of information on a raft of topics, from health to the economy to the environment.
Note that the regime has canceled scientific meetings and instructed federal health officials to refrain from all public communications, including those about bird flu.
How would the anti-vaccine Robert F. Kennedy Jr., if he became Health and Human Services secretary, respond if the flu virus rapidly spreading among birds became a full-scale pandemic?
Last April, Our Maximum Leader asked a bunch of very rich (his favorite kind of person) oil and gas executives at his Palm Beach palace to give his campaign $1 billion. We know that they saluted and gave a lot, some of it secretly via “dark money.’’ It may take years, if ever, to determine how much. His nominee for energy secretary, Christopher Wright, is CEO of Liberty Energy, America’s second-largest oil and gas fracking company.
Then, last Wednesday, Our Maximum Leader ordered a halt to all leasing of federal lands and waters for new wind farms pending a government “review” (aka attack on) the sector and directed federal agencies to stop issuing permits for all wind farms anywhere in America for the time being. His order also suggests that he might try to close down many already operating wind farms.
This move, of course, has thrown the wind industry, which employs hundreds of thousands of Americans, into something approaching chaos, paralyzing investment, weakening America’s move toward a more diversified and increasingly renewable-energy future and making it more vulnerable to gyrations of the international oil and gas market. Among the big players in that market are various tyrannies – Russia, Iran, etc. – that are American enemies. That some European nations have substantial renewable-energy operations and nuclear power explains why they were able to cut off Russian gas imports to try to undermine Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Around here, of course, we think of the effect on offshore wind projects, all of which are controversial in varying degrees. Ever since Trump tried to block a wind farm off a Scottish golf resort he owns, he has vehemently opposed any and all offshore wind farms. But the American places that have come to depend on windpower are all deep Red states --- Iowa (58 percent dependence on windpower for electricity), Kansas (43 percent) Oklahoma (35 percent) and Texas (20 percent). And there were big plans for expansion, even in the big oil states of Texas and Oklahoma. There, as in so many places, many people voted for Trump against their own self-interest, besotted by a carnival barker.
Under Trump, policies will favor economic interests he’s in bed with – crypto, etc. -- whether or not it’s in the national interest. (Wait for pump and dump on crypto.) This doesn’t bode well for the future of the American economy. You might want to see these items on crony capitalism:
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I have the feeling that the only thing that will turn millions of Americans away from MAGA climate lies is a huge fossil-fuel disaster. I vote for an oil spill blackening the beaches at Palm Beach and other shores of the rich. Indirect examples of the effects of climate change, such as the Los Angeles fires, don’t do the trick. By the way, people with property across the country, including in places little affected (so far) by global warming, will have to pay more so that insurance companies hit by the repeated disasters in places that climate change is slamming, such as L.A., with its wildfires, and the Southeast, with its hurricanes, won’t go bust.
“If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.’’
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956), American journalist and scholar of American English
Neil Postman’s 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, is very prophetic, as it discusses what happens when politics, journalism, education and religion become subject to the demands of entertainment. And he wrote the book before “social media”! That our leader’s road to national power was built in no small part on his “reality TV” show called The Apprentice is an expression of what has happened.
This “post-fact” world has been a terrific place for someone like Trump and many other political celebrities to weaponize America’s spreading civic ignorance.
Now consider TikTok, the video-sharing platform that may not be banned in America after all, since Trump, who used to oppose it, has decided it’s too popular to kill it. Young people especially like it, indeed some spend/waste hours looking at it every day. And some people use it to make money, though there are plenty of other ways to do that on the Internet.
There’s just one little problem: TikTok is ultimately controlled by the Chinese government, which can use it to get data on millions of Americans. But national security risks don’t matter to millions of feckless – and in their way, selfish Americans. Amusing themselves is more important. This makes me wonder how much Americans would be willing to pay the cost of any new tariffs on China, let alone higher taxes to build up our military, to discourage Chinese expansionism.
But wait! Our new regime in Washington may work out a deal for China to sell TikTok to such billionaire allies of Our Maximum Leader as Elon Musk or Larry Ellison. If so, they’ll make sure that content on the platform heavily favors him and his allies.
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“Do not remove a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place.”
The distillation of a parable by G.K. Chesterson (1874-1936) and nicknamed “Chesterton’s Law”. Chesterton was an English author and philosopher.
The thugs, thieves and toadies now in charge vow to eliminate many federal regulations, promising that this will unleash a golden age of vast prosperity. Okay, some rules are very outdated, but before the great excision begins, citizens might do a little research to find out what disasters and menaces led to the rules being imposed in the first place.
Summer People vs. Whales
In its last days, the Biden administration decided to block new rules that would have forced some ferries to Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket and Provincetown to be slowed to 11.5 miles an hour at certain times of the year to protect North Atlantic Right Whales, of which there are fewer than 400 left. Humans are driving them toward extinction, mostly via hitting them with boats and entangling them in fishing lines. It’s unknown how their extinction would affect the ecosystems of the waters off the New England coast.
Many rich people like to go to Nantucket and The Vineyard, where they have hyper-expensive houses. The Vineyard is well known as a summer place for well-heeled Democrats, such as the Obamas. Joe Biden, for his part, has favored Nantucket.