Whitcomb: Ego Over Reality; Sort-of-Soothing Airport; Anti-Wind Power Goes to Church
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: Ego Over Reality; Sort-of-Soothing Airport; Anti-Wind Power Goes to Church
“Ignore that last one I sent you.
I’d really rather you didn’t
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTtry to find me.
Everything human is perfect here, round,
worn smooth….’’
-- From “Message: Bottle #32’’, by J. Allyn Rosser (born 1957), American poet
“The most may err as grossly as the few.’’
-- John Dryden (1631-1700), English poet, playwright and critic. He was England’s first poet laureate.
“Indeed, we should have seen all this coming. It has happened before. In his new book, Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power, historian Timothy Ryback describes how in 1933, after years of stumbling and scheming, the leader of Germany’s Nazis took advantage of public indifference, opposition disarray, a ramshackle political system and a captive press to become Germany’s chancellor. Within months, he got the legislature to give him unlimited power for his ‘official’ acts. All perfectly legal. We know what happened next.’’
-- International journalist Don Morrison in his weekly commentary. Hit this link:
The English ivy is growing so fast in this heat and damp that you might dream of it coming through the window and strangling you.
xxx
If he does bail out, he can tout the admirable things he achieved in office, such as in infrastructure, expanded health-services access, promoting American technology in chips and other areas and strengthening the NATO alliance after Trump’s dangerous attacks on it.
But if the president continues to fight to stay in office, his achievements will probably turn to ashes after a second Trump regime takes over and begins pillaging.
People in high positions need other interests so that they don’t try to hold on to jobs out of desperation.
For the big decisions in life – e.g., whom to marry, which jobs to take, where to live, etc., it’s usually best to go with your gut, but in some people their mental and emotional gut processing doesn’t work well anymore. That’s what’s been happening with Biden.
Every day that goes by with Biden still in the race is a gift to the increasingly incoherent, raving and unhealthy, but very, very LOUD, 78-year-old sociopathic traitor Trump and the fascists and grifters around him. As for the National Republican Party, it has become a cesspool of cowardice, corruption, and extreme opportunism as it rallies around a mobster.
Despite Trump’s decades of moral squalor, too many voters avert their gaze from the fact that this creature has no respect for the Constitution, or law in general. All he cares about is power. He can’t wait to use what his servants on the deeply corrupt Supreme Court have given him if he again becomes president: uncontrolled opportunities to advance his financial and emotional interests, including taking revenge against real or perceived foes.
He's a five-alarm fire for American democracy. If the Electoral College hands him power again, voters, especially in swing states, can’t say they weren’t warned.
Meanwhile, it’s odd that the Biden campaign doesn’t seem to get, or ignores, that most voters are speculating on what Biden, 81, if he’s by some chance re-elected, would look like in a year or two or three, whatever his “good days’’ now. Nobody can win a battle against time, though many hope to enter paradise after their demise.
Having to go from being a participant to a mere observer in old age can be depressing for some but it can be wonderfully liberating, too. Biden needs to put his country above his ego, announce that he’s leaving and hire a good ghostwriter to crank out his presidential memoirs while Biden pops beers at Rehoboth Beach. If his egotism results in electing someone as catastrophic as Trump, Biden’s achievements in office will be mostly forgotten. The MAGA mob, aided by bribes from certain business interests, will seek to reverse them, and they’ll have a good chance at succeeding, especially since the Biden mess may result in the Democrats losing both houses of Congress in November.
Meanwhile, some speculate that Biden actually has a plan to drop out based on the idea that he can’t legally shift his re-election campaign money to Vice President Harris until after he’s officially nominated at next month’s convention. I doubt it.
Does he have Parkinson’s Disease? It often looks that way.
The Biden and Trump mess is a reminder of the geriatric atmosphere of Washington. Too many politicians stay far too long. The Constitution should be amended to set 75 as the top age to be president or senator and we need term limits, say three terms for senators and five or six for House members. That is, someone who’s 72 would be too old to run for president. And all federal judges must retire by 75. That way, at least, the damage done by the likes of crooked Supreme Court justices such as Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito could be limited a bit.
It seems to me that the best presidential candidate would be a highly successful past or current Democratic or Republican governor in her/his fifties.
Of course, getting old people to leave jobs at the top of organizations is far from uncommon, especially when the executive is a founder. See “Founder’s Syndrome.’’
Many Americans like to look at their country as young, but this nation, created in 1776 or 1787 (depending on whether you date it from the Declaration of Independence or the creation of the U.S. Constitution), by quasi-European intellectuals whom Trumpers would have resented is very old, and the elderly unhealthily dominate its government.
The Biden/Trump challenge reminds us that a growing percentage of the population is elderly, which poses increasing problems for the public and private sectors. Policymakers need to be more creative and forthright in addressing the silver tsunami.
As so many Americans continue to slide into willful ignorance and moral squalor, I think of actor George Sanders’s (1906-1972) suicide note: “Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck.”
Good for PVD
“Once I get you up there, where the air is rarefied
We'll just glide, starry-eyed
Once I get you up there, I'll be holding you so near
You may hear all angels cheer because we're together.’’
-- From the 1958 song “Come Fly With Me,’’ with music by Jimmy Van Heusen (1913-1990) and lyrics by Sammy Cahn (1913-1993). Song was pre-airline deregulation!
Kudos to the folks at Rhode Island T.F. Green International Airport, which keeps getting honored, for being ranked by Travel + Leisure magazine as the second-best airport in America (after Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport (“Minnesota nice’’? Sometimes.).
Green gets high marks for being, for an airport, low-key and (relatively) low stress, in part because it’s so easy to navigate. God knows that many, probably most, medium and large airports have become stress centers, serving up a mix of anxiety, anger, boredom, confusion.
Airports have become so unpleasant because of the law of unintended consequences. The Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 removed federal control over fares, routes and encouraged entry of new airlines (most of which have since disappeared). That brought “the masses” into a sector whose customers had previously been mostly businesspeople and the affluent. And the nation’s population has increased from about 225 million in 1979 to about 340 million now – a hell of a lot more potential airline passengers.
Deregulation led to the fearsome hub-and-spoke system, based on using a few major airports as central connecting points, which increased passenger loads, intensified airport and air traffic congestion and eliminated many convenient nonstop flights. And if one airline dominates a hub, the lack of competition has often led to higher fares. Not exactly what the deregulators had in mind.
Another bad thing that came out of airline deregulation was that it led to the closing of airports serving small cities.
On top of that, there’s the mystery, to me, of so many Americans’ masochistic and lemming-like tendency to want to travel at the same times, which leads many people to spend as much as half the time or more on a trip amidst the hordes at airports and highways rather than at their sought destinations.
Anyway, at least the planes (even Boeing’s!) are safer these days. Think of that as you wait in lines for hours as your flights keep getting cancelled because of, say, a thunderstorm in Chicago.
One nice thing about airports, however awful they can be: They still have newsstands, which used to be everywhere but have rapidly gone away in other public places, especially since COVID erupted.
Pro-Fossil-Fuel Fete
I drove down from Providence to Emmanuel Church in Newport last Tuesday to hear energy-sector analyst/commentator Robert Bryce denounce offshore and onshore wind farms, as well as solar projects, as boondoggles, and laud the efficiency of burning natural gas and oil. Indeed, the Texan urges a big increase in drilling for gas and more pipelines.
(Despite what I had feared, getting across the Seekonk River and through East Providence’s round-about labyrinth to get to Route 195 East was only mildly irritating.)
Mr. Bryce was very entertaining and had lots of information (I assume most of it accurate) as he spoke to this amen chorus, which was mostly animated by its fervent opposition to current and proposed wind farms off the southern New England coast. However, I wish that he had had the time and/or interest to talk about other ways to address global warming, such as tidal and wave power, geothermal heating and cooling and carbon capture. I asked him whether he saw promise in nuclear fusion and he basically said no. I think and hope he’s wrong: Look at:
https://www.cfsatdevens.info/home
Of course he’s right that we’ll have to rely on nuclear-fission plants for much of our electricity for the foreseeable future. But he didn’t address its biggest drawback: It creates dangerous nuclear waste that nobody wants near them, and politicians comply with that opposition in helping to block new storage plans for remote areas, such as at a controversial and long-proposed site at Yucca Mountain, in Nevada.
Waste from fusion would be far less dangerous.
For that matter, watch for some closed nuclear plants to be reopened, as the demand for generating electricity without emissions surges with proliferating huge data centers and electric vehicles. The economics of nuclear plants look better and better. The juice needed for artificial intelligence is staggering!
Too many nuclear plants were closed after the Three Mile Island incident, in 1979. But even that plant might be reopened.
Before Mr. Bryce’s graphics-rich talk, I meandered through a reception outside the Late Gothic Revival church. The attendees were a stimulating mixture of just-plain folks and snazzy well-born Newport types. (Overhearing some of the conversations, I thought of the line from The Great Gatsby “Her voice was full of money.’’) A very nice group, however angry some of them might be about wind turbines, and the canapes were delicious.
Lots of Mercedes in the nearby parking lot.
When I left Providence it was about 90 degrees. When I arrived in Newport in the late afternoon, it was about 75, with an occasional refreshing drizzle in the southwest breeze, and the air smelled a little like the Gulf Stream. I think that the southern New England climate is quite pleasant, especially compared to much of America.
Driving by the enthusiastically eroding Easton’s Beach as the fog rolled in was exhilarating if eerie.
xxx
Rising seas may have wiped out a cactus species in Florida: SEE AXIOS
A referendum question may go on the Massachusetts ballot that would let Uber and Lyft drivers form a union, in what might be a good sign for gig workers elsewhere who are too often taken advantage of.
Of course, state and federal officials, including the National Labor Relations Board and judges, will have to continue grapple with defining what constitutes being an “employee” as opposed to a “freelancer’’. The vast increase in remote work further complicates this.
Certainly, more and more people recognize how unions can help move workers up into the middle class. It’s not surprising that the decline of unions that started in the ‘70s was accompanied by sharply increased economic inequality. In the past few years there’s been a bit of a union revival.
More union members in the private sector and far fewer in the public sector would be an improvement.
xxx
It seems odd that Eastside Marketplace, the dominant supermarket of the affluent East Side of Providence, thick with powerful people, will be closed by November. It generally seemed very busy. Too low a profit margin in what is a volume industry?
What will replace it? A huge Whole Foods, or a Market Basket? How about a roller-skating rink?
The West has been giving Ukraine just enough military aid to avoid losing to Russia’s bloodthirsty Putin regime, which does such brave things as bombing a children’s hospital. But Ukraine hasn’t been given enough to win.
The West needs to give Ukraine everything it needs to push back Putin or this war will go on for years more. I didn’t write that the U.S. should do this because there’s a very good chance that dictator worshipper/wanna-be Trump will abandon Ukraine to the wolf in the Kremlin. Trump has no respect for the idea of “The West’’ as a cultural entity that supports democracy and human rights.
Meanwhile, Putin has launched a hybrid war in Europe -- having his agents set fires in military-supply warehouses, setting plans to assassinate defense industry executives, using the Russian navy in threatening maneuvers in the Baltic Sea and of course relentlessly mounting cyberattacks and engaging in massive disinformation campaigns. If he wins in Ukraine, he’ll push west.
You might want to read How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler, by Peter Pomerantsev, with its many applications to Putin and Trump.
xxx
Canada is a nice country, often more congenial and civilized than the increasingly harsh United States, but it’s a shameful freeloader in NATO. Consider that Canada, a very rich country, has been spending a mere 1.4 percent of its GDP on defense. The U.S. spends 3.5 percent, with the NATO median 1.87 percent, though it has been rising. The alliance’s goal is a minimum of 2 percent.
Canada, especially considering its wealth, needs to stop being a deadbeat. You’d think that the increasing Russian military presence in the Arctic Ocean would help get their attention.
xxx
An article in Bloomberg News reports that more younger adults these days are eschewing online dating apps and opting to meet people in the flesh at what are called “dating events’’ instead. That’s a healthy sign, though scary for a while for some most of whose waking hours are spent looking at screens.
There seems to be a general pushing back against Internet addiction. Good. It’s done a lot of social damage. Company job interviewers have told me that many young people spend so much of their time online that meeting someone in person scares them so much that they can’t look that person in the eye in interviews.