Whitcomb: Fearsome Forecast; School Screen Stop; Mandated Language; Pals No Longer?
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: Fearsome Forecast; School Screen Stop; Mandated Language; Pals No Longer?
“She grubbed this earth with her own hands,
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTdomineered over this grass plot,
blackguarded her oldest son
into buying it, lived here fifteen years,
attained a final loneliness and—…”
-- From Williams Carlos Williams, M.D. (1883-1963), American poet and physician
It’s the educated barbarian who is the worst: he knows what to destroy.
-- Helen MacInnes (1907-1985), Scottish-American spy novelist
“All around, people lookin' half dead
Walking on the sidewalk, hotter than a match head.’’
--From the song “Summer in the City’’ (1966) by The Lovin’ Spoonful
“We do these things [give foreign aid] because we're a compassionate people, but we also do it because it's in our national interest. Because perhaps more than any other nation on Earth, we understand that a world that is freer, more just, more peaceful and more prosperous poses less of a threat…Foreign aid is a very cost-effective way, not only to export our values and our example, but to advance our security and our economic interests.”
-- Secretary of State Marco Rubio as a senator in 2017. Since getting his current job, he has presided over the evisceration of foreign aid. The wages of ambition.
Wouldn’t it be better to do this after Labor Day? Do other public works projects make that too difficult?
For my money, the downtowns of Warren (on Main Street) and Bristol (on Hope Street) are among the most charming in America.
There’s weather and there’s climate. How much of the Texas flood disaster can be attributed to global warming, as opposed to short-term variables, is unknown.
But science tells us that there will be an increasing number of events like the one in Texas, and public policy, especially under the, er, science-skeptical Trump regime, isn’t up to the task of addressing it. That’s to no small extent because the Orange Oligarch and his minions are in bed with the fossil-fuel industry, which is helping to cause the heating.
Questions abound about whether the Trump/Musk-ordered big staffing cuts at National Weather Service offices undermined warning systems as the deluge approached. One of the current vacancies is that of the warning-coordination meteorologist in the Austin NWS office. But the loss of life probably would have happened whatever the staffing. The biggest menace was that the huge flood came at night, when many of the victims were asleep, and too many buildings were built far too close to the Guadalupe River, along which there have been disastrous floods before.
And Texans, even more anti-tax than most Americans, have not wanted to pay for such things as alarm systems along rivers.
Hilly and rocky terrain and heavy rain obviously can combine to wreak havoc. Some elderly readers may remember the catastrophic floods in southern New England from Hurricane Diane, in August 1955. But people love to be near water, sometimes too near.
Still, let’s look ahead. DOGE, Elon Musk’s scorched-earth operation, has cut NWS staffing by hundreds of people, including meteorologist-in-charge positions. The regime has also reduced by 20 percent the Federal Emergency Management Agency staff and has talked about abolishing the agency, and throwing its functions to the states. Maybe that now won’t happen because of Deep Red Texas’s political power.
Killing FEMA would be quite anxiety-provoking for many Red States, which generally have worse weather disasters and thinner public services than Blue States.
Meanwhile, since Trump took office, the NWS has been reducing the number of weather balloon launches due to staffing shortages and budget cuts. This lessens forecast accuracy. And climate research by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is being slashed, too.
But we gotta pay for such goodies in Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill as its tax subsidy for companies buying private jets. These enterprises naturally want their senior executives and owners to travel in maximum comfort and convenience; the rich-loving administration agrees. So buyers can now deduct the millions of dollars to buy a private jet in the year of the purchase, rather than having to spread out the purchase over many years.
Curbing Anti-Education Electronics
It’s belated good news that many states have banned, or will soon ban, students from using their cell phones and some other personal electronic devices during school hours. Rhode Island and Massachusetts will take this step. Some local school districts, which would have to implement such bans, have already imposed them. There would presumably be considerable local variations in application once a statewide ban took effect.
As for the concern that parents couldn’t get through to their children in an emergency, real or imagined: They can do what parents have always been told to do: Call the school office. The advent of cell phones has helped produce disorderly, even chaotic environments in which many trivial matters whose resolution could be easily delayed are treated as urgent.
These distracting and addictive devices have grossly undermined learning in many schools. They’re part of the broader challenge of trying to teach and learn in a hyper-electronic world. Consider the difficulty in getting students (and the rest of us!) to do their own rigorous research and present their own developed thought based on that research amidst the artificial intelligence revolution. It will take a lot of time and creativity to address this vast cultural problem.
Teachers are increasingly using such strategies for this new world as more in-class tests and essay writing – on paper—along with more oral reports. (Of course, that cuts into teaching time.) Technology hasn’t yet come up with foolproof ways of determining when work is really a student’s and when it’s AI, whose abilities seem to be constantly expanding as individuals’ creativity shrinks.
(Ah, the long-lost sweet aroma of mimeographed instruction sheets in classrooms!)
As for the swamps of lie-infested social media, there seems little we can do about it for now, except improve the rigor of education, and the skepticism that goes with it.
Meanwhile, I remain amused about how often in store checkouts, human cashiers do the work faster than automatic checkouts. And watch what an amusing stew AI can make of a written report it writes based on “hearing” a Zoom meeting.
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Having a dominant language, especially one as adaptable in adding new words as is English, is a boon in helping to keep our vast fragmented, multicultural nation from flying apart. But it’s not enough to offset the damage being done in the many years we’ve allowed the citizenry’s knowledge and understanding of our history and civic/governmental systems to erode.
Still, America would be a stronger force in the world if more of its citizens knew more than just English. In many ways, we’re the most provincial people in the Western World, if we’re still in that world….
Note that the United States generally falls somewhere between 30th and 40th place in global literacy rankings. And perhaps more than half of American adults read below a sixth-grade level.
This explains a lot….
Back to That?
When I was a kid, raw sewage would drain as a fragrant little stream down an otherwise pretty beach near us on Massachusetts Bay, and ships going to and from Boston would release bunker oil that would coat the coasts for weeks. Heavy metals and poisonous chemicals would be blithely dumped in fresh and salt water. This was before the Environmental Protection Agency was established in 1970. The current leadership in Washington, at the behest of certain industries/campaign donors, is cutting it back.
But as G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) advised: “Don't take a fence down until you know why it was put up.”
How Much Does He Mean It?
Given Trump’s long, tangled and oft-mysterious and admiring relations with the Kremlin, some people were surprised by his criticism of Putin last week and his decision to resume shipments of some defensive arms to Ukraine. (We’ll see how many of these weapons are actually shipped.) Those shipments were apparently cut off the previous week by his outstandingly incompetent and emotionally unstable defense secretary, Pete Hegseth.
I think what happened is that the Orange Oligarch finally felt humiliated enough by Putin’s long and brazen ignoring of Trump’s erratic rhetoric about the need to end the war in Ukraine, for which the mass-murderer is responsible. It’s all about Trump. He still opposes imposing tougher sanctions on Russia, though they could be made tough enough to noticeably undermine that tyranny’s war economy. He still fears Putin, whose power he envies, as can be inferred from all the past sucking up. He still won’t blame the sadistic dictator for the war, and nor will he admit that Putin has already launched a war against Europe’s NATO members.
In Western and Central Europe, Russia has been attacking critical public and private infrastructure, including with explosives, destroying underwater cables in the Baltic Sea, spying on German military bases with drones, and, of course, engaging in relentless cyberattacks and using AI to generate fake news.
Meanwhile, high-level Russian officials and businesspeople who displease Putin continue to die prematurely. The latest is the “suicide” by gunshot of just-fired Transport Minister Roma Starovoit. I’m surprised he didn’t fall out of a window, the more common way for such people to end their careers in Mother Russia.
Two Deaths Last Week
Edward DiPrete (1934-2025), the congenial former Rhode Island governor who showed himself to be a very able manager but also engaged in corruption that landed him in prison. But God knows, he loved the state, which he stayed in after being released from prison and where he could be seen attending various public events seemingly without embarrassment.
Alan Hassenfeld (1948-2025) was the quirky, kindly, but when needed, tough leader of Hasbro, the Pawtucket-based toy and entertainment company that he helped turn into an international powerhouse. He was one of Rhode Island’s great philanthropists and a very engaging character.