Whitcomb: Fighting Fires Amidst Global Warming; Public Hospitals; Roundabouts; Sycophants Club
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: Fighting Fires Amidst Global Warming; Public Hospitals; Roundabouts; Sycophants Club
“But in the night we'd have something break in,
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTKidnap the baby or purloin the pie --
A tiger, maybe, or a passer by --
Just to make something happen, to move the story.’’
-- From “The Doll House,’’ by A.E. Stallings (born 1968), American poet and a professor at Oxford
“Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.’’
-- Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804), American military officer, Founding Father and the first U.S. Treasury secretary, in The Federalist Papers (1787)
“Music is our myth of the inner life.’’
-- Susanne K. Langer (1895-1985), American philosopher known for her theories of art’s influences on the mind
Many mayors have been brought down by a failure to keep streets snow-and-ice free. So some paranoically order melter (usually salt and calcium chloride) to be laid on thick no matter how minor the weather event. The stuff then blows around, which isn’t great for adjacent plants and animals, including people, and corrodes vehicles.
Providence is a prime example of the hyperuse of melter. But maybe we’ll need it later today.
Why has the weather hereabouts been so boring and cold, with a stiff and sterile northwest wind most days? No, it’s not because global warming is a hoax. It’s because of a stuck dip in the jet stream that’s been bringing cold air to the Midwest and Northeast and warmer than “normal” air in California. Eventually, it will flip, and we’ll be on the warm side. There’s climate, and then there’s the natural variability of daily “weather.’’
Which brings me to the disastrous fires in the Los Angeles area. They have been so terrible because, while this time of year has been in the past been the rainy season, L.A. has received virtually no rain since last spring. Early last year they got a lot of rain, even some floods, which caused vegetation to grow abundantly. Then came record heat and drought, which dried out the plants, providing a lot of fuel for fires in what, after all, is a semi-arid land dependent on water piped in from as far away as the Sierra Nevada.
Fighting the fires was, as increasingly is the case in American natural disasters, made more difficult by far-right online conspiracy theories and brazen lies, some coming from the societal arsonist Donald Trump himself and his entourage, including mega/MAGA investor/ Co-President Musk. Of course, there were plenty of mistakes made by federal, state and local government and utilities, and other businesses in anticipating/managing fire dangers in the years leading up to the disaster. They’re just people. Consider that higher taxes would have helped provide more staffing and equipment and, perhaps, more backup water to stop small wildfires from becoming conflagrations. But people hate paying taxes, even though, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., “taxes are the price we pay for civilization.’’
The fires, which destroyed the house of old friends of ours in Pacific Palisades and may have burned down the house of some friends in Malibu – we haven’t been able to get through to them – will probably increase the growing flow of people from Southern California. It’s a bit like the increasing flow of people from Florida, driven out by hurricanes and the difficulty of obtaining insurance. It’s hard to blame insurance companies from exiting areas under increasing stress from the effects of global warming.
The parts of the U.S. least imperiled by climate change’s effects are the Great Lakes region and the Northeast, which have abundant water. Even there, of course, summers will get hotter, and all in all, weather events more extreme. But many (but not ski-area operators) will like it that winters will, in general, be shorter and milder. On the other hand, rising seas will make living right along the Northeast’s coast increasingly problematical, as insurance rates for properties there already show.
Some communities in these northern places are already doing some long-range planning to handle an increasing number of climate refugees. Welcome to Duluth!
We in southern New England are vulnerable in some ways you might not think of. Remember the big woodland fires we had during the very warm and dry fall of 2024, though, of course, it was nothing like the rampaging wildfires sweeping through the dried-out brush and human-planted vegetation of densely populated Los Angeles County. (I wonder what role pyromaniacs played in staring the blazes.)
What’s happening in Southern California is very sad. Much of it is beautiful, indeed spectacular – mountains going down to the sea, a Mediterranean climate and so on. It’s a vibrantly multicultural place that has drawn many highly creative people and is the world’s entertainment capital. But big changes are coming fast. In the near term, these will include housing costs soaring even more than they had been. That’s because the fires have destroyed so much housing. But the exit of many people to regions less hit by climate change may well reduce demand enough that housing ends up costing less over the next few years.
The bankruptcy of Prospect Medical Holdings, the rapacious private equity operation, has, of course, raised questions about the survival of its Roger Williams Medical Center in Providence and Our Lady of Fatima Hospital in North Providence, both of which serve many poor people with no or inadequate insurance.
It raises the broader idea that perhaps Rhode Island and many other places now without them need publicly owned hospitals as part of their medical safety net. Of course, many privately owned hospitals are very good, even if senior executives of “nonprofit” hospitals tend to be paid too much. However, they market primarily to middle- and upper-income patients with good private insurance and Medicare. Around America, hospitals serving low-income people are closing because of low-reimbursement rates from Medicaid and unpaid-for care because of coverage gaps.
America needs something like the universal healthcare systems that exist in all other major developed nations, but lobbyists and their political servants will prevent that.
And our system is so rife with waste. Last week I had to spend 45 minutes filling out an online registration form for a minor orthopedic procedure. The answers to most of the questions were available from my primary-care doctor, whose name and contact info the orthopedic group had.
Fear of Change
Many, perhaps most, citizens fear changes in public infrastructure. I thought of this while reading about roundabouts in Ashland, Ky., whose construction many people there opposed, preferring to stick with intersections with traffic lights.
However, roundabouts are much safer than traditional intersections and improve communities’ walkability. They do, of course, demand more attention from drivers – more cooperation with other drivers in yielding right of way.
Well-landscaped roundabouts are even being set up in very rural parts of states such as New Hampshire to discourage speeding.
The public usually starts to accept new traffic infrastructures within a few months. They may be starting to do that in New York City, where an inevitably very controversial tolling system to charge most drivers going into Midtown Manhattan recently went into effect, with the first big impact of less traffic going into the tunnels connecting New Jersey and The Big Apple. Such systems, mostly aimed at sharply reducing traffic congestion in city centers, have been in successful operation for years in some big cities abroad. But we probably won’t know with any accuracy the degree of public acceptance in Gotham until the spring.
The toll money will be used to improve the city’s dense but underfunded mass transit, which will tend to lure people away from cars. Incidentally, despite a few horrific crime stories, New York’s subways, which I often ride, are generally safe. The toll money will include beefing up transit police.
The Wrecking Crew Bows Down
Why do so many people collaborate with kleptocratic dictators and other corrupt leaders? Why do they cast off the moral, ethical, and even legal standards they used to claim loudly that they held dear in order to work for, slavishly bow down to and lie for the likes of Donald J. Trump?
The confirmation hearings of folks he nominated to high posts were displays of what most of them will show in office --- unctuous loyalty to Trump, even when the national interest and the U.S. Constitution might suggest otherwise.
Some of this is simply the desire for the executive power they can exercise themselves and to be in the thrilling glow of the uber power of the president. Others, including Trump himself, see it also as a way of further enriching themselves by using their jobs for the benefit of their investments, businesses and families. And most will fear offending a famously vindictive and erratic man – essentially a gangster.
Big shots in the private sector have also been tripping over each other to curry favor with the man they both fear and want to profit from. Consider the impressively amoral Mark Zuckerberg, who has ordered a stop to fact-checking in the swamp called Facebook and is hiring Trump allies. The darkly funny movie The Social Network, about Facebook’s founding at Harvard College, presents a pretty accurate picture of Zuckerberg.
But then lies on Facebook, some from the Kremlin, helped make Trump president in 2016 and assisted him, with Trump ally and former illegal immigrant Elon Musk’s X/Twitter, to seize the throne last Nov. 5. He, Zuckerberg, and Orange Face are united in narcissism and greed, as so many Americans are united in wishful thinking and willful ignorance about what’s going on. I wonder how much Joe Biden thinks about how his narcissism led him to stay in the presidential race far too long, a key factor in his nemesis returning to power.
The rise of such oligarchy in the United States was accelerated by the right-wing-controlled U.S. Supreme Court (at least two of whom are on the take from Trump donors) when, in 2010, it opened the floodgates to campaign finance corruption.
By the way, Hegseth has cited Trump as being a brilliant CEO. In fact, as the bright, if sometimes drunk Hegseth surely knows, most of our capo di tutti capi’s business ventures, soaked in fraud and financed by his very rich, corrupt, and racist developer daddy’s fortune, were financial disasters. His one big success was his TV show, The Apprentice, which his low-information fans ate up and which launched him on his voyage to become the mega and MAGA threat to the tatters of American democracy he is. The show helped him to further develop his skills as a demagogue.
I laughed at how the hapless Democrats have tried to undermine self-proclaimed devout “Christian’’ Hegseth by complaining about his serial adulteries. Trump has shown that few Americans care. Onward Christian soldiers!
America may be speeding its way to become the Western World’s most corrupt nation. I guess we deserve it.
An essay by historian Anne Applebaum on what makes a collaborator with tyranny.
Immigration Ennui
Give Trump credit, though his message was demagogic, hate-filled, and often lie-rich, for bringing more urgency to our long messed-up immigration “system,’’ which neither party has addressed in truly serious ways. That’s largely because of economic and political self-interest.
For instance, Democratic politicians in some places see letting in more immigrants as not only kindly but potentially boosting their party (though that hope was dashed in many places on Nov. 5 as many relatively new immigrants voted for Trump because they want to pull up the bridge, too). Meanwhile, Republican businesspeople, especially in such sectors as agribusiness, love the cheap labor of illegal immigrants. And a really big crackdown on illegal immigration would raise inflation, especially food prices
Highly educated and accomplished people should be encouraged to move to America. We need them to stay competitive in the world.
But how do you stop the desperate hordes who will push on our southern border even with Trump’s threats against them.
A lot of circles to be squared.
Will more immigrants try to sneak into the U.S. via our border with Canada? Hasn’t happened much yet, at least in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont.
And, yes, we can agree with Trump: “No (enforced) border, eventually no country.’’
xxx
The exit of TikTok, ultimately controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, would be a minor reprieve for what’s left of Western Civilization.
That Old Empire
Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, by the British historian and theologian Nigel Biggar, an emeritus Oxford professor, is a rigorous and deeply researched study on what the vast British Empire (roughly 1600-1970) did right and wrong. Mr. Biggar’s conclusion, so far as I can see, was that considerably more good than harm was done for the people it ruled (via a remarkably small number of British officials). It reduced sanguinary tribal, ethnic and religious conflicts and, increasingly, racial discrimination, in the places it occupied. And it eventually became the world’s most powerful force against the slave trade. (That trade continues in some places in Africa.)
A couple of examples: In India, the biggest entity in the empire, the British tried mightily to improve the lot of the “Untouchables,’ the lowest class of the brutal caste system, and in South Africa sought to protect Black people from the extreme racism of the Boers.
The empire helped introduce liberal democracy and honest, competence-based civil services to their colonies. Post-independence, these have eroded or disappeared in too many ex-colonies, to say the least.
At the same time, the empire introduced such advancements as public health and educational institutions, as well as transportation and other infrastructure, some of which remain today.
There were abuses, especially sometimes excessive violence to suppress public disorder, mostly in its earlier part. And yes, some British colonial officials, also mostly in the empire’s first part, were too harsh and a very few corrupt. Some were as racist as the people they were ruling. But generally, they were honest, sensitive to the natives (often far more sensitive than the rulers they replaced), and very hard-working.
Still, of course, the Brits were, as they say, in Maine, “from away,’’ and so they eventually needed to go home.
As Professor Biggar says in his epilogue: “The conditions that occasioned it {the British Empire} will not recur, for good and for ill. So this is not about nostalgia. Rather, it is about discriminate identification with liberal, humanitarian principles and endeavors of the colonial past that deserved to be admired, owned, and carried into the future.’’
Perhaps contrarian, but true.
The late historian Zareer Masani, who grew up in India, accurately called the book in his blurb for it: “A hugely impressive ethical map of empire, based on an encyclopedic reading of events and the literature around them.’’