Whitcomb: Hard to Measure, but…; Israeli Intelligence; Immigration Facts

Whitcomb: Hard to Measure, but…; Israeli Intelligence; Immigration Facts

“That August time it was delight
To watch the red moons wane to white
’Twixt grey seamed stems of apple-trees;
A sense of heavy harmonies
Grew on the growth of patient night,
More sweet than shapen music is.’’

-- From “August,’’ by Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909), “decadent’’ English poet. Here’s the whole poem:

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“Make the revolution a parent of settlement and not a nursery of future revolutions.’’

-- Edmund Burke (1729-1797), Anglo-Irish statesman, political theorist and philosopher, about 1790, as the French Revolution was cooking.

 

 

 

‘’Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.’’

-- Frank Zappa (1940-1993),  American musician, composer and bandleader

 

 

 

This is the time of year when the bass in the mill pond along which my parents lived during the last few years of my father’s life were thickest. You could easily catch six of them in half an hour, though God knows what pesticides were in them from a nearby upstream cranberry bog; the EPA was only just getting going. Too bad that there were no trout in the pond to practice catching with a fly rod.

 

 

Acorns have already started to drop!

 

 

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The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (better known as MassMoCA, recently celebrated its 25th anniversary. It’s in what had been a factory complex where thousands once worked along the once industrially polluted Hoosic River in North Adams, Mass. North Adams recalls many other once-thriving New England mill towns.

 

Since the museum, with its spacious if rather ghostly spaces, opened in 1999, locals and others have wondered how much of an economic boost it would give to the area, with its many art institutions, including the vast Clark Art Institute, just up the road in Williamstown.

 

Well, MassMoCA has provided hundreds of jobs, albeit not highly paid, spun off some customers for local businesses such as restaurants, coffee shops and galleries and a boutique hotel and all in all helped keep North Adams from completely collapsing. After the factory closed, in 1985, there was no organization to take up the slack.

 

It’s difficult to measure with precision the economic effect of the arts. But there’s no doubt that art institutions bring the energy of creativity/invention that, over time, can improve an area’s civic engagement and business climate.  The arts bring in smart people, and some of them are very entrepreneurial. Indeed, to be a commercially successful artist you need to be at least a bit entrepreneurial. The Berkshires’ many art institutions are a reason that the region’s economy didn’t fall off a cliff after most of its factories closed over the last 60 years.

 

Providence’s Dr. Joseph Chazan, who died July 26 at 89, appreciated the civically and economically energizing role of the arts over his decades of supporting individual artists by buying many of their works and by his devoted support of arts organizations large and small, in Rhode Island and beyond. Dr. Chazan was not only a distinguished physician but also a highly successful businessman, which gave him the wherewithal to become such a beloved patron of the arts.

 

Of course the presence of the Rhode Island School of Design, and the state’s location between Boston and New York, help fuel the local art community.

 

Promoting the arts makes a lot of sense, especially over the long term, but it doesn’t have the quick dramatic effect of a big company moving in (usually after being given massive tax breaks).

Great artistic eras -- consider the Italian Renaissance -- tend to go along with great economic eras, in part because they create patrons of the arts. It’s synergistic.

 

 

 

Bike Lane Bathos

 

“In the roaring traffic’s boom, in the silence of my lonely room.…”

 

From “Night and Day,’’ by Cole Porter, who allegedly wrote some of the song in Newport.

 

Installing bike lanes on narrow streets in old cities such as Newport predictably leads to outcries. Thus, it is with a pilot plan to put a four-foot-wide bike lane on Spring Street, a road laid out in colonial times, in the City by the Sea.

 

Some residents yelped, complaining that the remaining vehicular part of the street would be so narrow as to make it difficult for emergency vehicles to get through, and excessively impede car traffic. So the plan was put on hold.

 

In the centers of some cities in Europe, most vehicular traffic has been banned. After initial complaints, such plans have become very popular because of the new ease of walking and biking, the quiet and the decrease in pollution. But that sort of thing is much tougher to do in America, where cars still reign pretty much everywhere.

 

 

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Ah, global warming: Poor little Vermont keeps getting hammered by disastrous flooding caused by tropical downpours, often associated with the remnants of hurricanes. This is particularly bad for its farmers, whose most productive fields are along the state’s increasingly flood-prone rivers, large and small. As in other places dealing with climate change, they’ll have to make adjustments to how they farm, or get out of agriculture entirely.

 

On maybe the bright side for the Green Mountain State: The growing season is getting longer.

 

 

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Regarding Israel’s amazing ability to locate and kill leaders of its terrorist enemies: A retired British Army intelligence officer told me some years ago at dinner in London’s Travellers Club that the Israelis had the best intelligence service in the world. But then, given their nation’s tiny size and that its region is run by nasty dictatorships, it needs such an operation to survive. He also touted the spies of the Vatican and the Aga Khan! I worked on a project for the latter, but never heard about spying.

 

 

Immigration Crisis Realities

Immigration is one of the most incendiary issues in the presidential race. Trump and his fellow demagogues have long asserted that the Biden administration has intentionally opened the floodgates for desperate illegal aliens and that Trump was much tougher when he was president. Certainly, his rhetoric was tough, even vicious.

 

But in fact, as a Politico investigation shows, the Biden administration has kicked out millions more illegal immigrants than Trump did. Why hasn’t the administration made more of this? My guess is that it didn’t want to sound cruel while the Trumpers, whose main tools are fear, hate and ignorance, want to sound cruel.

 

There remain millions of illegal aliens within the United States who have been here from very short to very long time spans. Trump, et al., say they want to deport ‘em all, after collecting them, perhaps with the help of the military, in camps and then somehow finding the transport equipment to dump them back in the countries they came from. Somehow I don’t think the people running those countries of origin would be all that cooperative.

 

In any event, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is underfunded and there are not nearly enough Border Control agents, immigration judges, lawyers and other officials to process the millions of illegal immigrants here as well as would-be immigrants.  By the way, U.S. immigration law is second only to federal tax law in complexity.

 

 

The Biden administration and a few prominent Republicans in Congress brave enough to risk the wrath of the mobster who rules their party tried to get a bipartisan bill through Congress this year that would have provided more resources to deal with the immigration challenge, both at the border and within the United States. But MAGA’s master ordered that it be killed lest it help the Democrats win the presidential election. And he certainly doesn’t want to raise taxes on billionaire Trump donors to help pay for such an overdue program! Don’t want to offend Elon Musk!

 

MAGA Republicans have long blocked any serious efforts to stem immigration.

 

And now that Vice President Kamala Harris is about to be the Democratic presidential candidate, Trump’s fascist/nihilist campaign is stepping up denunciations of the vice president as being partly responsible for the flood of immigrants. In fact, her official role in the Biden administration’s response to southern border immigration was only to act as emissary/coordinator of efforts to alleviate conditions in Central America that have led so many desperate people from that region (some fleeing for their lives) to try to get to the United States.

 

The main reasons for the crush at our southern border include corrupt dictatorships (hey, maybe we can have one too!),  extreme poverty (which tend to go with tyrannies), global warming and some other factors out of the control of the United States. Americans’ craving for illicit drugs from south of the border plays a part, along with easily available guns  from the U.S. used by drug cartels. We’re the great armory of international criminals.

 

Again, by the way, illegal aliens are less crime-prone than native-born Americans.

 

Hit this link:
 

 

 

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The prisoner swap last week of Russian agents, who worked in the West, including an assassin,  in return for innocent Westerners and Russian dissidents whom Vladimir Putin had ordered seized is typical. The Kremlin doesn’t care much about human lives, and dictatorships don’t have to worry that much about public opinion, but Western leaders do. Putin had grabbed the Westerners  in the first place as leverage to get back his thugs. It’s wonderful news for the released people and their families, but looking at things more broadly, you might be tempted to say that Putin came out on top. He knows that brutality pays well.

 

Meanwhile, Putin is still holding American Marc Fogel, 63, a Pennsylvania teacher, for ransom. He was arrested in 2021 for having a small amount of doctor-prescribed marijuana. Putin presumably hopes to trade him for another of his spies and/or assassins, if Fogel lives that long. He’s in declining health in a brutal penal colony.

 

 

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The Kremlin, assisted by such allies as North Korea, are flooding the Internet with disinformation/misinformation to try to get their useful idiot Trump elected, or at least, failing that, to sow as much anxiety and confusion here as they can to weaken America.

 

You might want to read historian and journalist Anne Applebaum, who has a Republican background and unrivaled knowledge of authoritarianism and disinformation, on how dictators in China, Russia, and elsewhere are making common cause with MAGA Republicans to try to damage democracy and freedom around the world.

 

 

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“And within every family, people know this, families are complicated. Every family has their crazy uncle. My uncle Donald is atomic crazy. And he has put his mark on the family history.” 

-- Fred Trump III, nephew of you-know-who, announcing his support for Kamala Harris. He called his uncle “complex and sometimes cruel.’’

 

 

Many of us grimaced when Trump, the most un-Christian president in American history, told his “Christian” (whatever that means anymore in America) fans that he’d make them so happy if he returned to power next January that they wouldn’t feel the need to vote anymore. But who needs further elections anyway when shiny-haired Donald Trump Jr. is primed to take power after Big Daddy?

 

Of course, if there were as many Jews or Druids as there are self-proclaimed “Christians,’’ he’d make similar pitches to them.

 

Dumbing Down Department

The Princeton University Classics Department will no longer require that students pursuing its majors know written Greek or Latin. Eh? This sounds like a cousin of the grade inflation  (except in the sciences) that has become so common even in Ivy League and other elite colleges.