Whitcomb: Land of Opportunity for Shooters; Trying to Grab the Oil; Rent Control’s Effects
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: Land of Opportunity for Shooters; Trying to Grab the Oil; Rent Control’s Effects
little tree
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTlittle silent Christmas tree
you are so little
you are more like a flower
who found you in the green forest
and were you very sorry to come away?
see i will comfort you
because you smell so sweetly
i will kiss your cool bark
and hug you safe and tight
just as your mother would,
only don't be afraid
look the spangles
that sleep all the year in a dark box
dreaming of being taken out and allowed to shine,
the balls the chains red and gold the fluffy threads,
put up your little arms
and i'll give them all to you to hold
every finger shall have its ring
and there won't be a single place dark or unhappy
then when you're quite dressed
you'll stand in the window for everyone to see
and how they'll stare!
oh but you'll be very proud
and my little sister and i will take hands
and looking up at our beautiful tree
we'll dance and sing
"Noel Noel"
--- “little tree,’’ by E.E. Cummings (1894-1962), American poet, painter and essayist
Or, with a more -- er, accurate? -- view:
Christmas time is here, by golly,
Disapproval would be folly,
Deck the halls with hunks of holly,
Fill the cup and don't say "when".
Kill the turkeys, ducks and chickens,
Mix the punch, drag out the Dickens),
Even though the prospect sickens,
Brother, here we go again.
On Christmas Day you can't get sore,
Your fellow man you must adore,
There's time to rob him all the more
The other three hundred and sixty-four.
This song was originally posted on protestsonglyrics.net
Relations, sparing no expense'll
Send some useless old utensil,
Or a matching pen and pencil.
"Just the thing I need! How nice!"
It doesn't matter how sincere it
Is, nor how heartfelt the spirit,
Sentiment will not endear it,
What's important is the price.
Hark the Herald Tribune sings,
Advertising wondrous things.
God rest you merry, merchants,
May you make the Yuletide pay.
Angels we have heard on high
Tell us to go out and buy!
This song was originally posted on protestsonglyrics.net
So let the raucous sleighbells jingle,
Hail our dear old friend Kris Kringle,
Driving his reindeer across the sky.
Don't stand underneath when they fly by.
“A Christmas Carol,’’ by Tom Lehrer (1928-2025), American satirical songwriter, musician and mathematician. Here’s him singing the song:
The reference to the {New York} Herald Tribune brought a pang. I subscribed to this “{Nelson} Rockefeller Republican” paper when I lived in Connecticut in the early and mid ‘60’s and worked for its relative the International Herald Tribune in the ‘80’s.
“We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.’’
-- D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930), English novelist and short-story writer
As the old saw goes, “as the days lengthen, the cold strengthens,’’ at least until the third week of January, which on average is the coldest week of the year. Still, outdoor-light obsessives, such as I, take hope in the fact that as of Jan. 5, the sunrise starts to get earlier.
(I wrote this before the apparent killer, Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, a Portuguese man who was a legal permanent resident of the United States, killed himself. The Trump regime is using the case to demand a further crackdown on immigration.)
It was an eerie evening on Dec. 13 on the East Side of Providence. Obviously, some friends had invited us to a holiday party, to start at 6 p.m. on Transit Street, a few blocks down the street from the shootings at Brown University.
Though the news of the shootings was seemingly everywhere, I drove and then walked to the party’s neighborhood anyway, with little problem even as cops, and TV newspeople, with their blinding lights, were all over the place, and looking disorganized. Some of the people at the party hadn’t heard the news. In any event, the chatty gathering went on, with, I felt, an undercurrent of anxiety.
We live a few blocks east of the shootings. News (and law-enforcement?) helicopters flying low over our house made a racket for many hours.
Very early the next morning, an old friend of mine, who’s a close friend of the parents of one of the Brown victims, called to ask me to be available to meet with the parents when they came to Providence to deal with their tragedy. When I asked what I could possibly do, he said: “Show them the love.’’ The meeting didn’t happen, but I quickly sent them a card. I guess I would have hugged them if we had met in Providence.
We got numerous messages from all over about the shootings, including from people we very rarely hear from. Much of this was simply to express dismay and their (unnecessary) concern for our safety.
Sadly, some of the intense reactions nationally were what’s been dubbed “disaster porn.’’
America is, by far, the mass-shootings capital of the world, primarily because of the lack of gun control. That must be blamed on the National Rifle Association and its Republican Party affiliates in Congress and the White House. They have much blood on their hands. Of course, the glamour associated with an Ivy League university ensured that the Brown murders would get international attention, much more than, say, yet another school shooting in Kentucky or some other gun-thick Red State.
Yes, there are many disturbed people in the barbaric United States of Anomie (and everywhere else) and the ease with which they can get guns makes it simple for them to kill. Unless the feckless American public, a plurality of whose voters put into the Oval Office a creature of bottomless corruption, rises up and drains the sewer that is MAGA Washington, the mayhem is likely to spread.
Residents of democratic nations with tough gun control have more freedom than we do. The NRA has curtailed our liberty by forcing on us a wide panoply of private and public security measures, including increasingly Orwellian surveillance, more locked buildings and more and higher fences. But perhaps the biggest effect is to dissuade people from going to many public places and events.
Now Brown, whose urban campus has been quite open to the wider community, will, sadly, have to tighten up.
As for those who point to the Bondi Beach massacre in Australia and say it’s terrible everywhere read this:
And look at the results of the tough (by American standards) assault-rifle law enacted in 1994, which the Bush administration and Congress (natch), both NRA partners, let expire in 2004, read here.
Of course, real gun control (well-enforced waiting periods for gun purchases and banning certain semi-automatic guns and high-capacity magazines, both of which are designed to kill as many people as possible as fast as possible, etc.) would take years and many gun buybacks to be very effective. There are hundreds of millions of guns in circulation in this country. At the same time, America will continue to keep U.S., Latin American, and other drug lords (some more to be pardoned by Trump?) and other criminals very well armed. Pro-business!
People ask whether the Brown campus will ever feel safe again. Well, no place is completely safe, and the NRA and the broader gun culture have helped to ensure that from time to time, even relatively safe places can become war zones.
In any event, more public-safety-information collaboration among Brown, the Rhode Island School of Design and their neighborhoods is probably needed.
I shouldn’t have been surprised at the rather infantile reaction of people miles away from the East Side/College Hill sections of Providence wanting their schools and other places closed after the Brown shootings for fear, real or purported, that the killer (s) would get them too. (With some of the students at these schools, it was probably more a matter of wanting to start their Christmas holidays early.)
Oh, come on! Of course, with so many disturbed people, thin mental-health resources, and so many guns around, maybe another killer will get them. But adults, at least, must go about their business despite generalized threats. There’s no perfect safety anywhere.
Meanwhile, MAGA gun fetishists press for “permitless campus carry’’ laws that let students carry guns – to presumably “defend themselves,’’ thus weakening the relative power of armed and heavily trained campus and other local police. That would cause more murders (and suicides) on campus. After all, young people tend to be more volatile than older folks.
Take a look at what happens with these “carry laws.’’
For what it’s worth, I think that Providence Mayor Brett Smiley has done a good job in this terrible and frustrating situation.
Oil Imperialism
It’s becoming ever clearer that Trump’s threats against the Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro are all about gaining control of that country’s massive oil and natural-gas reserves for the further enrichment of the Orange Oligarch and his fossil-fuel-sector supporters. It’s not about fentanyl, which Venezuela doesn’t produce, though some of it goes through that country –- mostly en route to Europe, not the U.S.
Most of that country’s oil exports now go to China, to whose dictatorship the Orange Oligarch has lately been making big trade concessions.
Trump doesn’t care about human rights in Venezuela or anywhere else.
In 2023, he said:
“When I left, {office in 2021} Venezuela was ready to collapse. We would have taken it over, we would have gotten all that oil, it would have been right next door.”
Kentucky Republican Congressman Thomas Massie noted: “If it were about drugs, we’d bomb Mexico, or China, or Colombia. And the president would not have pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández” (the former president of Honduras serving time in a U.S. prison after having been convicted of massive drug trafficking.’’ Trump has pardoned about 100 other drug traffickers. Why? Money?
Some readers may remember that much of New England’s heating oil used to come from Venezuela. Of course, most of our energy still comes from outside the region, not good for the regional economy! We’d be much more secure, and our costs would be lower and more predictable, if we generated a lot more of our own, via solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, hydrogen and the biggest hope for one fine day -- fusion.
xxx
The negotiations to end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine include promising that country “security guarantees”. They would be as good as the security guarantees Ukraine got from Russia, the U.S. and Britain in 1994 and the security guarantees that Czechoslovakia got as part of handing over the Sudetenland to Hitler’s Germany. Expansionist dictatorships treat such agreements as a joke. The only “security guarantee’’ that can save Ukraine from Putin is a more powerful military.
Economic Laws
As I’ve said, those in Providence and elsewhere demanding rent control are living in an economic fantasyland. Rent control slows the construction of housing and leads landlords to cut back on maintenance or even abandon their properties. For long-term control of housing costs, the key is creating more supply. Capitalism creates plenty of problems, but its creativity and dynamism generally address socio-economic and other issues better than other systems over the long term. (Health care is a partial exception. See next item.) Of course, capitalism must be regulated as necessary to reduce fraud.
Meanwhile, I read that there’s a push in Massachusetts to develop some of the capacious land owned by religious organizations for housing. More on that to come. Most religious organizations in the state are shrinking. Maybe some will see increasing the housing stock in order to boost affordability as a religious action.
xxx
Self-proclaimed “progressive’’ mayors such as incoming New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani will suffer a hard backlash if their tolerant policies lead to a big increase in homeless people on the sidewalks, scaring residents and visitors alike.
The trouble is that many, probably most, of these people are mentally ill and/or drug addicts, but we don’t have enough places to send them to, and we need new laws that make it easier to commit them to institutions, for their safety and that of the public. I hope that Mr. Mamdani, working with the state, can address those issues promptly amidst the innumerable other challenges facing him in what is by far the nation’s biggest city. Other cities are watching.
Medicare-for-All?
The battle over continuing Affordable Care Act tax credits continued last week in a country with the worst medical outcomes in the Developed World. I wonder why there isn’t more talk about jettisoning America’s current God-awful “system,’’ in which for-profit insurance companies’ lobbyists hold much political sway. They add at least 20 percent to premium costs to cover profits, administration (including sky-high senior executive compensation) and relentless marketing, not to mention much red tape.
A much better approach would be Medicare-for-All (AKA single payer), not just for old people. While this would increase taxes, it would slash Americans’ medically related costs. Look at very capitalist Taiwan, with impressive citizen longevity at least partly due to a highly successful single-payer system.
xxx
Whatever you think of the political promotion of what are called “Trump {Investment} Accounts’’ (the Galactic Narcissist must always have his name on stuff!) for children, you can bet that they’ll be good for Wall Street in general and thus for the at least 12 billionaires in the Trump regime, whatever the nice stuff and scams that may accompany these accounts, to be funded mostly by the taxpayers in ever-swelling deficit spending. This is also good news for accountants and tax lawyers!
A few billionaires are donating some money to the new programs, whether out of altruism, extra tax breaks, sucking up to Trump, generalized PR, or a mix of all three.
(No money yet for this from Elon Musk, slated to become a trillionaire! And nothing yet from Trump, whose best-known activities regarding charities have involved looting them.)
Read the Tax Foundation’s take on this program, which I suppose will be popular at least for a while:
Wouldn’t it be nice if, instead of adding yet more complicated programs, the regime made more of an effort to encourage more companies to pay a real living wage and to tax the hyper-rich a bit more to help pay for programs that help people of modest means?
xxx
Be very, very skeptical about the economic data coming out of the regime.