Whitcomb: Make 2025 End Faster! A Public Menace for Years; Ditching Europe
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: Make 2025 End Faster! A Public Menace for Years; Ditching Europe
The holly bush, a sober lump of green,
Shines through the leafless shrubs all brown and grey,
And smiles at winter be it eer so keen
With all the leafy luxury of May.
And O it is delicious, when the day
In winter's loaded garment keenly blows
And turns her back on sudden falling snows,
To go where gravel pathways creep between
Arches of evergreen that scarce let through
A single feather of the driving storm;
And in the bitterest day that ever blew
The walk will find some places still and warm
Where dead leaves rustle sweet and give alarm
To little birds that flirt and start away.
“Winter Walk,’’ by John Clare (1793-1864), English poet
“I imagined it was more difficult to die.’’
-- Louis XIV (1638-1715), French king, aka “The Sun King,’’ on his deathbed
“Oil! Our secret god, our secret sharer, our magic wand, fulfiller of our every desire, our co-conspirator, the sine qua non in all we do!’’
-- Margaret Atwood (born 1939), Canadian novelist, short-story writer, poet and inventor
She Might Not Warn You
Mother Nature’s little joke. The frigid air we’ve suffered lately is caused by the jet stream weakening because of stratospheric warming over the poles. This disrupts the jet stream, pushing Arctic air south and giving us colder-than-normal weather. Many forecasts call for warmer weather later this month or in January, but there are too many atmospheric variables to predict with any great confidence. Will we have one of New England’s famous January thaws?
Next Sunday, of course, is the first day of winter, and the landscape is stripped down. As the nature writer Edwin Way Teale liked to write: “Summer diversifies, winter simplifies.’’ The main colors are black, brown, gray, and green (the evergreen plants), supplemented by Christmas lights.
But each day from Dec. 21, the sun will rise slightly higher in the sky, and the total amount of sunlight will increase. BUT, the sunrise time will continue to get later until early January because of Earth's elliptical orbit and axial tilt.
In any event, something to look forward to as we spin through space. And it will be nice to pull the chain on 2025.
xxx
It was exciting to be taken to the likes of Boston, New York, and Providence to see the big window spectacles and the colorful cornucopia of gifts to buy or at least look at inside, most of them made in America, of all places. And the Salvation Army volunteers at many corners.
And Indian pudding in the restaurants, rope tows in the ski areas, and chains on tires.
Get your medicine out for the annual epidemic of maudlin holiday music.
Couldn’t the police, prosecutors, the courts, the Rhode Island Division of Motor Vehicles, and technology have done far more to keep the menace called Shannon Godbout off the streets? She should have had an ankle bracelet permanently attached to her body for years and been banned from using a car until the day she dies.
This woman has been arrested 102 times on assorted felony and misdemeanor charges, and yet she has had plenty of time between 28 generally brief stays in the Adult Correctional Institutions to continue to imperil the public and herself.
And now she’s charged with running down and killing musician Roderick MacLeod on a country road in Hopkinton, R.I., as he was walking his dog. As of this writing, she was charged in this case with driving to endanger, death resulting, and possession of narcotics with intent to distribute.
The charges against her over the years have included drug and vehicular offenses as well as larceny. Some or all of this might be explained by her mental illness and drug addiction, but of course, that’s no excuse for her threat to public safety. Could she have been put under guardianship?
In any case, Rhode Island must improve its systems for monitoring people like Shannon Godbout. And so should Massachusetts, I’m told.
Lessons here for RIPTA, too?
A study by the MassINC Policy Center and TransitMatters that looked into data from big public-transit systems across America found that the MBTA’s Commuter Rail was the only one to almost recover to pre-pandemic ridership, reaching 90 percent, while others have generally stopped at 70 percent.
Thank the MBTA’s decision to start spreading out schedules, among other things, ensuring that passengers traveling in the middle of the day didn’t have to wait a long time between trains; expanded nighttime and weekend service, new fare options, such as its $10 weekend fares, and reduced fares for poorer people. (But I worry about fraud on the last.)
Anything to get more people off the roads.
xxx
xxx
Fans may love going to games at pro-sports stadiums, such as the privately owned Centreville Bank Stadium in Pawtucket, home of the privately owned Rhode Island FC soccer team.
GoLocal has recently learned that the State of Rhode Island is now even more on the hook for the cost of the stadium. But the vast majority of the population who don’t go there, either because they’re not interested in the sport or they can’t afford the tickets, might ruminate on the fact that virtually all such facilities are a transfer of taxpayer money to rich people. Bread and circuses indeed! Still, I’m a romantic and still miss the Pawtucket Red Sox at the now-demolished McCoy Stadium.
xxx
New Englanders now complaining about big increases in natural-gas prices in their utility bills might want to consider that offshore wind farms could slash their bills. They would do that by lowering wholesale electricity prices, most notably during peak weather demand in the winter and during summer heat waves. (It seems that few people care anymore about the climate benefit!)_
There’s only one big problem: The Oval Office takes orders and money from the gas, oil, and coal sector and continues to try to kill green energy.
https://www.nrcm.org/news/report-offshore-wind-would-have-lowered-electricity-prices/
Of course, reasonable people can argue about the exact siting of wind farms, taking into consideration certain fishing grounds and shipping routes.
Mobster Alliance
The recent policy statement from fascistic and kleptocratic luminaries in the Trump regime denouncing Europe’s democracies and sucking up to Russia is no surprise. Trump, while afraid of his hero Putin, also sees Russia as a way for the Trump tribe to cut deals with a country run by a murderous mobster. It’s much easier than negotiating with mostly honest governments whose democratic systems require openness about transactions.
Of course, Europe has big problems. Its countries need to better control immigration, though they are toughening up, and to better integrate the ones who have flooded into Europe in recent years, partly because of wars and climate change in the Third World. Both Europe and America have taken in too many immigrants too fast, which has led to an explosion of far-right populism.
Still, immigrants bring economic and other energy.
Native-born Europeans’ (and Americans’) low birth rates argue for substantial immigration of young migrants to work in the West, and by so doing pay taxes to help pay for public services and physical infrastructure. That is, if artificial intelligence doesn’t destroy too many jobs.
To boost their economies Europeans need to streamline burdensome regulations, which were put into place for the best of intentions, and they are starting to do so. Most importantly, they are finally dramatically increasing their defense spending to better protect themselves from aggression from a barbaric Russia, which is already waging war against members of the European Union, via physical sabotage, drone overflights and relentless cyber attacks. And they need to coordinate their defense much more tightly, including creating a European Army.
Europe can do this: The E.U. has about 450 million people (and the allied U.K. about 70 million) and an economy vastly greater and more dynamic than that of Russia, which has about 145 million people and is mostly a giant gas station.
Europe knows that it can no longer depend on an increasingly corrupt and unreliable United States to help defend it. (And the U.S. was sharing that defense, mostly through NATO, not only for self-defense in the world and the humane values we used to strongly share, but because of the vast importance of our trading relationships with Europe.)
In any event, E.U. members are looking to sharply strengthen economic and other ties with other nations, such as Canada, Australia, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand, that share their basic values of liberal democracy and carefully regulated market economies. Watch out U.S. defense contractors!
So much for America as leader of “The Free World.’’
None of this is to say that some European nations, like the U.S., don’t face threats from citizens tempted by the promises/lies of power-hungry nationalist and racist demagogues harkening back to golden ages that never existed. It will take relentless pushback to remind citizens that over the long run, liberal democracy creates the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Freedom and democracy are always fragile.
Putin has been in power since 1999!
Ukraine has held five democratic elections in the past 20 years, while Russia has had none. Putin has ordered the murder of his political opponents, including those who have fled abroad, squashed free media, and, all in all, created a police state.
Putin’s net worth has been estimated to be as high as $200 billion, virtually all of it in complex hidden holdings, many of them abroad, and some partly held by allied oligarchs. Being a murderous dictator can be very lucrative.
Do Americans really think that they’ll be safer and more prosperous in a world dominated by the sort of ruthless dictatorships being strengthened by the creature in the Oval Office?
Those Somalis
Trump and his followers slur immigrants, especially those with darker skin, presenting them all as potential or real criminals (like him!) and asserting that those who come to the U.S. from the Third World can’t be integrated into our quasi-Northwestern European core culture. But they have in the past. Take particular note of Southern-Italian-Americans, Chinese-Americans, Vietnamese-Americans and the descendants of poor Shtetl Jews from Eastern Europe.
The most dangerous group in America are young native-born males.
But, as implied above, all nations need time, space and administrative systems and personnel to limit, accept and integrate migrants in orderly ways. Our system has been out of control for decades. Unfortunately, Congress, often at the behest of business interests loving cheap labor, has for decades blocked reforms that would have addressed the growing migrant crisis, most recently in 2024, when Trump ordered his congressional servants to kill a bipartisan measure for fear that its passage would help the Democrats.
Trump’s attacks on all Somali immigrants because of a fraud case in Minnesota involving a few of them remind me of when it was common to link all southern Italians, or indeed Italians in general, who moved to the U.S. with the Mafia. But then, who am I to quibble with an expert in fraud?
It may be of interest that Donald Trump's father, Fred Trump, the developer from whom came the fortune that led to his son’s power, was arrested in Queens in 1927 while participating in a violent Ku Klux Klan march.
He was a well-known racist who engaged in discriminatory housing practices against African-Americans, leading to a federal civil rights lawsuit against him and his son, Donald Trump, in the 1970s. Woody Guthrie, a tenant of Fred Trump's, wrote a song titled "Old Man Trump" condemning his racial hatred and segregationist policies.
xxx
The speculative orgy continues for the stocks of politically powerful tech companies in AI, whose future economic and social effects are impossible to predict with confidence, though they’re already huge. And companies are borrowing vast sums for takeover bids, and it’s a golden age for insider trading by corporate execs and others with confidential info, not to mention tax evasion by big shots, as the IRS’s auditing ability is being crippled. The leveraging is something to behold! But the phenomenon recalls Warren Buffett’s famous words:
"Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful."
“Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked.’’
Railroads were revolutionary, too, but most of them went bankrupt.
xxx
I was sorry to read about Providence area star heart surgeon James Fingleton’s, er, legal complexities. I went under his knife for a triple bypass late in 2011, and, whatever his disputatious reputation, found him charming. And knowing that I had worked for a nonprofit in East Africa, he brought me back a colorful Tanzanian hat from one of his trips there to provide pro-bono treatment.
After my heart symptoms became serious, my cardiologist advised me to wait, on blood thinners, for Dr. Fingleton to return from Africa to cut me open or go to Boston to have the surgery done there.