Whitcomb: Moving Stories; Travel Notes; Electric School Buses; Ukraine Not Like Iraq
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: Moving Stories; Travel Notes; Electric School Buses; Ukraine Not Like Iraq
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
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Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by.
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
“Sonnet 73,’’ by William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
“My ideas are clear. My orders are precise. Within five years, Rome must appear marvelous to all the people of the world – vast, orderly, powerful, as in the time of the empire of Augustus.’’
-- Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini (1883-1945), in 1929
“Today’s city is the most vulnerable social structure ever conceived by man.’
-- Martin Oppenheimer (born 1930), American sociologist
Big companies have a habit of clearing out even after they’ve promised to stay in return for juicy incentives from politicians.
Don’t believe companies’ promises to stick around, which are quickly jettisoned when business conditions, stock prices and corporate plans change and/or when a new CEO comes in who might want to have his office in some other state for reasons of prestige or simply personal convenience. Or a company might buy Hasbro and move all or parts of its operations elsewhere. Could happen fast.
In any event, whatever happens, Hasbro might well leave many of its design people in the Ocean State because of its large design/art community, including, of course, the Rhode Island School of Design.
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A bunch of chanting demonstrators angry about global warming and Israel’s war against Hamas moved to the front of a hall at the Boston Harbor Hotel to interrupt Sept. 4 remarks by the CEO of the aerospace and defense manufacturer Lockheed Martin, Jim Taiclet.
“We can keep with the Q&A, but I’m a Gulf War veteran {as an Air Force pilot} and this is OK,” Taiclet said. “That’s {free speech} what we fight for.” The audience loudly applauded the civics lesson.
Floating Wind Farms off Maine
Will there be as much controversy about putting up offshore wind turbines in the Gulf of Maine as there has been about wind farms in the waters south of New England? My guess is no, because there will be fewer affluent and politically powerful people to oppose them than in such summer resort places at Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, the south side of Cape Cod, southern Rhode Island, Long Island’s East End and the Jersey Shore.
The U.S. Energy Department has scheduled Oct. 29 for its first sale of offshore leases for the wind farms to be sited in lease areas in the gulf totaling 830,000 acres, after reducing the acreage by 12 percent after hearing opinions from people in the fishing and shipping industries.
But because the Gulf of Maine is deeper than the shoaled waters just south of New England, the monopile foundations used to hold up the turbines there can’t be used. Wind-farm foes have based part of their opposition on the generally debunked allegation that sinking in those foundations harms whales. The wind farms in the gulf would use floating technology to support the turbines.
Read the Scientific American report on whales and wind turbines:
I’m surprised that more offshore wind farm proponents don’t make more of the simple selling point that the wind energy to generate power would be local, keeping more energy-related money in the region, as opposed, for example, to buying natural gas from fracking in Pennsylvania, as electrification of transportation and other sectors accelerates. And, of course, locally generated electricity makes us less vulnerable to crises far away over which we have no control. Mideast wars, gas-pipeline sabotage by Russia and Iran, etc.
Meanwhile, best wishes to those scientists and engineers at Massachusetts-based Commonwealth Fusion Systems working on fusion energy. They might change the world in the next few years and eventually make battles over wind-turbine and solar-panel sitings moot. And other non-fossil-fuel energy technologies are being applied or are in research and development.
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Gabe Sender, a Brown University senior, is promoting an ingenious plan to beautify some streetscapes on the university’s main campus on Providence’s College Hill neighborhood. I admire young Mr. Sender’s initiative and energy.
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Try to see the paintings of 101-year-old artist Robert Thornton at the gallery of the Central Congregational Church in Providence. You won’t forget his big, ingeniously composed, vivid, and quasi-representational works. The show goes on until Sept. 29.
I’ve been checking out Portland, Ore., which I found one the quirkiest American cities I’ve visited.
A place that in its earlier incarnations was probably best known as a gritty port and factory town with plenty of brothels, bars known for fights and political and other corruption has since World War II gradually turned into a progressive and inviting town. And whatever the downtown’s infamous troubles during the worst of COVID and the since-repealed insane law that allowed possession of small amounts of hard drugs, which led to many public drug sales and, for some months, other anarchic downtown squalor, too, the city struck me as pretty benign and mellow last week.
And young adultish. In the neighborhood in which I spent most of my time, in the southeastern part of Portland, there seemed to be innumerable 30-year-olds with extensive tattoos on bikes riding around under the thick trees between American Craftsman bungalows, almost all with porches, built between around 1890 and 1930. I don’t remember when I’ve seen more coffee shops. And lots of babies and young children. It looked a bit like a more pleasant version of late ‘60s counterculture life.
I saw fewer people smoking pot than I see in Providence.
It was striking how few SUV’s there were, even in the most affluent-looking neighborhoods. Apparently, that’s because many locals don’t approve of these gas guzzlers on environmental grounds. There are lots of signs encouraging the growing of native plants and other indications of a strong civic sensibility.
The lushness of the vegetation was impressive. A climate moderated by prevailing moist winds off the Pacific encourages an astonishing range of plants, some even semi-tropical, surprising for a city at a latitude further north than Portland, Maine, after which it’s named. Roses everywhere!
I was surprised by how few houses had solar panels compared to southern New England. Too cloudy? Panels more expensive there?
Seeing Mt. Hood, which will almost certainly erupt again, reminded me of an architect whom I know slightly who moved to Portland with his wife around a decade ago. They seemed to much enjoy the city and the gorgeous countryside around it until they read a scary article in The New Yorker magazine about the inevitability of a huge earthquake in the geologically unstable Pacific Northwest.
They swiftly put their house on the market and bought an old house in New Bedford, in a geologically very stable area. At last report they were enjoying living in The Whaling City, for which the main threat is hurricanes.
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I wonder how many embolisms have been caused by the painfully tight seating of airlines’ coach seats. Remarkably unhealthy! Of course, it’s worsened by the scary incidence of obesity in Americans. One wonders how some of these people can somehow wedge themselves into these tiny seats or into the minuscule restrooms. One also wonders how much of the obesity is caused by overeating junk food and how much by physical inactivity.
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That airport restaurant/bars serve “breakfast cocktails’’ early in the morning is by turns both amusing and depressing. Getting sloshed at 9 a.m.?
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I flew out to Portland on Southwest Airlines. I know jokey patter to passengers by that airline’s stewards is a long tradition. But the guy making the announcements on my flight went too far in joking about crashes, though saying that the plane’s pilots were very competent because earlier that morning they had watched a video at home on how to fly a Boeing 737 was amusing. Was the passengers’ laughter nervous?
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For a New Englander, living in a mostly hilly region, seeing straight roads stretching to the horizon on flat ground is boring. But that’s what you see flying over the Midwest. I like curves.
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I often end up chatting with taxi and ride-sharing drivers on the way to airports and train stations. Maybe because I’m a stranger who at least looks friendly, they start talking about their often dysfunctional families – people with drug and booze problems, low-income folks who have multiple children without marriage, grandparents having to step in and raise infants…..Life is messy and unpredictable for most of us, but some almost seem to strive to make things worse, like the relatives of the Uber driver who took me to the Portland airport last Tuesday.
Ethiopians and Somalis seem to have moved to Portland in large numbers for work, as they have to Minnesota and Maine, which, like western Oregon, tend to be friendly to immigrants. Not quite northeast Africa’s mostly torrid and dry weather! Some have become taxi and ride-share drivers; I had a couple of them – very polite. So far as I know, none have yet been accused of eating U.S. citizens’ pets.
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Around when summer slides into fall you’re struck upon returning home after only a week away to see far more leaves on the sidewalks, which you might not have noticed if you had never left. It’s sort of like barely noticing the signs of aging on a friend or relative’s face when you see them day by day.
Electrifying School Buses
Modesto, Calif.’s school district touts the fiscal savings and reduction of air pollution as a result of buying 30 electric school buses to start replacing its diesel-powered ones. Its program was assisted by money from President Biden’s 2021 infrastructure law.
Leah Stokes, an associate professor of environmental politics at the University of California at Santa Barbara, told CBS News that school buses are ideal for electrification because they "run the same route every single day, and they can charge in the middle of the day. Those are some of the easiest things to electrify. And that's why it's so important to move to electric school buses. It's better for our health. It'll save school districts money, and it's, of course, better for our planet."
Israel’s Ingenious Terror Tactic
The Israelis have been very clever in arranging for Hezbollah's personal communication devices (pagers and walkie-talkies) to blow up in Lebanon, thus causing mass confusion/disruption in the Iran-backed terror group, which has been attacking thickly settled and hilly northern Israel -- also a major agricultural area. But some innocent bystanders, as well as Hezbollah fighters, have been killed in the process, and thousands of people have been injured, injecting moral ambiguity into the campaign. To the Israelis this is self-defense, but other actors may try to mimic this kind of attack.
The Israelis have turned these devices into little Trojan horses.
I’m sure that more than a few Lebanese will now keep their distance from men they suspect may be Hezbollah fighters, whom many in that tormented little nation hate and fear.
Ready for supply-chain warfare?
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J.D. Vance and other MAGA’s dangerously confuse our efforts to help Ukraine with the “endless wars’’ in Iraq and Afghanistan launched by the Bush administration. The fact is that Ukraine, a peaceable democracy, was invaded by an anti-American fascist dictatorship (admired by Trump). If it succeeds in rolling over Ukraine, Putin’s Russia plans to press farther west to threaten our European allies with which we have essential security and economic ties and similar political and human-rights values. The big exception is Hungary, where Trump hero Viktor Orban runs a kleptocratic dictatorship.
Perhaps historians, if they’re then allowed to, can tabulate in a decade the amount of money and other resources that the Kremlin have provided to MAGA politicians to get them to take Russia’s side.
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I wonder if the adulation of Trump by his cultists bespeaks the idea that this traitor, thief, rapist, compulsive liar and relentless narcissistic con man somehow gives them permission to act as despicably as him. And a perfect role model for their kids!
Moral rot? But hey! The Orangeman’s campaign, well funded by billionaires, is a satisfying way to stick it to “The Cultural Elites”!
Some of his support, especially among the rich, is simply predicated on his promises to slash their taxes and regulations again. Pure pragmatism by these folks, as much as they might find him unseemly? But beware of promises from a wanna-be dictator: If he decides you’re inadequately supine to him, he may take away what he gives and more.
I’ve noticed over the years traveling in places that you’d call Trump Country that the more his preacher-businessmen supporters, some of whom I’ve heard on my car radio, call themselves “men of God,’’ the less they tend to be.
If only Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken were around to chronicle this circus of cons.