Whitcomb: Need Giant Venus Flytraps; After-School Learning; Oh, for a Trial! Coastal Conundrum
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: Need Giant Venus Flytraps; After-School Learning; Oh, for a Trial! Coastal Conundrum
"Luxurious man, to bring his vice in use,
Did after him the world seduce,
And from the fields the flowers and plants allure,
Where nature was most plain and pure."
-- From “The Mower against Gardens,’’ by Andrew Marvell (1621-1678), English poet and politician
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“Whoever is not a misanthrope at 40 can never have loved mankind.’’
-- Nicolas Chamfort (1741-1794), French writer
“I’m from Connecticut, and we don’t have any dialects. Well, I don’t think we have any dialects, and yeah, it’s very complex. That Rhode Island/Massachusetts New England region is probably the hardest dialect to nail.’’
-- Seth MacFarlane (born 1973), American actor, animator, writer, producer, director, comedian and singer
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It’s good to see that many people are using less of such dangerous stuff as Roundup to kill weeds, or, for that matter, those manmade fertilizers that hurt the environment because, among other things, their nitrogen and phosphorus levels are so high. And many gardeners are reducing, or stopping, their use of insect-killing pesticides and instead look for ways to lure insects that assassinate the insects we don’t want.
Now if only some botanists could develop giant venus flytraps to plant among our crops. They eat insects.
Reminder about those cheery little yellow “Lawn Chemicals Applied” flags: That stuff is poison.
We’re hearing a little less use of those shrieking, polluting, grit-spreading gasoline-powered leaf blowers this year. Maybe we’re slowing our poisoning of this corner of the world?
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Do those “Red Flag” warnings about the need to be extra careful to avoid starting fires in the woods in our dry, windy weather just bring out the pyromaniacs?
Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee’s Learn365RI Initiative, meant to create a network of after-school programs to boost student academic achievement, is admirable. We’ll see how many municipalities and local organizations join to help craft and run these activities, which will require a lot of ingenuity and experimentation.
Success of this complicated public-private project will depend in no small part on gaining parental support. Given the alarmingly high percentage of families with only one parent in residence, that could be difficult in some communities. But that’s no reason not to press on.
I was surprised that the project will be open to private and parochial school students as well as those in public schools. Good politics, I suppose. And will some of these programs be vocational?
Of course, the main problem is the state of education in the schools themselves. To substantially fix that will require more cooperation from teachers' unions – a too powerful political force – and years of consistent effort. The governor wants to bring Rhode Island schools up to Massachusetts’s first-in-nation level by 2030. Given that the Bay State is very rich, and that much of the quality of public education depends on local and state tax resources, that will be tough.
But I admire the governor for putting education improvement on the top of his agenda. And the Learn365RI Initiative might reduce crime against and by students by keeping young people off the streets.
The settlement, just before trial, by Dominion Voting Systems of its suit against the highly profitable and slick lie-and-demagoguery machine called Fox News (“News” needs quotation marks around it) is deeply frustrating but understandable. This, of course, is about the behemoth lie that Trump won the 2020 election. Perhaps the result of this lawsuit will tend to weaken, if only a little, the resonance of future false assertions about election outcomes by the losing side. Fox is part of News Corp., whose brilliant and ruthless founder and chairman is Rupert Murdoch; the “co-chairman” is his son Lachlan.
While you can understand that Dominion’s owners would be content with the company getting $787.5 million from Fox, America would have benefited much, much more if the case had gone to trial, and the avaricious liars and bullies at the network, especially Rupert Murdoch and “entertainers’’ Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Maria Bartiromo, Laura Ingraham, Jeanine Pirro, et al., had been forced to answer questions in open court about their promotions of conspiracy theories that evidence has repeatedly proven to be utterly false; see those damning internal Fox emails and texts. This corruption has damaged our democracy and civic culture in general.
Fox’s chief motivation in its festival of fraud has been to keep its ratings as high as possible among its conspiracy-consuming and willfully ignorant viewers. Advertising revenue is based on ratings.
The judge in this case, Eric Davis of Delaware Superior Court, emphasized that it was “CRYSTAL clear” that none of the allegations about Dominion aired on Fox by its multimillionaire stars were true.
Of course, Fox’s most devoted viewers, ensconced in their “populist’’ bubble and not known for researching the news, or even reading much, will hear little about this on their favorite outlet. And most of the network’s Trump cultists will continue to adore their leader. But then, Hitler still had lots of supporters in Germany in the final months of World War II. Nazi propaganda had lots of staying power!
Still, even more damaging stuff may soon come out of other lawsuits against Fox, in particular a $2.7 billion filing by Smartmatic USA, another voting-technology company, alleging that Fox also defamed it by broadcasting brazen lies over and over again. That company promises that it will pile more stuff onto the mountain of evidence compiled in the Dominion suit. Of course, Smartmatic, too, may well decide to settle mostly or entirely on financial grounds. Still, consider what a public service it would perform by bringing the case to open trial and letting us see Fox phonies squirm on the witness stand!
The amoral Murdoch was granted U.S. citizenship in 1985 (during the Reagan administration, which liked his right-wing stance), when he gave up his Australian citizenship. His new citizenship let him satisfy a legal requirement for U.S. television network ownership. Fox “News” went on air in 1996 with long-time Republican operative (and sexual abuser) Roger Ailes as CEO.
Murdoch reportedly paid $1.7 billion to his second wife when they divorced, in 1999. The Dominion settlement won’t affect the 92-year-old’s lifestyle.
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One place where News Corp., the parent company of Fox News, rarely lies is in The Wall Street Journal’s news stories, which are usually very accurately and fairly reported. That’s because to lie there would undermine the WSJ, which Murdoch’s empire bought in 2007, as a respected source of actionable information in business and in doing so reduce the paper’s profitability.
Reformers
The political reform group No Labels has many civic-minded people seeking to promote a middle way between the left side of the Democratic Party and the right side of the Republican Party (which often seems to be its only side these days). It cites its many backers who call themselves “independents,’’ but it bears noting that many of these people are actually loyal voters of one of the two major parties but find it more socially acceptable to call themselves “independents.’’
No Labels is considering running a presidential candidate next year for those who don’t like Trump or Biden, or some other GOP or Democratic candidates, or either major party in general. It’s far too early to know how this will work out, but I do fear that it could set up a false equivalence between the traitorous crook Trump and the unpopular Biden. The latter wasn’t my favorite Democratic candidate in 2020 – that was former Montana Gov. Steve Bullock – but Biden looked more than reasonable compared to the existential threat that the gangster Trump poses to America, and he ain’t no “conservative.’’
I’m not sure that Biden will run; I hope he won’t -- too old. But the country could be irreversibly damaged by Trump polluting the Oval Office again.
Check out the No Labels Web site:
By the way, many of the sort of people drawn to No Labels also back such fine election reforms as “open primaries’’ to draw better candidates. Take a look at what’s happening in Rhode Island on this, in the admirable “People’s Primary’’ initiative.
Many coastal communities in New England face severe housing shortages for year-round residents of modest means. Around here, Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard and Block Island are infamous for this problem.
Consider Stonington, Maine, on Deer Isle. There, 80 percent of its shorefront is now owned by non-residents (mostly summer people), as are 56 percent of that fishing (mostly lobsters) port’s downtown properties,
according to a report in the Portland Press Herald.
The usually affluent summer folks bid up real estate prices to levels unaffordable to most year-rounders.
So where will the carpenters, yard-work people, plumbers, electricians and schoolteachers live? Perhaps some elderly summer people will leave their summer McMansions to towns to be converted into affordable housing. Just joking. But something must be done if these towns are going to have enough of the locals who make communities viable for year-round and summer people. That includes zoning changes and/or having states subsidize the construction of new housing in some places.
Comforting the Comfortable
It used to be that rich and famous old colleges and universities mostly named their units after distinguished dead alumni. But now, in a time of ever greater wealth concentration, even a place as rich as Harvard University, with a $50 billion endowment, will gladly change names if the check is big enough. Consider that the new name of its Graduate School of Arts and Sciences will be the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, after hedge funder Griffin donated $300 million to the university, to which Mr. Griffin, a Harvard College alumnus, had already given a total of $200 million.
Imperial Harvard used to consider itself far too glorious to honor big givers in this way. But the vast fortunes made in the past few decades have led to an unagonizing reappraisal. Perhaps the dam really broke in 2014, when its School of Public Health was renamed the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health after a $350 million donation, the largest in Harvard's history at the time, from the Morningside Foundation, run by Harvard School of Public Health alumnus Gerald Chan, SM '75, SD '79, and Ronnie Chan, both of whom were sons of the late T.H. Chan, a Hong Kong-based real-estate mogul. The following year, Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences was renamed for hedge-fund billionaire John A. Paulson in return for a $400 million contribution.
The last time before 2014 that Harvard made a big name change in honor of a donor was in 1638, when John Harvard’s donation led to a renaming of what had been called “New College’’ at its founding, in 1636.
Mega donors to Harvard and other hyper-rich schools could do far more good by giving the money to a range of institutions that aren’t primarily serving the privileged establishment. But many billionaires crave the vanity-fulfilment of donating to prestigious institutions. Consider all the money that the opioid-peddling Sackler family gave to famous museums and schools. Mr. Griffin gets to display just how important he is by giving such a big pile to the world’s richest and most famous university that they name part of it after him. How much will the next donor have to give to get Harvard to name a big unit for him or her?
In any event, the contribution will pump more money into the Greater Boston economy, which is good for us!
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U.N. data say that India has overtaken China, its main Asian rival, as the most populous nation, at 1.4286 billion people, slightly exceeding China’s 1.4257 billion and in much less space. (China’s numbers do not include Hong Kong and Macau, Special Administrative Regions of China, and Taiwan.)
Whether this is good news for India is highly debatable, as anyone who has seen the terrible crowding and poverty there can attest. And while Indians like to call the teeming nation “the world’s largest democracy,’’ the fact is that demagogic Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been turning it into a xenophobic and ominously arbitrary dictatorship. As with China, foreign investors should be increasingly leery of investing there, whatever its entrepreneurial energy.
Canada spends far too little on defense, only a little over 1.3 percent, compared to 3.3 percent for the United States. This means that it gives less than it should as a member of NATO, especially bad in a time of Russia’s war against Ukraine, and its threats to our NATO allies, but also as the U.S. partner in the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), which is charged with defending our continent. Meanwhile, Russia and China, allies in tyranny, are boosting their forces in the Arctic Ocean, which global warming is opening up for much more shipping.
Canada is a rich country. It needs to do more for the defense of democracy.