Whitcomb: Pulling Up Old Rope; More Tuition $ Needed? Ukraine and Fusion
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: Pulling Up Old Rope; More Tuition $ Needed? Ukraine and Fusion
“The ten o’clock train to New York,
coaches like loaves of bread powdered with snow.
Steam wheezes between the couplings.
Stripped to plywood, the station’s cement standing room
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTimitates a Russian novel. It is now that I remember you.’’
From “Winter,’’ by Ruth Stone (1915-2011), American poet
“The friend of all humanity is no friend to me.’’
-- Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, whose pen name was Moliere (1622-1673), French playwright
“I order that my funeral ceremonies be extremely modest, and that they take place at dawn or at the evening Ave Maria, without song or music.’’
—Giuseppe Verdi, 1813-1901, Italian composer, mostly known for his operas
Just a couple of days last week, we were in the 40s after a few frozen days, and brown grass started to turn green. Promise of distant spring, or at least of the usual January thaw in three weeks. What we used to call a “cold wave’’ is now called “The Polar Vortex’’ That’s much sexier. It sounds like a sci-fi beast.
All those former Christmas trees lying on roadsides after only a couple of weeks use! Seems such a waste. If you have the space, you can attract birds by laying the old trees on the ground in your yard for a while. Birds like to hide in them.
What a country! Think of two such dissimilar presidents. There was Jimmy Carter – kindly, truthful, charitable, self-sacrificing, deeply Christian, sometimes preachy and taking the long view in crafting his positions and policies. Then there’s Donald Trump – vastly selfish, an endless liar, swindler, intensely materialistic and changing his positions by the minute depending on what most promotes his personal interests and desires.
Oddly, America is said to be the most religious of major Western countries. And yet, many millions of self-proclaimed “religious” people adore Trump.
And pay to pray with the Trumps at their pre-Inauguration interfaith service!?
Get your checkbook ready! Or would they accept appreciated stock?
“American Exceptionalism’’ indeed!
Buckle up! Character is fate.
The terror attack last Wednesday in New Orleans by Afghanistan war veteran Shamsud-Din Jabbar is a reminder of what can be the long-term effects in some former vets of wartime experience. Reminder: Jabbar was a native-born American from weapons-saturated Texas, not an immigrant.
He became a follower of ISIS.
Then there is Matthew Livelsberger, who was in the Tesla Cybertruck that blew up outside the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas the same day. He shot himself right before the explosion. He was active-duty Green Beret who, like Jabbar, served in Afghanistan. He, like Jabbar, was an extremist, but apparently of the far right, and he was a great admirer of Trump. And he, like Jabbar, had had family problems.
We have an increasing problem with troubled vets, too many of whom are drawn to violent extremism, some of which is encouraged by American politicians.
We seem to live in a country with ever-increasing anomie.
Cleaning Up the Bottom
“Ghost gear’’ -- abandoned ropes, traps and other fishing equipment on the sea floor -- entangles and kills marine life and makes a mess when it washes up on the shore.
So Massachusetts has commendably enacted a new law that grants the state more authority to remove the gear from the coastal waters over which it has jurisdiction, which means out to three miles from the shore. It has often been hamstrung in dealing with this problem because the stuff, though abandoned, has been treated as private property.
Under the new law, the state Division of Marine Fisheries will develop new regulations to allow for its removal without so much red tape. This will save a lot of animals, from whales down, and will, over time, boost fishing stocks, especially of such groundfish as cod, flounder and haddock.
There are no more parking spaces on Providence’s East Side. In recent years, Brown University has dramatically grown its student population, with undergraduate enrollment now at over 7,700 and more than 3,000 graduate students. The latter, at least, will grow more with a planned expansion of master’s degree enrollment.
With the university now facing a $46 million budget deficit, it may be tempted yet again to increase undergraduate student enrollment to get more tuition revenue; it will be helped in that effort by Brown’s ability to draw many students from families affluent enough that they can pay full freight, and the university has long been swamped with applicants.
Brown, with a $7.2 billion endowment, tries very hard to keep up with much richer Ivy League rivals such as Harvard, which has an endowment of over $53 billion. Such ambition is very expensive. Consider that the smallest of the eight Ivy League schools, Dartmouth College, has only about 4,400 undergraduates and 2,300 graduate students and an $8.3 billion endowment (which doesn’t include its tens of thousands of acres of land).
I wonder how much Brown’s university’s edifice complex –- endless construction of new buildings, some of them ugly and all of them requiring expensive utilities and maintenance, can explain some of its budgetary problems. Consider the glitzy new Lindemann Performing Arts Center, whose real cost the university won’t disclose, though I’ve heard $250 million. These structures cost a lot to maintain. Of course, Brown is far from alone among colleges and universities whose leaders want to build, build, build.
What would definitely improve American culture in 2025 is cutting back our time with the jarring distractions of electronic media. So bans on cellphone use in an increasing number of schools are good news. So would be banning TikTok – that time waster, which millions are addicted to and that is ultimately controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.
And some day, though not under Trump, perhaps social-media swamps such as Facebook will have to worry about libel and slander litigation in the same way that traditional and more responsible media do. (European Union nations take a much tougher stance against the psychological damage, especially to the young, done by social media.)
Traditional media founded back before the invention of the World Wide Web, in 1989 -- especially print newspapers and magazines and broadcast outlets – have been financially slammed by social media’s taking so much advertising revenue while claiming to be mere neutral conduits for content rather than what they effectively are – originators/publishers of the stuff that should have the same exposure to the civil law that traditional media have.
Whether it’s old media or new, turning them off at least one full day a week is healthy.
Don’t Send Murderers Money
Of course, it will entail problems, but the ending last week of Russian natural gas shipments via Ukraine to the European Union is welcome news. It will deprive Russia’s tyranny of a lot of money that’s been used to assault Ukraine and, increasingly, to attack the E.U. via sabotage, assassinations, nonstop cyberwar and cutting communications in the Baltic Sea.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that his country would not let Russia "earn additional billions on our blood". The government of Poland, which is on the border of Belarus, a Russian satellite, called the cut-off "another victory" against Moscow.
Russia can still send gas to E.U. member Hungary, run by Viktor Orban, its thieving dictator and pal of Vladimir Putin, Turkey and Serbia through the TurkStream pipeline across the Black Sea. Hungary, which has long been heavily subsidized by the E.U., should be kicked out of the organization, at least while the thug Orban is running it.
The E.U. will now have even more incentive to diversify its energy sources with more wind and solar power as well as more gas imports from the U.S., Qatar, and elsewhere. And for the long term, more use of nuclear power. The E.U. now gets around a quarter of its electricity from nuclear.
So all best New Year’s wishes to Commonwealth Fusion Systems, based in Devens and Cambridge, Mass., as it makes progress toward creating nuclear-fusion-generated electricity that would have epochal benefits for the world –- endless power with little of the radioactive waste that’s produced by atomic fission, which fuels nuclear-power plants now. That would be a huge hit to the kleptocratic dictatorships that subsist on oil and gas exports (and to U.S. fossil-fuel centers such as Texas). And it would slow global warming.
But before then, some good electricity news from Europe, as use of renewables grows: READ HERE
History Lessons
Two fine historical reads.
The first is How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee, by Bart D. Ehrman, a historian who is a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina. A former devout Christian who is now an agnostic, Ehrman brilliantly analyzes biblical and other material, and uses his extensive knowledge of psychology, to describe how, after the apocalyptic prophet Jesus’s execution by the Romans, some of his followers, who believed that they were living in the “End Times,’’ started to create the message that Jesus was divine. This message was elaborated over the next few hundred years as Christian theology was developed amidst many contradictions, controversies and paradoxes. The crucial thing was belief in Jesus’s bodily resurrection.
Ehrman obviously doesn’t believe that happened and brings much scholarship to his discussion but is very respectful to believers, who have gotten great comfort from the Jesus story, in large part because it suggests the possibility that they may gain eternal life by following him.
Ernest Becker’s book The Denial of Death is good on this subject – how many of us try to relieve the anxiety associated with the inevitability of death. But then, there’s the symbolic world and the physical world….
xxx
The novel Precipice, by Robert Harris, is superb historical fiction, but based heavily on documentary evidence. It was inspired by the love affair of H.H. Asquith (1852-1928), British prime minister in 1908-1916, and the young aristocrat Venetia Stanley (1887-1948). (Her nickname for him was “Prime’’.) Their affair went from 1912 to 1915, when she broke it off to marry Asquith’s cabinet colleague Edwin Montagu.
Harris reviewed the smitten Asquith’s hundreds of letters (some written during cabinet meetings!) to Stanley as well as many other long-since declassified documents. Asquith destroyed the letters that Stanley sent him, while she kept all or least most of the letters he sent her. So Mr. Harris had to use his fine-honed imagination to create her side of the correspondence. The author, a former journalist, is famed for his rigor in research. The prime minister’s indiscretion in sending her letters with secret government information, some of it military, such as Allied positions on the Western Front, was astoundingly dangerous to British national security, particularly after the United Kingdom entered World War I (which Asquith called “Armageddon’’) on Aug. 4, 1914.
One wonders if Britain would have more effectively fought the war if its leader during the first part of the conflict had not been so preoccupied with very personal matters.
The book, along with other documents from the first part of World War I, provides riveting pictures of a country in crisis. It teaches ever-useful lessons about good and bad decision-making at the highest levels, with, of course, the benefit of hindsight. Spoiler alert: Winston Churchill doesn’t look good in the book.