Whitcomb: Quick, Summer! Watch Those Contract Talks; Bribe ‘Em; Weather Museum
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: Quick, Summer! Watch Those Contract Talks; Bribe ‘Em; Weather Museum
“Summer country. In the morning the leaves
bend
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTto the window and fold
the house in….’’
-- From “Making the Bed,’’ by Burt Kimmelman (born 1947), an American poet
“Happiness, whether in business or private life, leaves very little trace in history.’’
--Fernand Braudel (1902-1985), French historian who emphasized the role of broad socio-economic forces in history
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Summer, long wished for, seems to explode into warm, wet air and jungle-like lushness as the last of the petals of most of the flowering trees blow through the air like browning snowflakes. Rather unsettling, though wonderful.
You start to make detailed plans for the season, knowing that as you get older that you won’t have time for all of them – the trips, seeing faraway friends, expanding a garden, catching up on reading books you’ve put off for years, learning a bit of a foreign language, etc. And soon enough, in August, as the dusk comes noticeably earlier, you realize that you won’t have enough summer to do all the summery things you wanted to do.
A nice thing for kids getting out for the summer is that the season seems to stretch to the far blue horizon for them. Except maybe not so much this summer, when many will have to catch up with schoolwork delayed by COVID-19.
New Water Source
I love reuse ideas! One that might be useful around here in our getting-longer and humid summers is using the condensate produced by air conditioners to do such things as water gardens, flush toilets or even use in beverages. That’s what people are doing in some places. Of course, air conditioners in places with high humidity – e.g., the Southeast during much of the year and the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states in the summer -- produce a lot more water than those in deserts, but air-conditioner condensate is being used there, too.
What to Do About Local Gun Violence
Could the recent shootings in Providence have been prevented? Maybe not. There are just so many guns around (with the enthusiastic aid of the NRA and its major affiliate, the Republican Party).
Guns are so easily available across America that street gangs or other bad actors can arm, or rearm, themselves at a moment’s notice, whatever the local efforts at gun control.
That isn’t to say that poverty, unemployment, fragmenting families, drug abuse and other socio-economic problems don’t encourage an environment in which a few people turn to violence. But the availability and lethality of guns make things much more dangerous.
Big gun-buyback programs in some cities would help, but of course firearms can be easily brought in from outside the area.
Other, perhaps obvious, things to do:
A larger and more visible police presence, with expanded intelligence operations, in crime-prone neighborhoods. Tougher court action to keep those newly arrested on gun charges from quickly going back on the streets – e.g., higher bail. Longer sentences for those convicted of gun-related crimes.
Meanwhile, don’t worry. In armed-to-the teeth America the police won’t be “defunded’’.
I’ll let the financial experts debate whether Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza’s plan for the city to sell $704 million in bonds to better fund Providence’s grossly underfunded pension system is sound. The concept is to take advantage of current low interest rates; the proposal would repay the bonds at a 3-4 percent interest rate. The current pension system is only 25 percent funded! The bond-sale plan, it is hoped, would boost the funding to 65 percent, which the current pensioners and the financial community would feel much better about.
The actuarially determined city contribution to the pension fund for fiscal 2020 was $86.7 million and is projected to grow at nearly 5 percent year, outpacing the city’s tax base. Yikes!
The root of the problem is sweetheart deals -- big benefits combined with very early retirements -- from decades ago for the benefit of Providence’s politically powerful municipal unions. If the public had raised a bigger outcry in the past, the city might not be facing this unfair annual drain, which makes it more difficult to find the money for other city needs.
In the future residents should watch the city’s labor negotiations with greater care. Back in the ‘90s, when I was editorial-page editor at The Providence Journal, we raised the alarm about irresponsible pension deals but the public was not as exercised as it should have been by their long-term fiscal implications. Providence, under the sway of the showman Mayor Vincent (“Buddy”) Cianci, was starting to gain the reputation of a “renaissance city’’ and so many looked away from the city’s gritty challenges to gaze instead at brighter things about the place.
And now the Rhode Island Senate, which seems in thrall to public-employee unions, is considering approving new sweetheart deals regarding open-ended contracts and pro-union arbitrations that could surprise taxpayers with years of higher property and other taxes. Citizens better watch what’s going on in the State House between now and when the current session is set to adjourn on June 30.
It says something about the weirdness of American life that some states and localities believe that they must offer incentives (from tax money) to get people vaccinated against COVID-19.
These include free hunting licenses in Maine, $100 savings bonds in West Virginia, and here’s the biggest one so far, as described by the Ohio Department of Health:
“In an effort to increase the number of Ohioans who currently have not taken a COVID-19 vaccine to get vaccinated, Governor {Mike} DeWine announced a series of statewide drawings to help incentivize vaccinations.
“Ohioans under the age of 18 who are eligible to receive a COVID-19 vaccine will be entered into a drawing for a four-year full scholarship to any of Ohio's state colleges and universities, including full tuition, room, and board.
“Ohioans aged 18 and older will be entered into a weekly drawing with a prize of up to $1 million.
“A total of five weekly drawings for each prize will take place, with the first winners being announced on May 26th. Winners must have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine by the date of the respective drawing.’’
Bribing people to do the right and obvious thing to protect themselves and others!
I should think that the money could better be spent on, say, expanding the number of vaccination sites.
It’s been said many times before, but there’s a widening “local news desert’’ in the U.S. as local daily and weekly newspapers shrink or die and local TV and radio stations sharply curtail their news operations. (Newish online outlets such as GoLocal24.com seek to address this crisis.)
This is bad not only because it means less information for citizens to intelligently act on. It also means that there’s less of a public square in which people in a region can communicate and cooperate. People are less likely to take harsh stands against their neighbors than they are to fulminate against their perceived political enemies on a national scale, where social media and political shows on cable TV push hate, anger, and distrust.
As my GoLocal colleague Rob Horowitz, a political scientist and communications consultant, noted in a recent column:
“Like it or not, partisan news is here to stay. In today’s niche {national} media system with a seemingly endless array of viewing options at everyone’s fingertips, producing news and information that appeals to an ideological slice of the audience is a proven strategy for success…. News shows that aim at a mass audience, stripping out a strong point of view in an attempt to reach people of all ideologies and partisan sympathies, tend to fall flat in the ratings….’’
“Research shows that when people are exposed mainly to information that confirms their own views, they become more certain and extreme in their opinions and less open to seeing the merits in the arguments of people with whom they disagree.’’
We tend to avoid severely criticizing people we might actually run into on the street. And local people are more likely to work together to get things done; they may feel they must.
If local news coverage were stronger, corrosive national “news’’ shows would do less damage. Of course, it doesn’t help that much of one of the two major parties embraces vast lies and follows the dictates of a gangster.
To read Mr. Horowitz’s column, please hit this link:
Lethal Tensions in a Tight Place
Israel and the West Bank, which I’ve visited, and the Gaza Strip, which I’ve just gazed on, are generally very crowded, which helps make conflict between Arabs and Israelis so dangerous for civilians. Hamas, which runs Gaza and aims to destroy Israel and replace it with some sort of Islamic State in the region called Palestine (reminder: there never was a nation called Palestine) takes full advantage of this from its base in very crowded Gaza. It launches rockets against Israel from dense neighborhoods that then draw Israeli counterattacks that can result in many casualties. Those are used as weapons in Hamas’s global propaganda war.
Hamas has many tunnels in which to store weaponry and from which to get into Israel and stage the occasional terror attack.
A corrupt organization in part-financed by Iran, it does little to try to improve the lives of Gazans, focusing instead on continuing the conflict with Israel.
The Jewish state, whose minuscule size gives it little maneuvering room against attacks, is thus in an almost impossible situation. Presumably, the only long-term solution would be a treaty setting up a Palestinian state on the West Bank and in Gaza under the Palestinian Authority, which, unlike, Hamas, while corrupt, is not fanatical. But such is the suspicion, and moderate Palestinian leaders’ fear of being killed by Hamas or other fanatics, that such a solution seems very unlikely anytime in the next few years. (For that matter, there are some Arab-hating Jewish Israeli fanatics who can turn violent.)
Meanwhile, Israel sometimes makes things worse with excessively fierce actions against Palestinian demonstrators and by expanding Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
But in what perhaps you might call an irony, the human rights of Israeli Arabs are much better protected in Israel, a democracy, than they are in Arab nations, all of which are corrupt tyrannies. But many still feel humiliated and angry living in a Jewish state and that can trump everything else.
The Coast Guard has decided that it no longer needs the famous Beavertail Lighthouse, on a dramatic headland in Jamestown. So the government is offering the site for free to other federal, state, and local government agencies and to nonprofit agencies.
How about turning it into a museum of coastal weather and ecology with lots of scientific and historical information, especially what can be illustrated? One thinks of hurricanes and other big storms and of the animals that frequent the New England coast as well as plants, such as kelp forests. Perhaps the University of Rhode Island’s famed Graduate School of Oceanography could be brought into the project.
Make Them Tighten Up
It seems that such utilities as Colonial Pipeline, the hacking of which caused the recent fuel crisis, will always prioritize profits over security. That’s why the Feds must impose new cybersecurity mandates on such enterprises, which are crucial for national security, and make them spend the money on much tighter security.
A Way to Soften Class Divisions?
More states are looking at letting municipalities allow duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes and apartment houses on land now zoned for single-family houses. Such housing would be particularly encouraged near mass transit, which would discourage sprawl.
And no, these proposals would not involve demolishing single-family houses.
Good: This mixed use will help alleviate sky-high housing costs in much of the country. Further, it will tend to mitigate the extreme socio-economic class separation that has particularly intensified in real estate since the 1980s –- not healthy for a democracy over the long run.
Keep It Their Fault
One reason that I increasingly favor taking public transit – especially trains -- besides being able to read and snooze, is that if something goes wrong, say a derailment, it can’t be my fault, while an accident while I drive on America’s anarchic roads might be. That’s as the quality of driving continues to decline even as the cars themselves get safer.
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Are most people enjoying the comic horror movie that is the arrival of the 17-year cicadas? And consider the free fertilizer and bird food!
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It’s incredible how fast “incredibly’’ has replaced “very.’’