Whitcomb: Rubbery Roads; Convention Center Good With the Bad; Polluters in Charge
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: Rubbery Roads; Convention Center Good With the Bad; Polluters in Charge
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTwalking, hearing
the same tune no matter where
you find yourself —"
-- From “Lines for Winter,’’ by Mark Strand (1934-2014), U.S. poet laureate in 1990-91. He was a native of Prince Edward Island, Canada.
“The charm … of memory is that it is choosy, chancy, and temperamental: it rejects the edifying cathedral and indelibly photographs the small boy outside, chawing a hunk of melon in the dust.’’
-- Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973), Anglo-Irish novelist
“If you are going through hell, keep going.”
― Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965), world-historical British statesman and writer
"Nothing is as easy to make as a promise this winter to do something next summer; this is how commencement speakers are caught."
--Sydney J. Harris (1917-1986), American journalist
This winter, I’d like one big nighttime snowstorm, preferably with high winds (creating gorgeous drifts) and silent lightning, in which one could tramp along the roads in muffled magic. No traffic. Then, bright and early the next day, I’d like all the snow to evaporate in an hour, without congealing into a frozen mess, and the crocuses to commence popping. But wait! We’re better off letting the snow melt gradually into the water table.
We fill bird feeders in the winter not so much to feed the birds per se as to bring them close to us so we can enjoy their colors (e.g., cardinals) and movement, to strengthen our sense that we’re part of Mother Nature and to tell ourselves we’re helping to keep beautiful creatures alive, as marginal as are the benefits of bird feeders. (Keeping cats indoors, where they can’t kill birds, is better.)
Our day after day of clammy, cloudy days, in the 40s, recall London. It makes one want to pull down a long Dickens or Trollope novel, pour a Guinness Stout and throw some coal on the fire.
We’re in frost-heave season. That reminds me to write that mixing regular asphalt with crumb rubber made from recycled tires both reduces frost heaves –and thus the expense of road repair – and cuts road noise. It also increases skid resistance. Perfect for New England.
Glad We Have It
With possible scandals swirling in and around the Rhode Island Convention Center – and such problems seem to eventually arise in every such facility -- we shouldn’t forget that having this attractive complex has been important in the revival of downtown Providence since the capacious facility was opened in 1993 during the visionary administration of the late Gov. Bruce Sundlun. For one thing, the building of the Convention Center led to a big increase in downtown hotel rooms, with all sorts of economic spinoffs, such as new restaurants. The only major drawback to its construction was that city’s main commercial inter-city bus terminal was moved from the Convention Center site to a depressing, wind-swept site on the edge of Providence, outside of walking distance for most people.
And yes, politics always enters into the running of facilities like the Convention Center. For that matter, politics (including nepotism) enters into the operations of pretty much all large organizations, in the public and private sectors. Much, maybe most, of human life is “politics’’.
Repeated Danger
There is something wrong with Rhode Island’s judicial and mental-health system when James Proulx, who was controversially acquitted back in 2009 on a charge of assaulting a state police officer, who nearly died, is allowed repeatedly to be on the street. His latest adventure was being charged with simple assault and disorderly conduct at the Twin River casino in Lincoln last weekend. Then there was that he pleaded no contest in 2019 to a charge of obstructing a Smithfield police officer. He pleaded no contest in 2015 to simple assault and breaking and entering. He pleaded no contest to making obscene and crank phone calls in 2014. He pleaded no contest to charges of domestic simple assault and domestic disorderly conduct in 2010.
Someone else is going to get hurt if this goes on.
The Environmental Protection Agency, which is now run by the pollution-tolerant Trump administration to please campaign contributors, keeps approving toxic polyfluoroalkyl chemicals (usually just called PFAS) that get into streams and lakes, including drinking-water sources. PFAS is associated with cancer. The current Environmental “Protection” Agency has seen the exodus of many scientists, as the administration has made it clear that corporate concerns trump, so to speak, the health of the environment.
Still, there’s some comfort in knowing that much more of the public is aware of environmental dangers than they were before President Nixon signed into law the creation of the EPA, the Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act and President George H.W. Bush signed amendments to Clean Air Act to address acid rain. That knowledge puts political brakes on how much damage the campaign-contributors-above-all Trump regime can do, which isn’t to say that they can’t do a lot. The current head of the EPA, by the way, is a former coal-industry lobbyist.
Anyway, at least we’re less likely than in, say 1969, to see individuals and companies openly pouring poisonous chemicals into rivers. And think of how much cleaner Narragansett Bay and Boston Harbor are now than 50 years ago -- all because of those pesky “socialist’’ government regulations.
Some new environmental disaster along the lines of the Love Canal may reverse the reversal in environmental oversight of dangerous chemicals, as would, in the global-warming challenge, the eye of an extreme hurricane like Dorian passing over, say, Mar-a-Largo. But given that Trump seems to have more than a 50/50 chance of being re-elected, the environmental damage being done by his anti-science regime is more likely to worsen.
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The engaging Steve Wellmeier, managing director of Poseidon Expeditions USA and an expert on adventure travel in general and cruises to Antarctica and the High Arctic in particular, will talk about those topics at the Wednesday, March 18 meeting of the Providence Committee on Foreign Relations (thepcfr.org; [email protected]). Maybe someone will ask him about the giant Antarctic ice shelves that are melting from below, threatening to suddenly slide off from the continent and add a lot to global sea rise. Exaggerated fears?
Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker wants to boost the fee on ride-sharing companies like Uber and Lyft to $1 a ride from 20 cents. This would make the fee the biggest in the country. It’s hoped that the new charge would bring in $120 million a year in new revenue to use to boost mass transit and repair some of the wear and tear on the roads and bridges, some of it from all those ride-share vehicles, whose proliferation is worsening gridlock in Metro Boston.
Many will yelp but the Republican governor’s proposal is a reasonable part of his impressive administration’s efforts to address eastern Massachusetts’s formidable traffic problems, which affects much of eastern New England. Of course, the ride-sharing companies would pass on all or most of the fee to customers; that would lead some more folks to turn to mass transit, which would be good for the regional economy and the environment.
A Private Passenger Train
Watch Brightline, a two-year-old private intercity passenger rail service between Miami and West Palm Beach. It may be a partial model for the return of private passenger train service in the U.S., including the Boston-Washington route now served only by the quasi-public Amtrak. That’s what Brightline’s CEO, Patrick Goddard, is looking at.
Bloomberg News reported:
“As for Goddard, he has his eye on the U.S.’s most popular too-long-to-drive, too-short-to-fly corridor: Amtrak’s route via the Acela between Boston and Washington, D.C. He’s convinced he could double the profits in the line, Amtrak’s most essential revenue source…. ‘We love that business,’ he says. ‘We’d like to own it.”’
The rather luxurious service offered by Brightline is not yet profitable but ridership is growing. The railroad, whose trains run at 79 miles per hour at full speed (much faster than most of the car traffic on Interstate 95, which parallels it to the west). The line has had the inevitable problem, given the densely populated strip that it serves, of fatalities from risk-loving people trying to drive over the tracks as a train speeds in, suicides and so on. But the company is working to minimize those dangers through more signage and gates.
The trains, which I’ve seen whoosh by, include wide seats made of leather, attendants serving food and drinks and a first-class section.
To read more, please hit this link:
Monied Faculty
Consider the FBI’s arrest of Charles Lieber, chairman of Harvard University’s Chemistry Department, on charges of making false statements to the Defense Department and to Harvard investigators about his hugely lucrative participation in China's Thousand Talents Program, created by the Chinese government to strengthen China's scientific competitiveness. It’s a reminder of how much the Second Gilded Age money culture has infected academia. With multimillion-dollar payouts to football and basketball coaches and university presidents and huge paydays via outside contracts to professors in the sciences, engineering and business faculties, what had been a calling has been turned too often into a business, instead of a “vocation,’’ in this “nonprofit’’ sector.
For more on Professor Lieber, please hit this link:
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In other academic angst, Yale is scrapping its famous course “Introduction to Art History: Renaissance to the Present’’ because most of the creators were white, male and straight European artists. The course will be replaced by such offerings as “Art and Politics,” “Global Craft,” “The Silk Road” and “Sacred Places.”
I don’t care what ethnicity, gender or sexual persuasion these Western artists were members of. The important thing is that they were great artists.
This reminds me of the promises of some Democratic presidential aspirants to appoint certain percentages of certain minority groups if they are elected – along the lines of, say, 11.3 percent transgendered, 17.7 percent Hispanic and so on? This would be insane, and a real turnoff for voters. Hire individuals based on competence, integrity, temperament and experience. Identity politics is a political loser. Far better to appeal to the population with policies that would benefit as broad a range as possible of people regardless of their ethnic, racial, sexual or religious identity, if the Democrats want to win, as opposed to just appealing to their identity group.
History teaches us that many people don’t care if a regime is corrupt and brutal as long as they think the economy is working for them, even if it isn’t, and the leader puts on a good show that appeals to people’s hopes and hatreds.
Hitler was mighty popular in prosperous Germany in the mid and late ‘30s even though his regime’s viciousness was already well known. But all economic growth periods will end, including the present one, most of which so far has taken place in the Obama administration. However, we’re now stuck with an emboldened would-be tyrant (and his Mafia-like family). He has already corrupted, most notably, the Justice Department, among other agencies, not to mention eviscerating the Constitution’s separation of powers. In his second term, our maximum leader will move on to government agencies that collect and report economic data so as to lessen the political damage in an inevitable recession.
Americans are being reminded daily of the growing fragility of our democracy, though many of us don’t care much. Still, for all its inconveniences, we’ll miss it when it’s gone, and we’ll get a big bill for the swelling corruption that is accompanying its accelerating decay.
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The Iowa caucuses turned out to be an even bigger farce than expected with the failure of a new app. Once again, the old-fashioned way – with paper ballots – has shown itself better than a mostly digitally based system. The counting chaos also suggested how vulnerable our computerized voting systems are to hacking, especially by such experts as the Russians, who are hard at work trying to keep Trump in power. It’s technology for the sake of technology. Anyway, let’s hope that these are the last Iowa caucuses, and that the hawkeye State goes to a regular, secret-ballot primary in 2024.
It reminds me of how much safer it usually is to do your banking by writing checks, keeping a written register on paper and physically depositing checks than to do all your banking online, where everything is hackable.
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Trump’s presentation of the long dubious and politicized “Presidential Medal of Freedom’’ to the rich radio entertainer (I often listen to him on the car radio on long trips and enjoy his riffs), demagogue/carnival barker and non-stop liar and fantasy fabricator Rush Limbaugh in last Tuesday’s State of the Union Address is entirely suited to today’s political environment – one that could have been predicted by George Orwell and H.L. Mencken. Its tone fit in perfectly with the lies, exaggerations and smoke-machine emissions of Trump’s well-delivered speech. Of course, the fact-checkers got on the case, lie by lie, but that won’t matter in our increasingly post-literate society.
One of the most entertaining parts of the State of the Union reality TV show was watching sycophant-in-chief Mike Pence jump up like a robotic jack-in-the box about at almost every Trump applause line. Truly an epic of emasculation.
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“For the stay-in-office-at-all-cost representatives and senators, fear is the motivator. They are afraid that Mr. Trump might give them a nickname like ‘Low Energy Jeb’ and ‘Lyin’ Ted,’ or that he might tweet about their disloyalty. Or — worst of all — that he might come to their state to campaign against them in the Republican primary.”
-- Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, in The New York Times.
Hit this link to read his op-ed:
-- Mitt Romney
Utah Senator (and former Massachusetts governor and 2012 GOP presidential nominee) Mitt Romney has shown memorable character and Mormon morality in voting to convict Trump of his obvious and criminal abuse of power in the Ukraine scandal after a bogus Senate “trial’’ with no witnesses and no new documents allowed. He’ll now be relentlessly slandered by the Trump cult that has seized the national Republican Party, but history will honor him.
As for that famously cowardly weather vane known as Maine Sen. Susan Collins, she voted to acquit because she worried that the Trumpists, who are numerous in northern Maine – its version of Appalachia – will not forgive her if she did.
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With such potentially strong (in the general election) Democratic presidential candidates as Sherrod Brown and Montana Gov. Steve Bullock out of the race, and the news media giving far too little attention to another potentially very strong nominee, still-campaigning Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet, I’m increasingly thinking that former New York mayor, self-made billionaire, engineer and mega-philanthropist Michael Bloomberg might well be Trump’s most plausible opponent. He’s brilliant, unflappable, knows how to get under the caudillo’s skin and has more than enough money to offset the cash that the Koch Brothers and other right-wing moguls will spend to get Trump re-elected so that he can give them yet more tax cuts and eliminate some more pesky environmental, health and anti-fraud regulations.
But Bloomberg has a big handicap stemming from the stop-and-frisk policing implemented in his mayoral reign. This angered many African-Americans, a key part of the Democratic base, because so many of those frisked were black. He has since apologized but….
Back, briefly, to Senator Bennet, a moderate: He’s still hard at work trying to get traction in New Hampshire.
Meanwhile, the question remains as to whether the Democrats are willing to be as ruthless in winning power as the congressional/presidential GOP, well under way to fully embracing neo-fascist/banana republic politics and governance.
Grace and Humor at the End
An always sharp, droll and valiant friend of ours, offered morphine in her final hours after years of battling cancer, cracked: “This won’t me addicted, will it?’’
The Computation Crisis
In his fascinating book New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future, technology writer James Bridle attacks the idea that we can understand the world and our existence through computation, and that getting more and more data will improve our lot. No, he argues, trying to live in a digital dream is making life worse as we drown in seas of information and misinformation.