Whitcomb: Should They Be For-Profit? They Only Look Scary; Immortal Epstein
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: Should They Be For-Profit? They Only Look Scary; Immortal Epstein
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTRough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to Time thou grow’st.
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
-- “Sonnet 18,’’ by William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
“God seems to have left the receiver off the hook, and time is running out.’’
-- Arthur Koestler (1905-1983), Hungarian-British writer, most famous as the author of the anti-totalitarian novel Darkness at Noon. The quote above comes from 1967.
“The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless, irresponsible, and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. And I knew we’d get into that rotten stuff pretty soon. Probably at the next gas station.’’
Hunter S. Thompson (1937-2005), American journalist and author. This quote comes from 1971.
The horrific fire in Gabriel House, the assisted-living place for elderly people in Fall River, an inferno that killed 10 residents and has left 29 injured, raises the question of how much local, state and federal oversight there is over such places serving low-income people. Especially given the rapid increase in America’s elderly population, we must address this.
It seems that some of Gabriel House’s residents would more properly have been in nursing homes, which are more tightly regulated than assisted-living establishments. And there have been complaints about very substandard conditions at the building.
Gabriel House is owned by Gabriel Care, a corporation controlled by Dennis Etzkorn, who owns some health-care facilities in Massachusetts and is listed as an officer in numerous corporations registered in that state. He has had his share of legal controversies. How much of a role, if any, did the drive to maximize profit cause conditions that helped lead to the fire?
Environmental News
We’ve had plenty of rain, and yet there are big brown spots on many lawns. Too much rain and heat, some owners dumping heavy loads of chemical fertilizers and toxic pesticides that can “burn’’ grass? On a happier note, the vegetables in many backyard plots are popping.
Many complain about the long shadows cast by tall buildings. In some cities, most notably, around here, in Boston, there are laws and/or proposals aimed at limiting such shadows with new height restrictions.
But Sam Bloch, author of a forthcoming book titled Shade: The Promise of a Forgotten National Resource, touts the value of deep shadows in a rapidly heating world in a New York Times article. We especially appreciate them in steamy mid and late summer afternoons.
He writes:
“The monolithic shade of buildings can actually enhance parks, playgrounds and plazas by cooling them down. As extreme heat becomes more common, urban dwellers need to relinquish their bias against daytime darkness and embrace the shadows.’’
This reminds us of the need to plant more fast-growing and urban-tolerant trees for their shade and for air-cleaning, such as poplars, plane trees and silver maples.
(The Times allows non-subscribers to access 10 articles a month for free before hitting its paywall.)
Are people cutting back on warm-weather outings to such vacation areas as Newport because of economic fears? We were surprised to see remarkably light traffic on our way to that often mobbed city on a sunny late afternoon on Friday, July 11. Or maybe, like us, more people are so put off by news reports of vacation-time traffic jams they just stay home.
It was heartening to see a couple of horseshoe crabs plowing along a lovely little estuary on the sandy shore of Buzzards Bay the other day. You don’t see nearly as many as you would have 60 years ago. That’s because of habitat loss, overharvesting for the use of their blood in biomedicine, and for bait.
Horseshoe crabs, while scary-looking to some, are harmless to humans, if not to such prey as marine worms. And they’re not true crabs. They and their eggs are an important food source for some birds and fish and they recycle nutrients in mud and sand, which is good for the overall ecology of the coast. They should be protected.
Along the same shore, there were plenty of piping plovers. They’re listed as “threatened” along the East Coast in general, but perhaps partly because of stronger public and private habitat-conservation efforts in the Bay State, they seem to thrive there.
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Of course, there’s lots of complaining about the increase in Providence’s property taxes, but few precise suggestions from citizens on which city services should be cut or other taxes raised to balance the city’s budget. (A few folks have suggested creating a city income tax or jacking up the vacancy tax; I doubt that the state would approve.) Meanwhile, some bumpy roads are finally being repaved, perhaps not coincidentally with the long-expected tax increases. A little offset to the bad PR of tax increases?
Few citizens seem to understand that a major factor in Providence's property-tax rise is a settlement with the Rhode Island Department of Education regarding underfunding of the Providence Public School District (PPSD) for over a decade. Brett Smiley has only been mayor since 2023.
His term ends on Jan. 4, 2027. He and the City Council may hope that enough time will have elapsed by then voters will have accepted the need, real and/or perceived, for the tax increases to maintain or even improve city services. But a fly in the ointment is that we’re very likely to have a recession between now and then that would slash municipal revenue even as it increases demand for some social services.
Another fly is that the hope for new money from such tax-exempt institutions as universities, particularly Brown, is being undermined by Trump’s attacks on their revenues from federal research grants and investment income. The next few years will be exciting. Voters will get what they voted for, or didn’t, good and hard.
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Sunbelt suburbs have long looked like bargain places for housing – low taxes, houses much cheaper than up here. But demands for more infrastructure (such as more and wider roads, which then draw more cars…) and better social services to serve much increased and more complex populations are making less competitive. And climate and related costs hit them hard, as you can see in the evening news.
Rhode Island officials got this message from the U.S. Justice Department:
“We would like to request a call with you, or the relevant election official in your office, to discuss a potential information-sharing agreement that would provide the U.S. Department of Justice with information on, among other things, individuals who have registered to vote or have voted in your state despite being ineligible to vote, who may have committed other forms of election fraud, who may have provided false information to state authorities on voter registration or other election forms, or who may otherwise have engaged in unlawful conduct relevant to the election process.”
I suspect this is another way that the most corrupt White House in history can stick it to Blue States (and scare immigrants?). I doubt that we’ll see many such forays against such deep Red States as famously corrupt Louisiana.
The seemingly endless interest in pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and his connections with the rich and powerful (Trump, Bill Clinton, etc.) is partly the sort of usual voyeurism in the general public about sex, money and power and partly an obsession with conspiracy theories pumped up by MAGA cultists, who will believe anything they want to believe on “social’’ media or hear from rich far-right fabricators on radio and TV. Welcome to QAnon!
Of course, there are still many mysteries about how Epstein, that creature of the Manhattan social sewer, managed to play such a central role in a very broad sleaze. For instance, we still don’t really know where all his money came from. And many of us still wonder if he actually killed himself in jail or was silenced by murder.
Some of the cultists (particularly poorly educated and frustrated young white men – the most dangerous people in America outside of those in the Trump regime) are now infuriated at the regime for first saying that there was a list of Epstein clients (which the cultists hoped would include many Democrats) and now denying it and seeking to close down the whole story. Since open-ended lying is now de rigueur at the top of the administration, who knows if there’s a list?
My God, what a squalid time we live in!
Many readers have noted that the highly respected prosecutor Maurene Comey, who led the case against Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell out of the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, has been fired by Trump. To shut her up by removing her access to certain records?
Ms. Comey is a daughter of James Comey, whom Trump fired as FBI director for failing to show himself an adequately slavish employee willing to ignore his oath of office. (That tedious U.S. Constitution!) Of course, a great historical irony is that Comey helped elect Trump in 2016 by pumping up for a few weeks an inflated scandal about Hillary Clinton’s emails. (But she was a rather inept candidate anyway.) Like the producers who helped put the Orange Oligarch in the White House with the fantastical TV show The Apprentice, he must feel deep regrets.
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A Federal Reserve Board that can act as independently as possible from political pressures is essential in efforts to maintain long-term economic growth while minimizing inflation. Trump’s threats to fire current Fed Chairman Jerome Powell, a registered Republican, for not seeking to lower interest rates because to do so could fuel inflation, damages the financial community’s trust that the Fed will act responsibly, basing its decision on rigorous and unbiased analysis of economic data from the public and private sectors.
We should also increasingly worry that the Trump regime will hide and/or manipulate federal economic data for political purposes. Indeed, it may already be doing so.