Whitcomb: The FIFA Invasion; Fading Accent; Putting Putin on the ‘Board of Peace’!
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: The FIFA Invasion; Fading Accent; Putting Putin on the ‘Board of Peace’!
“The cocktail is a pleasant drink;
It's mild and harmless — I don't think!
When you've had one, you call for two,
And then you don't care what you do.
Last night I hoisted twenty-three
Of those arrangements into me.
My wealth increased, I swelled with pride,
I was pickled, primed, and ossified….’’
From R-E-M-O-R-S-E, by George Ade (1866-1944), American syndicated newspaper columnist, librettist and playwright
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLAST
“Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”
-- H.G. Wells (1866-1946), prolific English writer
“It is very foolish to attack one’s enemy openly if one can injure him in secret.’’
-- Giambattista Giraldi (1504-1573), Italian poet and novelist
“Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height.’’
-- E.M. Forster (1879-1970), English novelist
xxx
I enjoy overhearing younger adults conflate the interests, skills and good and nasty habits of Boomers with those of “The Silent Generation’’ (born in the ‘ ‘30’s) and “The Greatest Generation” (born in the late teens and the ’20’s). Not much teaching of history these days.
Salt
You see more robins and other birds associated with spring wintering over around here as winters generally become shorter, but you don’t hear them singing much in mid-winter. Meanwhile, folks really ought to be more sparing with salt on sidewalks. The biggest overusers are those working at apartment complexes, stores, and office buildings, but then these people aren’t usually paying for the stuff.
The salt is sometimes laid on so thick that you could shovel it.
This obviously kills vegetation and harms animals. The newer “pet and plant-friendly” salty melters are better than rock salt, still the most widely used melter, but are still very corrosive. Of course, some owners tend to encourage over-salting because of paranoia about lawsuits. Walkers, too, have a responsibility to be careful!
But kudos to Providence for doing a far better job keeping the streets clear of snow and ice than the city usually did before Mayor Brett Smiley’s administration. Pre-treating the roads with brine before predicted storms seems to be key.
Too bad that the Appalachians aren’t a tad higher. If they were, we’d be shielded more from the much hyped (but common) “polar vortex.’’ The walls created by the Rockies, Sierra Nevada and Cascades, and the prevailing westerly winds off the Pacific, help shield much of Out West. (Its interior is now experiencing very serious drought.) So much of the best skiing now is in New England, if you can handle the cold.
Now, if we could only wait a few million years until the Adirondacks, which, unlike the Appalachians, are rising, could shield us more.
xxx
We New Englanders tend to remember winters more for their snowstorms than for the cold. My strongest blizzard memory is from the winter of 1960-61, with three gorgeous, but, naturally, inconvenient, storms, on Dec. 11-12, Jan. 20 (“The Kennedy Inauguration Storm”) and Feb. 3-4. The first two, with dry snow, were entertaining (except for shovelers and travelers), but by the time of the Feb. 4 event, with wet snow, it was all becoming tedious, even for some skiers, sledders, and small children.
Still, I trace a lot of my interest in the science of weather to that time.
xxx
Embrace winter in downtown Providence “igloos”?
To Get to Spring
What a boon the rapidly spreading use of heat pumps is for heating and cooling in places like New England. As expensive as our being at the end of natural-gas pipelines now is, heat pumps, solar, wind, and geothermal systems offer hope for the region gaining energy independence within the next couple of decades.
Meanwhile, under a $180 million deal with utilities, the administration of Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey, who is running for re-election, Bay Staters will pay around 10 percent less for natural gas and electricity in February and March. Then they’ll make up for that in the warmer months to follow. Sounds reasonable. But imagine how much cheaper and more reliable energy would be if all the state’s energy came from such local sources as solar, wind, geothermal, and so on. It is technologically possible.
Maybe this ais good problem to have, but also a little scary. When thousands of fans from across the world converge on Greater Boston for matches in the FIFA men’s World Cup competition, can that city, and Massachusetts and Rhode Island in general, handle the throngs going back and forth from the matches at Gillette Stadium, in Foxboro? (It will be dubbed “Boston Stadium” for the seven FIFA matches between June 13 and July 9.)
And for Boston itself, the tournament will overlap with the celebration of America’s 250th anniversary (Boston was the cradle of the Revolution) and Sail Boston 2026. Yikes!
All this will be quite a challenge for the MBTA and private bus lines. And car drivers may be advised to try to avoid Routes 95 and 495 for when matches are scheduled. Or move to Canada for the duration. It’s pleasant up there in June and Canadians are generally nicer and more honest than Americans.
Who knows how MAGA’s anti-foreigner campaign might affect attendance? And a few soccer fans may stay away to protest FIFA’s famous corruption.
Accentuate the Positive
Prof. James Stanford, a linguist at Dartmouth College, has written about how old New England accents are declining, particularly in and around Boston, as the region’s population mix changes. If that means the demise of the harsh local accent in places like South Boston, and in the crime movies that try to mimic it, it’s music to our ears. But I hope that the soft, drawling Downeast accent stays.
Again, It Doesn’t Work
Providence Mayor Smiley is expected to veto a rent-control program apparently supported by a majority of the City Council that calls for a 4 percent limit on annual rent increases, though many apartments would be excluded from the new limits. As economists frequently note, rent control makes things worse by discouraging building and encouraging owners to close up apartments and/or cut back on maintenance. Better to enact regulatory and tax changes to encourage building, especially of multi-unit housing.
We should keep in mind that despite its well-known problems, especially in public education, the city is a very popular place to live, with Zillow, for example, predicting that it will be America’s fourth-hottest real-estate market this year. That probably means even higher rents because the housing stock is too small for the number of people who want to live here. That is, unless a recession starts this year. Federal tax cuts will probably keep the economy chugging -- and the federal debt exploding -- for a while
“When the rules no longer protect you, you must protect yourself. But let’s be cleareyed about where this leads. A world of fortresses will be poorer, more fragile, and less sustainable.”
-- Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney on Trump’s rupturing of the Western Alliance and the rules-based international order.
Mr. Carney is right to urge his nation and other “middle powers’’ with shared values to join to defend themselves from the bullying by the police states of Russia (Trump’s ally) and China and the ever-more corrupt, erratic and tyrannical United States. The post-World War II international system engineered by the United States and allies out of enlightened self-interest -- a system that brought prosperity and relative peace, and expanded democracy -- is dead, killed by the plurality of American voters who put into power a gangster regime. They did this despite Trump’s long-documented depravity. The country, to fully wake up to the danger, maybe needs a deep recession as a socio-political-economic antibiotic.
Of course, Carney’s remarks especially remind us that European nations must unite much more closely to respond to the urgent need to protect the best parts of Western Civilization. That includes pushing back hard against the squalid administration that now rules America. Appeasement only makes such a regime step up its domination/extortion efforts. A tighter European Union could become the world’s strongest power and help save America from itself. For now, European investors would do well to consider disinvesting from corrupt America, where even official economic data will be distorted by the government for political purposes.
Meanwhile, the Orange Oligarch has invited Putin to be on his “Board of Peace.’’
“Departments of ‘It Can’t Happen Here’ and ‘History Doesn’t Repeat Itself but It Rhymes.’’’:
See the new movie Nuremberg.
xxx
“I was just so naïve,’’ Marjorie Taylor Greene, the recently resigned mostly far-right Georgia Republican congressman, who has broken with her former hero, Trump. But given the daily demonstrations of his malignant narcissism and 24/7 lies since he became a famously corrupt New York developer decades ago, how could she have been so naïve?
xxx
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, not surprisingly a very rich former hedge funder, is among the slimiest sycophants around Trump. While for years he made political donations to Democrats and presented himself as a liberal, once Trump was elected, he became an unctuous supporter of anything that the Orange Oligarch said or did, no matter how economically incoherent, just plain stupid and vicious. “Yessir, Boss!”
Bessent is typical of people who will cast off all morality in order to enjoy being next to a dominating, “charismatic’’ leader, no matter what. But wait! There’s more! Bessent has put himself in a handy position to profit from various Trump and Trump Organization business schemes, illegal or not, in America, and/or in, say, Qatar, a Trump Organization subsidiary. Crypto scams, insider trading, money laundering, bargain capital stock!
Another Election-Year Pitch
The Caudillo from Queens wants to let folks take money from their 401(k)s without tax penalties, if they’re lucky to have one, for downpayments on a home. Sounds nice, but the biggest cause of America’s housing crisis is too little housing. (See above.) The added demand caused by the 401(k) scheme could goose housing prices enough to make purchases unavailable to some of the very people Trump wants to vote MAGA in return for his present.
The scheme would also undermine users’ retirement security and further explode the national debt, helping to raise long-term interest rates.
But anything to win the midterms!
Japan may be a fire bell in the night on U.S. debt, as tax cuts favoring the rich and popular programs drag us ever deeper into red ink.
xxx
Texas has an estimated 2.1 million illegal aliens, and Florida has 1.6 million. Minnesota has around 130,000. So why don’t we read about massive ICE raids in Texas and Florida? The basic answers: They’re run by Trump allies, Minnesota votes Democratic, and local authorities there, including the cops, don’t think that they should act as ICE employees
Terrific, if not up to date enough, reviews of immigration policy, and the lack thereof, since Reagan:
Teeing up for Another Presidential Pardon
Something to consider when looking at the Minnesota welfare scandal involving some Somali-Americans:
Former football star and Trump fan Brett Favre is at the center of Mississippi's massive welfare scandal. He and his cronies are accused of misusing more than $77 million in federal funds intended for the poor for such pet projects as a $5 million volleyball arena at his alma mater, the University of Southern Mississippi, and investments in a concussion-drug company.
Not surprisingly, Favre remains the sole major figure in the scandal who has escaped federal indictment. But then he is a white boy Republican.