Whitcomb: An Economic Cancer; ‘Christian’ Mayhem; Get Pregnant!
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: An Economic Cancer; ‘Christian’ Mayhem; Get Pregnant!
“Political peace too. It should be quiet
when one eats an egg. No political hoodlums
knocking down doors, no lieutenants who are
ticked off at their scheming girlfriends and
take it out on you, no dictators
posing as tribunes.’’
-- From “A Quiet Life,’’ by Baron Wormser (1948-2025), a Maine-based poet
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“A miracle drug is any drug that will do what the lab says it will do.’’
-- Eric Hodgins (1899-1971), American novelist
“Oil dependency is not just an economic attachment but appears as a kind of cognitive compulsion.’’
– Peter Hitchcock, American writer and author of Oil in an American Imaginary. He is also a professor of English at the City University of New York
“A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.’’
-- Mary Ann Evans (1819-1880), known by her pen name George Eliot, English novelist, poet, journalist, translator and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era
Nice to see those red buds on some trees, bulbs pushing up their green swords through the dirt and last fall’s brown fallen leaves, and sunny-side lawns greening, making the pink plastic flamingo on a neighbor’s lawn look cuter than ever.
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This is a good time to think of the uses of “negative capability,’’ and the need to avoid excessively reaching for, or expecting, “fact and reason,’’ in the words of the poet John Keats. That means the ability to tolerate uncertainty, seasoned with fatalism, but not to give up doing what you think you should be doing.
Or, as F. Scott Fitzgerald (a big Keats fan) famously wrote on negative capability:
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless, yet be determined to make them otherwise.”
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Watching one’s middle-aged children start to complain about the aches and pains of aging does tend to encourage taking the long view or, on the other hand, to feel more the transience of life.
The other day, I discovered with a start that someone I had always thought of as young, because I first met him when, though an adult, he looked like a teen, was turning 70. “Time’s winged chariot’’ indeed.
Here’s a good definition (from Wikipedia!) about the vagaries of time-sensing:
“The telescoping of time, or the telescoping effect, is a cognitive bias where people misjudge when past events occurred, making them feel closer to the present (forward telescoping) or further away (backward telescoping) than they actually are.”
Then there’s our “recency’’ problem, which can get nations and individuals in trouble with ignorance-based decisions. More on that some other day.
Cancerous Private Equity
Private-equity firms are often legal looters/asset strippers that should not be allowed to buy up essential institutions serving the public, such as hospitals. Private-equity investors make killings buying up organizations via putting up only a little of their own cash and financing the rest of the purchase with vast debt to be paid by the acquired enterprises. The organizations, in turn, must slash operations, including laying off staff (say hospital nurses) and terminating whole departments to keep their carnivore owners happy.
Within a few years, PE firms then unload the institutions, or what’s left of them.
And PE firms often charge big "management fees," "monitoring fees," and "transaction fees" to their victim acquisitions.
So we’ll see how it works out, but on the face of it, the sale of Roger Williams Medical Center, in Providence, and Our Lady of Fatima Hospital, in North Providence, to the nonprofit Centurion Foundation by the PE outfit Prospect Medical Holdings might a good thing. Even better would be entirely banning private equity from owning hospitals and nursing homes in Rhode Island.
Private equity all too often is a kind of social and economic cancer, diverting resources from essential public services to further enrich the very rich.
God knows it has devastated newspapers and other parts of the news media that used to be owned by families and others who were in it for more than just very high profit margins. Some even saw reporting the news as a public trust.
Onward, ‘Christian’ Soldiers?
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s adolescent-like ravings are rife with glorifications of violence. He threatens to give the Iranian regime and those forced to defend it “no quarter’’ and to “decimate” them. He identifies himself and his followers with the Medieval Crusaders from Europe who kept invading the Mideast to war on Muslims. (By the way, “decimate,’’ from the Latin, used to mean to wipe out 10 percent of something. But Hegseth seems to see it as open-ended.)
He loudly prayed last Thursday that there be “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy."
Hegseth’s bloodthirsty rhetoric mirrors that of Islamic terrorists.
Hegseth and his boss threaten to utterly devastate Iran (aka, Persia, one of the oldest high civilizations) if its nasty Islamo-Fascist regime doesn’t surrender to our regime’s bombing war, which has killed thousands. And yet he claims to be an intense follower of Jesus (expressed by the tattoos on Hegseth’s body), though his “Christianity” clashes with much that’s in the New Testament.
Why does he wrap himself in what’s been labeled (mostly white) “Christian nationalism’’? Well, embracing an extremist cause can give people a sense of order and group membership in an always anxious and uncertain world, especially for unstable and troubled people like Hegseth. And his parents identify as “Christian.’’ Most people who identify themselves as following this or that religion follow what their families did.
If Hegseth’s parents had been Muslims in the Mideast, he’d almost certainly be Muslim, and given his volatile nature, maybe an extremist one. But, hey, it’s all Abrahamic!
Also, some of this religiosity is a denial of death. Join this or that religion, and maybe you’ll live forever (though that sounds exhausting).
Given how huge Islam is – with an estimated 2 billion followers – it’s distressing and dangerous how few American policymakers appreciate its complexities, theologically, sociologically, politically and even economically -- not just of the two main and adversarial groups – the Shiites and the Sunnis – but of innumerable smaller Islamic sects. We see this ignorance played out again and again.
I studied Mideast history in college and followed the region as a journalist. But my part-time job of some years working for a philanthropic education project of the Aga Khan, the leader of the Ismailis, a Shiite group, gave me the richest sense of the nuances of Islam.
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There are early signs that the more extreme forms of right-wing populism may be fading in parts of Europe as leaders adjust to changing public opinion, economic and other realities. And that center-right and even center-left parties have accepted at least parts of populist positions, particularly on restricting immigration, has diluted some populist energy.
The Israeli-Trump war against Iran may cause another flow of migrants toward Europe; they would not be treated warmly.
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The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has just barred transgender women athletes who have gone through male puberty from competing in women's events. Physiology, fairness and common sense affirm that the IOC is absolutely right to do so.
Toxic Waste
It’s late in the day, but it’s still comforting to see social-media companies – those swamps of lies, exploitation and foreign tyrants’ propaganda (including to promote Trump, et al.) -- starting to be held legally accountable for the social and civic damage they do to America. Facebook has probably done the worst damage over the years. See the movie The Social Network to get a sense of where someone as amoral as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg would take us.
Who Will Pay for Them?
There’s a push, mostly by self-proclaimed social conservatives, to get more (native-born) Americans to have babies. They fear that the U.S. population will soon start to fall and that there won’t be enough younger workers to pay to support old people.
But these same proponents’ economic policies, which favor the very rich, do little to help most young current or prospective parents feel that they can easily afford to have kids. At the same time, artificial intelligence threatens to kill many millions of jobs.
And how well can the world that we have ravaged handle billions more people?
Bribe Away the Turbines
Trump’s fanatical opposition to renewable energy knows few bounds. This is almost funny, as the latest Mideast war shows the growing unreliability of oil and gas as our major energy sources
The regime will pay nearly $1 billion to French energy giant TotalEnergies in return for the company abandoning plans to build wind farms off the Southeast.
TotalEnergies will now spend its money to develop a new liquefied natural gas plant in Texas. The LNG would be exported to Europe! The deal will also help it to set up oil-drilling (and spill-cleanup?) operations in the Gulf of Mexico and shale-oil projects elsewhere in the U.S., mostly, of course, in Red States.
North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein, a Democrat, said this is “a terrible deal for the people of North Carolina and our country.”
“Our state has the offshore wind potential to power millions of homes with renewable American-made energy (from wind turbines and put into rapidly improving power-storage batteries). It’s ludicrous and wasteful that the Trump administration is spending $1 billion in taxpayer money to pay off a company to stop it from investing private dollars to create the clean energy we need.’’
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Because of the nihilism in Washington, things may look grim now for renewable energy and other parts of “climate tech,’’ but the projects at Greentown Labs’ incubator summit, at its Somerville, Mass., facility, are exciting and hold out hope.
For example, Charlestown, Mass.-based Lydian has developed a process to convert carbon dioxide into jet fuel.
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Regarding those school zones (aka speed traps, some that come with little warning) that drivers get fined for speeding in: Wouldn’t it be nice if the fines went to local schools? Too complicated?
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Insider trading is a crime, but then so is the whole Trump administration. There’s been massive trading just before The Orange Oligarch makes major statements, say on his war against Iran, that would affect the financial markets.
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Here’s a prediction: By the end of 2026, the Dartmouth College building now named the “Black Family Visual Arts Center’’ will no longer have that name. The building was named for the Wall Street billionaire Leon Black and his family, who gave $48 million to help build it. But more and more stuff is coming out about Black’s very close ties with Jeffrey Epstein.
Big donations from crooks can put nonprofits in a quandary.
Meanwhile, gird yourself for more revelations about the unholy trinity of Trump, Putin, and Epstein.
The name of the Dartmouth facility reminds me of the chuckles about the former “Happy White Family Concert Series” at the Rhode Island Philharmonic. Mary Tefft “Happy” White was the matriarch of a very generous Rhode Island family.