Whitcomb: Back to the Farm in NE; Addicted to Adventure Drama; Hunter Woes; Peddling Plots
Sunday, June 25, 2023
As she sped from dawn to gloaming, a palace upon the sea,
Did the waves from her proud bows foaming whisper what port should be?
That her maiden voyage was tending to a haven hushed and deep,
Where after the shock and the rending she should moor at the wharf of sleep?
Oh, her name shall be tale and token to all the ships that sail,
How her mighty heart was broken by blow of a crystal flail,
How in majesty still peerless her helpless head she bowed
And in light and music, fearless, plunged to her purple shroud.
Did gleams and dreams half-heeded, while the days so lightly ran,
Awaken the glory seeded from God in the soul of man?
For touched with a shining chrism. with love's fine grace imbued.
Men turned them to heroism as it were but habitude.
O midnight strange and solemn, when the icebergs stood at gaze,
Death on one pallid column, to watch our human ways,
And saw throned Death defeated by a greater lord than he,
Immortal Life who greeted home-comers from the sea.
-- “The Titanic,’’ by Katherine Lee Bates (1859-1929), American writer, literature professor and native of Falmouth, Mass., best known for writing the words to the song “American the Beautiful.’’
….“Shaking water off our limbs, we lifted
up from ladder rungs across the fern-cool
lip of rim. Afternoon. Oiled and sated,
we sunbathed, rose and paraded the concrete,
danced to the low beat of ‘Duke of Earl"’….
“From the Summer I was Sixteen,’’ by Geraldine Connolly (born 1947), American poet
Hit this link to read the whole poem:
“People too
Will vanish with the grasses.’’
-- Minamoto no Muneyuki, (unknown birthday, died about 935), Japanese poet and nobleman
The New England State Food System Planners Partnership has looked into how the region could boost its food production so that it could produce 30 percent of the food it consumes by 2030. We’ve been harvesting less than about 20 percent of the food we eat.
Wouldn’t it be nice if the six states could grow enough vegetables and grains, and catch and grow enough animal protein (especially finfish and shellfish), so that it wouldn’t have to import nearly as much from far away, much of it from huge agribusinesses, with the accompanying energy and other costs. In so doing, we’d get fresher food, employ many more New Englanders, reduce fossil-fuel burning and in some places get cheaper stuff to eat.
Of course, we think about this more in the summer, when we enjoy locally grown super-fresh vegetables. But an increasing number of large indoor “farms’’ are slowly adding to our locally grown year-round vegetable crops. And the warming climate might substantially extend our growing season.
Most of New England’s farmland is in the three northern states, which are largely rural. That won’t change, but we ought to encourage more agriculture near cities in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut. That would reduce shipping costs. Many farms in Europe and elsewhere abroad are remarkably close to large and small cities.
Where to find the land? One is to use some of the open space (parking lots, etc.) freed up by the demise of many shopping centers in the Age of Amazon. Of course, much of this acreage would require extensive remediation to make it safe for agriculture. Then there’s cutting down trees in some places to convert to farmland. There used to be much, much more open land devoted to farming (especially for dairy cows) in New England before the opening up of the flat and fertile farmland in the Middle West, California’s Central Valley and elsewhere. That made many of our region’s farms, most of which were small because of the hilly and rocky terrain in much of our region, economically uncompetitive. (There were some big exceptions, most notably the Connecticut River Valley.) Thus New England is far more wooded than it was 150 years ago.
But we’d need studies on how reducing our woodlands to plant food might worsen global warming. Trees absorb huge amounts of carbon dioxide.
There’s been a bit of revival in raising cattle and pigs in some parts of New England for high-end markets. But raising such animals for slaughter is, in food-production and nutrition terms, very wasteful compared to raising plants. Most Americans still love eating red meat, though many who know the health drawbacks and/or have seen the horrific slaughtering process have given it up.
Then there’s aquaculture, a source of high-quality protein that could be greatly expanded. It was mild good news that Perry Raso, the South Kingstown, R.I. restaurateur and shellfish farmer, has reportedly received approval to modestly expand his farming.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is getting $3.3 billion under the Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act to invest in science-based management and conservation of marine resources amidst global warming. Let’s hope that some of this money promotes coastal aquaculture.
Bravo to the New England State Food System Planners Partnership as it presses for greater regional food independence – good for public health, our economy and the environment.
Enjoy the sweet corn, tomatoes and other treasures of the New England summer. Patronize those farmstands.
xxx
I wouldn’t be surprised if tolls will eventually have to be imposed on drivers to and from Cape Cod to help pay for the long-needed replacement of the Bourne and Sagamore bridges. User fees have always struck me as the fairest way to pay for such infrastructure.
xxx
To help downtowns recover faster from COVID and the work-from-home revolution, cities and states should find more ways to speed permitting to make it easier to adapt buildings and open spaces to our new ways of working, shopping and playing.
Addictive Drama
Once more, rich adventurers put themselves – and perhaps their would-be rescuers -- in peril. Sometimes it’s a high mountain and the edge of space, and sometimes it’s the five now-dead people who dropped in an apparently inadequately tested submersible to view the wreck of RMS Titanic, which sank on April 15, 1912, hundreds of miles south of Newfoundland, with the loss of about 1,500 lives. That disaster, which seemed to eerily presage the 20th Century catastrophes to come, continues to haunt the world.
The disappearance of the submersible, which imploded, led to a massive, complex and hyper-expensive U.S. and Canadian rescue operation in the North Atlantic.
OceanGate, the adventure company that owned the submersible, has taken people on tours of the Titanic site since 2021, with guests paying $250,000 each. Paying to see the wreck of the Titanic has always seemed to me tasteless and macabre. It is, after all, a mass grave. But some clearly see such a trip as something to brag about.
Media watchers have complained that the OceanGate crisis has gotten far too much publicity, especially given such simultaneous news as hundreds of migrants drowning in the Mediterranean, Putin’s continuing mass murder in Ukraine, etc. But rescue dramas are riveting.
Nuclear-Family Radiation
Troubled Hunter Biden has agreed to plead guilty to two federal tax misdemeanors and struck a deal to resolve a felony gun charge in a proposed settlement that most legal experts say follows the guidelines for such situations. The case was overseen by Delaware U.S. Atty. David Weiss – nominated for his job by Donald Trump -- who said the investigation of Hunter Biden was “ongoing,’’ presumably referring to his dubious business transactions in China and Ukraine when his father was vice president. Some legal experts say he has been treated more harshly than defendants in somewhat similar situations because the Justice Department feared being denounced for political favoritism.
So there may be more charges against Hunter, though I rather doubt it. After all, he has already been investigated for five years, with Republicans setting the dogs on him as a way to take down his father.
Bear in mind that U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika, another nominee of Trump, must approve the aforementioned deal.
Hunter, who has been an alcoholic and drug addict, and for several years out of control, apparently took in several million dollars from his deals in those two countries but he seems to have since blown the money.
As has always been the case, relatives and friends of powerful people –in the public and private sectors – try to take advantage of their connections. That’s one reason that so many people apply to Ivy League and other elite colleges – to make connections with people likely to become rich and/or influential. But the Trumps have been in a league of their own. Consider:
Donald Trump made up to $160 million from international business dealings while president, much of it in real-estate operations, including resorts, hotels and expensive housing. The center of influence-peddling during his regime was the Trump Organization’s hotel in Washington, D.C., since sold.
His son-in-law Jared Kushner got a $2 billion investment from a fund led by the Saudi crown prince/murderer Mohammed bin Salman. a close ally during the Trump regime. And now Trump, who’s running for president again, has partnered with Oman in a multi-billion-dollar project thick with geopolitical conflicts of interest, as are most of his deals.
Ivanka, his older daughter and Kushner’s husband, has also made a mint off the Trump presidency, some of it from licensing and other sweetheart deals abroad, including China and Russia.
Indeed, Donald Trump and his clan have used the presidency as a huge money-making operation.
A drawback of being a public figure is that you live in fear that your relatives will embarrass you. But the Trump family is devoid of shame.
Out to Get Us
America has been swimming in conspiracy theories, most of them right wing. Of course, conspiracy theories have always been around. Just think of such lethal ones as the Nazis’ about the Jews. But social media and “conservative’’ cable-TV and radio shows have made it worse, as has the decline of public education.
It’s fairly easy to understand the allure of conspiratorial beliefs. Conspiracy theories soothe the sort of people made particularly anxious by life’s complexities, ambiguities and uncertainties. They do this by providing structured narratives about events and people. At the same time, they provide comfort in telling people what they already want to believe.
Conspiracy theories give the anxious and ill-informed road maps. Expert demagogues are adept at promoting the maps to gain and consolidate power.
xxx
President Biden and other U.S. officials have the unenviable task of trying to maintain cooperative relations with such elected autocrats as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. They have maintained themselves in power in part through their erosion of democratic norms, such as by undermining elections via suppressing opponents’ speech. (They’re giving ideas to such wanna-be American autocrats as Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis.)
But with such aggressive dictators as Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping threatening Western security, we have little choice but to try to work with the likes of Modi and Erdogan.
One recalls the famous but probably apocryphal remark by President Franklin Roosevelt about the vicious and kleptocratic Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza Garcia: “He may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.’’
So we must sometimes hold our nose while taking the opportunity to say, 'You know we'd like it if you cleaned up your act.'" But as America itself has flirted with GOP/QAnon fascism in recent years, our self-righteousness about democracy has come to sound just a little bit hypocritical.
xxx
American and other major democracies need to do more to stop the flow of high-tech weapons parts to Russia from Western companies that it uses in its assault on Ukraine. There still seems to be an uninterrupted supply of microchips and other high-tech components made by semiconductor giants in the U.S., Europe and Japan that ends up in Russia.
xxx
Ireland has an exaggerated reputation for having a lot of heavy drinkers. It’s far from the top in that category, and it has plenty of teetotalers.
That’s why the news that the country will become, starting in 2026, the first country in the European Union to mandate comprehensive health labeling on alcoholic-beverage containers, including cancer warnings, caught my eye. (The liquid is better known as a cirrhosis creator and neurotoxin.)
Robert Whitcomb is a veteran editor and writer. Among his jobs, he has served as the finance editor of the International Herald Tribune, in Paris; as a vice president and the editorial-page editor of The Providence Journal; as an editor and writer in New York for The Wall Street Journal, and as a writer for the Boston Herald Traveler (RIP). He has written newspaper and magazine essays and news stories for many years on a very wide range of topics for numerous publications, has edited several books and movie scripts and is the co-author of among other things, Cape Wind.
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