Whitcomb: Climate Central; North Toward Civilization; Taxpayers Waking Up; Arizona Anxiety

Sunday, April 14, 2024

Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

 

View Larger +

Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

‘’’Sir,’  a cadet yelled from the balcony,
and gave his name and rank, and then,
closing his parentheses, yelled
‘Sir’ again. ‘Why do your poems give
me a headache when I try
to understand them?’ he asked. ‘Do
you want that?"’….

-- From “A Poetry Reading at West Point,’’ by William Matthews (1942-1997), American poet and essayist

GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLAST

 

 

“Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.’’

-- Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), Connecticut-based poet, insurance executive and poet

 

 

“All gardening is an act of faith, but in no work in the garden is the chasm that faith must leap wider or deeper than in planting peas. In the North, where peas grow best, they are planted in April, which around here is called a spring month only out of courtesy to the equinox, much as you might call a mean, stingy and detested family acquaintance ‘Uncle’ Adolf.’’’

-- Castle Freeman Jr. (born 1944) in Spring Snow  (1995), American author who lives in Vermont.

 

 

View Larger +

PHOTO: GoLocal

I’m always a bit surprised at this time of year at how quickly life comes back in bright colors, motion and smell after the freezing sterile nights of winter. Insects buzzing away, worms wiggling, birds rioting and leaves and flowers opening theatrically – on a warm day, fast. And far too swiftly, petals of flowering trees drop on the ground, making what looks like an Impressionist painting that seems to fade as you look down on it.

 

People fortunate enough to have gardens feel exuberant now and line up various projects for the growing season, which continues to lengthen as the years roll by. They haven’t yet grown weary of weeding, and they probably won’t have to water for a while.

 

Or maybe they’ll say the hell with it and take out a second mortgage so they can go to Fenway.

 

I used to be surprised at learning about people who grew up on farms, as my maternal grandfather did, and then went off to make money in physically much easier, white-collar ways but in middle age bought a little farm as a hobby. That’s what my grandfather, who became a (mostly corporate) lawyer, did in Minnesota, with raising a few representatives of each major type of farm animal on the premises of his little farm, which he mostly visited on weekends and paid a couple to look after much of the time. Nostalgia for gritty work.

 

xxx

 

It can be fascinating to watch the transformation of some people in old age. Some formerly irascible people become mellow and kindly while formerly nice people become the opposite, and some once harmlessly eccentric people descend deep into insanity.


 

xxx
 

 

Might New England become the world center for climate studies, given its plethora of well-known research universities and science-and-engineering-based companies – and perhaps also because the region is warming faster than most of the country. Think,  for example, of the work being done at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,  the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Dartmouth College’s Irving Institute. And now Clark University in Worcester seeks to raise $100 million to create a School of Climate, Environment, and Society.

 

 

View Larger +

PHOTO: File

O Canada!

As the weather warms, and the U.S. seems increasingly corrupt and prone to disinformation and misinformation from grifting demagogues and menaced by frustrated young guys with guns, Canada looks better and better.

 

(According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s data for 2022 (the most recent year available), the murder rate in Canada was 2.27 per 100,000 persons, while the U.S. rate was 6.38 murders per 100,000.)

 

Canada’s overall crime rate is lower, citizens live longer, the literacy  and general knowledge of its citizenry are higher (thus making its citizens less vulnerable to con men), its media are less sensational and its citizens more polite than Americans.  And of course its air is cleaner.

 

Note that foreign-born people in the U.S. make up about 14 percent of the population, compared to 23 percent in Canada.
 

Canada isn’t saddled with the sort of harshness, crudeness, bigotry and ignorance that have spread in recent decades in the U.S., especially radiating out from the old Slave States of the South but from some of our big cities, too. Canadians’ humor favors irony, parody and satire and is gentler than Americans’. And Canadian society is less splintered and anomie-ridden than ours.

 

And how nice that we can go up there quite easily and experience a charmingly different version of Western culture, especially, of course, in French-infused Quebec but also, for example, the Celtic subculture in Nova Scotia. Of course, that annual cool snap called winter tends to diminish the desire to head north for four or five months of the year.

 

Oh yes, but Canada should pay more for its defense.

 

View Larger +

Gov. McKee obligated RI Taxpayers to Pay Nearly $140 Million for the Privately Owned Pawtucket Minor League Stadium PHOTO: GoLocal

Game Called

Many businesspeople don’t really want real, highly competitive private enterprise. Rather, they want special insider deals,  using lots of public money if possible. Of course, the best deal is a monopoly.
 

One example of special deals is using taxpayer money to finance rich investors’ pro sports stadiums, rationalized with the disproven argument that these facilities are good for the local economy. More welfare for the rich. 

 

But the public is waking up to these scams, as Victor Matheson,  a professor of economics and accounting at the College of the Holy Cross, in Worcester, explains in a column in The Conversation that leads off with taxpayers’ refusal to help pay for proposed tax-funded stadium projects in Kansas City, Mo., and then discusses taxpayers pushing back elsewhere.

 

The fact is that these vastly expensive projects are almost never justified economically, or even for boosting the morale of most locals, however ecstatic die-hard team fans might be.

 

What is particularly irritating is that taxpayer money being spent to further enrich the very wealthy people who own professional sports teams could be spent in ways that really would fuel local long-term prosperity, such as on public education, public health, transportation infrastructure and parks.  Something to think about as the local-and-state-taxpayer-subsidized soccer stadium arises in the poor old factory town of Pawtucket.

 

Here's the Matheson article:

 

And read this entertaining story of how stadiums have become big status symbols for the very rich: HERE


 

 

View Larger +

PHOTO: File

Now that the federal government is finally setting national limits on certain PFAS chemicals (so-called “forever chemicals”) in public-water supplies, more people are speculating on the role that these chemicals might or might not play in the increase in various cancers in younger adults in recent years, as well as in such other health concerns as heart problems. The companies, especially DuPont and 3M, making these chemicals hushed up their potential dangers for years, in a coverup reminiscent of tobacco companies’ lies about the dangers of smoking and fossil-fuel companies lying about the role that burning oil, natural gas and coal play in global warming.

 

Check with your local water supplier to see how much PFAS might be in your water.

 

 

 

I wonder whether some of Boeing’s scary equipment issues can be traced to moving some of its manufacturing to anti-union South Carolina from its unionized Washington State operations in 2011. How capable are its South Carolina employees, whose wages and benefits are considerably less than those of their Washington State counterparts?

 

 

 

View Larger +

PHOTO: Florian Schneider, Unsplash

 

The Angst State

Some folks may now have another new reason not to move to Arizona, besides 120-degree F summer temperatures and the state supreme court applying a near-total abortion ban enacted in 1864, long before Arizona gained statehood, in 1912.

 

Will the ban, if it survives a proposed ballot initiative this November, drive many physicians and nurses out of the state? Hit this link for hints.

 

Note that some of the obstetricians and gynecologists who would be most affected also, in effect, act as their patients’ primary-care physicians, of which there is a national shortage.

 

And now there’s a GOP bill in the Arizona legislature that would set up a “grade challenge department’’ at each state university that could order professors to regrade the work of students who allege that their professors are somehow persecuting them for their political beliefs. There’s very little evidence that such biased grading is going on, and there are already formal administrative mechanisms for challenging grades.

 

This is obviously an attempt to reduce the intellectual freedom that colleges and universities – and, indeed, the country – need. It’s meant, among other things, to restrict the freedom of expression of academics, who would hesitate to give their political, economic or other opinions for fear that their ability to fairly judge students’ work would be constrained at every turn.
 

xxx

 

The National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics, which mostly represents smaller colleges, has rightly set a new policy that bars people who were born male but have undergone surgical and hormonal treatments in order to become a kind of female from competing in women’s sports.

 

Whatever the sex-change treatments,  people born male will always retain some physiological characteristics that could give them an unfair advantage in athletic competitions over people born female.

 

Despite all the publicity about this group,  less than 2 percent of the U.S. population are transgender.

 

xxx

 

Charities have been hard hit by Trump’s 2017 tax law, which raised standard deductions so much as to make charitable giving less attractive to the majority of people, who no longer itemize deductions and hence don’t get the tax break.

 

The rich, however, generally do still itemize their deductions and, in so doing, can reap the tax advantages of giving. So the big donations are still coming in while the smaller donations you’d expect from middle-income people are fewer.

 

This explains some of the increasingly plaintive pleas for money from charities, especially smaller ones. Anyway, if it’s a good cause, please ignore the tax angle and give what you can anyway.

 

What’s More Important?

Maybe because it provides better or at least easier-to-get (?) video, the Israel-Hamas War in Gaza gets a lot more media attention than the horrific war unleashed by  Russia’s increasingly Hitlerian regime against Ukraine.

 

But Ukraine is more significant because Putin’s aggression is unraveling much of what’s left of the West’s post-World War II international security hopes.

 

Meanwhile, what would what is now Israel look like if it became part of a new, Arab country called “Palestine’’? (Would  high Arab birthrates in Israel and the West Bank eventually doom the Jewish state?) Eventually, such a new nation would probably look like Egypt or Syria – a kleptocratic dictatorship, in which Jews and Christians would  often be discriminated against. There are no full democracies in the  Arab world, for historical,  religious and economic reasons, and there’s little indication that any are coming. Of course, you might assert that America is a little bit more of a plutocracy than a democracy.

 

I sort of pity American politicians who try to navigate between being pro-Israel and expressing sympathy for the people of Gaza seen suffering on TV in the war, a conflict that most Israelis consider unavoidable in order to counter an existential threat. (The politics of this get very problematical in Michigan, a swing state with many Arab-Americans.) And consider that many Israelis and American Jews dislike Benjamin  Netanyahu because of his corruption and quasi-authoritarian ways even as they accept his government’s strategy in Gaza.

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.


 

Related Articles

 

Enjoy this post? Share it with others.

 
 

Sign Up for the Daily Eblast

I want to follow on Twitter

I want to Like on Facebook