Whitcomb: Delighting in Our Dairy Farms; Wind Matters; New Bryant Boss; Maine Rejects Anti-vaxxers

Monday, March 09, 2020

Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

“At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind…

 

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“Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.’’

 

-- From “Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself,’’ by Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)

 

 

“Happiness is beneficial for the body but it is grief that develops the power of the mind.’’

 

-- Marcel Proust (1871-1922)

 

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A couple of the happy harbringers of spring: how the swelling buds of oak and beech trees, some of which hold

many old, brown leaves through the winter, push out those depressing old leaves, and the smell of wet earth.

 

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What a nice feeling it is after a windy cold morning to feel the sun on your face after the wind drops off.
 

Boston is the windiest major city in the United States, partly because it’s on a stretch of ocean frequented by intense storms. The blasts sure hit you in the wind-tunnel effect in the mix of skyscrapers and much older buildings downtown, and in the growing but perhaps eventually imperiled-by-sea-level-rise Seaport District. Very off-putting. The wind-tunnel effect is serious enough that building codes and designs may have to be adjusted in downtown Boston. Architects and city planners are working on the problem. I love many skyscrapers but…

 

Trying to Keep Our Dairy Farms Going

Over the last half-century, New England has lost most of its dairy farms, most of them small. Most rural towns had at least one such farm. The rural/suburban town I lived in as a boy had several, including one across the road from our house. We used to go over there and try to irritate the bull. Now there are only about 125 dairy farms in the state, though much of Massachusetts remains rural west of Worcester.

 

It’s tough to compete with huge agribusiness dairy operations that are outside New England; they can usually produce milk and other dairy products more cheaply. But besides the aesthetic/psychological rewards to us of their beautiful open green spaces, New England’s dairy farms offer some local security by ensuring a supply of nearby food as a buffer against transportation and other supply-chain problems of far-away agribusinesses in the Midwest and elsewhere. (The Coronavirus reminds us of supply-chain dangers.)

 

And I’m not just talking about dairy. Many New England farms also sell fruits, vegetables, maple syrup and so on, and some are also growing solar energy – all that full-sunlight land for panels.

 

Let’s help keep as many of these farms open as possible,  first off by buying more of their stuff.

 

 

Fine New Boss for Bryant

Bryant University has done well to pick Ross Gittell as its next president, to succeed the able if too extravagantly paid Ron Machtley. I’ve been reading Mr. Gittell’s essays for years in The New England Journal of Higher Education, on whose editorial advisory board I used to serve;  I’ve been impressed.

 

Mr. Gittell is the chancellor of the Community College System of New Hampshire and before then was a business professor at the University of New Hampshire’s business school, and he has also taught at Harvard. He’s an expert in economic policy, job creation, community development and in how to improve business climates.

 

In his new post running an institution that at its core is still more of a business school than anything else, he’ll almost inevitably become a leader in efforts to improve southeastern New England’s economy, which may well include helping to pull it out of the next recession.

 

To read GoLocal’s profile, please hit this link:

 

 

Whitcomb and GoLocal News Editor Kate Nagle on GoLocal LIVE Friday

 

Happy Hartford Line

The success of the new Hartford Line, the commuter train service from New Haven to Springfield, shows that if you offer good service, the passengers will show up. Lots of people want to get off the highways.

 

Ridership on the line has been rising at a 25 percent annual rate since the service started, in June 2018, with 750,000 passenger trips projected for this year, compared to the 666,960 projected. The line had more than a million passenger trips in its first 18 months.

 

The administration of Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont wants to build on the line’s success by:

 

Adding a second line of tracks north of Hartford to increase service frequency there.
Adding new train stations in Enfield and Windsor Locks.
Connecting the new Windsor Locks train station directly to Bradley International Airport, similar to the MBTA station connected to T.F. Green Airport.
Adding digital displays at each station with real-time train times and each train’s origin and destination.

 

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An article in the peer-reviewed Journal of Transport & Health found that only 28 percent of drivers yielded to pedestrians in crosswalks and that a car’s price was an indicator of such bad crosswalks behavior, with the likelihood of drivers yielding falling 3 percent for every $1,000 increase in a vehicle’s value. This jibes with previous research that suggests that rich people tend to be more arrogant and narcissistic than poorer folks. Culture of entitlement, a sense of insulation, lack of empathy?

 

I’ve certainly seen this behavior on the roads, including just yesterday, when a huge Cadillac SUV roared through a crosswalk ahead of me, nearly hitting a couple of pedestrians.

 

To read the study, please hit this link:

 

 

Another Geriatric Comeback

It looks at this writing that Joe Biden will be the Democratic presidential nominee. While I would have preferred a much younger and more articulate moderate candidate with governing experience, such as Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, Democrats so far, as least as expressed on “Super Tuesday,’’   generally feel that they could do a lot worse than Joe Biden. Last Tuesday’s primary elections showed, among other things, that the Democratic Party is basically a mildly center-left party, not a fierce social-democratic one. Evolution, not revolution.  The results may also have shown that Bernie Sanders’s strident, hectoring style doesn’t wear well and that his ability to bring in a lot of new voters has been exaggerated. Many young people shout their praise for the old guy, 78, but don’t take the time to vote.

 

Biden, 77, has always been verbal-gaffe-prone – part of his sometimes charming glibness. (I have followed him since 1975 when I worked in Delaware.) How many of his recent gaffes are due to age is hard to know. The age factor is troubling, as it is with Trump, who will soon turn 74, is obese, and, in a sign of mental decline, his vocabulary seems to dwindle by the month as his incoherence rises. But Trump’s fragmented, chaotic, contradictory and crude remarks are similar to how many Americans talk, and may actually make him alluring to many folks by making this macho child of family wealth and corruption seem a tribune of Average Joes.

 

Biden would do well soon, after he nails the nomination, to swiftly select a vice-presidential running mate – someone younger and with extensive political and administrative experience, very plausible as a president and with better debating skills than Biden has. Actuarial tables suggest the importance of finding such a person. And Biden would do well to say he only seeks one term.

 

Super Tuesday also reminded me of the drawbacks of early voting, which I oppose, except for shut-ins. It seems to me that as much as possible, voters should have the latest information about candidates when they vote. After all, things can change a lot in a day. Ranked voting would be an improvement, too. In that system, voters use a ranked (or preferential) ballot to rank choices 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.

 

As for female presidential candidates, now that Elizabeth Warren, who is probably the smartest person who was running, has dropped out: How much was she a victim of sexism? And how about Amy Klobuchar? Still, there’s a  very good chance that Biden would like a woman as running mate. That might well be California Sen. Kamala Harris – a two-fer since she’s also a person of color and people of color are a crucial Democratic constituency. She’s also a former prosecutor, and well trained to go after Trump’s endless sleaze.

 

And how much was Pete Buttigieg, another dropout, hurt by being openly gay? A bit, I’m sure.

 

Oh, yes, Michael Bloomberg has bailed out, too. He’s a  very rational data guy and saw no road forward. But I think that his patriotic aim all along was not so much to run for president as to keep Trump from staying in office. As a New York mogul himself, Mr. Bloomberg knows just how dangerous Trump is for America. So I trust he’ll use his fortune to help offset some of the money advantages of Trump’s plutocratic backers.

 

 

Turn Them Off

The blessed, if forced, retirement of Chris Matthews (after some sort of quasi “Me Too’’ incidents) as an MSNBC host reminds me of how awful most of these cable-TV opinion hosts are, as they seek to turn all of life into political contests, of course, tinctured with their own political and personal allegiances. And with few exceptions, they take the short view as they turn partisan and policy battles into entertainment. (See book  touted below.)

 

If only their viewers spent the time they spend on watching these shows on reading history and civics instead.

 

 

Viral Educations

The epidemic of the Coronavirus called COVID-19 has been a reminder that we’re animals who can, out of the blue, get sick from other animals and that these viruses are notably unpredictable – coming as “black swans’’ and suddenly changing our world, at least for a while.

 

The United States, while it has the world’s best top-end health care, also suffers from a fragmented system (compared to other industrialized nations) in which there are big gaps in such essential tools of epidemic control as testing. Thus there are probably many thousands of people walking around and spreading COVID-19 in America who don’t know they have it. We also face the challenge of having a national administration led by a man who has shown little respect for science and who seems to view the crisis almost entirely in terms of how it might affect him politically. Americans should mostly ignore him and listen to the medical/public health EXPERTS in “The Deep State.’’

 

But Trump has been right to take firm steps to curtail flights from China and other nations with the biggest COVID-19 outbreaks. Quarantines can be very inconvenient but obviously not as nasty as the diseases that can spread so easily without them.

 

Americans have been a bit spoiled in recent years by advances in medicine that have made epidemics that were so common 50 years ago rare. Up into the ‘60s, getting measles, chickenpox and mumps was a childhood rite of passage, and really bad flu epidemics were much more common than today. Staying home sick was common, with aspirin, ginger ale,  bouillon and black-and-white TV shows among the few treatments. Consider the great 1957-58  flu epidemic, which like the current Coronavirus, started in that great petri dish of China, whose data can’t be trusted. (The dictatorship might be greatly understating the number of those ill and dead from COVID-19.)

 

The mutations roll on, and Nature will find ways around our science. We should be a lot more prepared than we are for very nasty epidemiological surprises.

 

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In happier news, Maine voters on Super Tuesday decided to affirm, by a 74 percent majority, a new law that eliminates religious and philosophical exemptions for childhood vaccines. Things were getting dangerous.

 

Consider that the parents of more than 5 percent of kindergartners in Maine had been granted nonmedical exemptions, more than double the national average. That pushed vaccination rates for many diseases below 95 percent, the threshold to achieve “herd immunity’’ to avoid spreading a disease across communities. In very, very few cases there are negative reactions to vaccinations. The much, much greater threat, to individuals and public health, is the diseases that vaccinations prevent.

 

You might say that in the case of vaccinations, we need freedom from religion.

 

 

A Massive Waste of a War?

 

 “History. We don’t know. We’ll all be dead.”
 

-- Then-President George W. Bush’s response when asked in 2003 how history would judge his decision to invade Iraq.

 

 

Trump is right to press to get the United States out of Afghanistan, to cut our losses. Yes, the Taliban will win, but we never could. Our war and, for a while, semi-occupation, in that benighted country seems a horrific waste, though in half a century perhaps some historians will argue that it wasn’t. Let’s stop the waste but keep special forces strong enough so they can go in there to stop and/or punish any terrorist attacks on us and our remaining allies launched from Afghanistan. One, though probably minor, factor in Trump’s 2016 Electoral College victory was his promise to get out of our relentless wars.

 

 

The Emperor of GE

Jack Welch,  a brilliant son of Salem, Mass., who never let anything get between him and a camera, has died at 84. He helped amplify the myth of the superman, imperialist CEO as he built up the vast conglomerate through acquisitions and divestitures (including of throngs of employees). His focus on “shareholder value’’ above all else, and enriching himself beyond all the dreams of avarice, was impressive, as was his charismatic showmanship.  He made a lot of money for shareholders during his reign and they naturally loved him for it.

 

But some of his big bets, especially in making GE more of a finance company than anything else, turned out very bad for the company in the long run, after he retired, in 2001.  Indeed, more than a few of his decisions look in retrospect to have been dangerously unsustainable. But while he reigned, he reveled in a cult of personality, which gave him a monarchial lifestyle, including in retirement – paid for, of course, by his beloved shareholders, many of whom were unaware of his extreme compensation and privileges.

 

Some of the things he did were financially necessary, such as closing some not very profitable Rust Belt factories and moving the operations to cheap-labor countries. More problematic was that he cut funding for research and development in order to maximize short-term profits – bad for GE’s very long-term health and so bad for America. He also pushed back against public pressures to make the company clean up some of the horrific industrial pollution it caused.

 

“Neutron Jack” (so named because of his enthusiasm for layoffs) could be amusingly hypocritical. For instance, in 2009, long after his retirement, he called “shareholder value” (above all else) a “dumb idea’’ and said that corporate executives’ “main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your product.’’ But during his 20-year reign at GE, its stock price took precedence above all else.

 

Still, I’ll miss his TV and other performances.  

 

A  sentence in a New York Times editorial in 2001 summed up Welch’s work well:

 

“His legacy is not only a changed G.E., but a changed American corporate ethos, one that prizes nimbleness, speed, and regeneration over older ideals like stability, loyalty, and permanence.”

 

Jeff Spross, a writer for The Week, opined: “Focusing on shareholder value and stock market capitalization ultimately turns a company into an abstraction, its life sustained by financial flows that are less and less connected to the underlying fundamentals of the company — its workers, its resources, its infrastructure, the real needs it provides to the people it serves. When the good times end and the money dries up, what's left of the company may not be able to stand on its own.’’

 

Maybe, but in any case, now-Boston-based General Electric seems back on the road to long-term prosperity again.

 

 

Going to Ground

Building or retrofitting to install geothermal heating and cooling makes a lot of economic and environmental sense if you can handle the hefty cost of installation.  I’ve been in some geothermal-heated and -cooled houses and was impressed by these systems’ quiet efficiency and the steady comfortable temperatures they produced.

 

I thought of this the other day when reading in The Boston Globe of a proposal in that city for a 140-unit project of apartments and townhouses called Orchard Village whose developer would have it heated and cooled by geothermal energy.  Geothermal systems circulate fluids through pipes drilled down deep underground, where temperatures run a steady 50 to 60 degrees. Yes,  you need electricity to run such systems  but the net effect is to substantially reduce fossil-fuel emissions.

 

Happily, big utilities, such as National Grid and Eversource, are showing more interest these days in geothermal.

 

To read more, please hit this link:

 

 

 

Is Urban Diversity Oversold?

Alex Marshall, writing in Governing.com, had a good take on Duluth, Minn. (where my mother, when not in Miami Beach during Minnesota’s long cold season) grew up. Mr. Marshall noted the paucity of diversity (or at least of ethnic and racial diversity) in that city, at the western end of Lake Superior, and, surprisingly,  seems to have concluded that isn’t entirely a bad thing.

 

He noted that its homogenous (white) population, with many residents with Scandinavian backgrounds, had something to do with its strong sense of community. He cited Harvard Prof. Robert Putnam’s (author of Bowling Alone) research that an effect of “diversity,’’ as in New York City, is that people tend to retreat into their ethnic/racial shells.

 

As the Duluth Superior (Superior, Wis., is next to Duluth) Area Community Foundation said of the results of a survey:

 

“The survey found that Duluth and Superior are known for their high levels of some kinds of social capital. For example, residents in this region vote at greater numbers than other places and are involved in politics and sports in great numbers. People in Duluth and Superior also visit with their neighbors in very high numbers. {They also, I recall, drink a lot.} But there are challenges. When they tend to interact, they interact with people like themselves. The area lacks ‘bridging social capital,’ in which people with different interests and backgrounds work together.’’

 

Duluth leaders are now trying to make the city more diverse, at least diverse in the usual ethnic (and sexual persuasion) ways, if not in opinions. Okay, but that might reduce aspects of what Mr. Putnam calls its “social capital’’. There’s a tradeoff, in some places a big one. I’m a bit tired of identity politics, and prefer to see people as unique individuals rather than as representatives of some ethnic/racial, religious,  political or sexual-preference group.

 

To read more, please hit this link:

 

 

Politics Becomes TV

James Poniewozik’s Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America is a useful thing to read as we head deeper into what will undoubtedly be a nasty, if occasionally entertaining, election year that will be dominated by the insomniac cable-news addict who once told People magazine: “Man is the most vicious of animals, and life is a series of battles ending in victory or defeat.’’ The main battlefield is television.

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