Whitcomb: Divestment Delirium; Ready for the Next One? Near a Nike Site

Sunday, May 05, 2024

Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

When all the world is young, lad,
And all the trees are green;
And every goose a swan, lad,
And every lass a queen;
Then hey for boot and horse, lad,
And round the world away!
Young blood must have its course, lad,
And every dog his day.
When all the world is old, lad,
And all the trees are brown;
And all the sport is stale, lad,
And all the wheels run down;
Creep home, and take your place there,
The spent and maimed among;
God grant you find one face there,
You loved when all was young.

-- “Young and Old,’’ by Charles Kingsley (1819-1875), English Anglican minister, historian and poet

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“Advertising may be described as the science of arresting human intelligence long enough to get money from it.’’

-- Stephen Leacock (1869-1944), Canadian writer and political scientist

“God is love, but get it in writing.’’

-- Gypsy Rose Lee (1911-1970), American burlesque performer, most famously as a stripper, and writer

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Fox Point PHOTO: GoLocal

With the foundation built by a wet winter and a damp, cloudy April, we can expect an explosion of plant life (and pollen) this week. We’re entering the jungle.

The new tree leaves are now mostly a light green, but they’ll darken, signaling the approach of air conditioning. June 1 is the start of meteorological summer.

Old cemeteries are particularly lovely in the spring.

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“Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.”

― George Orwell (1903-1950)

It’s remarkable how rarely student demonstrators on American college campuses protest dictatorships. Consider China, with its concentration camps. Where are the demands that university investment funds divest themselves of investments there?

Nor do they seem to care much about Putin’s bloody invasion of Ukraine and Syrian dictator Bashar Assad’s continuing mass murder of his citizens.

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Pro-Palestine Encampment at Brown PHOTO: GoLocal's Richard McCaffrey

Speaking of divestments, of Israel-connected and other investments: It’s far more complicated than the students and faculty allies seem to understand. Endowments are in a plethora of complex holdings, such as index funds, hedge funds and private-equity investments. Trying to penalize Israel – the Mideast’s only democracy and vibrant free-market economy -- with any precision, by, for example, selling stocks of Israeli companies, is problematic.

Protestors generally, if rather chaotically, want Columbia University, etc., to divest themselves of the stocks of Israeli companies and of U.S. companies that supply Israel with weapons. Some want divestment of the shares of any American makers of defense-related stuff. In a world with two brutal and aggressive major-power dictatorships, China and Russia (aligned with the bloodthirsty likes of Iran and North Korea), some of these protestors seem to want unilateral disarmament.

College and university investment funds are generally charged with maximizing long-term returns to help pay for the institutions’ programs. These include financial aid for students and scientific research, both of which provide important benefits to the wider society. Letting politicized and often ignorant students and faculty members play major roles in investment strategies would be disastrous.

The campus protestors complain that their freedom to demonstrate is being unfairly limited when administrators call in the cops to remove the kids from buildings (where they sometimes do property damage) and grounds that they’ve seized. But what about the freedom of other students and faculty to easily come and go at facilities paid for in part by hefty tuitions?

And my sense is that institutions generally act too slowly to remove disruptive demonstrators. Why let things fester?

(I covered anti-Vietnam War and related college disruptions in 1970-1971 in Boston as a newspaper reporter.)

Meanwhile, Russia, China and Iran are hard at work on disinformation/misinformation campaigns using campus unrest to divide and weaken America. Artificial intelligence is a powerful tool in creating these fake “news” reports and images. Given the Kremlin’s ruthlessness, I wouldn’t be surprised if it also used actual people to stir up things here. The ultimate in outside agitators, maybe with some help from Trumpers.

And the campus disorders may well help Trump return to the Oval Office. Shouts of
"Law and Order!" Do the protestors want that? See what happened in 1968.

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Oriole PHOTO: Ray Hennessy, Unsplash

The Next Pandemic?

We ought to worry, but not panic, about the outbreak of H5N1 bird flu that has spread among American livestock and poultry and mildly affected only a few (we hope) farm workers so far. (Given that these workers are concentrated in rural areas and include more than a few immigrants, legal or otherwise, it’s hard to track the problem.) Mutations in the virus could pose a broad danger to public health. But how ready are we for it?

Given the highly politicized opposition during the worst of COVID-19 to such actions as closures of schools, face-mask mandates, and even traditional mass vaccinations (thanks, Bobby Kennedy Jr.), it would probably be hard to institute these programs even if a strain of bird flu takes on 1918 “Spanish flu” proportions. Millions of Americans’ idea of freedom doesn’t include the freedom not to be infected.

For now, anyway, we need more testing of people who work with livestock so that health authorities can better monitor the flu’s spread and rapidly detect any mutations that could make it dangerous to the general population. This threat deserves heightened attention by public officials and biotech companies. Could the latter step in with new vaccines as fast as they did with COVID-19?

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With the exit of COVID-19 money from the Feds, how ingenious can state and local officials be in maintaining programs that some voters have naively expected would continue until the end of time.

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PHOTO: GoLocal

Idiotic Legislation

There’s an idiotic bill in the Rhode Island House to pay commercial “landscaping” companies a total of $350,000 to help them buy electric leaf blowers. Gasoline-powered blowers should be banned as the public-health and environmental menaces they are, with the ban going into effect in a year. Taxpayers shouldn’t be billed for what is the responsibility of businesses. The damage done by gasoline-powered blowers has long been clear.

‘‘Landscapers’’ can pass on to their customers their cost of buying non-polluting and relatively quiet electric blowers. People who can afford these services, which some would consider luxuries, can afford to pay a little more to stop the assault of shrieking, poison-emitting blowers, which make life miserable in many neighborhoods. For that matter, many residents could easily ditch the “landscapers’’ and pick up an electric blower or a rake and do the modest work themselves in a few minutes. Too lazy even for that? Hire a teenager, who might even be your son or daughter.

Here’s the bill:

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A recent issue of Yale Climate Connections presents an interview in which Tiffany Smythe, PhD, of the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, discusses the results of her survey of 199 recreational fishers regarding the five-turbine wind farm off Block Island. In the interview, she says that “we found, overall, a neutral to positive effect of this wind farm project on recreational angling,’’ with many of those surveyed saying that the supports of the turbines act as artificial reefs that attract fish. But some respondents also worried that some wind farms might hinder fishing access.

So location is crucial.

Read her remarks and the study:

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Of course, the national debt is a problem, for which the GOP likes to blame the Democrats, and there’s blame to go around. Interest payments on the debt are now at over 3 percent of GDP. The George W. Bush and Trump tax cuts, which have mostly benefited the affluent, are responsible for about 57 percent of the increase of the ratio of the national debt to the American economy, with about 90 percent attributed to them if you exclude the one-time spending related to the great disasters of the 2008-2009 financial crisis/Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic. (G.W. Bush’s policies helped cause the 2008-2009 mess.)

An obvious problem is that Americans like, indeed demand most federal programs while trying to avoid paying for them; the swampy labyrinth of the tax code provide innumerable opportunities for the latter. I chuckle when I hear politicians talk vaguely about slashing “wasteful’’ government spending while being remarkably vague about what they’d cut, because virtually every program has avid fans, and more than a few relentless and highly paid lobbyists on Capitol Hill.

Push may come to shove in 2025, when members of Congress and whoever is president then must decide whether to extend the big tax cuts Trump and his congressional allies pushed through at the end of 2017. My guess is that they’ll do the irresponsible thing and keep them mostly in force.

When federal tax rates were much higher than now, the economy often did well.

See this chart of top federal income-tax rates for 1913-2024:

And this study of the relationship between tax rates and the federal debt as a percentage of the U.S. economy:

In the First Cold War

As international tensions rise, I remember the scares of the 1950s, with such silly instructions as for kids to “duck” under their wooden, ink-stained and scratched desks in the event of a Soviet nuclear attack. We had a “Nike Site’’ near us on Boston’s South Shore whence missiles were to be launched against Soviet bombers, which would presumably attack such nearby defense-related facilities as a naval shipyard and several military air bases.

I’m not sure how much comfort the Nike Sites gave to their neighbors. I once asked my father, a World War II combat veteran as a Navy lieutenant commander, what he would do if he saw nuclear bombs exploding in Boston. He said (as a joke?) “Get into the car and drive toward them. Get it over with.’’

As kids we’d be tempted to approach the wooded perimeter of our Nike Site until someone warned “They’ll shoot us!”

Many of us were far more worried about milk enriched (bad joke) with strontium-90 from nuclear weapons tests than being bombed.

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The problems encountered by Argentina’s new far-right, or, if you prefer “libertarian’,’ president, the flamboyant and/or crazy Trump-loving would-be caudillo Javier Milei, as he tries to “exterminate inflation” by taking a chainsaw to government services reminds me of a line from H.L. Mencken (no big-government fan): "For every complex problem, there's a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong."

What a fascinating country Argentina is, with a large middle class, many highly educated people, academic, technological and other institutions, and plenty of natural resources and a generally mild climate. To many visitors, Buenos Aires recalls Paris.

In many ways, the nation seems European. But more often than not, it has been badly governed, like most of Latin America, which can be traced back to Spanish colonial days. It didn’t have the benefit of being colonized by Britain, with its parliamentary traditions and belief in a mildly regulated market economy.

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IMAGE: File

Mental-Ill-Health Memoir

You’ll probably look at psychiatry differently upon reading David S. Viscott, M.D.’s (1938-1996) by turns acerbic and empathetic anecdote-rich memoir The Making of a Psychiatrist (1972). The narrative flow and cast of characters -- primarily patients and caregivers -- and institutions (whose names had to be changed to protect against libel suits), mostly in Massachusetts, is novelistic. I found his explanation of psychiatric training particularly interesting.

I was also surprised, while reading the book, at the slowness of advances in psychiatric care since he wrote it. We have new drugs but very serious mental illness, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, remain very difficult to treat and mental illness in general seems as pervasive as always, at least in America. Indeed, in some ways things seem to have gotten worse amidst what might be spreading anomie.

But then, the human brain may be one of the most complex things in the universe.

Viscott’s primary approach was to try to swiftly identify the source of each patient’s emotional problems that led to, or worsened, his/her mental illness. While he wasn’t opposed to electroshock and psychotropic drugs, he thought that his fellow psychiatrists tended to overuse these therapies to make patients easier to handle. He favored “talking therapy.’’

Much of Viscott’s advice might have been sound, but his own latter years were a mess, as this celebrity doctor’s career as an instant therapist for troubled callers to his radio and TV shows faded, he became swamped with marital, financial and other woes and a heart problem. Clearly, he sometimes ignored taking the advice he gave others, not that all of that advice was necessarily sound.

You can see hints of his coming problems in this book. But then, his own issues were presumably at least one reason why Viscott went into psychiatry. Physician, heal thyself.

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.

Whitcomb: Divestment Delirium; Ready for the Next One? Near a Nike Site

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