Whitcomb: Metered Metropolis; Will They Kill a Golden Goose? Lawless Migrant Bicyclists
Sunday, October 22, 2023
O hushed October morning mild,
Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTTomorrow’s wind, if it be wild,
Should waste them all.
The crows above the forest call;
Tomorrow they may form and go.
O hushed October morning mild,
Begin the hours of this day slow.
Make the day seem to us less brief.
Hearts not averse to being beguiled,
Beguile us in the way you know.
Release one leaf at break of day;
At noon release another leaf;
One from our trees, one far away.
Retard the sun with gentle mist;
Enchant the land with amethyst.
Slow, slow!
For the grapes’ sake, if they were all,
Whose leaves already are burnt with frost,
Whose clustered fruit must else be lost—
For the grapes’ sake along the wall
“October,’’ by Robert Frost (1874-1963)
“Turn on again, that old, once new film of your life -
it's called the 'establishing shot'; and as it pans
across your once-favourite city, corny in the sunshine,
arty in the dusk and rain, the home to all your dreams,
the music slides in, takes the reins, the heartstrings of recall....”
From “The Sound of Cities,’’ by Michael Shepherd (English poet)
“Why can’t we build orphanages next to homes for the elderly? If someone’s sitting in a rocker, it won’t be long before a kid will be in his lap.’’
-- Actress and comedian Cloris Leachman (1926-1921), quoted in Good Housekeeping magazine, October, 1973
“One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.’’
-- Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880), French novelist
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We’re waiting for a freeze this week to send most of the leaves from the trees falling in one fell swoop, as often happens a few days before Halloween.
Years ago, this would be followed by air suffused with the sweet smoke from innumerable leaf-pile fires. Despite the bluish air pollution, worsened by the atmospheric inversions common in the fall, we always looked forward to the leave-burning season. Leaf-burning is now banned in most communities, mostly for public health reasons.
As everything else slows down -- even without a frost the grass grows more slowly -- the squirrels seem to scurry faster amidst the acorn caps. (They’ve stashed away most of the acorns (oak nuts).)
I’m looking forward to that mild, still, dry, hazy and pleasantly melancholy time called Indian Summer that follows the first real freeze. It grants the best walking weather of the year. But get out those light boxes to treat your SAD.
Parking and Housing
Providence Mayor Brett Smiley is right to propose using federal money to boost emergency housing aid by about $2,774,000 and using about $1 million to replace the city’s parking meters, too many of which are broken and don’t accept credit cards. Parking meters bring the city over $1.5 million a year in much-needed revenue. Some find the PVD parking app confusing. I favor the old-fashioned meters that are fed with the coins that fill up several of our coffee cups over the months.
Meanwhile, let’s forget about putting up more parking garages, which take money and space from housing, public transit and other needs and add to car congestion. And some garages are extraordinarily wasteful in that many are mostly empty much of the time, as are open-air parking lots even in densely populated cities.
We need to encourage more people to walk, bike (both good for you!) and take public transit, if you can find it.
City officials everywhere should read The High Cost of Free Parking, by UCLA Emeritus Prof. Donald Shoup (an engineer and professor of urban planning). Of course, "free” parking in cities is anything but free when you add up the socio-economic and environmental costs.
See:
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I wish the roads heading into Newport’s North End and in East Providence (New England’s speed-trap capital) near the Seekonk River could be made a lot less confusing and so less potentially dangerous. We’re not great with signage around here.
Somerset Quandary
Seeking perfection can be the lethal enemy of the good.
Consider what’s been happening in Somerset, Mass., where at Brayton Point, the Italian company Prysmian Group wants to build a $250 million factory making transmission cables for big offshore wind-power farms off the Northeast coast, some of which may actually be built in the face of relentless misinformation campaigns about their effects. (Fossil-fuel companies are helping to finance these campaigns. Hey, who wants competition?!)
The project, reports the wonderfully useful CommonWealth Magazine, would employ nearly 300 people and bring in local property taxes of $9 million a year – equivalent to about 12 percent of the town’s current annual budget. It would be a boon for the offshore wind-power industry, and that sector’s contribution to the battle to slow global warming, which is accelerating, and offset some of the air pollution from fossil-fuel-burning power plants. And they’d make New England less dependent on energy from afar.
But Somerset Zoning Board members and some in the public have been demanding a zoning change mandating that all cable-laying ships at the facility turn off their diesel engines while in port and run only on “shore-to-ship” electricity as a condition for approving the factory.
Now the problem: The company, from time to time must hire ships from other companies to lay its cable. Prysmian wants an exemption for those cases in which these ships, unlike all of Prysmian’s, wouldn’t be equipped to run on ship-to-shore electricity while at Brayton Point. There’s been enough opposition on the zoning board and some in the community to this exemption to threaten to drive away the company.
It's nuts.
We’ll see what happens in the next week or so.
Remember that there used to be a coal-burning power plant at Brayton Point.
See:
https://commonwealthmagazine.org/energy/brayton-point-offshore-wind-prize-in-doubt/
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It’s usually satisfying to hear of a proposal to turn an abandoned building into housing for people of modest means, which BCM Realty wants to do with the beautiful old (opened in 1899) Coggeshall School, in Newport. The company would turn the brick structure into 22 one-and-two-bedroom apartments, along with putting up three duplexes on Evarts Street.
But such projects rarely go smoothly. People complain about potential new traffic (natch!), and they don’t like the duplexes idea. I assume that there was lots of traffic there at school opening and closing times. Were there protests?
Well, big tents, like the ones at Boy Scout camps, can be set up in Newport’s lovely parks to house shelter seekers….
Migrants on Bikes
I was recently in New York for a couple of days, and despite the sometimes dire reports, the city seemed, well, okay. Lots of people on the sidewalks, mostly young, and most seemed cheery. Maybe they were faking it for business reasons in that intensely competitive place.
There’s been much in the news about migrants overwhelming Gotham, as Red State governors, who keep social services thin to keep taxes low for their campaign contributors, send them north to places that promise shelter, such as New York and Boston. Certainly, these newcomers are highly visible in some New York neighborhoods, such as around Manhattan’s Roosevelt Hotel, the city’s main intake center for homeless migrants. But you don’t see swarms of them in many places.
(Amusingly, the Roosevelt Hotel was for years most famous nationally for hosting the New Year’s Eve gala of Guy Lombardo’s syrupy orchestra, which was broadcast nationally. Now it’s New York’s new Ellis Island.)
Some of these migrants have admirably gotten jobs, illegal or not. But this can be a safety problem. The most noticeable one is migrants on bikes doing delivery work. Few seem to have any idea of traffic rules, and thus many speed down crowded sidewalks, often hitting people, run red lights and swerve in front of moving vehicles. The city must start cracking down on this chaos, and force the migrants to learn the rules (usually necessarily in Spanish).
This is sometimes a problem even in smaller cities, such as Providence.
As for the broader migrant crisis coming over the southern border, there’s no solution except from Congress, too many of whose members benefit politically from demagoguing the current non-system. And some of the members’ donors love the very cheap labor provided by illegal aliens. Minimum wage? What’s that?
It will probably take an election that delivers a strong majority to either the Democrats or the Republicans to enact comprehensive immigration reform and start to quell the crisis.
Reasonable and fair immigration reform would include vastly strengthened border controls, including, sadly, in a few places new walls; a much denser national network of immigrant-monitoring-and-processing facilities to provide orderly legalization (and in some cases deportations) of aliens; new tracking systems to catch migrants, and their employers, in illegal (which are sometimes unsafe) working situations, and a system for bringing in future foreign workers needed by the U.S. labor market, as the birth rate continues to fall for native-born Americans.
Hit this link to read a terrific debunking of myths about immigration:
https://www.carnegie.org/our-work/article/15-myths-about-immigration-debunked/
Still, it’s true: If the border is not rigorously managed, eventually you have no country.
xxx
I’ve been taking the train from Boston and Providence to New York for almost my whole life, but I am still mesmerized each trip by the beauty of the marshes along Connecticut’s Long Island Sound – ever-changing in color, light, shadow, birds and boats. Lately, it helps offset some of the irritation from Amtrak’s endlessly terrible Internet service. Remember to sit on the Sound side of your train.
Public Parasite
Nobody’s perfect, but it’s hard to think of anyone in the pathetic but dangerous GOP/QAnon Party in the U.S. House who’s more repellent than Ohio’s Jim (“Gym”) Jordan, a bogus “conservative.’’ He’s a traitor who backed the Jan. 6, 2021, Trump insurrection, a pathological liar, a performative demagogue, a world-historical hypocrite and a man who serves up nonstop fascist baloney. He’s a narcissistic thug and exhibitionist among whose main aims are appearing on TV with such crooks such as Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and other two-bit Joseph Goebbels types; being hugged by, and slobbering over, his leader, Traitor-in-Chief Trump, and reveling in his role as a bomb thrower, as opposed to governing, which requires real work.
This loudmouth, power-mad public parasite has never been the primary sponsor of a bill that passed into law, although he’s been a congressman since 2007. But blame the suckers in his district for electing this con man and the wealthy donors who pay to help keep him in office and look after their interests.
He doesn’t do anything to actually improve the lives of his constituents, but his easily debunked conspiracy theories and his appeals to bigotry, along with his knowledge that his voters are brainwashed by “conservative” media, are enough to keep his seat secure. He knows the folks back home love his show. They’re happy, as are many Americans, to be entertained to death.
Now, he apparently won’t be speaker, as just enough members of even this Republican caucus have decided that they can’t stomach this famously jacketless lowlife from an intensely gerrymandered district as their leader.
But America’s slide into anti-democratic populism will continue, and there are a lot of latter-generation Nazis out there, with guns.
xxx
Here’s a good discussion of the failed, “business-friendly” Southern economic-development model:
https://www.epi.org/publication/rooted-in-racism/
Biden and Bibi
U.S. support for Israel, a key ally and the only Mideast democracy, is crucial. But I wish that President Biden, in his brave visit to wartime Israel last week, had not embraced Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. After all, it was the latter’s support for extremist Israeli settlers on the West Bank and his government’s huge intelligence failures that helped create the environment that led to this terrible war. The corrupt “Bibi” will be gone, in disgrace, soon after the war. Will he move back to Massachusetts?
Meanwhile, I tend to believe the Israeli explanation for the hospital explosion in Gaza that reportedly killed hundreds: Islamic Jihad – a rival Islamist militant group of Hamas – caused the explosion when one of its rockets launched at Israel misfired. Of course, Hamas (which launched this war by mass-murdering and kidnapping Israeli civilians) and others in the Mideast terror community are gleefully calling the explosion an Israeli war crime.
Analyses using overhead imagery, intercepts and open source information strongly suggest that, yet again, Arab terrorists (among whose favorite strategies is using civilians as human shields) are responsible for killing large numbers of their fellow Arabs.
I almost always believe Israeli reports over Arab ones because Israel has a free press with rigorous investigative reporters who challenge all government assertions, while Arab regimes, all of which are dictatorships, crank out propaganda that few of their subjects dare challenge.
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I had the brief hope that Biden, at the end of his strong speech last Thursday on Israel and Ukraine, etc., would announce that he wouldn’t run for re-election after all, in order to give undivided attention to addressing America’s current foreign and domestic crises. That’s what President Lyndon Johnson did on March 31, 1968, when he announced that he wouldn’t run for re-election that year so that he could better concentrate on trying to end the Vietnam War and on cooling domestic disorder and division.
xxx
A reminder, again, to those GOP/QAnoners in Congress who favor aiding Israel in its war but abandoning Ukraine in its existential struggle with mass murderer Putin’s Russia:
Russia, Hamas, Iran, China and North Korea are allies. If we weaken Russia, we weaken the nasty regimes which it assists.
But some Republican pols admire Putin for, say, denouncing homosexuals and his, er, rigorous leadership. The same reason some of these pols’ great-grandparents admired Hitler. (I knew some people like that in the Midwest.)
Much of the GOP support for Israel is due to the fact that many people in one of its major constituencies – Evangelicals – support the Jewish State because they believe it’s important for fulfilling end-times prophecies! Jesus’s Second Coming is near! This is hyped up by multimillionaire TV preachers adept at separating their followers from their money and promoting the idea of Donald Trump as sent by God. It’s a wacky country indeed.
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If you want the help of distinguished scholars in understanding the news, try The Conversation. I think it’s terrific. Take a look:
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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