Whitcomb: RI Needs Real Newport-Providence Express Buses; College Hill Hotel: Creepy Hunter Biden
Monday, October 07, 2019
“O hushed October morning mild,
Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;
Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild,
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTShould waste them all.’’
-- From “October,’’ by Robert Frost (1874-1963)
“October is the fallen leaf, but it is also a wider horizon more clearly seen. It is the distant hills once more in sight, and the enduring constellations above them once again.’’
-- Nature writer Hal Borland (1900-1978)
“You know, people talk about this being an uncertain time. You know, all time is uncertain. I mean, it was uncertain back in 2007; we just didn't know it was uncertain. It was uncertain on September 10th, 2001. It was uncertain on October 18th, 1987 {the day before the U.S. stock market’s biggest single-day crash,} you just didn't know it.’’
-- Mega-investor Warren Buffett
A Better RIPTA
Many Rhode Islanders depend on RIPTA to get to work every day. This doesn’t just include low-income folks who can’t afford cars. It also includes those who can’t drive because of physical disabilities and those who need to use the commuting time for job-related reading. And with the aging of the population and that many young people don’t want to drive, the need for RIPTA can only grow. (Uber, etc., are too expensive for much commuting.)
And yet RIPTA service remains remarkably unreliable and thin. Buses are all too often late or don’t arrive or leave at all. Buses break down all too frequently. And riders are sometimes not informed about what’s going on.
The service connecting what I call the two nations of Rhode Island – Greater Providence, centered at Kennedy Plaza, and Aquidneck Island (especially Newport) with its technology, defense, marine-related and tourism sectors, needs to be made faster and denser – now! There should be real express buses – no stops on the way! – connecting Providence and Newport.
This is not just a matter of providing an essential public service to individuals; it’s about boosting the state’s economic productivity and wealth.
Shorting RIPTA is a false economy. It needs a dramatic expansion of routes and equipment.
Not Really Discriminatory?
U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs has ruled that Harvard’s admissions process doesn’t discriminate against Asian-American applicants, though, she wrote, the university could improve the process with more training and oversight.
But a mystery: Judge Burroughs noted that Asian-American applicants generally got lower ratings on such qualities as integrity, fortitude and empathy. How would Harvard admissions officers come up with such measurements? Makes no sense to me.
Anyway, Harvard and other very selective schools take into account ethnicity among many other factors in putting together a first-year class. The admissions process at elite institutions has to be complicated as the schools strive for diversity so that their schools are at least marginally representative of America. For the courts and other parts of government to try to micromanage the process, especially at private institutions, is inappropriate.
This issue is particularly resonant in New England, with so many highly selective schools, most famously four (Harvard, Yale, Brown and Dartmouth) of the eight Ivy League schools and MIT.
Ed Blum, the lawsuit’s originator, was previously involved in challenging the University of Texas’s affirmative-action program. Blum is a right-wing zealot whose efforts would restore what has in effect been white privilege to the admissions process.
Big Endowments
Some of these “nonprofit’’ elite schools are so rich and powerful that they’re almost taking over the cities they're in. Yale’s ($30 billion endowment) imperium over much of New Haven is an example.
Move the Problem Down the Shore
“Climate change poses risks to real estate that homebuyers may not be able to predict. As sea level rises, coastal properties, for example, may be subject to increased flooding and intensifying storm surges. First-time homebuyers often lack the expertise to evaluate these new risks, and thus tend to underestimate them and overpay for increasingly exposed properties.’’
Matthew E. Kahn, professor of economics and business and the director of the 21st Century Cities Initiative at Johns Hopkins University, and Amine Ouazad, an associate professor in the Department of Applied Economics at HEC Montreal, in a Bloomberg column. To read it, please hit this link:
The Cape Cod Times reports that for mysterious reasons, the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection has overruled the National Park Service and the Town of Wellfleet’s Conservation Commission and is allowing a 241-foot rock revetment to be built to protect (for a while….) a McMansion owned by James Hoeland (of Newtown, Pa., and Vero Beach, Fla.) from sliding into the sea from its current position on top of a rapidly eroding bluff. (Remember that Cape Cod is but a giant glacial moraine, which is washing away at ever faster rates because of sea-level rise linked to global warming caused by our burning fossil fuel.
The property is within the Cape Cod National Seashore.
The revetment will worsen erosion down the beach. And one huge storm may make it far less effective than Mr. Hoeland hopes. As coastal flooding and erosion worsen, especially along sand, gravel and boulder heaps such as on the Cape, we’ll see more demands from rich summer property owners that such rock structures be built but they won't be effective for long and will hurt the property of neighbors.
To read the story, please hit this link:
Denser East Side
Providence’s East Side could use a good-size hotel, especially considering the growing Brown and RISD communities. But a plan to build a six-story, 130-room hotel at the corner of Angell and Brook streets, and tear down three houses in the process, will rouse a lot of opposition because it would make the neighborhood more, well, urban. But then, the neighborhood’s main commercial street, Thayer, has for some time been looking like a downtown.
Running Through Beautiful New England
Wiry and a glutton for punishment, I was a pretty good cross-country runner in a Connecticut boarding school. (This was before the unfortunate term “preppy’’ became so popular.)
Cross country is, of course, mostly an autumn sport. When we started the season, in the middle of September, it was often hot and humid, few of the leaves had turned and we sweated gallons. Then, first slowly, then faster, it got cooler and cooler, the leaves of the maples in the Litchfield Hills turned to flame, and then wind and cold rain would take them down – in some years it seemed all at once -- after the first hard freeze. By November snowflakes would mix with the rain. Then, we’d almost look forward to starting the race just to get warm, although it was always by its nature a test of pain tolerance. There was the taste of what seemed to be blood in your mouth when you were running the hardest, coming up from your throat.
We ran at schools all over the southern half of New England, up and down muddy or rocky trails through woods, along streams, across golf courses, around ponds and beside country roads, sometimes dodging dogs and slipping on wet leaves. Almost all of the courses were hilly, and often steep.
Most of the schools were in the country or exurbia. So being on the team impressed on me again just how beautiful much of New England is, even when you’re seeing it while gasping for breath on a November Saturday when it’s blowing a gale and pouring, and the landscape is mostly brown.
Our coach was a short, solid, bald man with piercing blue eyes who didn't look like a runner himself (more like Mr. Clean) called John Small, who also taught Latin and German. An Army veteran of the Battle of the Bulge, he was the perfect coach – (outwardly) calm and persistent, innovative in training methods and usually perceptive about the psyches of adolescent males.
As I came to know him a bit I learned that the most traumatic events of his life were, not unexpectedly, during the Battle of the Bulge, in which Mr. Small, barely out of boyhood, was ordered to do some lethal and desperate things in violation of the Geneva Conventions. A bachelor, he lived alone in a small apartment at the school and often seemed reclusive. You could often hear through his door Bach being played on his hi-fi. But most Sundays he could be seen in his Porsche with an attractive lady of about his age – 38-40 or so.
Maybe he had dealt with his trauma by taking cover in the soothing routine of a boarding school. But all in all, he was a very complicated man of mystery.
Some Things That Unite
Americans are much more united on policies than you might think. Most want some sort of Medicare-for-all but with the option of keeping their private insurance. Most want more gun control. Most think the hyper-rich should pay more taxes. And so on. But demagogues have divided them by race, class and geography (South vs. North, rural vs. urban, etc.) to thwart reforms. Indeed, the country, on policies, tends center-left but it’s being governed by the hard right.
Health Danger Roundup
To me, spending time on social media other than to use it as a bulletin board to announce events, etc., as I do a lot, is mostly a waste. Monopolist Mark Zuckerberg and his Facebook associates have set it up to make it addictive for some people, who use it to avoid “real life.’’ And FB users’ political “discussions’’ are mostly closed loops and amen choruses. It’s getting worse with fake images and sound. And why do so many people put very private family stuff on it? It remains in the Internet forever.
Over time, Facebook’s most addicted users tend to become depressives, as they lose the ability to fully engage with people in person, not to mention enjoying the healthful effects of sunlight, breezes, colors and smells of the natural world.
Trump’s Regulatory Slashing
As the Trump administration seeks to cut back on anti-pollution rules, especially for its beloved coal industry, you might want to know that the small particulate grains that are part of most air pollution travel from lungs into brains, where they cause inflammation that leads to cognitive deficits and boosts the risk of dementia. Pollution is particularly scary because it can damage brain development in children.
Zantac Dangers
I suspect, as some have observed, that the probable human carcinogen nitrosodimethylamine found in small amounts in a couple of brands of heartburn remedies, most notably Zantac and TopCare, is also in lots of our food. But unlike with Zantac, the foods won't be withdrawn for sale because of this stuff. Too complicated and, for that matter, this stuff may not be dangerous. There are all kinds of nasty chemicals in much of what we eat but generally not in large enough amounts to hurt us. We need to ration our paranoia. And something will get us at the end.
Ukraine Phone Call Recalls What He Did With Russia
Trump and his minions destroyed and hid much incriminating evidence in the Russia probe, though the stuff that did come out, even after “Attorney General’’ William Barr did his damnest to suppress the worst of it, was devastating enough. Now we have Trump’s phone call with the new Ukrainian president, in which our mobster-in-chief tried to pressure him to damage the candidacy of Joe Biden.
Gee, that’s exactly the sort of thing Trump did with his pal Vladimir Putin – to try to get help from another country to put himself in power and keep himself there, for the joy of power and the opportunity for him and his family to loot beyond all the dreams of avarice. And now we learn that Barr has been flying around abroad at taxpayer expense to try to get other foreign governments to help Trump once again get elected by coming up with, or fabricating, dirt on political foes.
It’s becoming clearer and clearer that Trump, elected by fraud, might do anything to stay in office. This includes encouraging his followers to murder whistleblowers and threatening not to accept a defeat in next year’s election by appealing to gun nuts and rich Protestant “evangelists’’ to scare up some sort of insurrection. Let’s hope that our political establishment and military act to protect the country if necessary.
Thomas Edsall, in The New York Times, discussed this with David Leege, former chairman of the board of overseers of the American National Election Studies and one of the founders of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems.
Mr. Leege said: “We should not assume that either a 2020 election defeat or impeachment/conviction will remove Trump from the White House.’’
“Both before Trump was elected in 2016 and during his term, he has made frequent references to ‘my 2nd Amendment friends’ and increasingly the ‘patriots’ who constitute the military.’’
Mr. Leege speculated:
“I think the legal profession, finance, and corporate business would resist Trump’s efforts toward a coup. They need stability to make profits. Perhaps the biggest question concerns the military. Coups are usually backstopped by colonels, not generals. Thus, major barracks could provide him with support. Probably his best strategy to keep all levels of the military loyal to him rather than to the Constitution would be to embroil us in a major war.’’
Mr. Leege said that the crucial group “has always has been Republican United States senators. If enough of them, spread across the country and in the South, see advantage in supporting the Constitution instead of their personal and party’s advantage, they would desert Trump either through conviction on impeachment articles or through the 2020 election.’’
Who are Trump’s most intense followers? As I have noted, it’s older white folks feeling threatened by changing demographics: Surveys by Pew, National Public Radio and the Public Religion Research Institute suggest that a majority of whites believe they are discriminated against and a plurality of whites believes that a majority-minority nation will “weaken American culture”. (Does Trump represent “American culture?”) And they don’t like the demographic shrinkage of once-dominant white Christians.
Still, if you asked these folks whether they wished they had been born African-American instead of white, if it’s so bad being the latter, you might see a bit of discomfort on their faces….
To read more, please hit this link:
NRA Influence
The National Rifle Association does not deserve nonprofit, tax-free organization status. After all, the NRA is a gun-industry lobbying operation and organ of the GOP hard right in general and the Trump mob in particular. (It also has had contacts with Russian companies and individuals who were working to put Trump into office.) The NRA clearly does not qualify as a so-called 501(c)(4) organization that the IRS requires to be not-for-profit and operated exclusively for social welfare.
Creepy Hunter Biden
That Joe Biden’s troubled son Hunter had a very well-compensated job in Ukraine for a while during his father’s vice presidency is typical of the legal corruption that has increased in the higher echelons of the American political establishment, especially since the Reagan administration, leading to grotesque conflicts of interest amongst present and past politicians and their families and friends as they take advantage of their connections in order to rake in the dough.
This sort of legal corruption used to be mostly confined to nepotism and public-private-sector revolving-door enrichment within America. Now, ethically challenged American influence peddlers such as Hunter Biden can be found globe-trotting to make big bucks. Clearly we need tough new laws to discourage this. To the Ukrainians and Chinese paying for his “services’’ his political connections were paramount. He was more than happy to cash in on them.
I think that the main reason for this is the idea that wealth and a fancy “lifestyle’’ are the most important things in life and that extreme greed is nifty – an idea promoted far too much by mass media besotted by glitz. (Remember the TV show Lifestyles of The Rich and Famous?) We’ve come a long way from the days when retired President Harry Truman, who lived on his government pension, refused fees for speeches because he thought to do so would demean public service. The GOP, as the party most devoted to the expansion of the plutocracy’s wealth and power, is worse than the Democrats on this but the Democrats are pretty bad too. The common good? No money in that.
Biden’s Backslapping Skills
It has long surprised me that Joe Biden, whatever his backslapping skills, has done as well as he has.
Sanders Heart Attack
So, Bernie Sanders, age 78, just had two stents put in because of a blocked artery. Just another reminder that he, the obese Trump (73) and Biden are all too old to be president.
Inside the Revolutionary War
There’s lots of stuff that even many American history buffs didn’t know in Rick Atkinson’s The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777. The detail on the battles of Lexington and Concord and Charlestown (aka “The Battle of Bunker Hill’’) and the British destruction of Falmouth, Maine, is riveting, marred only by tortured use of florid and obscure language, and far too many technical military terms. The Revolutionary War started in Massachusetts in 1775, or some might argue, several years before, and quickly drew in fighters from neighboring states, and so this book will presumably be of particular interest to New Englanders.
Related Articles
- Whitcomb: New State Tax Systems Coming? ‘Autonomous’ Shuttle; Roe v. Wade’s Future
- Whitcomb: Freedom From Measles; Creative Nonfiction; Narragansett Beer & Library, Swindler’s List
- Whitcomb: Make Newport a Bigger Convention City? Cape Congestion; Trump Cozy with Twin River
- Whitcomb: Energy Realignment; Soccer at McCoy; Newspaper Fadeouts; Twin River Downtown
- Whitcomb: RI’s Cross-Addictions; Hire a Possum; Buddy’s Brief New Fame; Hypocrisy Roundup
- Whitcomb: RI Sovereign Localities? Providence Pension Crisis; Sea-Ahead Ahead; Union Persistence
- Whitcomb: South Coast Rail Delay; Take Over Providence Schools; Sanders’ Stupid Idea; Implosion
- Whitcomb: Good News for Real Stores in RI; No Beach Fees; Barr Family Members Well Placed to Protect
- Whitcomb: ‘Western Values’; Special-Interest Bill Would Wallop R.I. Localities; Keeping Local Cos.
- Whitcomb: Springtime for Public-Employee Unions; Sacklers at Tufts; Wisdom Through ‘Loafing’
- Whitcomb: R.I. Schools; Stop & Shop Alts; Portland’s Appeal; Ignoring Maintenance; Low Barr
- Whitcomb: Real-Estate Realities; Well-Placed Dr. Pedro; Encore in Everett; URI Needs Its Own Board
- Whitcomb: Making Hospital Bills Less Surprising; Providence Schools Crisis; Help for ‘Hilltowns’
- Whitcomb: Education in Your Dorm; Baker-Raimondo MBTA; RI Work Problem; Small-Headquarters Town
- Whitcomb: I Was Naïve About Jump Bikes; IGT a Better Bet; Aquidneck in 2050; No Phones
- Whitcomb: Growing Cranberries and Electricity; 5G vs. Weather Forecasts; Kennedy Renaissance?
- Whitcomb: Buried Buses & 24 Hour Fun in Prov; Building Higher Along the Water; Posting Pet Loss
- Whitcomb: Buddy’s Cologne; Care New England’s Ego; the Fading Church; 4 Ways to Fight Fake News
- Whitcomb: Coal-Powered Regime Whacks Windpower; Raimondo’s 3 Genders, More Health-Care Goliaths
- Whitcomb: Woodstock Hype; Gano St. Swim; Warmer Water; Gun-Debate Diversion; Luxury Public School
- Whitcomb: Busing Was a Bust; Underwater-Property Battle; Marsh Medicine; Mooring Mania
- Whitcomb: Who to Run the Schools? Gambling on a 20-Year Deal; Close Earlier, Please; Quit Now!
- Whitcomb: Those Rhody Rankings; Twitter Smoke Machine; Oyster Advance; Mad Memories
- Whitcomb: First Steps in Schools Takeover; Newport Class Warfare; Boris and Donald
- Whitcomb: Inhaling Hypocrisy; Our Blue Economy Corridor; Fane’s Final Innings; Bribe to Move West