Whitcomb: Perilous Pause; The Polar Park Era; The Quiet Mega-Crook

Sunday, April 18, 2021

Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

 

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Robert Whitcomb, columnist

“Who made it,

One side or the other?

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Bad neighbors make good fencers.’’

From “Spite Fence,’’ by Richard Eberhart (1904-2005), a New Hampshire-based poet

 

 

“They must be out of their minds.’’

--  Prince Philip (born 1921), in the Solomon Islands in 1982, after he was told that the annual population growth there was 5 percent. The prince, aka the Duke of Edinburgh, who died on April 9, was famous for “outrageous” remarks, some of which were very funny – to some of us.

 

 

Encouraging the Anti-Vaxxers

The decision to “pause’’ the Johnson & Johnson one-shot COVID-19 vaccine is unfortunate. After all, only a minuscule number of people (six out of 6.8 million as of last Tuesday) who have been jabbed with it have gotten blood clots. The biggest danger of pulling the vaccine is that too many people will decide not to get vaccinated with any shot. Getting COVID-19 is far, far, far more dangerous than any vaccine for it. And J&J’s vaccine is particularly useful because it requires only one shot to be effective, and thus is obviously a way to get many more people quickly and fully vaccinated than with the two-shot vaccines Pfizer and Moderna (and maybe soon the promising Novavax).

 

Any vaccine poses a tiny threat of side-effects. For that matter, virtually all medicines have side-effects in some patients. Meanwhile, let’s remember that correlation and causation aren’t the same thing. The blood clots of the six (as of last Tuesday) may have been caused by other things than the vaccine.

 

Social media encourages exaggeration, misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories. The J&J situation will provoke some more.

 

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Polar Park

Polar Park Big Price Tag

The new, $159.5 million Polar Park project, in Worcester, looks lovely, as well it should at that price. Worcester, through borrowing, is paying $88.2 million, the Worcester Red Sox $60.6 million, and the state and Feds $10.7 million, at least according to a February 4 Worcester Business Journal report.

 

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Will Polar Park pay for itself in bigger local business revenues and payrolls and such related public benefits as more municipal-property-tax revenue? Generally, publicly financed sports stadiums don’t pay for themselves, at least in measurable monetary benefits for the taxpayers, though of course, they can be very lucrative for the team owners. And there can be psychic benefits for some locals from the pride in having a (hopefully) successful team to rally around and an often jolly place to gather.

 

In the case of Worcester, I have some doubts on whether, after a year or two of people drawn by curiosity to the new ballpark, the WooSox can lure the number of long-term gamegoers they hope for.

 

While Worcester was very narrowly the second-largest city in New England in the 2010 Census, with 181,045 people, compared to Providence’s 178,042, its metro area had only 923,672 people, compared to Greater Providence’s 1.6 million.  Providence proper’s area is only 20.58 square miles, compared with Worcester’ 38.41.

 

Those numbers seemingly would have made it much more sensical to keep the Pawtucket Red Sox going, even with less than the substantial taxpayer help that the organization had been offered in the Ocean State. Further, Providence/Pawtucket is on the main street of the East Coast and Worcester is more off to the side.

 

Well, que sera, sera. Now that Polar Park is up, I wish the WooSox all the best and plan a trip there soon to check it out.  While I have little interest in such things as baseball statistics (real baseball fans are obsessed with such data) and don’t much follow the ups-and-downs of current stars, I do love the setting, sights and sounds of baseball: The slope of the stands; the smell of very green grass and of hot dogs and beer; the cheers (and boos); the crack of the ball against the bat; the tacky organ music; the alternations of relative immobility and explosive activity; the manic announcers, and the seventh-inning stretch.

 

As for folks living in and around Worcester, perhaps it will become one of those “third places,’’ such as restaurants, coffee shops, gyms, and even some bookstores, where locals go to hang out with their neighbors on a regular basis. We may know within a couple of years. Maybe it will become as beloved a local institution  (for many) as Clark University, the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and the Worcester Museum of Art, and as the PawSox were for so many years in Greater Providence.

 

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The cold rain late last week probably has helped ensure that this spring will be greener and lusher than usual. It did this by blocking a looming drought and slowing the march toward summer.

 

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The repeated dubious decision-making of the Rhode Island Coastal Resources Management Council makes a lot of us wonder yet again why the CRMC hasn’t been abolished and all of its duties handed to the state Department of Environmental Management, where they belong and that deserves bigger staffing. The CRMC is sometimes worse than redundant.

 

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URI's New President Marc Parlange

New Leader for URI

He has high-level academic-management experience, a deeply international personal and professional background, experience as an environmental engineer, and a keen knowledge of business. So the very high-energy Marc Parlange (who runs 10 miles a day), provost of the large Monash University, in Melbourne, Australia, seems a superb selection to be the University of Rhode Island’s next president.

 

This Providence-born son of a father from France and a mother from Ireland has big shoes to fill: Retiring URI President David Dooley has been a superb leader, raising the university’s quality across the board, and thus its national and even international prestige, while helping to lure a wider range of undergraduate and graduate students. Mr. Parlange’s experience as an environmental engineer seems particularly apt for URI, with its highly respected engineering programs and famous Graduate School of Oceanography.

 

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While the pandemic has slammed many cities, the economic obituaries of some big places such as New York and Boston are more and more looking premature. Their large tech, health-care, higher-education and “creative class’’ sectors make them more important than ever. The people in these sectors tend to like city life and they are less vulnerable to the ravages of automation than workers in many other fields. Indeed, New York and Boston are already coming back, though in some pandemic-changed ways.

 

Will cities, such as Las Vegas, that depend on “hospitality industry,’’ which has suffered so much from the pandemic, do more poorly? And what about fossil-fuel centers, such as Houston?

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Rhode Island state Rep. Patricia Serpa has filed a bill in the state General Assembly that would let people buy “medical marijuana’’ for their dogs and cats with a prescription from a “certified” veterinarian.  I can see where this could go: Stoned pets and even more stoned but loving owners. In any event, vets seem to think that this is a bad idea: Marijuana could be very toxic for these animals. Stick with fentanyl?

 

 

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PHOTO: File

The NRA vs. the Police vs. the Public

It doesn’t seem all that surprising that some police officers would be so paranoid and trigger-happy that they sometimes shoot innocent people in car stops, given the number of crazies and criminals that the National Rifle Association has so kindly helped to arm in the past few decades. Whomever the cops stop could well have a gun (or guns).

 

Out, Except for….

 

President Biden has decided quite rationally that the conflict in Afghanistan is unwinnable in any clear way and so he’s pulling our remaining troops out of that nation by next Sept. 11. (Dangerous symbolism?) Before we leave, however, basic morality says we should offer asylum to all Afghans who have worked with us, lest the Taliban murder them. And for after we exit, I assume that there are plans being developed for a beefed-up regional rapid-response special-operations force to thwart any potential terror threats from bad actors in Afghanistan (including a national government-run by Taliban fanatics) and respond fiercely to any actual attacks against the U.S. and its allies that come out of that Petri dish of archaic Islamic insanity.

 

Now America can perhaps focus more sharply on its main threats – from the ruthless expansionism of the Russian and Chinese dictatorships. Our friends at the U.S. Naval War College will have much to say on that challenge.

 

Still, global power politics is always evolving, and so look for Afghanistan to become a tense nexus of China-vs.- Russian great power rivalry over the next decade.

 

 

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Bernie Madoff PHOTO: U.S. Bureau of Prisons

The Quiet Crook

Wall Street con man Bernard Madoff, who died in a North Carolina prison last week at 82, shows the difficulty of getting people to see what’s in front of their noses. His investment company, which over the years he turned into the biggest Ponzi Scheme in history (so far), promised investors year after year of moderately high returns as if business cycles didn’t exist. His customers engaged in the willful suspension of disbelief.

 

He was particularly effective because of his low-key, conservative, gray-flannelled manner – trust-building. There was nothing flamboyant about Bernie Madoff, and he became seen as almost a statesman of Wall Street.

 

An article in 2001 headlined “Too Good to Be True’’ ran in Barron’s, the weekly financial newspaper. It questioned his promised returns. But there was little follow-up, and the fraud continued up until the Great Crash of 2008, by causing an avalanche of redemption requests, yanked off his camouflage. Warren Buffett likes to joke, "It's only when the tide goes out that you learn who's been swimming naked.’’ But for at least 20 years before there were plenty of signs that Madoff’s promises were absurd.

 

 

The Exciting Fifties

Paul A. Carter’s Another Part of the Fifties, published back in 1983, remains a very readable reappraisal of that decade, which is still sometimes presented as a time of torpor. In fact, it was a time of great political, economic (especially in burgeoning consumerism) intellectual and artistic change and achievement. The book, spiced with highly entertaining anecdotes from the Eisenhower era, holds up very well. So does Jeffrey Hart’s (1930-2019) very entertaining 1982 book, When the Going Was Good!: American Life in the Fifties.

 

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