Whitcomb: Pond Skating and Mall Skiing; Property Taxes Explained; R.I. Secret Police
Monday, February 17, 2020
“A mist appalls the windshield.
So I still see trees as moral lessons
As I pass under them, shadowy and astute’’
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--From “February,’’ by Ira Sadoff, a poet who teaches at Colby College, in Waterville, Maine
“Here in New England, each season carries a hundred foreshadowings of the season that is to follow – which is one of the things I love about it. Winter is rough and long, but spring lies all round about.’’
-- From E.B. White’s (1899-1985) essay “Home-Coming” {to Maine}, first published in December 1955 in The New Yorker
“To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.’’
-- Gustave Flaubert (1821-80), French novelist most famous for Madame Bovery
I’m not crazy about winter these days. For one thing, as you grow older your skin gets thinner and so you feel the cold more, and the spectacle of a snowstorm, however lovely to look at, quickly morphs into a depressing chore. But I have fond memories of skating on a little pond next to a marsh near our house, on Massachusetts Bay. Winters were more reliably cold then, and the pond became the neighborhood’s social center, for free-form skating and pick-up hockey, for several weeks in mid-winter. That’s even though some saltwater moved into it in Nor’easters.
Fairly often someone would light a fire on the shore, encouraging people to hang around longer than they normally would. Good for roasting marshmallows. One very cold day I fell on the ice – I can’t remember if I was playing pick-up hockey or just loose skating – smashing my right elbow. This necessitated a rather long hospital stay for an operation, which introduced me to the charms and uncharms of the American health-care system. I had to wear a cast for several months. I very rarely skated after that. But I still vividly remember the wind in my face as I breezed around the pond, with nary a thought of the joys of spring.
You don’t see much pond skating anymore even in a long cold spell, which is sad. I think that a lot of parents seek out indoor rinks for their kids instead.
Mall Skiing
As weather conditions become more iffy for skiing, turn your eyes to East Rutherford, N.J., and its huge American Dream mall. There, in its 16-story-high building, is Big Snow American Dream – a well-refrigerated (28 degrees), four-acre ski area with man-made snow and a chair lift. It’s the same idea as the famous big indoor ski area in Dubai, where outdoor temperatures can hit 120 degrees.
I can well imagine how much fossil fuel must be burnt to keep Big Snow cold. In any case, the owners are doing their small part to increase the global warming that is gradually eroding the ski business in the nearby Poconos.
To read more, please hit this link:
Demigods
Tomorrow is Presidents Day, which mostly honors our two greatest presidents – Lincoln and Washington. The day reminds me of our crowded (30-plus students) elementary school classrooms back in the ‘50s with their chalk dust, smell of varnish and the sweet scent of fountain-pen ink. Old prints of portraits of Honest Abe and the Father of Our Country stared down on us. Our teachers presented them as demigods, with, happily, no mention of Washington’s slaves or Lincoln’s depression. Indeed, even the sitting president, Eisenhower, was treated with near-reverence.
Property Taxes Explained
A Providence resident, businessman Jordan Frank, has put together a very useful guide to the maze of the Providence property-tax system, and by extension to the mysteries of most property-tax systems, at least in New England. To read his article as it appeared in the Providence Business News, as well as supplemental material he sent me, please hit this link:
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The current general prosperity, propped up in part by the Federal Reserve Board’s steady pumping to keep interest rates very, very low and stock prices very, very high, papers over the quiet continuing crisis of Providence’s $1 billion in unfunded pension obligations. When Wall Street goes south, the crisis will get noisy again, and such partial possible solutions as trying to sell off Providence’s water system must again be considered.
Protecting the Great Salt Pond
Let’s hope that a Rhode Island Superior Court ruling ends the seemingly interminable effort to expand Champlin’s Marina in the beautiful and fragile Great Salt Pond on Block Island. The court has supported environmental-science-backed decisions by the state Coastal Resources Management Council opposing the big project, which would have allowed for 140 more boats in pond, raising the potential for serious pollution.
The Secret Police
Rhode Island Atty. Gen. Peter Neronha, unfortunately, wants to change the state’s open-records law to try to keep the names of police officers’ hometowns hidden from the public. The identities of the hometowns are now publicly available but the street addresses aren’t. At the very least, the public in the towns and cities where these officers work should know whether or not they reside in the communities employing them, even if (in a compromise) the specific towns these officers live in are not identified. Their nonresidency can be an important consideration in, for example, weighing whether a new police labor contract seems fair. Citizens deserve to know how vested the officers are in the present and future fiscal and social health of the places that pay them.
Also, in this creepy Internet age, it’s remarkably easy to track down someone’s residence anyway.
Sargent’s Historic Transit Turnaround
A lot of people owe thanks to the late Massachusetts Gov. Frank Sargent, who on Feb. 11, 1970, declared a halt to the seemingly endless and destructive highway construction that was tearing up neighborhoods and making traffic worse (by drawing in more cars) in Boston. The same thing was happening in many other cities.
On that date, he was one of the first major political leaders in the country to call for a thorough reappraisal of our addiction to car culture as he canceled the Southwest Expressway and Inner Belt highways. His action became a model for the country. Someone called him “anti-highway’’ but maybe a more accurate term would be “pro-city.’’
As he said at the time:
“Four years ago, I was the commissioner of the Department of Public Works – our road-building agency. Then, nearly everyone was sure highways were the only answer to transportation problems for years to come. We were wrong. . . . Are we really meeting our transportation needs by spending most of our money building roads? The answer is no.”
Thus began attempts to rebalance transportation priorities, particularly by allocating a higher percentage of taxpayer funds to mass transit. As awful as is traffic in Greater Boston now (partly a product of its great prosperity for much of the past quarter-century), think of how much worse it would be without the changes set in motion by Frank Sargent, an MIT-trained engineer. By stopping the destructive projects above and turning more attention to public transit, he helped protect and then raise the city’s quality of life as expressed in its vibrant neighborhoods and lovely parks and by eventually making it easier for many more people to move through Boston’s dense urban core, with its famously narrow, curving streets, without a car. This has been a boon for individuals and businesses.
This, in turn, helped make “The Hub” the prosperous world city it is today. Frank Sargent understood that the urgent need was to move more people, not more cars, and that only a much improved public transit system could do that. He also knew that relentlessly paving over green space for roads and parking lots was, to put it mildly, bad for the environment, as was the intensifying air pollution from vehicular traffic at the time.
Still, as former Massachusetts Transportation Secretary James Aloisi recently told Commonwealth Magazine: “We remain adrift on a sea of ideological resistance to raising the revenue we need to do the job, still fully in the grip of a stubborn auto-centric mentality that would prefer to see us all stuck in the worst traffic congestion in the nation rather than invest in a modern electrified regional rail system… that would entice many {more} commuters to take commuter rail,’’ including from Providence, of course.
I covered Governor Sargent back then as a reporter for the Boston Herald Traveler, and fondly remember his high intelligence, his directness and his political courage, along with his humor, charm, and ability to swear like a stevedore.
To read Mr. Aloisi’s piece, please hit this link:
Amtrak Funding
Trump wants to slash funding for Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor service, on which traffic has been booming, to $325 million from $700 million. (To stick it to Blue States?) He’d also cut funding for the quasi-public railroad’s long-distance routes to $611 million from $1.3 billion. Those long-distance trains tend to be underpatronized. So he may have a point there. But it’s unlikely that these cuts will take place: To address crippling car congestion, an expansion, not a contraction, of Northeast Corridor train service, is needed. And reminder: Northeast Corridor trains are very heavily used for business travel. As for those long-distance trains: They serve many Red State communities whence cometh some powerful members of Congress….
Red-Tape Reduction
Governing.com has a heartening article about how states are cutting regulatory red tape to invigorate their economies, and without hurting public health and safety. Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo is cited as one of the red-tape cutters. To read the article, please hit this link:
Those ‘Deep State’ Docs
Trump’s conspiracy-minded-and-right-wing-talk-show fans love his railing against “The Deep State’’ – those highly trained civil servants who keep government services going. And the mobster, for his part, realizes that many members of this imaginary conspiracy think that his deeply corrupt, ignorant and increasingly autocratic rule is bad for America.
I hope that he doesn’t consider health programs part of the Deep State, too.
His budget calls for cutting funding for the Department of Health and Human Services by 9 percent in the next fiscal year. HHS includes the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which would have its overall budget cut. The plan would also reduce by 40 percent, or $65 million, the U.S. contribution to the World Health Organization. The WHO’s duties include dealing with current and potential pandemics – e.g., the coronavirus.
Yearly Coyote Crisis
In its Feb. 14 article, “Valentine’s Day Is Also for Coyotes,’’ The Boston Guardian warns us that February marks the start of coyote mating season. Yes, there are plenty of opportunistic coyotes in Boston, including downtown, and in Providence and Worcester. The beasts become more skittish and territorial in mating time, and more likely to attack other animals, including people, at this time of the year. As mankind takes over more and more of the world, many creatures will have to learn -- like, for example, coyotes and raccoons – how to live close to humans, or go extinct.
Classical Command
The White House is considering putting out an order called “Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again’’ that would mandate “classical’’ styles as the default design for all new federal buildings in Greater Washington, D.C., and for all new federal buildings everywhere, including courthouses, projected to cost more than $50 million each.
Now, a lot of “classical’’ architecture is attractive in its dignified, symmetrical, solid way, and some modern architecture, especially the Brutalist (think Boston City Hall) and Deconstructivist (think the Seattle Central Library and the Stata Center at MIT), hideous to many, but not all, people. (The order would ban both styles.) Some “classical’’ architecture can look silly, with columns looking pasted on in an effort to make a building appear Graeco-Roman (and instant old); or they can recall sterile, heavy Stalinist or even Nazi-era creations.
But many people (including me) find some modern architecture gorgeous. Consider the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art in Washington or the federal courthouse in downtown Los Angeles.
The selection of architects, and of the many other people involved in getting public buildings up, should depend on their appreciation of beauty (modified by functional needs and budgetary constraints) of design and quality of materials, whatever the style. And public buildings should look as if they’re going to stand for a long, long time, as we hope (more nervously these days) the country will. Why circumscribe creativity as much as Trump wants to do? There’s a lot of it out there.
UMass Dartmouth Raising Profile
Kudos to the University of Massachusetts for winning a $4.6 million grant from the Navy to finance research projects in collaboration with the Naval Undersea Warfare Center, in Newport. This is the largest research grant in the history of the campus, which has been gradually raising its profile, especially in marine matters. It’s part of a regional cluster of ocean-related research centers that stretches from the Mystic Museum to the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography to the world-famous Woods Hole complex that includes the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the Marine Biological Laboratory, among other organizations.
Economic-development types should promote the hell out of this three-state cluster.
Hard to Get Young Adults to Vote
‘"The difference between my socialism and Trump’s socialism is I believe the government should help working families, not billionaires.’’
-- Bernie Sanders
Much has been made of Senator Sanders’s avid youthful followers and, more broadly, of the importance of the young-adult vote in general, especially in efforts to oust Trump. But I think that it will play a much smaller role this year than advertised. The fact is that the majority of young adults, whatever they say they’ll do, don’t vote.
Consider that in 2018 that while 18-29-year-olds comprised almost 22 percent of the voting-age population, only 13 percent of this cohort voted. Now, while the percentage of those voting is higher in the excitement of presidential-election years (about 46 percent in 2016), it’s much less than that of people 65 or older. Almost 71 percent of that group voted in 2016. No wonder that Medicare is always much more secure than Medicaid.
And yet, except in some GOP-controlled states with obvious voter-suppression policies, it is very easy to vote –easier than a few decades ago. People have few excuses for avoiding this duty. But even if the Democrats nominate Sanders I’d be surprised if young adults come anywhere near the voting percentage of the elderly. Another reason Trump will probably win.
By the way, Sanders calls himself a “democratic socialist.’’ But he’s really just a social democrat of the, say, German or Danish variety.
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There is some good stuff in Trump’s budget, at least sort of.
He wants to make $36 billion in cuts over the next decade in farm subsidy programs, which favor not the family farms of yore but big agribusiness. More welfare for the rich. This, however, is a tad ironic considering that his regime has authorized $28 billion in taxpayer funds over the past couple of years to pay to farmers (most of whom are Trump backers) to offset their losses from his trade war with China.
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A “mixture of gullibility and cynicism... is prevalent in all ranks of totalitarian movements.’’
“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and nothing was true... The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.’’
-- Hannah Arendt in Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)
Trump has denounced Michael Bloomberg for his “stop and frisk’’ policy for crime suspects when Mr. Bloomberg was New York City mayor – a policy Mr. Bloomberg has since apologized for since it seemed to target minorities.
But here’s what our maximum leader told a Chicago police group in 2018:
“I’ve told them to work with local authorities to try to change the terrible deal the city of Chicago entered into with ACLU, which ties law enforcement’s hands; and to strongly consider stop-and-frisk. It works, and it was meant for problems like Chicago. (Applause.) It was meant for it. Stop-and-frisk.’’
Hit this link to read all his remarks:
Eat and Read
Two newish and very interesting establishments are right next to each other on Ives Street, in Providence’s Fox Point neighborhood. First, there’s the bakery and restaurant Aleppo Sweets, owned by refugees from Syria, and offering delicious Mideast food. Aleppo, of course, is the ancient city ravaged by the regime of dictator Bashar Assad in the Syrian civil war. Please hit this link:
There’s the light-filled Twenty Stories, a charming and highly curated bookstore and literary center, which also has a mobile bookstore. Please hit this link:
We much enjoyed visiting both.
Or Exhale Alone
I noticed a couple of people who looked of Chinese ethnicity walking around with face masks on Providence’s Wayland Square the other day. Time to stock up?
Fishing for Controversy
Providence native, scholar and famed public intellectual and contrarian Stanley Fish has come out with a book guaranteed to amuse, infuriate and educate most everyone. It’s called The First {as in the First Amendment): How to Think About Hate Speech, Campus Speech, Religious Speech, Fake News, Post-Truth and Donald Trump.
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