Whitcomb: Season’s Greetings; And Public Good? Releasing Sociopaths; In Search of Rich Patients
Sunday, November 28, 2021
How like a winter hath my absence been
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTWhat freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!
What old December's bareness everywhere!
And yet this time remov'd was summer's time,
The teeming autumn, big with rich increase,
Bearing the wanton burthen of the prime,
Like widow'd wombs after their lords' decease:
Yet this abundant issue seem'd to me
But hope of orphans and unfather'd fruit;
For summer and his pleasures wait on thee,
And thou away, the very birds are mute;
Or if they sing, 'tis with so dull a cheer
That leaves look pale, dreading the winter's near.
-- “Sonnet 97,’’ by William Shakespeare (1564-1616). His contemporary Ben Jonson hailed him as "not of an age, but for all time." Indeed.
“One of the most obvious facts about grownups to a child is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.’’
-- From The Third Book of Criticism, by Randall Jarrell (1914-1965), American poet, literary critic, children's author, essayist and novelist.
xxx
So we go full-bore into the holiday season, although stores have been playing Christmas carols since before Halloween. That diffuses some of the intensity. By now, many folks are sick of it all.
The holidays, like everything else, seem to come faster and faster as your years roll by.
Kitty Carlisle Hart (1910-2007), a once-famous actress, singer, TV personality and spokeswoman for the arts in New York City, liked to quote her mother about how time flies: “When you pass 50, every 15 minutes it’s breakfast.” Many others have said variants of the same thing, usually referring to being over 60 or 70.
But for the majority who aren’t yet tired of the holiday mania, there’s much fun ahead: advent calendars with chocolate (for believers and nonbelievers alike); sometimes thrillingly volatile Christmas parties; traffic jams of Amazon trucks; unexpected gifts and, best, that daily sunlight starts lengthening again on Dec. 22. Then come the blessedly quiet weeks of January, albeit anxious for those who spent too much on Christmas presents quickly forgotten (or regifted….) by the recipients.
Meanwhile, maybe the rich could cut back on stuff-buying and so reduce the stress on supply chains. Actually, most of us would do well to cut back on consumption of stuff, much of it from China and too much of it on credit.
A few frigid nights and some gales have removed most of the leaves even from the oak trees. That’s actually a comforting reminder that space is now available for next spring’s budding.
Of course, everyone complains about the cold in our shortening winters. But that New England has chilly winters is a factor in it having lots of freshwaters, a more useful commodity than even oil. There’s frequent precipitation and obviously less evaporation during our winters. And assorted diseases are much more rife in warm and especially tropical places. In general, regions with cold winters are heathier than ones with mild ones, even for those with seasonal affective disorder. And the winters make us appreciate spring and summer more.
There’s an old proverb (not based on facts) that “A green Christmas makes a fat churchyard.” It is an old superstition that a Christmas without snow will be followed by much illness and many deaths. Dunno. My own aesthetic preference is for six inches of powdery snow on Christmas Eve, with it lasting on the ground through Christmas night and then disappearing by 6 a.m. Dec. 26. But it’s healthier for the environment around here if it’s supplemented by more snow until March.
As our region’s climate warms, some scientists warn, we may have colder soil during the winter because we lose the snow cover that acts as insulation for the ground, thus damaging the soil structure and leaching nutrients. Bad for plants.
It’s one damn thing after another!
“Average weight, in pounds, of a professional Santa: 245”
-- Harper’s {Magazine} Index
Bribing ‘Em to Do the Right Thing
Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee has made a deal with the state’s largest union of state employees, Council 94 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, to give two $1,500 bonuses to employees who have gotten their COVID-19 shots.
Bribing them with taxpayer money to do the right thing for themselves and the people around them! This is obviously a ploy by McKee to get union support in next year’s Democratic primary election.
Gee, wouldn’t it be nice for all of us to be paid to get shots to protect public health – and ours?!
As for those anti-vaxxer state employees –e.g., some health workers -- wallowing in misinformation and disinformation who are fighting the order to get vaccinated as a condition of employment: They can go elsewhere. Their employment is not mandatory and no one is going to strap them down and jab them. And vaccinations of government employees have been common going back to George Washington’s order that his troops be vaccinated against smallpox. Look at all those shots against various diseases that kids have long had to get to be let into school.
State healthcare workers, of all people, who refuse, barring some verifiable individual medical reasons, to get jabbed are a public-health threat. They should go into other lines of work. Yes, other, more responsible healthcare workers will need to be recruited to replace them, maybe at higher pay. But it would be worth it.
Hit this link for the historical background of vaccinations.
xxx
Meanwhile, the GOPQ fights vaccination and mask mandates and then blames Biden when cases rise as a result of their sabotage.
Why on the Street?
The horrific case of Darrell Brooks, charged with murdering six people by using a SUV to plow into people in a Waukesha, Wis., parade, brought up a growing issue around the country, including Rhode Island and Massachusetts: Violent criminals being let out on minuscule bail. Brooks, for example, with a long and violent criminal record, had gotten out on a cash bond of $1,000 after allegedly assaulting and running over the mother of his child!
There should be full investigations of how this and similar outrages have happened.
Brooks’s record has included: battery, domestic abuse, drug violations and a sex crime. He’s obviously a sociopath or psychopath. There are lots of them out there.
Do we need more jail cells to hold such obviously dangerous people when they’re awaiting trial? Better trained or at least more accountable judges and magistrates?
By the way, whether it’s people like Brooks or such criminals as the Trump Fascists who invaded the Capitol to try to overturn the election in order to keep their kleptocratic Mussolini wanna-be leader in power, one of the very visible characteristics is tattoos. It sometimes seems that the more tattoos the more likely someone is a violent criminal! Why do so many bad people have them, and why do so many bad people favor SUVs and pickup trucks? I guess that these vehicles are big makes their owners (or lessors) feel more powerful, supplementing the rush some of them get from carrying guns everywhere. (Okay. Some of my best friends drive SUVs and pickup trucks and haven’t committed crimes—yet. Some even have tattoos, albeit discreet and precisely targeted ones.)
Have tattoo regret? Read this:
In Search of Rich Patients
Woonsocket-based CVS plans to close 10 percent of its stores. This may well be because of intensifying competition from Amazon, Walmart, etc., and the proliferation of cheap store chains such as Dollar General that plan big expansions in offerings of health-related stuff. And the mail-order drug business will keep expanding. Further, maybe CVS, Walgreens, etc., are worried about coming up with the scratch to pay off billions of dollars in awards from lawsuits stemming from drugstore chains’ role in the ongoing opiate-addiction disaster.
Which stores will they close around here? I’ll bet they’ll be in poorer neighborhoods, with fewer well-insured people. CVS stores in affluent neighborhoods, such as Wayland Square, on Providence’s East Side, will survive.
Big and hugely profitable hospital chains such as Mass General Brigham are also acting to get more affluent, well-insured customers/patients by setting up mini hospitals in rich suburbs. That raises questions about what happens to the quality of care of patients in poor places as more resources are shifted to the suburban land of milk and honey.
xxx
There are so many shootings, etc., at Providence “clubs” – strip or otherwise – that I and a lot of other locals wish they were all closed forever.
From Journos to Flacks
As many journalism outlets, especially local and regional ones, are gutted by the ads that used to pay for them being gobbled up by Google and Facebook, etc., and more and more TV stations and newspapers are owned by job-killing asset strippers, the ratio of public-relations people (in business and government) to journalists is now over 6-1, and widening, according to U.S. Census data.
Consider the many journalists who have left such local newspapers as The Providence Journal and local TV stations in the past few years to become PR folks.
Of course, the companies and government agencies that employ these “flacks’’ like to call them “public-information officers’’ performing the needed role of informing the public about the activities of their organizations. But in fact the main job of many of them is to protect and promote their bosses and organizations. They’re propagandists.
The big national challenge is how to boost local journalism so that, among other duties, it can adequately monitor powerful governmental and business institutions, hold them to account and serve as a public square. As journalism continues to implode, corruption prospers. Such new or newish news organizations as GoLocal (which even bravely covers local business intensely) are trying to take up the slack. But the problem – and danger to democracy, which needs a vibrant news media to inform citizens – is very broad.
Some possible approaches:
• Break up the duopoly of Facebook and Google to reduce their ability to take such a high proportion of advertising dollars. Revise copyright laws to stop them from using for free the journalism they have been stealing from news organizations for years, in the process destroying many of them.
• Make it easier for commercial news organizations to be converted into nonprofits, which could let subscription fees be treated as tax-deductible charitable contributions.
• Provide low-interest government loans for news start-ups and community publications, given the huge civic importance of local news organizations.
• Expand the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s mandate to include local public-interest news media that aren’t connected with NPR and PBS and their affiliates.
Circling Infrastructure Money
I, like too many other commentators on the $1.1 trillion physical-infrastructure law, have often failed to note three very important things about it in addition to the better known transportation-related parts: It would help improve water-supply systems, which are dangerously corroded and outdated in many places, and strengthen the electric grid and Internet, including their security, which is all too vulnerable to attacks by the Russians, Chinese, North Koreans, and other foreign enemies as well as private-sector extortionists just in it for the money.
On the transport side again, we need fewer road intersections with lights and more traffic circles, with landscaping in the middle. The latter have fewer accidents, in part because they slow down drivers where they should be slowed down.
The Federal Highway Administration reports that traffic circles reduce injury and fatal crashes by around 80 percent compared to conventional intersections. Further, they reduce gas consumption: Unlike at regular intersections, cars don’t get stuck idling waiting for lights to change.
And, as I discovered last week driving up Route 10 in New Hampshire, they can be quite attractive.
Something for states and localities to consider when it comes to spending federal infrastructure money.
Taiwan Belongs There
Good for the Biden administration for inviting Taiwan to its "Summit for Democracy" next month, angering, of course, the Chinese dictatorship, which hates having the island democracy as a model that might tempt the dictatorship’s subjects in Mainland China. Bejing claims ownership of Taiwan.
But no, Taiwan has not “always been part of China,’’ contrary to Mainland claims. Hit this link for some history:
The summit is part of Biden’s effort to pull together the world’s democracies and semi-democracies, such as the U.S., to push back against increasing aggression by autocracies led by China and Russia after the damage done by dictator-suck-up Donald Trump.
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