Whitcomb: Trying Again in the Spindle City; Measuring Impairment; Free Stuff for Schools

Sunday, November 10, 2019

Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

“Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.’’

-- Mark Twain

 

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“The house of stone turns its back on town

to govern an Atlantic even sky can’t stop.

Big as a museum, it keeps us off the lawn

With chain-link fences camouflaged by rosehips.’’

-- From “On the Cliff Walk at Newport, Rhode Island, Thinking of Percy Bysshe Shelley,’’ by Caroline Simmons Olds

 

New Day for Fall River

It was good news indeed that Paul Coogan defeated the twice-indicted incumbent mayor, Jasiel Correia, and City Administrator Cathy Ann Viveiros, a Correia ally running as a write-in, and will be the new mayor of troubled Fall River.  Mr. Coogan, a member of the city’s school committee, is well respected and holds promise to be an honest and steadying force for the city, which has faced far too much corruption, as well as socio-economic challenges.

 

Sleaze alert:  The (Fall River) Herald News published a leaked video of  a secret meeting where Mr. Correia told supporters that he couldn't beat Mr. Coogan, head to head, but that  at least one person (presto -- Ms. Viveiros!) would launch a write-in campaign, helping him by dividing the vote. Luckily for the city, the scheme failed.  Mr. Coogan won with 79 percent of the vote, with Mayor Correia, getting only 7 percent. Clearly the voters want a big change!

 

For the leaked-audio story, please hit this link:

 

Fall River has much poverty and plenty of drug problems, but also some great strengths, including notably hard-working residents, a spectacular hilly site at the head of Mount Hope Bay and some beautiful structures, especially (to me) those old stone mill buildings that look so beautiful as you drive on Route 195, particularly as the sun comes up and sets. Further,  Massachusetts’s South Coast Rail project will restore commuter rail service between Boston and southeastern Massachusetts, with stations in Taunton, Fall River and New Bedford; service is expected to be restored by the end of 2023. These are currently the  only major cities within 50 miles of Boston lacking commuter rail access to Boston. South Coast Rail will boost the region’s economy by connecting it much tighter with rich Greater Boston. This will include luring more refugees from the sky-high housing costs up there to seek affordable digs in Fall River.

 

For a long time, New Bedford, which has long been twinned in the public mind with Fall River, has had much better mayoral administration than the Spindle City. Let’s hope that Mr. Coogan’s victory evens that out.

 

Pot Impairment Mystery

I’ve been worried a long time about the increasing number of people driving around here stoned on marijuana in varying degrees, with outlets selling “medical marijuana,’’ as well as illegal sales of “recreational” pot, in Rhode Island, and with recreational, as well as medical, marijuana legal in Massachusetts. (The Feds have some different ideas about all this.) A big problem is that unlike with alcohol, there seems to be no precise metric to measure when somebody might be impaired by pot.

 

The issue was front and center in a Nov. 6 Providence Journal story, “Judge ponders: Can impairment by pot be measured,”  involving Marshall Howard, charged with driving under the influence, death resulting, in the 2017 death of David Bustin.  Mr. Howard’s car hit Mr. Bustin after he  had stepped into the street. A blood test showed that Mr. Howard had THC, the mind-altering ingredient in marijuana, in his system at the time. Mr. Howard also had fentanyl and heroin in his car; Mr. Bustin, for his part, was apparently drunk.

 

Inebriated America? Are that many people in need of psychic or physical relief?

 

The story, by Katie Mulvaney, quoted the Superior Court judge in the case, Daniel Procaccini, as saying:

“We don’t have any way to correlate any amount of a substance {such as THC} in a person’s blood to impairment. With alcohol we do.’’ This is a national problem, which we’d better address as throngs hit the road after toking up. 

 

Thank God cars themselves are much safer now than a few decades ago since drivers seem to be ever more distracted.

 

To read the Massachusetts angle on this, please hit this link:

 

 

Looking for Free Stuff for Schools

A piece in The New England Journal of Higher Education caught my eye. It says, among other things:

“Massachusetts public colleges and universities have galvanized a statewide movement to adopt more comprehensive use of Open Educational Resources (OER)…. ‘’

”….OER includes teaching, learning and research materials in any medium—digital or otherwise—that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions.’’

 “Ultimately, the largest beneficiaries of this work will be the students of Massachusetts for whom reducing the cost of textbooks and other ancillary learning materials will significantly reduce student direct, out-of-pocket expenses.’’

 

I hope that those trying to improve Rhode Island education at all levels read the article, which you can do by hitting this link:

 

Help More, Please

“In a community where public services have failed to keep abreast of private consumption, things are very different. Here, in an atmosphere of private opulence and public squalor, the private goods have full sway.’’

 

-- From The Affluent Society (1958), by  the late economist and writer John Kenneth Galbraith

 

Gary Sasse is much more liberated these days now that he doesn’t have to ask business leaders for dues to maintain the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council, which Mr. Sasse led for many years. He’s since spent some years as the founding director of the Hassenfeld Institute for Public Leadership at Bryant University.

 

So he bluntly asked business leaders in a recent GoLocal TV segment to show much more action – and money – to improve the Ocean State’s public schools. He called upon the Partnership for Rhode Island,  a business-dominated group that seeks to improve education and other aspects of life in the state, to do more than such things as finance studies and announce a grant to “fund chalk’’ – a reference to its grant to pay for some classroom supplies.

 

“These guys are getting off cheap. First, of all they got all kinds of tax cuts here over the last  10 years, from the income tax to the corporate tax...which could have been used to pay for, you know, schools there,” he said.

 

Mr. Sasse called on rich leaders in the business community to personally invest -- and for the leading companies to step up and directly adopt schools in distress.

 

"It would be great if these ….guys [there is one woman, Brown President Christina Paxson, in The Partnership] would stand up and say we're taking over this high school and we're going to put hundreds of thousands each -- millions of dollars into this high school and we're going to make it a demonstration school … and the 2,000 kids that attend that high school are going to get a good education.’’

 

I don’t know the personal and occupational financial pressures on the individuals in the Partnership. I do know that business leaders in some other states, including Massachusetts, have generally been more active and generous than those in Rhode Island, both out of altruism and enlightened self-interest.

 

Meanwhile, the money pours into rich elite institutions such as Brown University….

 

The Partnership members are Amica, Bank of America, Brown University, Citizens Bank, CVS Health, Electric Boat, FM Global, Hasbro Inc., IGT, Providence Equity, and the Rhode Island Foundation.

 

Mr. Sasse, a moderate Republican, is also showing a sense of liberation by speaking out against the depravities of the Trump regime.

 

To see and hear his remarks, please hit this link:

 

 

New Industries for New England?

Herewith three products that might produce some economic and environmental benefits for New England—and the world. One is something called biochar, a charcoal that can increase soil fertility and resistance to some diseases affecting crops and reduce farm runoff into waterways. Perhaps most interesting is that it has been researched as a carbon-sequestration product to fight global warming.

 

And bioochar can be made from wood chips, as well as straw, husks, landscaping waste,  manure and even sewage sludge. It’s being used around the world.  New England,  much of it being heavily forested, is a very good source of wood chips.

 

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Then there’s the possibly highly lucrative potential of growing saffron (a  flower that’s a member of the crocus family) in Rhode Island. As the wonderful local nature writer Todd McLeish writes in phys.org:

 

“Saffron is the world's most expensive spice, selling for about $5,000 per pound at wholesale rates, and 90 percent of the global saffron harvest comes from Iran. But the University of Rhode Island agriculture researchers have found that Ocean State farms have the potential to get a share of the market as demand for saffron in the United States grows.’’ Saffron is also used for food coloring and fabric dye (think Buddhist monks’ robes}, and some have touted its uses against cancer, depression and age-related macular degeneration.

 

“The URI experimental saffron plot yielded 12 pounds of saffron per acre last year, compared to about 5 pounds per acre in {mostly arid} Iran in the second year of growth,’’ Mr. McLeish’s article said.

 

Another attraction: "It's a fall flowering plant and isn't harvested until late October, so it extends the season for farmers whose growing season is mostly over by now,"  Rahmatallah Gheshm, a URI postdoctoral researcher who moved to Rhode Island after being a vegetable seed producer and saffron grower in Iran, told Mr. McLeish.

 

To read the article, please hit this link:

 

 

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Then there’s Brendan Breen, who has figured out how to culture pearls in quahogs, something he learned how to do starting at an aquaculture class at the University of Rhode Island.  By the way, reminder: Shellfish aquaculture cleans water.

 

The Newport Daily News ran a good story a while back on Mr. Breen’s efforts. Hit this link to read it:

The paper reported:

“The Newport resident decided to become the first person to culture pearls in Rhode Island’s official state mollusk, the quahog. ‘I’m surprised that no one had even tried it before, because the anatomy of the quahog is similar to the oyster,’ he says. ‘I figured there was no reason why I couldn’t do it myself.”’

“Quahog pearls are noticeably different from those produced by oysters, according to Breen. Like the colors on the inside of the quahog shell, they can range from white to dark purple. And because they are made of calcite and aragonite, rather than the calcium bicarbonate of oyster pearls, they refract light differently.’’

 

 

Market Broadband Access

Broadbandnow.com reports that Rhode Island had, in the third quarter, the highest percentage of any state of consumers with access to wired broadband for $60  or less a month, with 89 percent with access to broadband Internet at that price. It also ranks pretty high in the percentage of the population with access to at least 500 megabits per second of wired broadband, at 66.8 percent.

 

Can the state better publicize this access to boost its economy?

 

To learn more, please hit this link:

 

 

Poisoning the Merrimack

The Trump administration doesn’t particularly like environmental rules because they can inconvenience some businesses, whose bosses/owners might be big campaign contributors. It’s been trying to weaken or delete some regulations, meant to protect people and the broader environment.

 

Here’s a troubling example of its attitude:

Federal and state environmental officials have renewed a permit letting Turnkey Landfill, in Rochester, N.H., send as much as 100,000 gallons a day of polluted runoff to a Lowell, Mass., treatment plant that empties into the Merrimack River, which provides drinking water to hundreds of thousands of people a day.

The polluted water has large amounts of highly toxic chemicals known as PFAS, which have been linked to kidney cancer, low infant birth weights and other diseases, reports The Boston Globe, which said:

“The company’s tests showed that the amount of PFAS, known as ‘forever chemicals’ because they never fully degrade, was more than 100 times higher than federal and state guidelines and more than 400 times higher than stricter standards being considered in Massachusetts.’’

 “While the Lowell Regional Wastewater Utility treats the landfill runoff before discharging it into the river, the plant lacks the expensive equipment to filter out PFAS. Worse, environmental advocates say, the treatment process can make the chemicals more toxic, enabling them to bind in ways that make them harder to break down.”

 

Don’t expect the EPA and the Granite State to change their minds (EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler is a former coal-industry lobbyist.) You might want to stick to bottled water when you’re in the Lowell area…

 

To read more, please hit this link:

 

 

Lies Undermine Civic Culture, Redux

Fake news can have a big impact on politicians’ government policies.

 

Princeton University Prof. Gene Grossman and his research partner, Harvard’s Elhanan Helpman, looked at the role of fake news in a research paper, “Electoral Competition with Fake News.’’

Please hit this link to see it:
 

They summarize their findings thus in:

 

“Misinformation pervades political competition. We introduce opportunities for political candidates and their media supporters to spread fake news about the policy environment and perhaps about parties' positions into a familiar model of electoral competition. In the baseline model with full information, the parties' positions converge to those that maximize aggregate welfare. When parties can broadcast fake news to audiences that disproportionately include their partisans, policy divergence and suboptimal outcomes can result. We study a sequence of models that impose progressively tighter constraints on false reporting and characterize situations that lead to divergence and a polarized electorate.’’

 

Of course, politicians trying to implement public policies based on misinformation, be it in foreign affairs or such domestic matters as taxes and health, can be disastrous. More broadly, the public’s growing sense that an increasing percentage of what they’re hearing in the public square from our “leaders” are lies corrodes trust across our civic culture, which undermines both democracy, our market economy and our national power. That’s why Putin and other tyrants so strenuously work to inject disinformation and misinformation into our country.

 

If politicians aren’t bound to stay with the truth in their political rhetoric, and the policies that go with it, their lies tend to become ever more extreme.

 

One of the problems is that many voters increasingly live in media echo-chambers; many voters take the “information’’ they get there at face value. This can lead to dubious public policies.

 

Then there’s the cesspool of misinformation and disinformation on Facebook in the 2020 election cycle.

 

To learn more about that, please hit this link:

 

 

Crafty Crows

Crows seem to be most excitable in November. From crows.net:

“This {mid-November to mid-December} is the time when the big communal roosts are forming…{L}arge number of crows will be gathering together in the evenings to spend the night in roosts that may contain anywhere from several hundred to tens of thousands of crows. Crows from a fairly large geographical area, covering a circle with perhaps a 20 mile or larger radius, will begin flying in the late afternoon or early evening towards a central roost location. It appears that in many cases, crows from various parts of the area served by the roost will stop at one or more staging area along the way where groups of crows gather and remain a short time before proceeding to the main roost. To use a human analogy, one might say that families of crows proceed to staging areas, where the clans gather, before flying on to gather as a tribe at the roost….”

 “Although roosts may occur in a wide variety of surroundings, most commonly they are found in areas with large, mature trees not growing to densely, relatively near a water source such as a river or lake. In cities favorite areas seem to be cemeteries, college campuses, parks, malls, railroad yards, and old industrial areas.’’

 

No wonder they like our neighborhood so much!

 

They sure drop massive quantities of guano on our cars.

 

Much has been made of recent research showing the high intelligence of crows and ravens, which look like crows but are larger.  Parrots and the corvid family of crows, ravens and jays are considered the most intelligent birds.

 

They can, for example, remember individual humans, count and use tools. This naturally leads people, as they do with, particularly, their dogs and cats, to assign them human qualities. It’s as if we want to expand our human community to include other species as subsidiaries of us, the ruling class. But of course, whatever their range of intelligence, including emotional intelligence, they live in worlds far different from ours. Beware anthropomorphizing them.

To read more, please this link:

 

 

“Histories are more full of examples of the fidelity of dogs than of friends.’’

-- Alexander Pope

 

 

Less Work, More Productive!

This is what we want to read!

 

In a Bloomberg News article, Noah Smith, responding to a Microsoft study in Japan, writes:

 

“For the U.S. and Japan, as well as other countries where employees are working inefficiently long days, mandating shorter hours — through four-day workweeks, shorter workdays, or more paid vacation — could be just what they need to raise productivity while improving work-life balance.’’

 

America has about the longest work hours in the Developed World and Americans take the least vacation time.  Northern European nations have higher productivity. That they also have more humane hours probably has something to do with that.

 

To read Mr. Smith’s article, please hit this link:

 

 

Better Crowded Than Empty

While I was waiting in South Station last Tuesday night for the train back to Providence, an older lady sitting next to me said of the churning crowd at 8:30 p.m., “I wish it weren’t so crowded.’’ I told her that 50 years ago the then dirty, gritty terminal was often almost deserted by mid-evening, with a few drunks and/or homeless people seemingly the main population. “You’re right,’’ she said. “It’s funny how you forget.’’ Crowded places are generally safer than empty ones, and bespeak prosperity, too.

 

Now if only the MBTA and Amtrak would install a few counters with plugs where you could recharge your cell phones in the huge station.

 

 

‘Those Who Fought Them’

With Veterans Day tomorrow, Nov. 11, I recommend historian and Marine veteran James Wright’s book Those Who Have Borne the Battle: A History of America’s Wars and Those Who Fought Them.

 

Some of the title’s wording comes from the end of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, to me, arguably the greatest speech in American history:

 

"With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.’’

 

When I was a small child we called the holiday Armistice Day, which marked the “11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month’’ of 1918, when the guns of “The Great War’’ (World War I) fell silent, followed by a couple of decades of mostly increasingly uneasy peace in Europe that ended on Sept. 1, 1939, with the German invasion of Poland.   

 

Some historians, however, like to mark the start as July 7, 1937, when the “Marco Polo Bridge Incident” led to a brutal and massive war by Japan against China.

 

A history teacher of mine used to call the period between the World Wars “The 20-year armistice.’’ I wonder how long the one we’re in now will last.

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