Whitcomb: Turning on the Light; Bugsy Would Have Approved; Pipes in the Ground

Sunday, February 11, 2024

Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

 

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Robert Whitcomb, columnist

“When I think of my youth I feel sorry not for myself
but for my body. It was so direct
and simple, so rational in its desires,
wanting to be touched the way an otter
loves water, the way a giraffe….’’
 

-- From “The Mind-Body Problem, ‘’ by Katha Pollitt (born 1949), American poet and essayist
 

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To read the whole poem, hit this link:
 

 

 

“We are here to do good to others. What the others are here for, I do not know.’’

John Foster Hall (1867-1945),  English music-hall and radio comedian John Foster Hall, who called himself The Revd. Vivian Foster, the Vicar of Mirth

 

 

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PHOTO: Elisa Stone, Unsplash

 

There’s good news for all who suffer from seasonal affective disorder. Solar spring began Feb. 5 and runs through May 4. It’s when daylight increases at the fastest pace during the year, gaining four hours and four minutes. This will gradually wake up plants, with such flowers as snowdrops blooming on south-facing slopes among the first you’ll see reacting.  And wild animals will start getting more active, including that old recreation mating.

 

So no matter how dark world affairs may seem, there’s some hope to be found by walking around outside.

 


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Bedridden for some of last week with COVID, I watched through the French doors as bare gray branches waved slightly in the cold breeze, as if an invisible artist were doing a charcoal sketch. Except for the boring relentless cough and the aches, it would have been quite soothing.

 

 

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The drivers around here are so bad that I wonder if states should mandate refresher courses, with tests, on the rules of the road every five or ten years as a condition of keeping a license. Could drivers at least relearn to signal before changing lanes, and understand that speeding in right-hand lanes can be dangerous?

 

Of course, more police to enforce traffic laws would help.

 

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Of course, the best long-term solution to the open-ended Route 195 West bridge public-works-political-psychological-economic-sociological crisis would be to ditch both the eastbound and westbound bridges over the mighty Seekonk entirely and replace them with a tunnel. Put a pedestrian and biker bridge above for locals and tourists, with snack bar and/or just bar at each end, along with massages and CBD candy for sale! Good source of tax revenue.

 

Upside? While East Providence used to be feared as one of New England’s most intense speed traps, its confused-driver-congealed streets are now mighty tough to speed on.

 

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Brown University PHOTO: Will Morgan

 

It would interesting to know how many Brown University trustees live in Rhode Island. I’ll wager it’s very few. If more lived near Providence, there might be more and louder influential voices against the hideously ugly buildings Brown keeps putting up.
 

 

 

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Sportsbetting Book RI

 

Super Betting

“No one does, or could, dispute the absolute necessity of keeping our game free not only from scandal but, even more so, from suspicion of scandal”  {connected with gambling}.

-- National Football League Commissioner Pete Rozelle (1926-1996) to federal officials in 1975.

 

The National Football League used to keep its distance from gambling, which is inherently corrupting in many individuals and organizations. The NFL’s leaders knew that an intimate connection with gambling could encourage thrown games and that gambling addictions cause many social woes. (Gambling particularly preys on the desperate poor.) But big money usually wins, and the NFL is now in bed with gamblers via sportsbook sponsors and data partners. So it’s fitting that Super Bowl LVIII today (love the pomposity of the Roman numerals!) will be held in the gambling capital – Las Vegas – where mobster Bugsy Siegel helped make The Strip famous in the ‘40s.

 

A sportsbook is a company or individual that takes bets from individual sports bettors, generally accepting bets on either side of a sporting event.

 

That 38 states (including Rhode Island and Massachusetts) have legalized sports betting, from whose revenue they get slices, is giving such gambling a big boost. State officials love it because it brings in a lot of money to state treasuries, thus reducing the proportion that must be raised through politically unpopular income and sales taxes.

 

Some fine day, there will be a huge scandal connected with the NFL’s marriage with the gambling industry, but maybe no one will care much.  As Calvin Coolidge famously said: “The business of America is business.’’

 

 

Grounded Heating and Cooling

New Englanders ought to learn more about geothermal systems, as we look for additional ways to quit fossil fuels.

 

Geothermal systems use liquid-filled pipes to move underground heat to buildings in cold weather and to transfer heat from them into the ground in the summer. They are expensive to install but cheap to run.

 

I have visited buildings around here that have geothermal systems. They make no noise, have no smell and provide very steady heating and cooling.

 

Hit this link:

 

 

 

Block Everything That Might Work

The GOP/QAnon folks in Congress and their monstrous master, Trump, who terrifies them because they are spineless, if cynical and ambitious, people, have a powerful strategy. It’s to block any reform that would be good for America, such as more strongly policing our southern border through what would have been the most important immigration law in decades. That reform would have happened under a bipartisan deal made in the Senate that was heavily slanted to giving “conservatives’’  much of what they said they wanted in tougher enforcement. But Trump and his sheep killed it for one reason only: It might help Biden get re-elected. The hell with the country!

 

Indeed, most congressional Republicans have shown little interest in the hard work of governing – drafting and passing legislation, much of it on complex matters, via compromise, which is a central part of lawmaking in a democracy. The GOP/QAnon prefers paralysis. They find it much more engaging to spend their time bloviating  to their MAGA base on right-wing radio and Fox, etc., and (like Democrats) raising money from donors, especially since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, in 2010, opened the floodgates.

 

And for that matter, many Republican donors and the states they mostly control are very happy to have the influx of immigrants, especially the younger ones, to continue. Cheap and fearful labor is so energizing!
 

As David Frum noted in The Atlantic:

 

“Consider that Florida’s Republican-controlled House … has voted to allow 16- and 17-year-olds to work eight-hour days during the school year. Or that the Republican governor of Arkansas has signed a bill that relieves the state of having to certify that teenage workers aged 14 and 15 may work. Or that Ohio’s Republican-controlled legislature may soon pass a law allowing 14- and 15-year-olds to work as late as 9 p.m. on school nights. Or that Republican legislators in Wisconsin are pushing to allow 14-to-17-year-olds to serve alcohol in bars and restaurants. …. Almost 40 percent of recent border-crossers have been  under 18, a fivefold increase since the late aughts.’’

 

Some of you may remember the PBS/The Public’s Radio story last fall about migrant teens, some as young as 14, working up to 12 hours day at seafood processors in New Bedford, amidst violations of labor law and low pay.

 

See:

 

 

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Tucker Carlson on Fox PHOTO: Screengrab

 

The rich, spoiled brat and dictator-suckup Tucker Carlson was in Moscow last week at the feet of his hero, mass murderer Vladimir Putin, for a TV interview. The interview was mostly for the Russian audience, not the American one.

 

Carlson has said he “roots for Russia’’ in its invasion of Ukraine.



Putin wanted him at the Kremlin to show that there’s lots of support for the tyrant in America, which might be helpful in boosting turnout for Putin in the March 15-17 “election.’’ And if the interview can be used to help drive a stake through the heart of U.S. military support for Ukraine in Congress so much the better for the diminutive dictator.

 

Carlson is from a long line of figures  aptly called “useful idiots.’’ Such previous dictators as Hitler and Stalin found pliable Americans, British and others to propagandize for them. In Carlson’s case, he probably hopes that his meeting with Putin, whom Trump both admires (for being an anti-democratic “tough guy”) and fears, will give him brownie points with America’s would-be tyrant.

 

 

Octopus Farm

Now this will be a battle. A Spanish company wants to raise octopuses for food. Delicious and high protein. But research over the past few years has suggested that the animals are highly intelligent and have complex emotions. (Reminder: Pigs and cattle have emotions too, and pigs, anyway, are fairly intelligent. And would you eat your dog? Well, I suppose it depends….)

 

An inducement for raising the eight-legged and very flexible beasts is that these short-lived creatures grow very fast.

 

So there’s a campaign to block this aquaculture. So far, I’m on the octopuses’ side. Also, I wonder if there are other creatures in the ocean  (besides marine mammals) that we’ll discover are smart.
 

Hit this link:

Robert Whitcomb is a veteran editor and writer. Among his jobs, he has served as the finance editor of the International Herald Tribune, in Paris; as a vice president and the editorial-page editor of The Providence Journal; as an editor and writer in New York for The Wall Street Journal,  and as a writer for the Boston Herald Traveler (RIP). He has written newspaper and magazine essays and news stories for many years on a very wide range of topics for numerous publications, has edited several books and movie scripts and is the co-author of among other things, Cape Wind.


 

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