Whitcomb: Appeasement Advances Aggression; Lunatic In Loco Parentis; Pulling Straws; Boarding Houses – GoLocalProv

Sunday, January 09, 2022

Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

“The car snapped backward into a frozen ditch.

I sat speechless, shaking, my wife speechless also,

GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE — SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLAST

and a man pulled up, a  salesman: You folks okay?

Suddenly the radio roared, and by the car

a dog barked wildly and, yes, we were fine.

Fine. We were fine. But what was ‘fine,’ I wondered….”

— From “Begotten,’’ by Andrew Hudgins (born 1951)

“If you talk to God, you are praying. If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.’’

–Thomas Szasz (1920-2012), controversial Hungarian-American psychiatrist

xxx

A little more than two years ago, no one had heard of COVID-19! We’re still learning as new data keep flowing in. So please have patience as scientists,  the healthcare sector and public officials, elected and appointed, must constantly adapt to its changing information and challenges while risking intense anger from a frustrated public most of who know little or nothing about science, and have no plans to learn about it.

And the federal system, which gives the states primary responsibility for public health, makes crafting a national response to the pandemic almost impossible.    

You try it!

Now on to the next variants….We won’t wipe out COVID-19. We’ll have to accept it as a long-term part of our environment while doing the best we can to mitigate its worst effects, and we cannot lead healthy lives spending so much of our time on, well, Zoom for one.

The world of a new normal awaits.

xxx

Let us hope that the United States does everything possible to stop, or at least make very painful, Russian gangster-in-chief Vladimir Putin’s plan to stage a massive armed attack on Ukraine. He’s already grabbed Ukraine’s Crimea and part of that besieged country’s east. Failure to act decisively against his fascist regime will encourage him to seek to turn the other fragile democracies on Russia’s eastern border into satellites of his empire.

Like many tyrants of big countries, Putin will keep extending his aggression as long as he thinks the cost-benefit analysis is in his favor.

A failure of will in Europe can only  weaken the United States everywhere, not only vis-a-vis Russia but also against other dictatorships, most importantly China, which is pushing for hegemony over all of Asia

What to do?

First, the U.S. and its NATO allies need to speed defensive weapons to Ukraine. This means anti-tank and anti-aircraft equipment and rapid training to use them. It also means much-enhanced cyber-weapon capability. The Russians have long used cyberweapons to confuse and sow discord in their foes, as they have succeeded in doing in the U.S., even helping put Putin toady Donald Trump in the White House.

But probably the single most effective move would be pressing European Union members to cancel the suicidal plan to buy yet more Russian natural gas (which finances Putin’s war machine), this time via the Nord Stream  2 pipeline. This project will make the  European democracies even more perilously vulnerable to economic blackmail by Moscow – blackmail that Putin is more than happy to use in his lust for more power and the wealth associated with it.

Note that the new pipeline would let Russia achieve its old aim of ending  Russian-gas transit through Ukraine, depriving it of $2 billion to $3 billion a year in transit revenue and cutting an important link between that country and the West.

And note that Putin has sent troops to Kazakhstan to help put down a mass nationwide revolt against its dictator, and Putin ally, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev.  The Russians and Kazakh security forces have shot dead many demonstrators. You could see Vlad the Great doing the same thing in eastern Europe to keep his anxious subservient allies there in charge.

The United States should take steps to speed shipments of liquefied natural gas to Europe to help Europe withstand Russian pressure while doing everything possible to help expand the European Union’s local alternative-energy sector over the next few years. (We sure need fusion energy fast!) Obviously, the more a nation’s energy generation is domestic the more secure it is. And it’s dangerous to depend on tyrannies.

Of course, while we try to protect democracy in Europe, we should recognize that our quasi-democracy in the U.S. itself is increasingly imperiled. But then, the federal system has long granted massive power to a minority of the population via the Electoral College and the composition of the U.S. Senate, gerrymandering effectively disenfranchises many people, and the deeply corrupt campaign-finance system gives immense political power to the increasingly multigenerational plutocracy that runs much of the country only for its own benefit. And the bulk of the Republican Party has been taken over by a lies-based cult led by a mobster of lethal public and personal corruption angling to be a fascist dictator.

The silence, cowardice and cynicism of much of the old center-right (which was my group when I was younger) in the face of the fascist threat is appalling. Indeed, some of its biggest campaign donors continue to give lots of money to Trump’s allies.

Political action committees for businesses including Koch Industries Inc., (natch!) Valero Energy Corp., United Parcel Service Inc., and Lockheed Martin Corp., together have given $16.1 million to the 147 Republican members of Congress who voted against certifying Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential election,  a Bloomberg analysis of Federal Election Commission disclosures show.

And rich, spoiled, arrogant,  amoral right-wing Ivy Leaguers are among those leading the way to autocracy.

Hit this link:

Looking forward to more high-end tax cuts and killing some environmental regulations?

It recalls the lines from W.B. Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming,’’ written in 1919 in the wake of the catastrophe of World War I and during the great flu epidemic of that time, which killed tens of millions:

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.’’

Another Reason to Bring Back the Draft

Something like the U.S. military draft should be brought back to give more young people a sense of common national purpose and a wider opportunity to learn about, and so empathize with, fellow citizens from a much wider range of backgrounds than most young people experience now.

It would also tend to dilute the troubling tendency of the current all-volunteer military to attract too many gun-obsessed far-right extremist young men.

Silly Schools

This note from a Connecticut boarding school is a display of that fragmenting thing, for a multiethnic semi-democracy, of identity politics:

“As we continue the important dialogue

among Taft’s BIPOC {Black and Indigenous People of Color} alumni and students,

we hope you will join us virtually

Thursday, January 13, 7pm EST

This event includes

Taft’s Pan-Asian Affinity Group,

Mosaics (Black/LatinX Female Affinity Group),

Shades (Black/LatinX Male Affinity Group),

and Somos (LatX Affinity Group)’’

Education should be almost entirely focused on people as individuals, not as members of groups.

In other academic craziness, Yale has told students, whom they have placed under quarantine until Feb. 7, that they:

“{M}ay not visit New Haven businesses or eat at local restaurants (even outdoors) except for curbside pickup.”

Does the university plan to send the campus cops around the city to arrest resisters at their tables?

Then we have Princeton University’s order:

“Beginning January 8 through mid-February, all undergraduate students who have returned to campus will not be permitted to travel outside of Mercer County or Plainsboro Township for personal reasons, except in extraordinary circumstances. … We’ll revisit and, if possible, revise this travel restriction by February 15.”

Will there be roadblocks at the county line?

This is ridiculous medical theater and lunatic in loco parentis that will have little or no effect on the spread of COVID, which is pretty much everywhere now anyway.

But it’s certainly a good way to create right-wingers.

Strawmania

The new Rhode Island law barring restaurants from handing out single-use plastic straws to customers unless they ask for them offers a reasonable, if small, way to reduce the plastic pollution that makes a mess of our environment, especially in how it kills much wildlife.

Paper straws are biodegradable and wood and metal straws are reusable. Use them instead of plastic ones.

xxx

Will car crashes and thus auto-insurance rates rise if Rhode Island legalizes recreational marijuana? I fear so.

Make It in America

The pandemic-pushed international supply-chain backup, especially of stuff from the world’s biggest factory—China (including its forced-labor camps) – is a constant reminder that America must bring home much more of its manufacturing, and indeed recent data suggest that may be happening. That’s good news for New England, with its high-value added small, medium, and large manufacturers.

And considering America’s national-security vulnerability regarding imports from a region that Chinese dictator Xi Jinping would like to turn into a much wider Middle Kingdom. For instance: The U.S. depends on Taiwan’s huge computer-chip industry even as Xi keeps threatening to invade the island democracy. Obviously, we need to get more of that industry back in the U.S. while finding other ways to economically and militarily support that stalwart (if diplomatically unofficial)  American ally and beacon of freedom.

What About the Long Term?

As Rhode Island’s state government finally starts distributing the first 10 percent of its $1.13 billion in American Rescue Plan money, something to watch is how much of the money addresses short-term and so immediately politically popular but fast-disappearing programs (e.g., bonuses for certain workers and small businesses) and how much (as in the Biden administration’s separate $1 trillion infrastructure program) goes to strengthen society for the long term.

Boarding-House Reach

Housing, its lack thereof, and its expense continue to be a big issue in Rhode Island. One way to alleviate the crisis in “affordable housing,’’ at least for single people, would be to encourage a revival of that old standby, the boarding house.

Or maybe call them dorms.

Put up buildings, subsidized or not, with one-bedroom units, each with a bathroom, bed, table, chair and utilities, including Internet.  Obviously, you could provide far more units than with a conventional apartment house, which would attract developers.

There could be a central kitchen, maybe on each floor, with food lockers for each tenant and maybe some central lounge/living room.

Such housing would be particularly handy for young or other single people, retirees, people in transitory service jobs, and those between long-term housing. Building them near public transit would make them even more useful.

It might even reduce, a little, the pressure for sprawl development that the pandemic has depressingly accelerated, especially with the rapid increase in remote work, while helping to moderate housing-cost inflation. This sprawling is chewing up yet more countryside, increasing air and water pollution and stressing municipalities trying to serve a population that’s becoming even more spread out and car-dependent.

Vegetarian Melting

Now that real winter seems to be here, at least for a few days, let’s lobby cities and towns to go easier on pouring rock salt on the roads during and after ice and snowstorms. This stuff is highly corrosive and its runoff pollutes local water supplies. And it hurts the feet of animals and kills plants.  Quite a few places are instead using a mix of beet extract (!) with brine. That’s been found to be a very effective melter and somewhat biodegradable.

xxx

The Feds are expected to approve a two-year experiment in free fares on several MBTA lines in Boston. That’s good news. Worcester’s experiment in free fares has been underway since the start of the pandemic and has just been extended another year. But trying it in a big city, with a dense public-transit system, such as Boston, is much more important.

A big question is how much savings from the resulting decline (if there is one) in car traffic, and thus less wear and tear, and fewer accidents, on the roads,  can offset the loss of fare revenue? There would also be less air pollution. Give it a try!

xxx

Might Rhode Island and Massachusetts, when they come out of the COVID crisis, take a closer look at Maryland, which since 2014 has set rates for all hospitals there, in a system that seems to have worked well.

Since then the state, which hosts such prestigious healthcare institutions as the Johns Hopkins University Medical School and its affiliated hospitals and the National Institutes of Health, has reduced some care costs, improved quality metrics and cut preventable admissions. 

In Todd AO!

The new, serialized TV version of Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days, which has started this month on PBS, reminds me of the wonderful 1956 adventure-comedy movie version, starring David Niven, and many other stars, mostly in cameos, of Jules Verne’s eponymous 1872-1873 novel. I saw it via the very-wide screen Todd AO process (Todd as in Mike Todd, the movie’s flamboyant producer) from the first balcony of a grand, ornate Boston movie house while gorging myself on butter-smothered popcorn washed down by Orange Crush. Going to the movies, I think, was much more of a thrill than now, especially a spectacular like this, even with the manic computer graphics that have taken over so much movie production in the past few decades.

The story has English gentleman Phileas Fogg of London and his French valet Passepartout trying to circumnavigate the world in 80 days on a wager of 20,000 pounds set by Mr. Fogg’s friends at the Reform Club.

The brilliant book and (often hilarious) movie highlight how technology was advancing rapidly in Victorian times, with faster railroads, whose schedules were set to increasingly orderly schedules, and steamships replacing sail.  Then, there’s the hot air balloons. I fondly recall Fogg and Passepartout scooping snow off the top of an alp for drinks as they drifted by.

Mike Todd’s death came in a 1958 plane crash. I can still hear in my head a newsboy for the old tabloid Record American near Jacob Wirth’s German restaurant (1868-2018), in downtown Boston, where my godfather had taken me to lunch, yelling “Extra, Extra! Mike Todd Killed in Air Crash!’’. He was the only one of legendary movie star Elizabeth Taylor’s seven husbands whom she didn’t divorce.

Pernicious Privatization; Two Urban Views

Two useful books:

The first is The Privatization of Everything: How the Plunder of Public Goods Transformed America and How We Can Fight Back, by Donald Cohen and Allen Mikaelian. It details how so much of our public services and physical infrastructure have been taken for private profit to the detriment of public services and democracy in recent decades.

The other book, The Battle for Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs, by Roberta Brandes Gratz, discusses the wildly different approaches of the autocratic city and state official Moses, who happily pushed wide divided highways and huge, sterile public-housing projects into neighborhoods, some of them once vibrant, and neighborhood-preservation advocate Jacobs, with her organic view of urban development, as you can read in her classic book The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

On Moses, it must be said that he led the creation of some terrific parks.

Related Articles

• Whitcomb: After Afghanistan; Time Passing Them By; Extreme Localism
• Whitcomb: Law and Order; Summer Challenges; High-Level Risk Takers; A Real Meritocracy?
• Whitcomb: Would They Pay for It? Hurricane Hype; Unsightly Lines; ‘God Is Not Great’
• Whitcomb: Three Connected Stories; Inside Farming; Offshore Angst; Natural Cities
• Whitcomb: Our Amazon Basin; Letter for Spreaders; More Melting, Please; Churchillian Psychodrama
• Whitcomb: Lost Opportunity; Too-Wide Streets; Getting Physical; Newport at Season’s Height
• Whitcomb: Intimations of an Ending; Always on Camera; Therapy for Tax Trauma?
• Whitcomb: Bombs Away! School Meritocracies; Parasitical N.H.; Nimbys vs. Coastal Crops
• Whitcomb: The Paranoid Style; More Audits, Please; Plants Under the Panels; Socialite Stress
• Whitcomb: Jobs and Character; Income Supports; Singles in the Jewelry District; Profitable Lies
• Whitcomb: Outdoor Angst; Wave Art; Goat Dairies; Viral Ignorance; Remembering Sundlun
• Whitcomb: Rewilding of the Suburbs; History on the Blackstone; Gambling for More State Revenue
• Whitcomb: Fusion Future; Litigation Traffic Jams; Depressing College ‘Bookstores’; Floors Over Water
• Whitcomb: Season’s Greetings; And Public Good? Releasing Sociopaths; In Search of Rich Patients
• Whitcomb: Rinks, Roads and Bathrooms; Putting on the Old Ritz; Dictators’ Delight; Grave Matters
• Whitcomb: Baker Had Enough; Affordable-Housing Challenge: Cuomo Crash; Fusion Factories; Fauci Abuse
• Whitcomb: Winter Wonderland, for a While; Judeo-Christmas Songs; Masking Not Over; Mini-Warehousing
• Whitcomb: The Apex Opportunity; Christmas-Display Inflation; The Silent Treatment; Tip of the Hat
• Whitcomb: Outboards Over Oysters; Ocean Plastics Lab; Inflation Then and Now; Belarussian/Russian
• Whitcomb: Paring Down; Lost Amusements; Nice Idea but Not Near Us; Into the ‘Meta’ Maze
• Whitcomb: The Diner Republic; At least a Few Voted; Higher-Price Panorama; Flood Fun
• Whitcomb: Port Opportunity? Food-Sector Engine; Disorganized Democrats; Accents
• Whitcomb: Employers’ Rights; Meet SAM; Censorship at MIT; Another ‘Twilight Struggle’
• Whitcomb: Countryside Protection; Down With This Duopoly; Building Early Equity; Working Waterfronts
• Whitcomb: Don’t Burden the Responsible; Backyard ‘Little Houses’ and Other State Stuff

Enjoy this post? Share it with others.