PBS retaliates against Harper's after negative article

  PBS, whose Vatican is Boston's WGBH and  which increasingly targets its programming  to  affluent old people, has cancelled an ad in Harper's Magazine that discusses the Koch family's powerful role in PBS and the network's increasing separation from middle-and lower-inc0me people. The retaliation comes after an article in Harper's discussed what the author sees as PBS's timidity and moral decline.

Jim Hightower: Marriott asks guests to supplement its slave wages

Courtesy of OtherWords.org

Just when you thought the plutocratic profiteers running America’s exploitative, low-wage economy couldn’t get any more clueless, self-serving, pious, and mingy — along comes Lady Maria of Marriott, magnanimously saying: “Let them eat tips.”

Marriott International supports the political notion that America is divided between a few noble “makers” (like them) and a mass of “takers” (you, me, and the rest of us). Its approximately 4,000 hotels in 78 countries and territories have more than 690,000 rooms and operate under 18 different brand names that range from plebeian chains like Fairfield Inn & Suites to the luxury Ritz-Carlton properties.

The company hauled in nearly $13 billion in revenue last year.

Yet the extravagantly rich Marriott domain is a miserly employer that fattens its profits by paying its hard-working housekeepers poverty-level wages of roughly $8.32 an hour.

Enter Maria Shriver, grandly offering to boost the pay of Marriott’s 22,000 North American housekeepers. A pay raise, perhaps? Oh, tut-tut — the moneyed elites prefer charitable gestures to straightforward populist remedies.

So Shriver’s foundation has “partnered” with the far-flung hotel empire to reduce its low-wage housekeepers to begging for alms from Marriott customers. The corporate giant has adopted Shriver’s noblesse oblige with its “the envelope please” program that consists of putting an envelope in each room asking customers to subsidize its employees’ wages with tips.

The envelope even scolds customers, saying: “The hard work (of room attendants) is many times overlooked when it comes to tipping.”

Hello — Marriott is the one deliberately overlooking the hard work of its own workers. This is a disgraceful and embarrassing exercise in corporate feudalism. Come on, just pay a decent wage.

Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer and public speaker. He’s also editor of the  newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown. This originated on OtherWords.org

Your papers are not in order

"Archway'' (oil on canvas), by LESTER JOHNSON, in show "Classical Themes,'' at ACME Fine Art,  Boston.

Seeking resolution

 

"Ledge and Resolution,'' by LOUISE BOURNE, in the show "By Turns,'' at Alpers Fine Art,  Andover, Mass., through Nov. 16.

William E. Colleran: The ups and downs of another felonious mayor

Vincent A. “Buddy” Cianci Jr. is not the only twice-convicted felon to “throw his hat in the ring” for mayor of a capital city.  I give you the story of James Michael Curley of Boston.  This comparison is all the more interesting to me as I recalled a family story which follows in due course.

Curley’s career of political machinations and corruption is ably cataloged in Jack Beatty’s Rascal King: the life and times of James Michael Curley, 1874-1958.   That book and Mike Stanton’s 2003 exposé on Buddy Cianci,  The Prince of Providence, made my summer reading list!

During his six decades at the public trough, James Michael Curley was a four-term mayor of Boston, a congressman twice, governor, state representative and city alderman.  He was known for his glib tongue, barbed ripostes and ostentatious lifestyle.  Like Cianci, he used the power of the office to settle personal scores and enrich himself.

As to Curley’s felonies, unlike Cianci, they were not committed while serving as mayor. Curley’s long political career was book-ended with criminal convictions and curiously, the Kennedy family.  In 1904, while serving as a Boston alderman, Curley was convicted of mail fraud when he took and passed a postal examination for a friend.  Seemingly harmless, it was indeed a federal crime; and he served two months in the Charles Street jail.

Curley’s political star soared and he was elected to Congress in 1910.  While still in Congress, he ran for mayor of Boston in 1914 against the incumbent John Fitzgerald, ''Honey Fitz, '' the maternal grandfather of John F. Kennedy.  It was a formidable task, so Curley resorted to blackmail!   Honey Fitz was having a dalliance with a dancer named Toodles.  Photographs of the two were shown to his family and he withdrew from the election citing health reasons.  Thus began Curley’s first of four mayoral stints.

Curley lived an opulent life well beyond his mayor’s salary.  His mansion on the Jamaica Way with shamrock cutouts on the shutters, was financed by skimming and shady dealings with city contractors.

As to my story, my grandfather was raised in Loughrea, County Galway.  He left for America as a teen in 1887 and was followed by his younger sister Jenny -- my great-aunt.  In 1907 Jenny married a Tom Hynes, also of Loughrea, and settled in Boston, where she ran a boarding house while he was a porter at the Harvard Club. They were childless.

Tom's brother lost his wife and was left with a young child; and therein lies my tale.  Jenny raised young John until his father remarried.  Time passed and John served in World War I, went to night law school and got a job in Boston City Hall.  Jenny and Tom returned to Loughrea in the 1925 .

After a single term as governor of the Bay State,  in 1935-37, Curley spent  some time in the political wilderness. But he ran and was elected to Congress again in 1942.  During his second term in Congress, while running for mayor, he was indicted for federal mail fraud.

In 1947, Curley was sent to the slammer for the second time, City Clerk John B. Hynes, the aforementioned John Hynes, became the acting mayor of Boston.  The City Charter devolved the power of mayor to the City Clerk.

Upon his release ,  after five months, Curley, now a twice-convicted felon, returned to serve out his term.   Hynes had served as a caretaker reserving to the mayor major decisions upon his return.  Curley dismissively said:  “I have accomplished more in one day than has been done in the five months of my absence”.

Hynes returned to his position of city clerk.  Stung by Curley’s public rebuke, he bided his time.  In 1950, backed by a bipartisan group, he took on Curley in the mayoral election and soundly defeated him!

Mayor Hynes would go on to serve four terms and Boston experienced  the start of a renaissance under his calm, steady hand.  The eponymous John B. Hynes Convention Center is testimony to that revival.

In 1953, after defeating Curley again, Mayor Hynes visited Loughrea.  He was greeted by local dignitaries, his uncle Tom, and Jenny’s family.  My wife, Julie,  and I visited Loughrea in 2010 and visited the Carmelite Cemetery where Tom and Jenny are at rest a few yards from the grave of my great-grandparents.

The voters of Boston rejected four decades of corruption and venality and turned instead to the future.  May Providence voters, who have suffered through a similar period, profit from their example.

William Colleran, a retired engineer and longtime good-government activist,  lives in Bristol.

Postscript from Robert Whitcomb: Jim Curley had a brilliant pol's memory for names and faces. My paternal grandfather met Curley once in the '20s. He next met him in the late 40's. Curley's first question to my grandfather was "Henry, how is Margaret? '' -- referring to  his wife, my grandmother.

My grandfather, a Yankee Republican  (the other side of my family were Midwesterners of French and Scottish ancestry) who  generally detested big city machines and the sort of people like Curley who ran them,  was impressed!  He spoke of Curley as something of a genius.)

Many readers will remember Edwin O'Connor's book The Last Hurrah and the movie of the same name,  which starred Spencer Tracy as the Curley figure.  It greatly romanticized the life of a narcissistic crook. Still, it's true that his mayoral regime did help many  of his impoverished supporters during tough economic times for New England, especially when he served as mayor in the early '30s, in the worst of the  Great Depression.

Jim Hightower: America's rich fake farmers

We know from the childhood song that Old MacDonald had a farm. But e-i-e-i-o — look who’s got his farm now. It’s outfits like American Farmland, Farmland Partners, and BlackRock.

These aren’t dirt farmers wearing overalls and muddy boots. They’re Wall Street hucksters in Armani suits and Gucci loafers.

The latest fast-buck fad for high-roller investment trusts, hedge funds, and venture capital speculators is “farming.” Not that these dude ranch dandies are actually plowing and planting.

No, no — these are soft-hands people, buying up farmland with billions of rich investors’ dollars, then tilling the tax laws and threshing the farmers who do the real cultivation.

For example, American Farmland Company — which owns 16 farms — is a combine of the largest real estate empire in New York City, two Florida sugar barons, a wealth management outfit, and the real estate brokerage arm of insurance giant Prudential.

None of these nouveau sodbusters has a speck of dirt under their fingernails, but they’ve figured out how to work the land without touching it and still harvest a sweet profit. The founder of this scheme says “It’s like gold, but better, because there is this cash flow.”

Cash flow? Yes, farmers are charged rent to till the Wall Streeters’ land. Then the financiers get a prime cut of any profits from the crops that the farmers produce. Also, the combine is set up as a real estate investment trust, providing an enormous tax break for the Wall Street plowboys.

And, of course, there’s the mega-pay the moneyed elites will reap when they convert their scheme into securities for sale on the stock exchange.

A few rich speculators get richer, farmers are turned into sharecrop laborers, and farms are switched to high-profit crops that require heavy pesticide dosages and soak up scarce water resources. Other than that, this is one hell of a deal.

OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker. He’s also editor of the populist newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown.  This is distributed by other OtherWords.org

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Reconstructing history

 

Sculpture  by SARA FINE-WILSON in her part of the "Gaze and Extension'' show Fountain Street Fine Art,  Framingham, through Nov. 2. Her art, says the gallery, explores breaking down things and "then rebuilding them multiple times as a way to create history in visual form.''

Buddy Cianci's management style

  Read this entertaining and dismaying chapter about Buddy Cianci from Phil West's new book, Secrets & Scandals: Reforming Rhode Island, 1986-2006.

Be a clown

''1589 VFW Pkwy'' (mixed medium on wood panel), by SAM EARLE, in his show "Circus,'' at Adelson Galleries, Boston, through Oct. 14.

The gallery says "Sam Earle’s mixed media paintings are composed of tediously layered, hand-painted transfers on hollow-core wood panels. He embellishes some images with tacks that are painted over, and then glazed with acrylic. The extensive process of his paintings reflects the eclectic nature of the artist’s inspirations. Earle’s works range in subject from circus themes to elements of antiquity mixed with his own icons and invented symbols.''

''Circus'' plays with the  advertisements for a once  loved pastime.

Who could forget the turtles and lizards in those Chinese-restaurant takeout boxes  you'd take home from the circus to die? And the smell of cotton candy, popcorn,  orange soda and  manure.

Promises, promises

  In 1997 the Communist dictatorship in Bejing promised the people of Hong Kong that they'd have local autonomy, including electing their own officials, after the British colony was forced to rejoin China. In 1994, Russia, then a corrupt democracy and now a corrupt dictatorship, promised not to use force or threaten to use force against Ukraine in return for Ukraine giving up its nuclear weapons.

We know how both these promises worked out. You can bet that no country is going to give up its nuclear weapons. any time soon. And Taiwan is even more unlikely than before to join  China on the basis of the promise that Beijing would allow the people of Taiwan their own democracy.

Dictators think promises are a joke.

Lisa Petrie: The great delusion of natural gas

courtesy of ecoRI  News

Can anyone tell me why it’s called “natural” gas? Sure, it comes from the remains of long-dead plants and animals, just like coal and oil — so yes, in a sense, it’s natural — as long as it stays deep underground. But there’s nothing natural about drilling down thousands of feet, then drilling horizontally in all directions for thousands more, and all the while pumping in millions of gallons of water laced with toxic chemicals.

Why don’t we say “natural” coal or “natural” oil? Maybe it’s because, when they came on the scene, they didn’t have to masquerade as something good for the environment.

The natural-gas industry, seeing the writing on the wall about the future of fossil fuels, has tried to market its product as the exception — the not-so-dirty fossil fuel that can serve as a “bridge” to a clean-energy future. It’s a comforting notion, but is it true?

Spectra Energy is proposing to expand its Algonquin pipeline, which carries fracked gas from the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania to Massachusetts. The project calls for the buildout of a compressor station in Burrillville,  R.I,, which would result in increased air pollution and noise for local residents, as well as a greater risk of explosions all along the pipeline because of the increased pressure and volume of gas being transported.

But, serious as these risks are, they are not my main concern.

The price tag for this project would be nearly $1 billion, and we the consumers, would  ultimately foot the bill. Before we spend more of our hard-earned money on this bridge, let’s take a closer look.

The International Energy Agency — hardly a radical environmental group — warned in 2011 that “anything built from now on that produces carbon will do so for decades, and this ‘lock-in’ effect will be the single most important factor increasing the danger of runaway climate change.” Looks like this bridge is too long.

What’s more, do we really believe we can grow a for-profit industry like natural gas, use it to supplement renewable energy while we bring the latter up to scale, and then just say “sayonara” when we’re done with it? Is that how it’s worked, for instance, with the oil industry? Oil and coal are “bridge fuels,” too — bridges from our pre-industrial past to our post-carbon future — but somehow we seem to have stayed on them for too long. Why is that? Could it be because those industries have been spending millions to block the exits?

Finally, we need to ask, where is this bridge taking us? The industry boasts that gas burns twice as clean as coal. But, when you take into account the methane that leaks into the atmosphere during the extraction, processing and transport phases, suddenly gas doesn’t look so much better for the climate than coal. Methane is a greenhouse gas that’s 34 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a 100-year period, and far worse — 86 times more potent — over 20 years.

Most comparisons have focused on the longer time frame, tilting the balance in favor of natural gas, but the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — the world’s leading authority on climate change — recently declared that “there is no scientific basis” for using the 100-year timeframe rather than 20 years.

In fact, Anthony Ingraffea, a professor of engineering at Cornell University, says that natural gas is a “climate bomb with greater potential impact than the Alberta tar sands.” Greenhouse-gas expert Robert Howarth warns that if we fail to control methane emissions, we’ll cross the threshold for runaway global warming in 15-35 years, even with drastic cuts in carbon dioxide emissions.

OK, you might say, but what are the alternatives? Aren’t we still many decades away from being able to meet all of our energy needs with renewables? That may be true, as long as we keep doubling down on fossil fuels. In fact, the ready supply of cheap natural gas will likely slow the growth of renewable energy.

But, once we decide to roll up our sleeves and start building for the future instead of clinging to the past, it won’t take long. According to researchers at Stanford University and the University of California, Davis, the world can meet all of its energy needs with renewables by 2030 — just 16 years from now — if we put our minds to it.

Renewable energy has come down in price dramatically and will likely be cheaper than fossil fuels, even without subsidies, in about six years. The renewable-energy revolution is already underway; the biggest obstacle isn’t energy storage, long-distance transmission, or even land use — it’s the fossil-fuel industry. Perhaps we don’t really want or need that bridge after all.

Why am I writing this, you may be wondering? What’s my stake in this issue? That’s a fair question. I am a stay-at-home-mom-turned-volunteer-climate-activist. I have two sons and 7 billion brothers and sisters, we only have one planet — that’s why this matters to me. Runaway global warming is not the legacy I want to leave my sons.

But perhaps you struggle to heat your home in the winter and you’re hoping  that this pipeline  would bring lower gas prices, or maybe you are concerned about the economy and jobs. If so, then you deserve to know that the main purpose of this pipeline isn’t to bring more natural gas to New England; the main purpose is to ship it overseas.

The Algonquin pipeline connects to the Maritimes & Northeast pipeline, which has applied to expand and also reverse its flow from north to south, carrying gas from the Marcellus Shale — via the Algonquin pipeline — up to Goldboro, Nova Scotia, where a new export terminal is to be built. Sure, there might still be enough gas to meet winter demand in New England, but instead of paying less for natural gas, as promised, we’ll be paying more, because we’ll be competing with international markets, where natural-gas prices can be more than twice as high as in the United States.

And, with increased gas exports, the market will be globalized like the oil market, making arguments about U.S. energy security or energy independence irrelevant. The only path to true energy independence and energy security is to cut demand and transition to locally controlled renewable energy.

This project is unnecessary, it would lock us into dependence on fossil fuels for decades to come, and would fail to deliver the promised benefits of lower gas prices, energy independence or energy security.  It would, however, increase the profits of Spectra Energy and the natural-gas industry.

The fossil-fuel industry has hoodwinked Americans too many times already with promises of cheap, abundant and safe energy; let’s not be taken in again. This project is under review by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). You can register your opposition by signing the petitions for Rhode Island and for the region.

Lisa Petrie , of Richmond, R.I., is the chairwoman of the Green Task Force at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of South County and a member of Fossil Free Rhode Island.

Creating a network of community health workers

   http://lnkd.in/dxP4z7Y

Hear/see this video in which national healthcare reformer Marc Pierson, M.D., describes how to create a network of community health workers.

Health is much more than medicine!

Don Pesci: In Conn., the fine art of insincerity

VERNON, Conn

Most commentators in Connecticut seem to trust the Quinnipiac Poll. The latest Q poll shows Republican gubernatorial challenger Tom Foley leading Gov. Dannel Malloy by about six percentage points. The same poll shows Independent gubernatorial challenger Joe Visconti capturing about 7 percent of the vote, and that 7 percent represents the ants in the pants of Foley supporters who point out that, during the last gubernatorial go-around, Mr. Foley lost to Mr. Malloy by a very thin margin. The Q poll also points out that Mr. Visconti appears to be drawing equally from Republicans and Democrats, so that his effect on the general election would appear to be a wash.

Still, Republicans are nervous, and Democrats are pleased that Mr. Visconti – unlike Jon Pelto, a Democratic Independent who earlier withdrew from the gubernatorial race – is still stubbornly plugging along. Mr. Visconti’s position on taxes and education is indistinguishable from that of Mr. Pelto, whose position on taxes is indistinguishable from that of Leon Trotsky. Both Mr. Pelto and Mr. Visconti see an increase in taxes as inevitable. Mr. Pelto would hammer the rich in Connecticut by making the state income tax more progressive. There are a number of resurgent Republican conservatives in Connecticut who believe that Mr. Pelto is exactly what the doctor ordered for Connecticut’s billionaires, many of whom continue to toss campaign contributions in the direction of progressives determined to use the contributions to purchase the rope with which they will hang the dupable contributors.

Mr. Pelto and conservative Republicans in Connecticut both oppose Common Core for different reasons. Conservatives dislike Common Core – or, as some of them call it, Common Gore – because it is a federally imposed standard that violates the principle of subsidiarity, which holds that educational decisions should be made by the smallest political unit affected by political decisions: Towns, rather than state and federal governments, should decide how best to shape public and private schools. Mr. Pelto dislikes Common Core because he perceives enforced national standards as a threat to hegemonic teacher unions. Mr. Pelto’s venom tap was turned on by Mr. Malloy, who sneered that, because of tenure, teachers only had to “show up on the job” to continue to miseducate urban school children. Mr. Malloy and other Common Core adepts would change all that once national standards had been put in place. Mr. Malloy since has had second thoughts.

The correlation of political forces in Connecticut, little understood by Connecticut’s media, has not changed since 1991 when former maverick Gov.  Lowell Weicker festooned the state with an income tax. It was the fashion in Connecticut before and after the age of Weicker to insist that Connecticut, a small but rich state, had no spending problem; rather, Connecticut had a revenue problem that became apparent whenever red ink appeared in its budgets. Any deficit could be discharged by a sufficient increase in revenues. Mr. Pelto clings to the same notion today. So do other progressives -- including Mr. Malloy, however much he insists that he has no plans to increase taxes -- so do most political writers in the state.

Since 1991, Connecticut’s forward progress has been thwarted by progressives who now man all the political high ground in the state. Progressives run the governor’s office, all the Constitutional offices in Connecticut, the entire U.S. Congressional Delegation, both Houses of Connecticut’s General Assembly, and they have captured all these office from moderate Republicans who had never effectively challenged Democrats on social issues. Democratic moderates also have disappeared. For this reason, any effective challenge to Democratic political hegemony in Connecticut must come from right of center Republicans who in the past have been quietly strangled in their cribs by left of center forces.

There is an additional problem.  In the absence of strong state political parties, which have been weakened for many years by campaign finance reform, state political campaigns have been “other directed” by professional armies of political architects that provide strategy and laundered money to candidates.  In the new political dispensation, every candidate is his own political party, multiple dog tails wagging the Democratic or Republican Party apparatus. In such circumstances, political campaigns become detached from political practices, and a measure of deceit is accepted that not so long ago would have sunk duplicitous campaigns.

Given the level of duplicity in political campaigns, saying what you mean and then doing what you say itself becomes a revolutionary act that cannot be tolerated by incumbents who have become practiced in the fine art of insincerity. This crooked politicking alone accounts for the inattention of voters who hunger for authenticity; they are unwilling to sanction with their votes the obvious duplicity of shamelessly duplicitous politicians.

 

Don Pesci  (donpesci@att.com) is a  political writer who lives in Vernon.

A working waterfront

  See "Portraits of  a Working Waterfront'' in Gloucester, Mass.

David Warsh: Of plane crashes and hyper-computerization

  BOSTON

The course in introductory computer science at Harvard College this year surpassed elementary economics in popularity. It has 818 enrollments, or nearly 12 percent of the undergraduate population, compared to 711 students in Economics 10. For most of the last  30 years, the economics course has been the catalog’s top offering.

The swing probably reflects the expert showmanship of computer scientist David Malan more than any underlying change in the relative importance of the fields. (See this eye-opening account of Malan’s entrepreneurial flair by Cordelia Mendez, and/or read a defense of it by Malan’s colleague Harry Lewis.) But the surge of interest in computers surely also reflects desire on the part of undergraduates to understand better whatever happens next, especially in the sorts of fields they think they might like to enter.

It is a conviction among many computer scientists that when (not if) the generalizable knowledge representation problem is solved, a new wave of expert systems will quickly emerge, enabling robot software to displace human  doctors, lawyers, bankers, teachers, pilots, and, of course, taxi drivers in performing a wide range of their customary tasks.

An especially good meditation on this uncertain future has just appeared.  The Glass Cage: Automation and Us (Norton), by Nicholas Carr, stipulates that software has cut costs, decreased workloads and enhanced safety.  But, warns Carr, it has also eroded skills, dulled perceptions, slowed reactions and produced a “glass cage” of complacency about automation – a cage that he aims to break.

A case in point. Carr’s book includes a wonderful account of the first appearance, almost exactly a hundred years ago, of a technology whose evolution since is of great interest to him.  The scene was the Paris Air Show, June 18, 1914 – an event designed then, as now, to showcase the latest developments in aviation.

Piloting a Curtis bi-plane that day was Lawrence Sperry, son of inventor Elmer Sperry.  Flying with him was his mechanic, Emil Cachin. On the first low pass before the grandstand. Sperry held his hands aloft.  Remarkable! The plane was flying itself.

On the second pass, Cachin had climbed out to stand alone on one wing. Again, no hands, despite the change in wind resistance. On the third pass, Sperry, too, had climbed out of the cockpit to stand on the other wing. Carr writes, “The crowd and the judges were dumbfounded.”

Beneath the vacant pilot’s seat was Elmer Sperry’s “gyroscopic stabilizer apparatus,” a pair of gyroscopes, installed horizontally and vertically and powered by the wind, the controllers of history’s first autopilot.  “Sperry won the grand prize – fifty thousand francs – and the next day his face beamed from the front pages of newspapers across Europe.”

Fast-forward to Air France Flight 447, Rio de Janeiro to Paris, June 1, 2009. You remember the story. The Airbus A330 encountered a storm in mid-Atlantic in the middle of the night.  The Pitot tubes, its air-speed sensors, iced up, the autopilot disengaged, and the co-pilot who took control, thinking he was going too slow, pulled back on the yoke and put the plane into a stall. Instead of reversing himself to pick up speed (or simply letting go to permit the plane to fly itself), he continued to try to climb. The pilot sought to take control but it was too late. The plane fell 30,000 feet into the ocean.

Carr rehearses the history of the design competition between Airbus and Boeing over the  30 years since computer-controlled “fly by wire” techniques (as opposed to traditional cables, pulleys and gears) were introduced. Airbus pursued a technology-centered approach to render its planes “pilot-proof,” designing software system that in some cases overruled commonly made pilot errors. Boeing, in contrast, embraced computer control of airplane surfaces, but kept the aviator at the center of its systems. Significantly, it retained bulky old-fashioned front-mounted yokes in contrast to the smaller side-mounted game-controller-like devices with which Airbus pilots steered their planes.  Carr writes:

Airbus makes magnificent planes.  Some commercial pilots prefer them to Being’s jets, and the safety records of the two manufacturers are pretty much identical. But recent incidents reveal the shortcomings of Airbus’s technology-centered approach.

Some aviation experts believe that the design of the Airbus cockpit played a part in the Air France disaster.  The voice-recorder transcript revealed that the whole time the [co]pilot controlling the plane, Pierre-Cédric Bonin, was pulling back on his sidestick, his co-pilot [captain] David Robert, was oblivious to Bonin’s fateful mistake. In a Boeing cockpit, each pilot has a clear view of the other pilot’s yoke, and how it’s being handled.  If that weren’t enough, the two yokes operate as a single unit.  If one pilot pulls back on his yoke, the other pilot’s goes back too.  Through both visual and haptic [tactile] cues, the pilots stay in synch.

Airbus sidesticks, in contrast, are not in clear view, they work with much subtler motions,, and they operate independently.  It’s easy for a pilot to miss what his colleague is doing, particularly in emergencies when stress rises and focus narrows.

Design differences like these in particular products will be resolved over time, but the differences in philosophy that the story reveals are ubiquitous, and often important on a systemic scale. Carr concludes:

As computer systems and software applications come to play an ever larger role in shaping our lives and the world, we have an obligation to be more, not less involved in decisions about their design and use – before technological momentum forecloses the options. We should be careful about what we make.

Thus the appeal of computer science, especially to those just starting out on their careers. Economics, too, has much to say about these matters, under the heading, at least at first, of recent work on the diffusion of general-purpose technologies (steam, chemistry, electricity, computers, biotechnology). After that come the deeper social mysteries of the nature of work itself.  Expect those enrollments to remain high. There will be plenty of opportunity teaching and writing about robotology.

David Warsh, a longtime financial journalist and an economic historian, is principal of

www.economicprincipals.com.

William Morgan: New England's glorious temples of transport

A Sunday autumn afternoon ramble about an antique shop in Concord, Mass., produced the  two images below of magnificent but long-lost railroad stations.

For two lousy bucks, I got to marvel at the duo of huge temples of transportation and potent symbols of 19th-Century New England wealth. I could also contemplate the stupidity of our county nearly abandoning  passenger rail service as it engaged in the folly of tearing down  gorgeous parts of our architectural patrimony. The railroad station in the New Hampshire capital –a Victorian pile worthy an industrial city in the English Midlands – was razed for a shopping center in 1960. Once one of the most powerful companies in the region, the Boston and Maine Railroad went bankrupt a decade later.

Boston and Maine Railroad Station, Concord, N.H.

Union Station in Worcester was far grander, with giant covered sheds and a 200-foot-high tower that was a combination of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence and a Hanseatic bourse. Built for the Boston and Albany Railroad in 1875, Union Station was torn down in 1911.

Although falling short of its abandoned predecessor,  and looking like the legislative building or presidential palace of a banana republic, the pompous new terminal at least attempted a civic statement. It would seem nigh on impossible to surpass the splendor of the post-Civil War cathedral of transportation.

Union Station, Worcester, torn down in 1911.

The current Union Station,  Worcester.

Entropy in the neighborhood

"Cosmos 1'' (mixed media), by CLAUDINE BING, in her show with Justine Freed, "Rhythms of the Universe: A Multimedia Collaboration,'' at Galatea Fine Art, Boston, Nov. 1-30.

There's a lovely little essay by Bill Miller in today's Boston Globe about life's flux and erosions, including of social relationships. This one is set in the affluent Boston suburb of Wellesley. (He now lives in the affluent exurb of Sherborn.)

"Like many events in our lives, we didn't see it coming. So we were kind of shellshocked when we exchanged sad goodbyes to the last family in the original neighborhood.'' Of course it is always coming, as is its analog death. Mr. Miller, like most people of his age, probably knows more dead people than living.

Something to think about walking  sidewalks  covered with yellow, crinkly leaves that have fallen more out of drought and  tree fatigue than cold.

Only 'the squirrel' is gone

  The interview on Rhode Island Public Radio last Friday was a vivid expression of Vincent Cianci's character. It was filled with lies, half-truths,  some good quips, historical revisionism, endless evasions, arrogance and industrial-strength narcissism as he tried to monopolize all the air time by talking over and interrupting his questioners.

The interview confirmed that the man, now 73, has not changed.  The ''squirrel'' on his head is gone, but he's the same old guy.  At least in the motor-mouth department, he has the energy of   a much younger man.

He constantly implies  that he  was the sole author of the "Providence Renaissance'' while that in fact was due to a national economic revival (which lasted more on than off from 1983-2007),  changing regional demographics, a new popularity  of medium-size and large cities with the sort of cultural institutions and location that Providence has and the efforts of such leaders as John Chafee, Bruce Sundlun, Lincoln Almond , designer Bill Warner and certain  local academic and business leaders.

Their work offset some of the destruction done by the corruption of Cianci and the crooks he placed in some key positions as he kept much of the ill-informed populace amused by his wisecracks (which can be heard from any number of tough Northeast pols; I heard variants of his jokes living in Brooklyn, Philadelphia and Boston over the years).

Plenty of cities revived from the mid-80's on, some with good bad mayors, some with crooks such  as Cianci. Technology, demographics, economic and cultural cycles and other factors play huge roles in the rise/fall/rise of all cities. We  tend to lazily  give to one person the credit or blame for all change n their jurisdictions,  be it the president in national and international matters or the mayor in local ones.

The news media, and the general population, just  can't seem to get away from the cult of personality.

So here we go again in Providence.

Meanwhile,  we fear that Mr. Cianci  plans massive giveaways to public employees of the sort that he pushed before.  No wonder he got the endorsements of the police, fire and teachers unions. (Note that many of their members do not live in Providence and so won't have to pay the bill for Mr. Cianci's promises.)

Can we look forward to more such Cianci-era  concoctions  as ''cost-of-living''  adjustments for public pensioners at three times the inflation rate and more early retirements? So in the end,  the amusing Dr. Daniel Harrop, the psychiatrist who is the Republican candidate for mayor, may be proven right: The city should go into bankruptcy and start all over again, a la Detroit.

The leadership of the police union, in particular, has humiliated its membership by endorsing a man who broke laws   that they are sworn to uphold and who presided over industrial-strength corruption in his police department. Not a great way to get the respect of the public.

-- Robert Whitcomb

There's a public-safety emergency in Providence

 Should you call 911?   Well, maybe.  

There is a crime in progress in Providence: Vincent Cianci is running for mayor, and, as of last week, he was winning.   So call 911?   Maybe not, if you live in Providence or you just happen to be passing through. That’s because the union representing the police officers who might be coming to help wants the Providence police force to be controlled by a twice-convicted criminal.  

 In fact, both the police and firefighters unions in Providence have endorsed Cianci in the three-way race for mayor of the capital city.   It sounds like another Rhode Island bad joke, but it’s not.   The men and women who enforce the law in Providence are recommending that a crook be the mayor of their city. The officers of the law want to be led by a lawbreaker. The man with the badge is backing the man who’s been in the can.   People with arrest powers want a twice-convicted felon calling the shots. They want a felon to appoint their chief; they’re hoping a crook will name a city solicitor and run the law department.

The cops’ Most Wanted Man is one with a record.   Cianci is not funny anymore; he’s leading in the polls.   Whom should you call instead of 911?  

 Call AAA.   Call the Institute for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence. Call the Democratic State Committee. Call your parish priest and the Rhode Island State Council of Churches, the bishop of Providence, the Rhode Island Board of Rabbis, the Providence Rotary, the Economic Policy Institute, the U.S. attorney, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.

Call the AFL-CIO, the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, the Service Employees International Union and the United Nurses and Allied Professionals.   Call the Rhode Island Boys and Girls Clubs, Trinity Repertory, Gamm Theatre, 2nd Story Theatre, the Unitarians, the Tea Party, the Rhode Island Community Food Bank, the Lions Club, the Kiwanis, the League of Women Voters, the Rhode Island League of Cities and Towns, the Republican Party, House of Hope, Crossroads, Channel 12, Leadership Rhode Island, the Young Democrats, the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce, Rhode Island Public Radio and talk radio.   

Call Verizon, Cox and Sprint. Call Lifespan and Care New England and all of the hospitals. Call the Visiting Nurses, the Ironworkers, the Steelworkers and the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority. Call Gov. Lincoln Chafee, House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello and Senate President Teresa Paiva Weed. Call the Providence Bruins, The Providence Journal, the Rhode Island State Police. Call the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts.  

 Call the presidents of Brown University, Providence College, Moses Brown, the Wheeler School, Rhode Island College, Bryant, Roger Williams, Salve Regina, and Johnson and Wales universities and the University of Rhode Island. Call your neighbors. Call the next governor, Gina Raimondo or Allan Fung.  And don’t forget to call your mother.   

In fact, call the Fraternal Order of Police and the Firefighters Union, and tell them it’s not too late to go straight.   But do something. 

Whether you live in Providence or not, Rhode Island’s capital is too important for its residents, as well as for the rest of Rhode Island, to stay silent. It’s time to speak up. Tell everyone to stand up and to be counted, to raise a chorus that can be heard in every precinct and ward in the city of Providence, in every city and town hall in Rhode Island, that we do not want Vincent Cianci ever again to operate our capital city as a criminal enterprise.   

Should you call 911 in the event of an emergency?   Maybe. But if a Providence policeman or a Providence policewoman answers the call, tell him or her not to bring in the man their union wants as the next mayor.   Then call the Rhode Island Expenditure Council, Operation Clean Government and Common Cause.

And all of us, let’s call on our own common sense.   

Brian C. Jones is a book author, freelance writer and former Providence Journal reporter.

Robert Whitcomb: A civic celebration and a cruise

  I enjoyed a piece of small-town Americana on Sept. 17, when I gave a talk at a luncheon meeting of the Bristol (R.I.) Rotary Club. Oh, for a renaissance of such civic organizations!

The club is part of Rotary International, which aims to bring mostly local business and professional leaders together to promote humanitarian service, boost ethics and encourage friendship and goodwill. The few dozen people at the meeting were thirtysomethings to eightysomethings; everybody seemed to have current or past professional or business connections.

I felt transported back to the Fifties. The meeting began with the Pledge of Allegiance, the singing of the National Anthem (with an 89-year-old lady playing the piano) and a nondenominational prayer. After lunch, attendees sang some pre-rock songs. Then came my talk, about the Islamic State, and smart questions.

It would be hard to find a nicer and more engaged group. Participating in such organizations has tended to decline in America in the last few decades. That’s sad, because they do a lot of fine stuff for their localities and the nation, raising money to fight illnesses, promoting education (especially through scholarships), sprucing up parks and many other good causes. Their decline is of a piece with the general slide of civic life. It’s harder these days to get people to run for office, serve on local boards and join charitable drives.

Cynics like to make fun of such upbeat, boosterish organizations, but they address the need of a healthy democracy to have a wide variety of agile nongovernmental organizations serving the public.

Increased mobility, more dispersed families, shorter-term jobs, the distractions of life on the Internet and the general weakening of the middle class have tended to shrink the memberships of service organizations such as Rotary. Let’s hope that can be reversed. That these clubs generally eschew “virtual’’ meetings online in favor of frequent face-to-face encounters is a particular plus. In-person members often become real friends, and thus more likely to encourage themselves and their fellow members to follow through on good works.

Later, I walked around Bristol, and marveled at its antiquarian beauty.

xxx

The next day I had a meeting on a small (perhaps 32 feet long) sailboat usually moored off Stamford, Conn. We sailed west to off Greenwich, where we anchored near an island with a gazebo on it. It was late in the season, of course, and there were only a couple of other people there. The menacing Manhattan skyline was in the distance.

We went swimming, in remarkably warm water, and talked about a project in China while admiring the beauty of the day – a glory that seems to go on day after day in September and early October in New England. For a few weeks, we have a champagne climate, albeit tinctured with melancholy about what will follow soon enough. But then “the American Season’’ as it has been called, is both a poignant annual ending and an often boisterous beginning.

To the north could be seen the waterfront mansions of the hyper-rich in Greenwich, not that far from slums in Stamford. The “1 percent’’ is what Greenwich is most famous for, and even more so since Wall Street became so much more powerful and rich in the past few decades, via hedge funds, private-equity firms and investment banks. (That the huge California Public Employees’ Retirement System has decided to quit hedge funds might start a wave that could do some damage to a few of the owners of these houses.)

After we had been at anchor for a while, a young woman in our party said that she had to get back to New York pronto. So our skipper decided to sail the dinghy we had been towing all the way to Greenwich, from whose shores the young woman would make her way to the train station. She made the train, but the wind died and so our captain (a film director!) had to row most of the way back to the bigger boat, where we grew slightly anxious waiting.

Finally the wind came up a bit and we saw his red sail, in the sunset. “There’s John!,’’ we shouted, trying to restrain the sound of relief.

  Then we slowly made our way back to Stamford through calm and bioluminescent waters; thank God for the inboard motor. I stayed that night in a cheap Stamford motel, some of whose illegal-alien workers might also be leaf blowers on the grounds of the Greenwich estates. There were cigarettes on the motel’s floors and its “breakfast’’ provided only Cremora for coffee. But perhaps that TV’s in the rooms showed very fuzzy images of athletic pornography to channel surfers was adequate recompense for many weary travelers.

Robert Whitcomb (rwhitcomb51@gmail.com) is a Providence-based writer and editor who oversees this site.