Showing of 'I Remember Better When I Paint'

See this announcement of a showing of the film  "I Remember Better When I Paint'' on June 19 at the Wenham Museum, Wenham, Mass. The  film shows how the arts can be used to alleviate the symptoms of dementia.

Inadequate diversity

 

"Monogram''  (single-channel HD withcolor sound), by ALIX PEARLSTEIN, at Samson gallery, Boston.

Colors of our chaotic world

 

"Between Storms'' (mixed media on acrylic),  by CARRIE McGEE, in her show at Lanoue Gallery, Boston.

Charles Chieppo: Boston convention centers follies

  By CHARLES CHIEPPO

BOSTON

Rarely is Massachusetts state government’s dysfunction on display more than in the waning days of a legislative session. This time around, exhibit A is the rush to approve a $1.1 billion expansion of the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center (BCEC) despite enough red flags to fill the quarter-mile-long building.

Apparently the $620 million the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority claims the BCEC and the Hynes Convention centers pumped into the local economy last year makes it easy to set aside doubts. But a closer look at how the MCCA arrives at that estimate makes you realize why there are no real numbers in the convention industry.

Convention centers are designed to attract people from outside the area who wouldn’t otherwise spend money here. But one thing the industry doesn’t want you do know is that about half of convention attendees — whether in Boston or elsewhere — are generally locals who’d be spending their dollars at a nearby mall if they weren’t eating in a Seaport District restaurant. It’s no accident that the number of hotel room nights generated by the BCEC and the Hynes is less than the number of people who attend events at the facilities; many of the attendees sleep in their own beds at night.

Yet when Pioneer Institute obtained a description of the methodology by which the MCCA derives its economic impact number, we discovered that it includes a “dollars saved” category and assumes “the in-state attendee would have attended the event regardless of location.” Believe it or not, the MCCA actually pretends that every local attendee at a BCEC or Hynes convention would still have gone if it were held in Las Vegas or Orlando, and the authority includes the savings as part of its “economic impact.”

Did that $620 million number just lose a zero?

The economic-impact follies are just the latest in a line of troubling revelations about the expansion proposal. First came word that, contrary to MCCA claims, taxpayers would indeed pay a price for expansion. Receipts from taxes that flow into the Convention Center Fund and support the authority could revert to the commonwealth’s general fund once BCEC bonds are paid off in 2034. Expansion of the facility would keep that money flowing to the MCCA until about 2050, siphoning off at least $5 billion from state coffers.

Next we learned that the expansion bill doesn’t require the MCCA to go back to the Legislature if it wants to take more money from the Convention Center Fund. The waiver is akin to a blank check when it comes to the hefty public subsidy that will be needed for the 1,200 to 1,500 room headquarters hotel that is part of the expansion plan.

Finally we learned that the legislation exempts the project from state procurement and public disclosure laws. That means we might never find out how large a subsidy that new hotel will require.

Thankfully, as the Herald recently reported, Senate Bonding Committee Chairman Brian Joyce (D-Milton) thinks the BCEC expansion question requires more thought and deliberation. Let’s hope this is one time when lawmakers won’t pass a bill to find out what’s in it.

Charles Chieppo is a senior fellow at Pioneer Institute.  He is a former vice chair of the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority.

'Pasture to Pond'

 

"Harvest Moon''  (oil on panel), by BRUCE CRANE, in the "Pasture to Pond: Connecticut Impression'' show at the Bruce Museum, Greenwich, Conn., through June 22.

More mental hospitals, please

  By ROBERT WHITCOMB

While we know a lot about Elliot Rodger, the young man who murdered six, injured 13 others and then killed himself on a rampage in Isla Vista, Calif., on May 23, we still do not know as much as we should to derive all the painful lessons; there are ambiguities galore. But his case has rightly energized the debate about gun laws and the fragmented American mental-health “system.”

I’d guess that the Second Amendment was far more about state militias than individual possession. Otherwise why did the Founders write in the amendment of the need for a “well-regulated militia” as its justification? (Especially note the phrase “well-regulated.”) Still, the amendment is badly written and it’s impossible to know for sure what the Founders wanted. Meanwhile, the firearms makers and gun-rights absolutists hold sway in Congress, whatever the public-opinion polls, and presumably will continue to do so for the indefinite future. (The one argument that gun-rights absolutists have that I think has a smidgen of sense is that our heavily armed population might make it more difficult for a dictatorship in Washington or outside invader to impose its will. Still, could they defeat military forces?)

Anyway, since the late ’60s and early ’70s, with the new drugs marketed as panaceas for severe mental illness, and the deinstitutionalization movement, which closed many mental hospitals, it’s been increasingly tough to commit people to institutions against their will.

Things got worse with the Health Insurance Portability and Affordability Act (HIPAA) of 1996, a part of which makes it agonizingly arduous for relatives to obtain essential psychiatric and other medical information about adult mentally ill people. We need to make it easier for families to obtain such information and then be able to act on it by obtaining a court order to involuntarily hold people who have shown themselves as potentially dangerous.

Legislation in Congress filed by Rep. Timothy Murphy (R-Penn.), Congress’s only clinical psychologist (Congress needs many more of them!), would help. It would encourage states to commit severely mentally ill people to mental hospitals or mandatory outpatient treatment by, among other things, loosening the privacy rules to give families more actionable clinical facts about troubled relatives.

But unfortunately it fails to speak to the need to build more mental hospitals, both private and state-run. Far too many of the mentally ill will not cooperate in outpatient therapy, be it sessions with therapists and/or taking medication. The fact is that some people need to be committed for long periods, and some for the rest of their lives. And that’s what happens anyway. We use our prisons for this function; at least half of America’s huge jail population is mentally ill in varying degrees, with many out-and-out insane.

At the same time, laws should be changed to more clearly limit the ability of people declared by a judge to be mentally ill to buy guns. Further, there should be more legal mechanisms to let police obtain warrants to take firearms away from people deemed dangerous. (And, yes, I know that Elliot Rodger stabbed to death three of his victims. But it’s far easier and faster to kill people with guns than with any other weapon except of course with what a competent bomb maker could make.)  Look at the mass murders of recent years.) As it is, the police have remarkably little legal power to stop crazy people from perpetrating violent crimes.

Will any major reforms involving the interface of guns and the mentally ill actually be implemented? Yes, though it may take a few more massacres. Meanwhile, who will lead to the way to build more mental hospitals to hold and treat people for whom outpatient treatment may be insufficient? Liberals and some libertarians will complain about the threat to civil liberties, conservatives about the cost. But what about the right of citizens not to be imperiled by crazy people walking around, and what about the huge financial cost of law enforcement and incarceration for so many of these people?

***

Thus we begin another summer. (I take June 1 as the real start of the season.) First comes lushness and freshness — “And what is so rare as a day in June?” asked James Russell Lowell, the 19th Century New England poet. He went on, in romantic (corny?) Victorian fashion:

Now is the high-tide of the year,

and whatever of life hath ebbed away

Comes flooding back with a ripply cheer,

Into every bare inlet and creek and bay;

Now the heart is so full that a drop overfill it

Then it gets grittier as we go into July and the lawns turn brown. Then comes a renewed freshness, almost a second spring, but with dimmer light and school-return anxiety (whatever your age) toward the end. Faster and faster comes Labor Day.

Robert Whitcomb (rwhitcomb51@gmail.com) oversees newenglanddiary.com.  He is a former Providence Journal editorial-page editor, former finance editor of the International Herald Tribune and former  managing editor of several newsletters on mental and behavioral health.

Warm-blooded gun

 

Photo by JAMES J. ORAM, a Connecticut-based photographer specializing in black-and-white images that evoke a lot of moods, although chiefly something between mellowness and melancholy.

The possession of pit bulls in tough neighborhoods suggests that they're meant as signs of strength and protection -- a sort of warm-blooded gun. Mr. Oram has had much opportunity to see pit bulls in some of the gritty old factory towns of the Naugatuck River Valley,  where he lives.

The Naugatuck, by the way,  used to sport a variety of vivid colors from the industrial wastes of varying toxicity that were directly dumped into the river before the arrival of the Environmental Protection Agency. The pollutants would then flow down into Long Island Sound,  where they would help kill fish and birds that they hadn't already been killed upriver.

Mr. Oram's Web site is here.

Energy under energy

 

"Subatomic Flux'' (acrylic on panel), by LYNDA SCHLOSBERG,  at Kingst0n Gallery, Boston.

Stupidity more than corruption

Perhaps if Rhode Island were bigger, the larger pool of public-official talent made available would make such stupidities as  the outrageous state investment in 38 Studios less likely. Also helpful would be if we in the media didn't make politics so unalluring for intelligent and civic-minded people to enter that too much space is left for stupid and/or corrupt people to fill. The low level 0f knowledge and intelligence of too many elected officials in Rhode Island has always struck me as a far bigger problem than out-and-out corruption, of which, yes, there's plenty in all states, including Massachusetts and Connecticut.  In the RISDIC scandal, in 38 Studios and some other Ocean State outrages, there have been various forms of corruption (felonies or more minor)  but stupidity, wishful thinking  and not necessarily criminal taking care of pals were the biggest culprits.

Meanwhile, I have often thought that we should consider abolishing the state and splitting the land between the Bay State and the Nutmeg State, thus reducing the pathologies associated with too much political intimacy.

Triumph for the Taliban

It seems clear now that President Obama made a very bad deal in swapping five Taliban people for Bowe Bergdahl.  Some or all of them will probably end up back in Afghanistan or Pakistan t0 resume their fanatical violence, and the swap will incentivize more kidnapping. We don't yet know all the circumstances of how Sergeant Bergdahl ended up in Taliban hands. Did he defect or just desert? Or a combination thereof?

President Obama's strongest moral argument, if he used it, for doing this bad deal is that Sergeant Bergdahl was and is mentally ill and was not acting out of rational volition in Afghanistan. But that is far from an adequate reason to do a deal that  so strongly favors the Taliban and signals weakness to it and the rest of the world.

Meanwhile, the U.S. and its Western allies continue to  signal weakness to Vladimir Putin, whose invasion of eastern Ukraine continues and who is eying stealing other Eastern European real estate to further strengthen the Kremlin kleptocracy.

Fast flower

 

"Iris,'' by MA QINGXIONG, at the Lexington (Mass.) Arts and Crafts Society through June.The iris flower's fast coming and going --- brilliantly purple one minute -- and drooping and wilted seemingly the next  --  signals the end of high spring.

If you really like cats....

"Sam'' (lithograph), by ANDY WARHOL, in the "Visible Soul: Feline  as Muse'' show at VanDernoot Gallery, Cambridge, Mass.  

The death of David and Anne Burnham

I have just heard the sad news that David Burnham, a leader in private and public education (among the institutions he graced were the Moses Brown School, St. Andrews School and the Paul Cuffee School) and  many other civic endeavors, has just died, hours after the death of his wife, Anne. He was one of the most energetic, congenial and public-spirited people I have met in my time in Rhode Island.

-- Robert Whitcomb

Challenges to clinics

Last fall, when I was writing about my Cambridge Management Group (CMG) colleagues' work in helping to turn around a financially troubled  Federally Qualified Health Center  (FQHC) called Community Health Connections, based in Fitchburg, Mass., I learned about the role these centers  play in addressing  changing American health-care demographics in general and illness — especially chronic illness — in low-income populations in particular. Such centers will continue to face reimbursement and other issues as the restructuring of the health sector accelerates.  The Affordable Care Act, in increasing the emphasis on primary care while more closely integrating it with acute care, will almost certainly  increase the importance of FQHC’s and other clinics. With all the publicity about  trying to get everyone signed up for insurance to use at physicians' offices and hospitals, we should keep in mind the need for facilities that are neither hospitals nor physician-group offices in treating  underserved populations in places like the old mill towns of north central Massachusetts, with their high incidence of poor behavioral health and such related chronic diseases  as diabetes, and sluggish economies.

Such institutions will have their hands full overcoming  the clinical, financial and administrative challenges of  meeting new federal and state health-care reform mandates while refocusing the payment structure on fee for value and away from fee for service in a new, far more accountable and evidence-based health-care sector.

Who knows what it will all look like in five years?

-- Robert Whitcomb

But takes longer to dry

 

"The Night Wash'' (Vietnamese nickel lead on black rice paper, on loan from the New Britain (Conn.) Museum of American Art and now on view at the Art Complex Museum, in Duxbury, Mass.

Chris Powell: Empty buses, broken train line

Last week brought another disastrous service interruption on the Metro-North commuter railroad in southwestern Connecticut as a 118-year-old swing bridge over a river in Norwalk malfunctioned and took hours to repair. The state Transportation Department said a replacement for the bridge is being designed and might be completed in ... 10 years. Meanwhile, the state Transportation Department hopes to have  the crown jewel public-works project of Governor Malloy's administration, the bus highway from Hartford to New Britain, operating in 10 months-- remarkable progress, except, of course, that there is no need for the busway, whose buses probably will run mostly empty for many years between hubs that have become mainly centers of welfare dependence and government bureaucracy.

By contrast, Metro-North is the busiest commuter rail system in the country and in southwestern Connecticut it serves people who not only work for a living in the private sector but provide the bulk of the state's income-tax revenue. The suckers are not likely to get any respect from state government until they go on welfare or join a public-employees union.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Arbor art

 

Work by a a student of Mary Wayss, who runs the young artists summer program at Dedee Shattuck Gallery, in Westport.  The gallery is rapidly becoming a major multi-arts regional cultural center.

Rebuilding mills as communities

   

Fall River, "The Spindle City. In the foreground is the Algonquin Mill, for which there are big plans and high hopes.

Photo by TOM PATERSON

The Mills Alliance, which wants to protect and reuse Massachusetts's old mills -- many built in the 19th Century -- for economic, environmental, sociological and, of course, aesthetic reasons is a terrific resource for developers, owners, public officials and local residents in general who see the big long-term advantages of saving these old stone and brick structures, which could last for many hundreds of years more if they are taken care of. Major centers for this beautiful and utilitarian architecture include Lowell, Fall River, New Bedford, Brockton (the former shoe-making center) and Taunton.

While the alliance is now focusing on Southeastern New England, members see it eventually expanding its activities to include mills in all of southern New England and perhaps beyond in the Northeast.  (Upstate New York and parts of Pennsylvania have some beauties.)

Many of them are highly adaptable for residential space and commercial activities, including assembly.  Yes, some can be turned into real factories again! These buildings are so large that people can work on one floor, live on another and shop in stores on a third (presumably usually the ground floor).  These are some of the ways in which saving them reduces sprawl.

The roofs of some of these mills are big enough to support commercially viable vegetable farms. (See the Brooklyn Grange as an example.)

And now Mills Alliance people are making a push to teach people that the carbon footprint of tearing them down is heavy.

The alliance says: "We believe that in an era of increasing population, decreasing economic stability, increased competition for natural resources, generally rising prices and abundant pressures on all of us to live smartly, economically and in harmony with our environment, mills offer great hope and possibility by their central locations and adaptive reuse.''

It goes on:

"Pull our mills into the 21st Century by the embrace of new technology, the promotion of tax incentives for recapitalization, and encouragement of mixed-use, live/work communities that will provide housing and employment and an agreeable, sustainable quality of life in our beleaguered industrial centers.''

Quite right.

A dash of healthier salt, and no app is needed!

  How refreshing to hear about a product that’s not an app or yet another social network but a physical thing. It seems that the business pages only cover the latest digital delight invented by a 23-year-old graduate of Stanford.

Here is something real called,  called “Salt for Life’’,  distributed by Nu-Tek Food Science LLC. It’s a blend of sea salt and potassium and has 70 percent less sodium than table salt; excessive sodium intake is associated with various health problems, particularly heart disease, about which I have more than a passing familiarity. I have no financial stake in this product, but do predict that these sorts of products will be bigger and bigger with the aging of the population and attempts to curb health-care costs.

The wine-dark Acushnet

Here's a terrific essay by William Morgan, with great pictures, about  the grand Greek Revival buildings put up in the 19th Century in and around whale-oil-rich New Bedford, which for a time was the richest community in America. The discovery of the many uses of petroleum ended that golden age for New Bedford (while constraining the nightmare of the whales -- highly intelligent mammals that the whalers consigned to excruciatingly painful deaths). See "Athens on the Acushnet''.