Vox clamantis in deserto
Jim Hightower: Our fraudulent, pathological liar president-elect still addicted to Twitter
Two previous pathological liars/egomaniacs in their glory days.
Via OtherWords. org
All hail Augusts Trumpus — the American Putin, whom none can criticize! All hail the All Knowing One, who reveals “realities” that aren’t there and finds “facts” that mere mortals can’t detect.
Once again, the Amazing Donald has demonstrated his phantasmagoric power of perception, having found a new outcome in November’s election that others haven’t seen. Trump has been greatly perturbed by the official results, which showed that while he won the Electoral College majority, he wasn’t the people’s choice.
Instead, according to the latest tally, Hillary Clinton won the popular balloting by a margin of more than 2.7 million votes and counting.
Growing increasingly furious at this affront to his supernatural sense of self, the master of factual flexibility went on Twitter with an amazing revelation: “I won the popular vote,” decreed our incoming tweeter-in-chief.
How did he turn a 2.7 million vote loss into a glorious victory? “I won,” he tweeted, “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”
Wow again! Millions?
You’d think that such a massive conspiracy, with millions of illegal voters in line at thousands of precincts, would’ve been noticed by election officials, GOP poll watchers, and the media. How did Trump find this truly incredible “fact”?
It seems he channeled it from the mysterious Twittersphere — and specifically from a Texas conspiracy hound who had earlier posted a tweet declaring: “We have verified more than 3 million votes cast by non-citizens.”
But this guy turns out to be part of a right-wing fringe group chasing non-existent voter frauds. Exactly none of those 3 million “illegal” votes have been verified. Stunned that Trump would cite his tweet as proof, he asked sheepishly: “Isn’t everything on Twitter fake?”
Get used to it — fakery is reality for America’s next president, Augustus Trumpus.
OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker. He’s the editor of the populist newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown.
'A Life that wearies me'
I heard a bird sing
In the dark of December
A magical thing
And sweet to remember.
Come, come thou bleak December wind,
And blow the dry leaves from the tree!
Flash, like a Love-thought, thro’me, Death
And take a Life that wearies me.
–- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1772-1834, ''Fragment 3''
Worsening the panhandlers' problems
Excerpted from Robert Whitcomb's Dec. 8 "Digital Diary'' column in GoLocal 24.
Kudos to those in the Rhode Island General Assembly for trying to suppress the epidemic of panhandling concentrated at intersections in Providence. It can cause car accidents, crime and scares away business. Better to beef up social services to deal with the panhandlers, many of whom are mentally ill, than to allow panhandling along the streets.
The ACLU is all wet on this. Reducing panhandling, including by penalizing motorists who stop and give panhandlers money (often swiftly used for drugs and booze), isa matter of common-sense public safety. Tolerating panhandlers reinforces their problems
But you wouldn't want to live there
'Faraway Land,'' by Katherine Downey Mlller, in the group show 'Landforms,'' at New Art Center, Newtonville, Mass., through Jan. 5.
The gallery writes:
"Katherine Downey Miller uses nature, imagery and emotion in order to create her pieces. With a background in drawing and painting, Miller. uses shapes from the landscapes and her own emotions to capture the landscape in an abstract way. Miller states, 'My goal is to try to create paintings that capture visual and emotional moments."'
Trump will hit the suckers who voted for him good and hard
Barker at Vermont State Fair, 1941.
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb's Dec. 8 "Digital Diary'' column in GoLocal 24.
''Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it, good and hard.''
-- H.L. Mencken
Steven Pearlstine, who writes on business and economics for The Washington Post and is a professor of public policy at George Mason University, had an entertaining observation the other day in a Washington Post essay headlined “Under Trump, red states are finally going to be able to turn themselves into poor, unhealthy states’’. Actually, many Red States are already poor and unhealthy. The much denounced liberal, higher-tax states are generally richer, in part because they have better public services.
“After all,’’ Mr. Pearlstine writes, “if Republicans cut taxes — in particular, taxes on investment income — then the biggest winners are going to be the residents of Democratic states where incomes, and thus income taxes, are significantly higher. Governors and legislatures in those states — home to roughly half of all Americans — will now have the financial headroom to raise state income and business taxes by as much as the federal government cuts them — and use the additional revenue to replace all the federal services and benefits that Republicans have vowed to cut.’’
That means the Northeast! And this region will continue as the richest in America. Good public services make states richer.
Peter Certo: CIA is well practiced in subverting elections
Via OtherWords.org
Even in an election year as shot through with conspiracy theories as this one, it would have been hard to imagine a bigger bombshell than Russia intervening to help Donald Trump. But that’s exactly what the CIA believes happened, or so unnamed “officials brief on the matter” told The Washington Post.
While Russia had long been blamed for hacking e-mail accounts linked to the Clinton campaign, its motives had been shrouded in mystery. According to The Post, though, CIA officials recently presented Congress with a “a growing body of intelligence from multiple sources” that “electing Trump was Russia’s goal.”
Now, the CIA hasn’t made any of its evidence public, and the CIA and FBI are reportedly divided on the subject. Though it’s too soon to draw conclusions, the charges warrant a serious public investigation.
Even some Republicans who backed Trump seem to agree. “The Russians are not our friends,” said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, announcing his support for a congressional probe. It’s “warfare,” added Sen. John McCain.
There’s a grim irony to this. The CIA is accusing Russia of interfering in our free and fair elections to install a right-wing candidate it deemed more favorable to its interests. Yet during the Cold War, that’s exactly what the CIA did to the rest of the world.
Most Americans probably don’t know that history. But in much of the world it’s a crucial part of how Washington is viewed even today.
In the post-World War II years, as Moscow and Washington jockeyed for global influence, the two capitals tried to game every foreign election they could get their hands on.
From Europe to Vietnam and Chile to the Philippines, American agents delivered briefcases of cash to hand-picked politicians, launched smear campaigns against their left-leaning rivals, and spread hysterical “fake news” stories like the ones some now accuse Russia of spreading here.
Together, political scientist Dov Levin estimates, Russia and the U.S. interfered in 117 elections this way in the second half the 20th Century. Even worse is what happened when the CIA’s chosen candidates lost.
In Iran, when elected leader Mohammad Mossadegh tried to nationalize the country’s BP-held oil reserves, CIA agent Kermit Roosevelt led an operation to oust Mossadegh in favor of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The shah’s secret police tortured dissidents by the thousands, leading directly to the Islamic Revolution in 1979.
In Guatemala, when the democratically elected Jacobo Arbez tried to loosen the U.S.-based United Fruit Co.’s grip on Guatemalan land, the CIA backed a coup against him. In the decades of civil war that followed, U.S.-backed security forces were accused of carrying out a genocide against indigenous Guatemalans.
In Chile, after voters elected the socialist Salvador Allende, the CIA spearheaded a bloody coup to install the right-wing dictator Augusto Pinochet, who went on to torture and kill thousands of Chileans.
“I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people,” U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger purportedly said about the coup he helped orchestrate there.
And those are only the most well-known examples.
I don’t raise any of this history to excuse Russia’s alleged meddling in our election — which, if true, is outrageous. Only to suggest that now, maybe, we know how it feels. We should remember that feeling as Trump, who’s spoken fondly of authoritarian rulers from Russia to Egypt to the Philippines and beyond, comes into office.
Meanwhile, much of the world must be relieved to see the CIA take a break from subverting democracy abroad to protect it at home.
Peter Certo is the editorial manager of the Institute for Policy Studies and the editor of OtherWords.org.
Unrequited love
"Winter Sleigh Ride'' {would there be a summer one?} (oil on canvas), by John Clymer (1907-1989), Saturday Evening Post cover, Dec. 17, 1949, at the National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI. (© Image courtesy American Illustrators Gallery, NYC, 2016)
On the Snow
We're all supposed to love the Earth
And thrill to nature's bold displays.
We're all supposed to be entranced
When nature sends us snowy days.
But I just tumbled on the snow
And gave my knee a nasty whack.
If I'm supposed to love the Earth,
The Earth should try to love me back.
-- Felicia Nimue Ackerman
*
Llewellyn King: What the Energy Department does
Pantex facility in the Texas Panhandle, where nuclear weapons are made and later dismantled.
To former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who has been nominated to be the next U.S. energy secretary. Texas is, of course, a huge fossil-fuel producer:
Welcome to the U.S. Department of Energy. It is a cornucopia of scientific wonders, brilliant people and, to be true, some duplication and wasted effort.
Oil, natural gas and coal are not the overriding concern of the DOE. Indeed, until President Jimmy Carter created it in 1977, fossil fuels were the province of the Department of the Interior.
The DOE was preceded by the Energy Research and Development Administration. This was a short-lived agency that combined the non-regulatory functions of the Atomic Energy Commission with the Federal Energy Administration, a policy coordinating body.
To be sure, the DOE has had a manful role in coal gasification, fracking and carbon capture and storage.
But its main role is to be the nation’s armorer; to build and maintain the U.S. stockpile of nuclear weapons, and to detect bad guys testing weapons in places like North Korea and Iran.
The department has 17 major laboratories, headed by the three big weapons labs: Los Alamos, Sandia and Lawrence Livermore.
In your own state of Texas, as you must know, is the Pantex facility. That is where the weapons are constructed and dismantled. That is ground zero, if you will, of weapons making. That where the “pits” are assembled and disassembled. Weapons are designed and engineered in the weapons laboratories.
You will find that cleanup of nuclear waste -- much of it from earlier weapons production -- in places like Hanford, Wash., and Los Alamos, N.M., is an ongoing and seemingly endless task that chews up talent and money.
Some of the other work of the DOE may surprise you. It was a major player in the human-genome project and it helps U.S. companies improve their manufacturing technology. It has developed ceramics for all sorts of non-nuclear uses, like car engines. Its work with 3-D seismic and advanced drill bits has made the fracking revolution possible.
You are, in fact, about to lead the largest science department anywhere in the world.
When you get the feel of the place, one hopes that talk of disbanding it will disappear. Likewise, wild talk about rooting out climate science, which has the department in shock. The DOE is not part of climate-science conspiracy. Please examine your charge before you trash it.
The DOE national laboratory system is a national treasure, the science mind of the nation. It collaborates with dozens of universities.
If President-elect Trump is determined to renegotiate the Iranian deal, you will be a player. The present secretary, Ernie Moniz, handled the negotiations brilliantly for the treaty we have with Iran. He knew as much about the workings of a hydrogen bomb and its supply chain as his opponent, Ali Akbar Salehi, who also went to MIT. If there is another negotiation as the president-elect has suggested, you will have to support the chief negotiator, the secretary of state, with expertise from your department.
First and foremost, the DOE is a nuclear agency, charged with making the weapons that protect the nation. But it also does some amazingly disparate things at its labs, from improving coal combustion to studying cancer to examining the very nature of matter. And, of course, climate science. It has been said that it takes a new secretary a year to find out what the department does.
Because the DOE operates in many states through the laboratory system, Congress rides it hard. Congressmen fight for dollars and projects in their states. An example – and one you will have to adjudicate -- is the battle over whether to continue with the construction and operation of the mixed oxide (MOX) fuel-fabrication facility at the Savannah River Site, in Georgia. The Obama administration has said that it should be terminated; Congress says no.
As there is throughout government, there is waste in the lab system. But it is a small problem compared with its huge value to the nation. A suggestion: Work on making it even more user friendly to technology transfer. That is how we assure the future of U.S. competitiveness: science and more science.
You have a great charge, Governor Perry, and it has very little to do with oil.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His e-mail is llewellynking1@gmail.com.
As repetitive as snow
"Snow Day,'' by Emily Berger, in the group show "Painting Is Not a Good Idea,'' at HallSpace, in the Dorchester section of Boston, through Jan. 7.
The gallery says that this show "invites viewers… to challenge views about what art should be and how art should be expressed. Guest curator Jo Ann Rothschild selected work from abstract painters Emily Berger, David Fratkin, Colleen Randall and Elizabeth Yamin. Though each artist works abstractly, their works are vastly different. Emily Berger, for her part, notes that the "paintings and drawings are based on a structure of repetitive and deliberate gesture that is intuitive but carefully considered."
Don Pesci: The CIA, Trump and an unhinged Democrat
VERNON, Conn.
U.S. Rep. Jim Himes, a Democrat who just won re-election to office, has been pushed over the edge by Donald Trump, according to a story in the New York Post.
“What finally pushed me over the edge, Himes said in an interview on CNN’s New Day, “was when the president-elect of the United States criticized the CIA and the intelligence community. Can you imagine what the leaders in Beijing and Moscow and Tehran are thinking as they watch the next president of the United States delegitimize and criticize his own intelligence community and stand up for the defense of Russia, one of our prime adversaries.”
Mr. Himes must have been standing very close to the edge, because he believes that Mr. Trump’s remarks on the CIA report show that the President-Elect is unhinged: “We’re five weeks from inauguration and the president-elect is completely unhinged.” In plain-speak, “completely unhinged” means that he’s nuts.
Among Democratic politicians still suffering from painful election losses – Republicans, this election season won the House, Senate and White House, a trifecta – the expression may indicate a general unease with the results of the election, rather than a serious appraisal of Mr. Trump’s mental health. Wounded politicians under stress are occasionally subject to hissy fits.
We should be thankful that the CIA, unlike Caesar’s wife, is not yet above criticism. Mr. Himes failed to note in his press response that reports issuing from the CIA and the FBI were in conflict. The FBI’s investigation found no unimpeachable evidence that Russian intelligence services – which, like their counterparts at the CIA, engage in hacking – had materially affected the U.S. elections. The CIA instructed members of Congress that Russian intelligence services did engage in hacking, perhaps through intermediaries, but hard evidence supporting the charge has not, and probably will not, be made public, principally because the CIA as a rule safeguards top-secret information more diligently than did former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whose loss to Mr. Trump has unhinged many a Democrat.
Mr. Himes will appreciate the distinction between spying, which may include acquiring data by hacking, and election interference through the manipulation of voting data. In fact, it would be nearly impossible for Russian spooks to manipulate election votes, because polling machines carry separate computer chips. Mr. Himes has not charged Russians with manipulating voter data, to be sure, but the charge he does make is broad and amorphous enough to leave in the public mind the notion that foreign entities have tampered with our near sacred voting process.
“The leaders in Beijing and Moscow and Tehran,” we know, are all expert in the fine art of hacking, as is the CIA -- one hopes. China in particular has masterfully exploiting data it illicitly gathered from American businesses, which permits it to produce products – cheap drone knockoffs, for instance – it then underprices and sells to countries such as North Korea, Iran and Syria, all announced enemies of the United States, a continuing practice that really should push American politicians over the tolerance edge.
Some Republicans and many Democrats have urged that a special prosecutor should be appointed to examine hacking by foreign entities and their bearing, if any, on elections. Mr. Himes is not new to investigatory work; he serves on The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which conducts oversight of the U.S. Intelligence Community. He must know that the proper venue for the investigation of possible voter interference by foreign entities lies within the political jurisdiction of appropriate Senate committees.
Timorously peeking out of Mr. Himes’s campaign hoopla is a serious point. Mr. Trump should be more concerned than he appears to be with Vladimir Putin’s ambitions affecting Russia, Ukraine, the Baltic States and his bosom buddies in the Middle East, which include Bashir Assad, Syria’s mass murderer, and the ayatollahs in Iran who, despite Mr. Obama’s velvet-glove treatment, continue to finance terrorist organizations with the planeloads of cash given to them by Mr. Obama as a side agreement to a deal struck between Mr. Obama and the Iranian regime; suspiciously, the dark deal arranged between Iran and the United States was never referred to the Congress for its advice and consent.
Neither Mr. Himes nor any of the six other members of Connecticut’s all Democratic U.S. congressional delegation were advised by Mr. Obama that planeloads of hard cash, easily transferable to Hamas, a militant organization that grew out of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood movement in the 1990s and the early 2000s, were in the dead of night delivered to terrorists that had conducted numerous suicide bombings and other attacks against Israel. U.S. Sen. Dick Blumenthal's silence on matters affecting Israel in particular is crushing. Mr. Blumenthal is Jewish. Had Mr. Himes been advised that American taxpayers were clandestinely supporting a heavily armed anti-Israeli terrorist group, presumably he might rightly have been pushed over the edge.
Don Pesci (donpesci@att.net) is apolitical writer who lives in Vernon, Conn.
'Old papers flocking away'
"Now the seasons are closing their files
on each of us, the heavy drawers
full of certificates rolling back
into the tree trunks, a few old papers
flocking away. Someone we loved
has fallen from our thoughts,
making a little, glittering splash
like a bicycle pushed by a breeze.
Otherwise, not much has happened;
we fell in love again, finding
that one red feather on the wind."
-- Ted Kooser, “Year's End’’
What's old is new again, continued
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb's Dec. 8 "Digital Diary'' column in GoLocal24.com
So Amazon is opening up physical-book stores, and vinyl records are making a comeback. One example is Kevin Morosini’s Olympic Records, onincreasingly interesting Wickenden Street, in Providence’s Fox Point neighborhood, near Narragansett Bay. As the (too slowly) developing Route 195 relocation land and the gradually-being-spiffed up waterfront attest, the street can only get more interesting and prosperous.
Mr. Morosini told The Providence Journal that he’s seeing a lot more young people coming in lately to buy vinyl records. Maybe they have discovered what I rediscovered recently a while back while listening to Thelonious Monk (jazz) record I bought in 1966: The sound is richer than with CDs. Other than a few scratches, which only added to the evocativeness (including a romance of the time...) of the music from so long ago, it was in good shape. And it didn’t even have any cigarette burns on it.
I hope that the young Mr. Morosini can expand his store. And, he’s right, Wickenden also needs a good bookstore. Every street does.
Ampersand architecture
"&ight'' (mixed media), by Kevin Gilmore, in his show "Cellar Doors,'' at the Atrium Gallery, One Financial Gallery, Providence, through March. The show is sponsored by the Providence Art Club.
Mary Mallinger: Researchers seek to save Eastern hemlock trees and the 'cathedrals' they build
Woolly adelgid on an Eastern hemlock tree.
--- Courtesy State of Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station
So distinctly dark and quiet is an Eastern hemlock forest that walking through a healthy stand has been described as finding oneself in a “cathedral-like atmosphere.” This native North American conifer is shade-tolerant, and as it grows it keeps its needles on lower branches. This unique feature of hemlock trees creates a densely shaded forest floor where few other plant species can survive. In time, this results in a forest stand nearly entirely dominated by hemlocks.
Economically speaking, Eastern hemlock isn’t a highly valued tree. Hemlock wood is coarse-grained, knotted and subject to splitting, making it difficult to work with. The bark was used in tanneries for making leather during the 19th Century, but as other sources of tannins were developed, the economic utility of hemlocks declined significantly.
The Eastern hemlock forests of North America do, however, play an important ecological role. Eastern hemlock is considered a foundational species, meaning it creates and defines an entire ecological community. These forests serve as important habitat for numerous animals. Several bird species, including the black-throated green warbler, have been identified as hemlock obligates, meaning they depend on this forest tree for breeding habitat. Eastern hemlocks also shade and cool headwater streams, creating suitable habitat for many aquatic species, such as trout.
This ecologically significant species is currently under threat from a tiny invasive insect. The hemlock woolly adelgid, native to Japan, was first discovered in the United States in Virginia in the 1950s and has since spread from Georgia to southern Maine. The adelgid is a small wool-covered insect and isn’t capable of moving long distances on its own. Yet, it has caused widespread hemlock mortality throughout North America. In some adelgid-infested stands of the Northeast, hemlock mortality has exceeded 95 percent.
As the climate warms, this invasive insect will continue to move north, potentially spreading throughout the entire range of Eastern hemlock in North America.
As the adelgid has steadily swept across the eastern United States, not all infested trees have responded similarly, however. In several forest stands, amongst an expanse of skeletal trees, occasional individuals appear to be healthy, in spite of heavy adelgid infestation. University of Rhode Island ecology Prof. Evan Preisser and post-doctoral researcher Chad Rigsby want to know why, and how, these trees are surviving.
Preisser said it’s highly unlikely that among the many millions of Eastern hemlock trees in North America there wouldn’t be individual trees that had developed some degree of resistance to the adelgid. It’s plausible that naturally occurring genetic mutations would create this type of resistance, he added. In the fight against this invasive insect, these resistant trees would have thicker armor to defend itself, so to speak.
To test their hypothesis, potentially resistant individual trees must first be located. And that, as Preisser said, is no easy task. In fact, he likens finding resistant individuals to finding a needle in a haystack.
However, the destruction that the adelgid has brought upon hemlock forests may actually make that task a bit easier.
“The best way to find a needle in a haystack is to burn the haystack and sift the ashes,” Preisser said. “Essentially, adelgid is a highly selective forest fire. It is going through forest stands and removing all the hemlocks.”
Any trees left standing after such an intense attack, it can be reasoned, are likely still alive because of some genetic mutation that left them more resistant than their neighbors, and not simply because of luck.
After locating potentially resistant individual hemlock trees, the next step is to determine if there are things about their genetic makeup that might indicate to researchers why those trees appear to be resistant.
Rigsby, the post-doctoral researcher in the Preisser lab, is well prepared to orchestrate such tests. Previous research of his includes working on resistance mechanisms of ash trees to the invasive emerald ash borer. Rigsby is currently applying those skills and techniques in the investigation of hemlock resistance.
He and Preisser are interested in hemlock resistance from a conservation perspective because that this information could help inform conservation, such as breeding efforts, and the planting of hemlocks, Rigsby said.
The hope is that eventually the trees that possess the specific resistant traits will be used in breeding programs to create a stock of healthy adelgid-resistant hemlock trees that can be planted throughout Eastern forests.
“It is becoming increasingly clear to me,” Rigsby said, “and I think the evidence is mounting in the face of the broader scientific community, that this really is the only approach to long-term continental hemlock conservation.”
Mary Mallinger is a graduate student at the University of Rhode Island pursuing a master’s degree in ecology.
Art for a nasty time
"Friend: Unfriend, the Inauguration of the 45th President of the United States,’’ by Kirstin Ilse, at Galatea Fine Art, Boston Jan, 4-29.
The artist says: “Reckon the vitriol remainder of the presidential election. This painting explores the tumult at the heart of a cultural crisis in which friends were friendly no more and new connections forged. Painted in steamed dye on silk, dynamic, luminous and colorful; feel the nation in the wounds and heals of the cultural shift. Drop off things left unsaid. Reconnect the world.''
Mental-health exhibit at Logan Airport
From the New England Council (NEC):
"McLean Hospital, part of Partners Healthcare, recently opened an art exhibit in Boston’s Logan International Airport, which is owned and operated by Massport. The exhibit is designed to highlight the stigma around mental health.
"The exhibit, titled 'Deconstructing Stigma: A Change in Thought Can Change a Life,' fills the 235-foot hallway between terminals B and C with 34 photographs of individuals with mental illness and quotes from them. The pictures tell the stories of depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, and other mental illnesses. The exhibit is part of a public-awareness campaign by McLean Hospital intended to change the way mental illness is perceived.
“'Mental health affects everyone, whether we recognize it or not. I am proud that Massport has collaborated with NAMI (Natonal Alliance for Mental Illness) and now McLean working to reduce stigma,' said Thomas P. Glynn, CEO of Massport and a member of the NEC Board of Directors. The exhibit 'Deconstructing Stigma' is another example of how we are all working together to help our state and country make strides in this area.”
"The New England Council thanks McLean Hospital and Massport for working to change perceptions of mental illness.''
At PCFR: Looking at trade wars
To members and friends of the Providence Committee on Foreign Relations (thepcfr.org; pcfremail@gmail.com).
Our next dinner comes on Wednesday, Dec. 14, with:
Jeffrey Frankel, James W. Harpel Professor of Capital Formation and Growth at Harvard and former member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. He will talk about international trade and when and if it’s good for national economies.
His research interests include international finance, monetary policy, regional blocs, East Asia and global climate change. His publications include "Does Trade Cause Growth?" in the American Economic Review, and “Regional Trading Blocs.’’
American trade deals were, of course, huge (or is it “yuge’’?) issues in the U.S. presidential campaign and helped elect Donald Trump.
Meanwhile, Jeff Colgan sent this along:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/11/29/donald-trump-is-an-economic-nationalist-whats-an-economic-nationalist/
'Crowding the mall'
Photo by Rama
"A full moon shines
over the morning frost;
the lanes are full of late-fallen leaves;
walking across the mulch
is almost as tricky
as treading over ice.
In town the carol-singers are in
crowding the shopping mall,
while a group of muffled musicians
play by the outside market.
This year but two robins
on the early Christmas cards;
the squirrel still runs along the fence
skirting our newly erected shed."
-- Gerald England, “Mid-December’’
Looks better with snow on it
"Slope, Mt. Washington,'' by Russell duPont. (Copyright Russ duPont Photographs.) By the way, there's a plan by owners of the cog railway that goes up the mountain to put a luxury hotel at 1,000 feet below the 6,288 summit of the peak. More on that to come.