Don Pesci: Connecticut's confused moralists

Lincoln quoting Jefferson: “I tremble for my country when I remember that God is just!'’

During his political career, which spans four decades, Connecticut U.S. Sen. Dick Blumenthal has been storming moral mounts and shaking his fists at the gods. At some point, the gods of Western morality may respond.

Blumenthal’s reaction to American Nazis in Charlottesville was commendable and necessary; in any denunciation of Nazism, there must be no ambiguity – no moral confusion. There are indeed degrees of evil in the world. The bank robber who murders a teller commits a greater evil than the bank robber who simply robs a bank.

However, using the greater evil to excuse the lesser cannot be defended on moral grounds. The Antifa movement, like the American Nazi movement and the KKK, uses violence as a means of moral suasion. The Nazis and the members of the KKK who hijacked a protest over an attempt to remove a statute of Robert E. Lee from a park in Charlottesville should have been unreservedly condemned for who they are by all people whose moral sense is not impaired by political considerations.

These two groups have been with us a long time; we know them, and we should not pretend to forget or forgive the unrepented sins of their dark past. Both groups have bathed in blood up to their knees. The anti-black, anti-Semite, anti-Catholic KKK used to hang or terrorize its victims; these days, they are content to defame and rouse public opinion against them. German Nazis persecuted and murdered Jews; these days, American Nazis accuse Jews, who they falsely believe are animated by anti-patriotic globalist pretensions, of capitalist greed.  The shadow of Buchenwald falls over all of this, and although David Duke is not Himmler – because there are differences in moral degrees of evil -- the seeds of the greater evil are sown in the ground of the lesser evil.

The Antifa movement – so called anti-fascists who have adopted the Stormtrooper tactics of Fascists -- should be roundly denounced for who they are by those who regularly storm moral mounts and shake their fists at the gods whenever television cameras are rolling. The Antifa movement has long been infiltrated by anarchists; in the anarchist dystopia, such senators as Blumenthal would be unnecessary excrescences.

Even for those who agree there is a moral order of greater and lesser evils, Blumenthal’s too ardent support of the more indefensible practices of Planned Parenthood is difficult to justify on moral grounds. Blumenthal's position on late term abortions, Orthodox Jews would say, is morally indefensible. Even a Reform Jew like Blumenthal may be uncomfortable with the killing of nearly born babies and the selling of their body parts to doctors, a process, some may think, that comes uncomfortably close to morally noxious Nazi practices?

The moral position on abortion – most especially partial birth abortion -- of 3rd District Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro also is confusing, which is why, she laments in her recent book, “The Least Among Us: Waging the Battle for the Vulnerable,”  her bishop removed her as a trustee of her Catholic High School.  Scandal in the Catholic Church is synonymous with sowing moral discord in the minds of Catholics. And Catholics who are public figures, so long as they remain in the faith, have a moral duty to maintain Catholic religious convictions in a morally confused universe. If they break with their Church on important matters of doctrine, a devil word in the modern period, they cannot maintain communion with the believing church, lay or clerical.

Of course, DeLauro has little use for bishops and little understanding of the historic opposition of her Church to the grave sin of abortion. She believes as a professing Catholic -- “My faith has always been important to me…” – that abortion has, within her Church, completely taken over “the conversation on faith in politics.” And she is inching toward a wholly indefensible moral position that important moral issues should be decided by the state, not bishops or rabbis.

DeLauro seems unaware that Catholic opposition to abortion and infanticide during Imperial Rome was the lever that freed women from a crushing paternalism in which the paterfamilias of a Roman family exercised complete dominion over the life and death of his unborn and born children. Abortion, infanticide and euthanasia, not uncommon in the Roman Empire, are becoming more common in the Western world as Christian perceptions are replaced by a morally neutral secularism, both in Europe and America.

The modern notion of human equality, unknown in the Roman Republic, descends from Biblical doctrine: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:28).” And the highly romantic notion of the love of children also has its roots in Christian faith, “But Jesus said, suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 19:14).”

In Heaven, one hopes, abortion is frowned upon, as it is among bishops in DeLauro’s church. There, one hopes, Nazism, Klu-Kluxery, Antifa fascism and anarchism will not gain a foothold. Here below, the usual strife continues. Flawed moralists continue to belch fire from their secular pulpits. Medical practitioners, unbound by the Hippocratic oath – noxamvero et maleficium propulsabo: “I will utterly reject harm and mischief”— perform partial birth abortions, after which dismembered baby parts are auctioned off, while politicians, wrapping themselves in moral mantels, wink behind the curtain.

Not a church going man, Abraham Lincoln, quoted from Thomas Jefferson, not a church going man, in his Columbus, Ohio, debate with Steven Douglas: “… there was once in this country a man by the name of Thomas Jefferson, supposed to be a Democrat -- a man whose principles and policy are not very prevalent amongst Democrats today, it is true; but that man did not take exactly this view of the insignificance of the element of slavery which our friend Judge Douglas does. In contemplation of this thing, we all know he was led to exclaim, 'I tremble for my country when I remember that God is just!' …  He supposed there was a question of God's eternal justice wrapped up in the enslaving of any race of men, or any man, and that those who did so braved the arm of Jehovah -- that when a nation thus dared the Almighty every friend of that nation had cause to dread His wrath. Choose ye between Jefferson and Douglas as to what is the true view of this element among us.”

Lincoln’s audience applauded this sentiment of a frail man leaning for support upon the crutch of an eternal truth. How often, we should ask, do the political heirs of Lincoln and Jefferson tremble when they consider that God is just?

Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based essayist.

Endless challenge

"Red Cross Serving the Children of the World'' (oil on canvas, 1942), by Frederick Sands Brunner, at the National Museum of American Illustration, Newport. Image courtesy, American Illustrator's Gallery Archives.

William Morgan: R.I. celebrates the tacky

Rhode Island's newest specialty license plate is yet another instance of the state's inability to put forth a decorous image. No wonder that Rhode Island keeps faltering at trying to sell itself as a tourist destination and a place to do business.

Perhaps the parade in Bristol is America's oldest Fourth of July celebration. So what? (This silly plate reminds me of one of my favorite instances of pathetic local boosterism. As you enter Mitchell, Ind., a sign declares: "Welcome to Mitchell. Home of the Mitchell Bees. State Basketball Championship Runner-ups 1948''. Or to echo the 1969 Peggy Lee ballad, "Is That All There Is?'')

American independence is, however, something to celebrate. Despite ongoing unhappiness with Thomas Jefferson because was a slaveholder,  the Declaration of Independence, of which he was the chief author, changed the world positively forever. Why not remember that document and the events it spawned as the zenith of the Enlightenment? Instead, Rhode Island commemorates a parade in only one of its 39 towns.

Could we have come up with a license plate that did not look like the cheapest sort of political bumper sticker, another "patriotic" pimping of Old Glory?

As a design, the plate is as silly as it is illegible. Why add the impossibly small drum with crossed flags (the simple graphic clarity of the Rhode Island Regiment's flag might have served as a template for the overall design)?

The waving field of stars and stripes is simply a distracting mess, while what are presumably fireworks explosions seems to have been borrowed from Maryland's equally dreadful War of 1812 commemorative plate. Never mind that a disastrous, unnecessary war that we lost (Fort McHenry did not fall, but Washington was burned) is the object of identifying motor vehicles boggles the mind. What’s next: a Vietnam War plate? (Its motto might be the legend I saw on a soldier's jacket in 1968: When I die I am going to heaven, because I have already been to hell: Vietnam.)

Official Rhode Island needs to stop trying so hard. With license plates, as with most aspects of our image, simple is best.

William Morgan is an architectural historian, based in Providence. He has written about license plate design for such publications as the Hartford Courant and Slate.

Lost in the goldenrod

Oak Grove Cemetery, in Falmouth, Mass., where Katherine Lee Bates is buried.

Beside the country road with truant grace
Wild carrot lifts its circles of white lace.
From vines whose interwoven branches drape
The old stone walls, come pungent scents of grape.
The sumach torches burn; the hardhack glows;
From off the pines a healing fragrance blows;
The pallid Indian pipe of ghostly kin
Listens in vain for stealthy moccasin.
In pensive mood a faded robin sings;
A butterfly with dusky, gold-flecked wings
Holds court for plumy dandelion seed
And thistledown, on throne of fireweed.

The road goes loitering on, till it hath missed
Its way in goldenrod, to keep a tryst,
Beyond the mosses and the ferns that veil
The last faint lines of its forgotten trail,
With Lonely Lake, so crystal clear that one
May see its bottom sparkling in the sun
With many-colored stones. The only stir
On its green banks is of the kingfisher
Dipping for prey, but oft, these haunted nights,
That mirror shivers into dazzling lights,
Cleft by a falling star, a messenger
From some bright battle lost, Excalibur.

-- "In August,'' by Katherine Lee Bates, a native of Falmouth, Mass., who also wrote the lyrics for "America the Beautiful.''

Tim Faulkner: A confusing set of energy proposals for Somerset, Mass.

Via ecoRI News (ecori.org)

SOMERSET, Mass.

A massive new energy project is being proposed for the former coal-burning Brayton Point Power Station and the Montaup Power Plant, a long-shuttered coal facility along the west bank of the Taunton River.  Both facilities are in Somerset.

During a muddled and at times rambling presentation on Aug. 23, a collection of energy developers outlined solar, biomass, fuel-cell and natural-gas projects with the potential to generate more than 2 gigawatts of electricity from the two locations. By contrast, recently closed Brayton Point had 1,611 megawatts of energy capacity.

The overall project, proposed by GSXI International Group, of Houston, is far from approved. The only agreement, so far, is a long-term contract to buy wood pellets from central Texas to fuel a biomass plant. The pellets would be shipped from Texas to Somerset via cargo ship. The town Economic Development Committee hosted the meeting as a public-information event.

The proposals presented conflicting data, but gave a rough outline of the scope of each project, which would be built in three phases. The biomass plant generated the most scrutiny, and about 20 protestors and several local environmental groups rallied outside the public library before the meeting.

Dubbed the Freedom Green Energy Biomass Project, the wood-fired plant is projected to generate between 400 and 1,000 megawatts by using the moth-balled coal boilers at Brayton Point. In a surprise twist, the power facility wouldn't burn the Texas wood pellets, but instead decompose the pellets and burn the emitted gases.

Skeptical residents wanted to know about pollution from emissions. Nilan Pillia, an engineer with GSXI, repeatedly promised that the energy process would generate no harmful pollutants. He couldn't cite any research, nor name a “syn-gas” facility that is already operating. Pillia could only say he’d worked on similar projects in Canada and Australia.

“There is no environmental risks. I can send you the reports,” Pillia said. “It is cleaner than natural gas, it is cleaner than coal.”

According to one of Pillia's charts, the biomass plant would also burn food scrap, animal waste and leaf and yard waste.

As the audience tried to grasp the unconventional power concept, the meeting shifted to a presentation on solar energy. Details were again sparse, but Seth Mansur, of Intelligen Energy of Worcester, described a 5-to-10-megawatt project comprised of solar carports and rooftop arrays combined with a residential discount program.

The presentation then pivoted to the hydrogen fuel-cell proposal. The audience expected to hear about hydroelectric power. However, Edgar Caballero, of Carter Energy Solutions, outlined a fuel-cell system that runs on hydrogen and raw sewage or seawater. The project would likely draw water from Mount Hope Bay, according to Caballero. Only carbon dioxide and drinkable water are the byproducts, he said. Although there are several companies developing full-cell energy, there are no industrial-scale power plants.

Caballero disputed the financial payout of residential solar power and touted the subsidy-free benefits of fuel cells. The costs to produce the energy from fuel cells is similar to the cost of generating power from natural gas, he said.

“It’s absolutely perfect, meaning zero emissions,” Caballero said, without addressing the amount of carbon dioxide emissions.

Caballaro explained that the competing hydrogen fuel cells are too expensive to turn a profit, but Carter is using a new, cost-effective 250-megawatt systems from German-based Langenburg Technologies.

In all, the combination of power projects promises 300 to 400 local jobs and $20 million in tax revenue. GSXI said it hopes to buy the Brayton Point site from Dynegy for $15 million. The projects would be built in three phases and cost $800 million.

After the meeting, Sylvia Broude, executive director of the Boston-based Toxics Action Center, said the presentation was shoddy and left her with more questions than answers.

"I continue to be very skeptical that they have a plan that could become a reality for Somerset," she said.

The Brayton Point Power Station operated for 54 years before ceasing operations on May 31. At the time, it was the largest and highest polluting power plant in New England.

The Montaup Power Plant closed Jan. 1, 2010. The 38-acre site has been considered for a number of industrial and commercial uses since its retirement.

Tim Faulkner writes for ecoRI News.

The perfect hiding place

"Passed a truck hauling portable johns.

20 bundled in plastic light blue.

Had a thought, they're perfect smuggling cons:

Who'd inspect? They're bound to pass through.''

- -"Rt. 95 Tales: Smugglers,'' by Allan C. Klepper

Do big tax breaks to lure developers make sense?

From Robert Whitcomb's Digital Diary, in GoLocal24.com

For years, Providence has used the offer of big tax-stabilization plans to try to lure big developers and other enterprises to the city, with occasional success. But at the same time, Providence commercial  real-estate-tax rates remain among the highest in America. GoLocalProv.com has reported that the Lincoln Institute ranks the cities with the highest commercial rates as Detroit, New York, Chicago, Providence and Bridgeport, Conn., with “effective tax rates that are at least two-thirds higher than the average’’ of the 53 cities it surveyed.

Meanwhile, Boston ranks at 28th. Not exactly a competitive situation for Little Rhody!

Basically,  like many jurisdictions around America, Providence (and Rhode Island) do a lot of economic development by deal rather than by broad-based policies that treat all property owners  equitably.

Thus in Providence, as GoLocalProv.com noted, “new projects are the ‘haves’ -- new, modern and heavily subsidized,’’  while businesses that have been in Providence without these “bribes’’ are in older, less energy- or otherwise efficient buildings and have to pay the very high commercial real-estate taxes.

Thus over time they have a big incentive to leave the city. These usually small enterprises don’t get the political PR of a sexy national company moving some employees into Providence but there are a lot of them, and the city suffers when they leave, usually quietly and with no news stories. This emphasis on preferential tax deals for “sexy,’’ high-profile tax deals at the expense of the much larger number of unfavored enterprises continues to destabilize the city’s fiscal condition.

And remember how often   companies that get preferential tax deals decide to leave town with little warning.

It’s past time that the city and state implement major commercial property-tax reform. As my friend Gary Sasse noted in GoLocalProv: “Unfortunately, state policy appears to be directed at providing real estate developers with preferential tax deals while totally ignoring structural property tax reforms needed to make Providence truly competitive.’’

WPI is setting up an operation in Boston's burgeoning Seaport District

This is from the New England Council

"New England Council member Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) recently announced that it will launch an Innovation and Collaboration Space in Boston’s Seaport District this fall to improve access to industry partners and other agencies for students and faculty.

"WPI has signed a seven-year lease for a 6,400 square-foot space that is within walking distance of major innovation sector leaders such as GE, Vertex, Amazon and Red Hat. The new space will create and strengthen strategic partnerships, professional development, and research opportunities in addition to advancing the university’s position in the state’s innovation economy. The new space will be home to WPI’s Boston Project Center, where students have analyzed and tried to solve real-world problems in the community over the past few years.  The space is expected to open in October. 

“'The Seaport District is playing a critical role in what has been dubbed Mass Miracle 2.0., and WPI will use this new space for industry-centric meetings, classes, projects, and events that are tailored to the interests and needs of our neighbors who are working in areas such as healthcare technology, robotics, cybersecurity, and big data,' said Stephen Flavin, Vice President and Dean of Academic and Corporate Engagement.

 “It will be a top priority to better serve these businesses and organizations by providing them with more convenient access to our high-caliber programs, and to connect them to our students and alumni.”

Easier than a bow tie

"Southwest Cravat'' (fabric), by Tanya Crane, in the show "Artists Awards,'' at the Society of Arts and Crafts, Boston, through Oct. 20. The gallery says:. "Her pieces are large in both size and meaning, exploring concepts like racial identity, industry and labor.''

Her pieces are large in both size and meaning, exploring concepts like racial identity, industry, and labor

A kind of love

-- Photo by William Morgan

Photo taken near the site of the now closed Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Conn., where, on Dec. 14, 2012, Adam Lanza, after fatally shooting his mother at home, went to the school and shot to death 20 kids, six school employees and then himself.

Llewellyn King: Elon Musk and the power of celebrity

Elon Musk and then President Obama  at the Falcon 9 launch site in 2010.

Agents of change are not always welcome. Seldom, in fact. Take Elon Musk, unquestionably an agent of change and not universally celebrated by his peers.

The public loves Musk, who has promised them pollution-free solar power, electric cars, space travel and an underground, intercity transport system called “Hyperloop,” in which they will be whisked in vacuum tubes on magnetic cushions at more than 800 miles an hour. He has hired Boeing  to build the tunnels for the system.

More, Musk has attacked artificial intelligence and its use in weaponry as a threat to humanity. In this, he has fed into the general unease about artificial intelligence.

Recently, the chairman and chief executive officer of one of the largest electric-utility holding companies unloaded on me about Musk, accusing the inventor of being “dishonest,” “lying” and using fraudulent data in pushing SolarCity, his rooftop solar company. Also recently, a nuclear scientist with creative credentials denounced Musk to me as a showman, a media darling, a hoax and someone who had used too much government money, particularly at SpaceX, his reusable- rocket company.

The automobile industry wishes that Musk had stayed in his native South Africa rather than beginning a student odyssey, which saw him studying in Canada and at Stanford University before making his first fortune with PayPal.

It is true that Musk has used some debatable numbers. Three years ago, he told the Edison Electric Institute annual meeting that more electricity from solar panels could be generated from a nuclear power plant site than from the solar plant. That was a huge blooper: the equivalent of saying the economy of Liechtenstein is larger than that of the United States.

One expects people whose whole life is tied up in math, from rockets to electric cars, to get their sums right. Yet Musk glides on, like some blithe spirit, changing things as he goes. Changing them in fundamental ways.

And we should applaud his progress.

The arguments over Musk's creations end up as a battle between technological incrementalists and a disruptor. His critics are incrementalists, moving forward slowly and steadily.

Incremental change is the compound interest of technology. Look no further than today’s automobile to see how it has improved and changed incrementally over the years.

Then look to Musk and his Tesla: It is standing the automobile industry on its ear. So much so, The Economist magazine has heralded the death of the internal-combustion engine.

Change agents can be unsung heroes. James Watt was when he was creating the condenser that made steam power viable, and Bill Gates when he was helping to write the original Windows operating system, and Mark Zuckerberg when he was playing around with Facebook.

But by and large, hero inventors get the job done faster and with more ease. All the cited inventors found hero status later, but they might have gotten there faster with the public cheering them on — and loosening the financial strings — if they were known names with which to to begin.

Wall Street is cool to unsung inventors and cannot control itself when a name inventor goes to market. That is why Tesla has a larger market cap than General Motors, why Apple is the largest company in the world by some measures, and why Elon Musk and other celebrity inventors will shape our future faster and more dramatically than a lot of quiet evolvements.

Woe betide the technology-based industry that lacks a celebrity, a Pied Piper, to conquer the public imagination. Exhibit A might be the nuclear industry, which  has achieved incredible things in making clean electricity through high science, but languishes today. Its last hero was Adm. Hyman Rickover, in the 1950s.

The book on celebrity invention could be said to have been written by one of the greatest American inventors: Thomas Edison.

He knew the power of a headline. His rival Nikola Tesla, less so.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His e-mail is llewellynking1@gmail.com. This first appeared in Inside Sources..

James P. Freedom: Free speech took a huge hit in Boston on Aug. 19

Monument to the First Amendment outside Independence Hall, in Philadelphia.

“If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought — not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.”

— The late Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., U.S. Supreme Court justice

“We are so concerned to flatter the majority that we lose sight of how very often it is necessary, in order to preserve freedom for the minority, let alone for the individual, to face that majority down.”

— William F. Buckley Jr., founder of National Review magazine

Out in the grape-growing town of Delano, Calif., during a famous exchange captured on grainy color film at a public hearing in 1966, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy questioned Kern County Sheriff Leroy Galyen about labor strife affecting migrant farm workers and the arrests of 44 strikers and priests. Kennedy asked the sheriff: “How can you go arrest somebody if they haven’t violated the law?” Galyen responded: They’re ready  to violate the law.”

Likewise, Boston public officials in advance of and during the Aug. 19's “Free Speech Rally” suppressed freedom of speech because speakers were ready to say something insensitive, perhaps even hateful. And local media condoned it.

Rally organizers were not ready to violate the law. In fact, all they intended was to exercise and express their constitutionally protected freedoms. Such as free speech.

Those freedoms, however, were ultimately too much too bear for Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, Boston Police Commissioner William Evans, and 40,000 so-called counter-protestors. (With impossible irony, they protested 40 “free-speech” advocates, barricaded like animals, on a bandstand on Boston Common.)

Before the free-speech rally Mayor Walsh stoked the counter-protest and condemned the group that was wrongly — and loudly — reported by media as being sympathizers with white supremacists. Among those guilty-by-false-association was John Medlar, who held the permit for Boston Free Speech Coalition, and is its spokesman.

Medlar, visually and vocally harmless, appeared on the WGBH program Morning Edition a day before the rally, dispelling what he called “misinformation about what we actually stand for.” He said, “If people are bringing overtly white supremacist symbols like swastikas or KKK flags or using the Nazi salute, we will disassociate ourselves from them.” Days in advance of the event the Boston Coalition rejected violence. It wrote on its Facebook page that the group was strictly about free speech: “We denounce the politics of supremacy and violence.” (The Boston rally was planned well in advance of the Charlottesville, Va., protests.) But these assurances mattered little to Boston officials.

America is itself supposed to be a free-speech zone but the free-speech advocates nonetheless had to obtain a permit for free speech, which was granted by the city with severe restrictions. A maximum of 100 people would be permitted entry (with no backpacks). Mayor Walsh went to the safe harbor of MSNBC four days before the rally and further articulated the restrictions (“no signs” and “no sound”). He also said he was “concerned with the message.”

Boston is subjective and selective when granting permits. Conservative-tinged groups such as the Tea Party and Boston Free Speech must obtain them but progressive-affiliated groups like Occupy Boston and counter-free speech groups are, interestingly, exempt from Boston’s high-minded indignation and moral preening. An example of Boston’s non-neutral public neutrality.

Mayor Walsh urged the public to stay away from the rally — lest they be offended — and he consulted with Southern Poverty Law Center for guidance on how to handle events involving white supremacists. He claimed it would be frustrating that vendors would lose business just “for five people to be able to spew hate.” And one commentator on Boston television reminded viewers, “there is no freedom of speech to incite violence.”

So what hateful speech (“the message”) was spoken on Saturday to incite violence?

No one knew.

Not only did Boston city officials suppress the expression of free speech but they also silenced dissemination of the content of that speech.

A Boston police directive, issued  a couple of days before the event, read: “NO media personnel will be allowed inside the barricaded area around the Bandstand.” Additionally, media members were expected to “remain mobile and refrain from long term stationary reporting which may incite and attract participants.” What happened to that other vital First Amendment freedom? Like freedom of the press?

Boston media had to follow the official directive like obedient puppies, bowing to the fear-driven direction of their master, Mayor Walsh, who surely must have approved the police order. He therefore effectively imposed a journalistic blackout. And journalists accepted it.

Only in Boston can a hyper-progressive administration suppress a mostly progressive media into such pathetic submission. The order should have been vigorously challenged. Where was the outrage by media executives? How could Boston media accurately report a local event making national headlines without finding out the truth behind it? Instead, on Saturday, no mainstream Boston media could seek the whole truth.

That did not prevent wall-to-wall coverage — fake news? — of the unofficially sanctioned, media-ready counter-rallies. The mayor actually walked with counter protesters, who were unfettered by free-speech restrictions Many interviews with counter-protestors were broadcast (involving, at times, offensive background free speech, hateful signs, and backpacks). But the media were prevented from engaging with the free-speech participants. One television commentator on Boston’s Fox 25, wrongly declared the station was there to “cover every angle.” Except one critical angle: What the free-speech speakers were saying and doing. (No wonder conservatives rightly sense a left-leaning media bias.)

As a consequence, the public had to rely upon a YouTube video posted by a participant, recorded on the bandstand. That video showed no hateful speech (even if there were, that is constitutionally protected speech). And among their terrifying signs: “Black Lives Do Matter.”

The mayor, acting as if he had victoriously evacuated from Dunkirk, tweeted out: “Boston stood for peace and love, not bigotry and hate.” Except for several counter-protester bullies who harassed journalists, taunted and assaulted police (“Stupid black bitch, you’re supposed to be on our side”), and abused a woman holding an American flag. And responding to charges that some speakers were denied admittance, Commissioner Evans said at the post-rally press conference, “That’s a good thing because their message isn’t what we want to hear.” This is their close-minded, homogeneously-diverse, yet happy and harmonious, progressive Boston.

A post-mortem editorial in The Boston Globe, two days after the rallies, finally asked, “Why was media restricted from the bandstand?” Sarah Betancourt, writing for Columbia Journalism Review, raised important First Amendment concerns. She concluded that Boston officials “failed at protecting the media’s right to cover a newsworthy event.” She added that, “Journalists were blocked from witnessing and reporting on the very reason for the massive crowds.”   

In 1860, nearly a hundred years before Bobby Kennedy’s questioning of Sheriff Galyen, Frederick Douglass, the eminent African-American human-rights leader, delivered “A Plea for Free Speech in Boston.” Douglass thought that the principle of free speech was “an accomplished fact.” He said, “There can be no right of speech where any man, however lifted up, or however humble, however young, or however old, is overawed by force, and compelled to suppress his honest sentiments. Equally clear is the right to hear. To suppress free speech is a double wrong.”

But the “mortifying and disgraceful fact,” Douglass stingingly observed then, “stares us in the face, that though Faneuil Hall and Bunker Hill Monument stand, freedom of expression is struck down. No lengthy detail of facts is needed.” The same must be said of Boston in 2017.

James P. Freeman, an occasional contributor to New England Diary, is a New England-based writer, former columnist with The Cape Cod Times and former banker. This piece first appeared in the New Boston Post. His work has also appeared in The Providence Journal and nationalreview.com.

Call the EPA

"Yellow Cloud'' (oil and collage on panel), by Jackie Reeves, in the group show "Speak My Language,'' at the Brickbottom Artists Association, Sept. 8-Oct. 14.

An old library's 'creature comfort'

Inside the Boston Athenaeum.

"The high-ceilinged rooms, the little balconies, alcoves, nooks and angles all suggest sanctuary, escape, creature comfort. The reader, the scholar, the browser, the borrower is king.''

-- David McCord, about the Boston Athenaeum

Chris Powell: Using Charlottesville for a partisan political agenda

Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy, that state's congresspeople and Democratic officials everywhere insist that everyone must speak out against the aspiring Nazis and Klansmen who went looking for a fight in Charlottesville the other week and were given one by street-theater-loving leftists as the city's police withdrew.

Many people are heeding the Democrats' calls, holding church services and "vigils" to declaim against "racism and hate." Even University of Connecticut President Susan Herbst felt compelled last week to issue a statement essentially declaring that she's not a Nazi, as if anyone had suspected her.

But no, we all don't have to speak out against "racism and hate."

For Nazis and Klansmen are not really numerous in this country. The few dozen who descended on Charlottesville may have constituted most of those who would even dare show themselves. The reaction to them is so disproportionate to their significance that it plainly has a partisan political purpose -- to keep discrediting President Trump for his inability to speak sensibly and accurately about anything.

But anyone who wanted to know that about Trump knew it long before Charlottesville. Further, people who live normal lives and behave decently can be safely assumed not to be Nazis or Klansmen. But people who demand that everyone certify  that he is not a Nazi or Klansman cast insinuation against everyone and engage in political intimidation. The sanctimony of the church services and "vigils" compounds this insinuation and intimidation, a merger of religion and politics that offends the political left when the right attempts it.

Even so, sanctimony is a great tool politically and it is getting out of hand. This week some environmental and religious groups planned a "vigil" at Hartford City Hall in support of an ordinance banning disposal of fracking waste. For apparently God isn't just against Nazis, Klansmen, and Trump; He stands with the left on energy policy too.

As they marched in Charlottesville the Nazi thugs carried torches for intimidating effect. The people holding "vigils" against "racism and hate" carry candles to reinforce their sanctimony. Invoking religion, the candles are more intimidating politically than the torches.

* * *

It's no wonder that Governor Malloy and leaders of the General Assembly like to attend "vigils" and posture against "racism and hate." It's a lot easier than a job they were elected to do: producing a state budget.

The state Senate's Democratic leader, Martin Looney, of New Haven, says municipal officials are wrong to complain about the delay of the budget. The budget is so late, Looney says, because legislators are trying to arrange "more aid to municipalities and more education aid."

Not really. The delay results from disagreement over the governor's plan to divert $400 million from teacher pension fund contributions, use the money to finance state government, and make municipalities replace it by raising property taxes. Most Democratic legislators would prefer to raise state taxes instead, particularly the sales tax.

The money here is not "aid to education" but compensation for members of teacher unions, who, as part of the majority party's biggest component, government employees, have to be bought off just as the state employee unions were recently bought off with a new contract that preserves their jobs and compensation for four years.

Without a budget the governor is reducing "aid to education" for all but the poorest cities and towns. It would be nice if this policy could last for a year or two so Connecticut could see if anything changes in student performance. For decades nothing about student performance changed as aid went up. Would anything change if aid went down?



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

Amazonian ambiguities

From Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com

Here’s yet another observation on Amazon, which has been hiring thousands of people across America and a few hundred at its new distribution center in Fall River:

Those warehouse jobs are being taken by many people who might otherwise have been working in the thousands of stores being put out of business by Amazon. Those are people who would have been customers of nearby stores and restaurants and, because they were working in local stores (which paid local taxes) -- people much more likely to be civically engaged than those working for a gigantic global corporation most of whose buildings are gigantic warehouses far from town or city centers. Thus Amazon’s relentless expansion will accelerate the decline of local economies and local government.

But, as I’ve said, people love the convenience of dealing with Amazon, which will trump the attractions of local retailing in most places.  High-end stores, with intense personal service, in very affluent neighborhoods will be partial exceptions. As for the good PR Amazon gets from its hiring binge, that will fade as the geniuses in Seattle figure out more ways to automate its warehouses.

You could do worse

"When I see birches bend to left and right 

Across the lines of straighter darker trees, 

I like to think some boy's been swinging them. 

But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay 

As ice-storms do. Often you must have seen them 

Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning 

After a rain. They click upon themselves 

As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored 

As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel. 

Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells 

Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust— 

Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away 

You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen. 

They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load, 

And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed 

So low for long, they never right themselves: 

You may see their trunks arching in the woods 

Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground 

Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair 

Before them over their heads to dry in the sun. 

But I was going to say when Truth broke in 

With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm 

I should prefer to have some boy bend them 

As he went out and in to fetch the cows— 

Some boy too far from town to learn baseball, 

Whose only play was what he found himself, 

Summer or winter, and could play alone. 

One by one he subdued his father's trees 

By riding them down over and over again 

Until he took the stiffness out of them, 

And not one but hung limp, not one was left 

For him to conquer. He learned all there was 

To learn about not launching out too soon 

And so not carrying the tree away 

Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise 

To the top branches, climbing carefully 

With the same pains you use to fill a cup 

Up to the brim, and even above the brim. 

Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish, 

Kicking his way down through the air to the ground. 

So was I once myself a swinger of birches. 

And so I dream of going back to be. 

It's when I'm weary of considerations, 

And life is too much like a pathless wood 

Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs 

Broken across it, and one eye is weeping 

From a twig's having lashed across it open. 

I'd like to get away from earth awhile 

And then come back to it and begin over. 

May no fate willfully misunderstand me 

And half grant what I wish and snatch me away 

Not to return. Earth's the right place for love: 

I don't know where it's likely to go better. 

I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree, 

And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk 

Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more, 

But dipped its top and set me down again. 

That would be good both going and coming back. 

One could do worse than be a swinger of birches. ''

-- "Birches,'' by Robert Frost

Longing for the elms

A rare surviving American elm in western Massachusetts. Most of these trees were killed by Dutch Elm Disease in the mid 20th Century.

"Never again

when the heat overwhelms us

cool elms

The elm leaves shrivel on the twig

and the sun beats through and our time is big

with a lidless time that knows no dark,

no shadow where the heart can see...''

-- From "Long Hot Summer,'' by  the late Archibald MacLeish. He lived in Conway, Mass.

New England's uber mountain

Mount Monadnock, from the campus of Franklin Pierce University, in Rindge, N.H. 

"Mount Monadnock is to New England what Mount Olympus was to the ancient Mediterranean: not the the highest or the grandest mountain, not the wildest or the most difficult, but somehow the most sovereign mountain. It is middle-sized at 3,165 feet and stands alone in the middle of a plain in southern New Hampshire like a clipper ship in parking lot.''

-- Castle Freeman Jr.

If Mass. won't help pay to build baseball stadium....

McCoy Stadium, the current home of the Pawtucket Red Sox.

Adapted from an item in Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com

Those who think that Worcester is about to grab the Pawtucket Red Sox should consider this news from the (Worcester) Telegram & Gazette.

Hit this link: http://www.telegram.com/news/20170813/worcester-city-councilors-love-idea-of-wooing-pawsox-but-obstacles-loom from the (Worcester) Telegram & Gazette:

“Massachusetts legislators told the Telegram & Gazette …{that} the {state} Legislature is unlikely to put public dollars toward a stadium for a private team. And even if a deal in Rhode Island that seeks to do that falls through, and neither city offers public money, staying in Pawtucket would likely be the shrewder move,’’ a stadium expert told the paper.

“All things being equal, Worcester is probably going to have to pay a higher subsidy to get them,”  said Victor A. Matheson, a College of the Holy Cross economics professor who specializes in stadiums. After all, the Worcester Metropolitan Statistical Area is only about half the size of the Providence-Warwick Metropolitan Statistical Area, which includes Pawtucket.  (Also, Worcester is not on the Main Street of the East Coast -- Route 95. Pawtucket is.)

“It sounds wonderful, doesn’t it?” Senate Majority Leader Harriette L. Chandler (D.-Worcester) said of the idea of the  PawSox moving to Worcester. ”(But) who’s going to pay for it?”

“The reality,’’ she told the paper,  “is that the Legislature has an established precedent of not putting public money into sports stadiums.’’ And Massachusetts is of course a much richer state than Rhode Island on a per-capital basis.

While Massachusetts has spent money for public-infrastructure improvements associated with stadiums (most notably around Gillette Stadium, in Foxboro), that’s not the same as the millions that the PawSox wants from Rhode Island taxpayers to actually build a new PawSox stadium itself in downtown Pawtucket. The Boston Red Sox, by the way,  got no public money for its massive improvements at Fenway Park in recent years.

The PawSox want $38 million in public money in Rhode Island to build a new stadium: $23 million from the state and $15 million from Pawtucket. The PawSox assert that the long-term loans from the public for the project would be repaid from the tax revenues that the new stadium generated and so wouldn’t hurt taxpayers. But of course it’s impossible to know how well the team and stadium would do in coming decades, indeed how popular baseball in general will be.

Anyway, I continue to be very skeptical that the PawSox would go to Worcester. And I hope that they’ll stay in Pawtucket. Had a wonderful evening there a couple of weeks ago.