Don't erase this

From the current "Erase Me'' exhibition, by Tariku Shiferaw, at Vermont College Fine Arts, Montpelier. The city, with about 8,000 people, is the smallest state capital, but remarkably lively, including with many artists and some very good restaurants. Its main drawback is that parts of it tend to flood in the spring.

'Ordinary days were the best'

    'Always the weather,

writing its book of the world,

returns you to me.

Ordinary days were best,

while we worked over poems

in out separate rooms.

I remember watching you gaze

out the January window

into the garden of snow

and ice, your face rapt

as you imagined burgundy lilies.''

-- From "Letter with No Address,'' by Donald Hall, of Wilmot, N.H., a  former U.S. poet laureate. He refers to his late wife,  the poet Jane Kenyon.

'An alien guest'

 

"For one brief golden moment rare like wine, 
The gracious city swept across the line; 
Oblivious of the color of my skin, 
Forgetting that I was an alien guest, 
She bent to me, my hostile heart to win, 
Caught me in passion to her pillowy breast; 
The great, proud city, seized with a strange love, 
Bowed down for one flame hour my pride to prove." 

-- "The City's Love,'' by Claude McKay

Materials found at AS220

"Compass Rose'' (acrylic on cardboard with rubber and fabric), Margie Butler, in the show "Counterbalance,'' at AS220, large downtown Providence arts center. Ms. Butler uses a broad range of organic and found materials.

AS220 explains that it offers artists "opportunities to live, work, exhibit and perform in its facilities, including: four rotating gallery spaces, a performance stage, a black box theater, a print shop, a darkroom and media arts lab, a fabrication and electronics lab, a dance studio, a youth program focusing on youth under state care and in the Rhode Island juvenile detention facility, 47 affordable live/work studios for artists, and a bar and restaurant. For more information, please visit as220.org/january-gallery-openings.''

AS220's facility in an old commercial building in downtown Providence.

Llewellyn King: Bumping up against the 'mortarboard ceiling'

Franklin University, in Columbus, Ohio, features a giant steel mortarboard suspended over the street as a landmark.

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

Horace Greeley, founder and editor of The New York Tribune, famously said, “Go west, young man, and grow with the country.”

In the movie The Graduate  the character played by Dustin Hoffman is advised to go into “plastics.” Nowadays, young men and women are being advised to go into the “trades”: There’s work for people who can weld, read a grade level, work a lathe or follow site drawings.

There’s a severe shortage of skilled labor, from carpenters to steel fitters. And it’s beginning to be a brake on the economy.

Some are heeding the call. One young man who grew up in San Francisco, call him Jeremy, whose parents are college-educated (his mother is an Ivy League college graduate), has decided he’ll forgo college — although his parents can well afford it — and become a welder. Bravo!

But the road to a happy life through the trades hasn’t been cleared of the debris left by our passion for college degrees. The aspiring young welder and hundreds of thousands of others who’ll be tempted to give up the pleasures of four years in college for the rigors of as many or more years in an apprenticeship will likely find themselves marked for life as “second rate.”

Jeremy can find work aplenty in today’s job market and good wages, too. But he’ll be binding himself to a world where many will look down on him; where the values of his upbringing are scarce in the workplace, with its dictatorial foremen and rough-and-ready society; where he’ll have a sense, ever present, of being low on the social and work totem pole; and where he’ll encounter many closed doors if he wants to leave welding for some other kind of work.

Jeremy or an equivalent young woman, call her Jane, could leave welding as their interest declined or simply because, with the passage of years, he or she couldn’t handle the physical demands of the trade. But what to do? With a wealth of experience, how about teaching? No way with no degree.

Supposing Jane, at age 25, decides that she doesn’t want to spend the rest of her life in a world of arcs and acetylene, burns and fumes. She’s young enough to learn to fly and become a pilot. But she’ll never fly for an airline: They require pilots to have a college degree of some sort. Management in a hotel chain? Not as such. They like degrees for anything above housekeeper or waiter.

Jeremy and Jane will come up against the “mortarboard ceiling,” as I’ve called it. I know many who’ve bumped up against it. A useless degree from a mediocre college is still better than great life experience when it comes to career.

When I arrived in the United States from Britain, I hit my head on the mortar board ceiling many times. Although I had worked for ITN and the BBC in England, I couldn’t get an interview with a U.S. television network on the grounds that I didn’t have a college degree. The human resources departments were adamant.

Insanely, The New York Times told me that I’d never be a writer on the paper, but they had an opening for an editor. I went, almost literally, around the block to The Herald Tribune and signed on there as a rewrite man on the foreign desk. They didn’t ask and I didn’t tell.

It’s important that people going into artisan work, for all of its camaraderie and job fulfillment satisfaction, know that it’s still fair weather work. Little or no sick leave, no lifetime guarantees and pension, unless it is a union job. You clock in and clock out: the devil take the hindmost.

Time was when the trades offered a future: A meat cutter could open a butcher shop and become self-employed, a baker a bakery, etc. That line of entrepreneurship is essentially foreclosed in today’s winner-take-all world of big companies.

But mostly, Jeremy and Jane need to know that the future for the non-college worker is still inferior. Society still looks down on the horny-handed sons and daughters of toil — and there’s no change in sight. Meanwhile, we’ll have too many graduates and too few people who can build and repair.

Llewellyn King (llewellynking1@gmail.com) is a veteran publisher, editor, columnist and international business consultant. He's the executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS, and a frequent contributor to New England Diary, among other outlets. He is based in Rhode Island and in Washington, D.C.

On Twitter: @llewellynking2

Don Pesci: Please spare Connecticut from more 'heroic' governors

Connecticut has had three “heroic” governors within the past four gubernatorial election cycles. Lowell Weicker was the first. His legacy is inseparable from his income tax, and it was his income tax. In a rare moment of humor, Weicker suggested that the tax should be named after his lieutenant governor, Eunice Groark, who broke a tie in the state Senate, assuring the passage of the income tax bill through the General Assembly sausage-making process. Groark declined the honor.

His was a campaign risen from the dead, after conservatives in his state, notable among them William F. Buckley Jr., indirectly supported the candidacy of then state Atty. Gen. Joe Lieberman to run against Weicker for the U.S. Senate. Weicker had been on the outs with his own state party for years. At one point he mused, “Why doesn’t someone take over the (state) party? It’s so small,” and, to Weicker’s way of thinking, dispensable and insignificant. Weicker’s senatorial run was indistinguishable from that of U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd and, during his last years in office, his Americans for Democratic Action rating was higher than Dodd’s. Weicker supported the presidential candidacies of both New Jersey Democratic  Sen. Bill Bradley and Vermont Gov.  Howard Dean, also a Democrat.

Following his senatorial defeat, Weicker, like Achilles, retired to his tent. Then, running in a three-way race for governor on a throw-away party ticket, he returned with a vengeance. Having signaled in unambiguous terms in his campaign that he would not look favorably on an income tax -- please don’t pour gas taxes on the state’s simmering recession -- he proceeded as governor to ram an income tax bill through Connecticut’s cowardly, spending-addicted General Assembly, thus saving state government the necessity of prudent and necessary cost saving measures.

Connecticut ran a surplus for a few years, after which spending increased threefold by the time Gov. Dannel Malloy had been sworn into office. Weicker declined to run for a second term as governor for reasons that were obvious to anyone who did not regard his signal achievement, the income tax, as heroic. He was given a “Profile in Courage” award by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum for having exhibited moral fortitude in forcing an income tax upon his state.

Weicker was followed in office by Gov. John Rowland, who gave indications during his own campaign that, were Connecticut citizens brilliant enough to vote Rowland in, he would abolish the new income tax. This did not happen, though Rowland, attempting to cut costs, did exhibit some courage in laying off state workers when he could not reach an accommodation with union leaders on work and benefit contracts. Rowland went to prison for corruption. Sometime later, Connecticut’s left leaning Supreme Court reversed Rowland's executive action, for which the Court has yet to receive a “Profile in Courage Award” from the JFK Library.

Governor Jodi Rell -- denounced by the state’s media as a do-nothing, caretaker Governor, the Snow White of Connecticut -- replaced Rowland and created no public disturbances. She was followed in office by the least popular Connecticut Governor in modern times, Dannel Malloy, who hiked Weicker’s income tax twice, both the largest and the second largest tax increases in state history. The heroic Malloy was, like the heroic Weicker, full of bluster; both led the state into recessionary thickets and deepening debt.

Such are the heroic strongmen governors of Connecticut, full of sound and fury, signatories of the state’s downward spiral – little more than blustering, politically privileged egotists, men who took the easy road usually followed by timid cowards and responsibility shirkers.

Connecticut likely will not survive such heroes in the future. The path upward in Connecticut is tediously straight and simple: 1) Reduce the costs of state labor permanently by eliminating state union contract negotiations  and allowing salaries and benefits to be set by statute ; 2) restore the dignity and recover the constitutional prerogatives of Connecticut’s law-making body from "heroic" chief executives and unelected autocratic appellate court justices; 3) institute term limits that will have the beneficial effect of restoring some of the power state political parties lost through enfeebling campaign finance reform laws; 4) privatize all possible governmental functions; 5) cut state regulations on business to the bone; 6) throw off wealth inhibitors – costly regulations and revenue enhancers -- and begin a movement from income to consumption taxes; 6) deep six all attempts to retain and attract businesses through polite chief executive bribery;  7) institute a flat or fair tax that will make everyone in the state investors in Connecticut’s recovery; and always 8) beware of Trojan governors bearing gifts.

What Connecticut needs at this most critical juncture is a courageous governor and workmen-like legislators who recognize the limits of political power and who are resolved to restore in the Constitution State an ordered republic without which the state cannot recover its political place in the sun and advance the public good.    

 Don Pesci (donpesci@att.ne) is a columnist who lives in Vernon, Conn.

'I'm not myself here'

"Ice petals on the trees.
The peppery black sparrows pour across
the frozen lawn.
The wind waits patiently behind the barn.

Though I’m not myself here, that’s okay.
I’ve lost my name,
my last address, the problem
that has kept me up all night this week in winter.''

-- From "Below Zero,'' by Jay Parini, a well known poet and professor at Middlebury College, in Vermont.

Josh Hoxie: Past time for a sociopathic generation to leave the political scene

Baby Boomers watching TV in the late '50s.

Via OtherWords.org

Historians won’t look fondly on 2017.

The news cycle was dominated by sexual assault, widespread anxiety, the unedited musings of a mentally unstable president, rising economic inequality, and an opioid epidemic. And in case you forgot, the planet is still on track to boil.

In short, things were bad.

This year, it’s time to transition from despair to action.

We saw the beginnings of this transition as hundreds of political newcomers came out of the woodwork to run for state and local office last year. And thousands more started the process to run in 2018 and beyond.

Democracy isn’t a spectator sport, and it’s good to see a younger generation more politically engaged than their parents. Unfortunately, the younger folks will have many messes to clean up left by their elders.

Bruce Cannon Gibney goes so far as to depict Baby Boomers, those born between 1946 and 1964, as sociopaths in his book, A Generation of Sociopaths: How The Baby Boomers Betrayed America.

Not all of them, of course.

Gibney limits his analysis to mostly white, native-born, powerful Baby Boomers — the ones in position to make decisions on behalf of everyone else. At each critical juncture, Gibney argues, these Boomers looked after themselves at the expense of everyone else.

Thanks. For. Nothing.

We saw this play out most recently in the tax cut package just passed by Congress. Regardless of the bluster coming from the White House, this bill was nothing more than a wealth grab by the already ultra-wealthy. Over 80 percent of the tax cuts go to the top 1 percent.

Poll after poll showed the majority of Americans understood this. Yet congressional Republicans chose to work on behalf of their donors instead of their constituents.

We see this playing out again as they threaten the Medicare and Social Security of future beneficiaries. That’s millennials they’re targeting, not Baby Boomers. That’s not a coincidence.

In case you couldn’t tell by the abundance of wrinkles and white hair on C-Span, the people making the decisions in Washington are not young. The average age in the Senate is 61, eight years older than 1981. More than a quarter are over 70. The last four presidents have all been Baby Boomers. They oversaw the greatest expansion in economic inequality in modern history.

Young people are inheriting an economy in which it’s all together common to start adulthood tens of thousands of dollars in debt, thanks to a higher education system rooted in exploitation. Meanwhile wages are generally stagnant, and the federal minimum wage falls below the cost of living of every major city in the country.

Young people are rightfully outraged at this inequality and are ready to take bold action to address it. Or, as legendary Republican pollster Frank Luntz put it, millennials are “terrifyingly liberal.”

Naturally, age isn’t everything. Paul Ryan, born after the Baby Boomers, wants to completely destroy the social-safety net. Bernie Sanders, technically too old to be considered a Boomer, might be the biggest advocate for young people in Washington.

Bernie also has massive support among youths. More Millennials cast a ballot for him in the 2016 presidential primary than both Clinton and Trump combined. Unfortunately, Sanders is the exception, not the rule, among his cohort in Washington.

Young people are ready, willing, and able to take a leadership role in healing our deeply broken society and environment. It’s time for the “olds” in Washington — either of age or of ideology — to make way for the rising generation.

Josh Hoxie directs the Project on Taxation and Opportunity at the Institute for Policy Studies. 

A devotion to reclamation

"RePOPART,'' by Liliana Marquez, in her show of the same name at Jamaica Plain (a section of Boston) Branch Public Library, through Jan. 25. She was born and raised in Caracas,  and has a background in graphic design. RePOPART reflects  her interest in mass production and reuse. Her artistic devotion to reclamation produces a bold body of abstract work. 

After decades of decline, Jamaica Plain, had,  the turn of the 21st Century, begun to lure many college-educated professionals, political activists and artists. The elimination of redlining and the stabilization of the real estate market starting in the late 1970s and the redevelopment of the Boston's Southwest Corridor set the stage for gentrification that began in the 1990s. 

In addition, Hyde, Jackson, and Egleston Squares have large Spanish-speaking populations mainly from the Dominican Republic, but also from Puerto Rico (which has grown sharply since Hurricane Maria)  and Cuba. 

Indeed, In 2016, the neighborhood between Jackson Square and Hyde Square was officially designated the "Latin Quarter" by the City of Boston. The area has many Hispanic-owned businesses  and Hispanic-related festivals, churches and activist groups.

Putting America behind you

Old Harbor Life Saving Station, in the Cape Cod National Seashore.

"What are springs and waterfalls? Here is the spring of springs, the waterfall of waterfalls. A storm in the fall or winter is the time to visit it; a lighthouse or a fisherman's hut the true hotel, A man may stand there and put all America behind him.''

-- From Cape Cod, by Henry David Thoreau

"East of America, there stands in the open Atlantic the last fragment of an ancient and vanished land. Worn by the breakers and the rains, and disintegrated by the wind, it still stands bold."

-- From The Outermost House, by Henry Beston

A city for the middle class?

Long Island, in Boston Harbor.

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

Boston Mayor Marty  Walsh promised at his second inauguration last Monday that he’d rebuild the city’s middle class.  “We can be the city that is world class because it works for the middle class,’’ he said. That’s an admirable if vague goal for a city that’s among the most prosperous in America but that also has increasing income inequality, as very highly compensated people at the top of the city’s tech and financial-services sectors get bigger and bigger slices of the economic pie. The new federal income-tax law will further widen the inequality. But Mr. Walsh can’t do much about it and he can sincerely celebrate Boston’s prosperity.

Mr. Walsh has shown himself an effective booster of the city’s reputation and so far, anyway, shows the potential of being as good a mayor as his immediate predecessor, Tom Menino, the “urban mechanic’’ who served from 1993 to 2014 and whom Mr. Walsh sees as his model. The current mayor said Mr. Menino “put us on the world stage as a national leader in health care, education, innovation, and the nitty-gritty of executing basic city services.” Of course, Boston was already a leader in those areas but there’s no doubt that Mr. Menino helped make “the Hub of the Universe’’ truly a world city.

Most interesting to me was the mayor’s promise to rebuild the Long Island Bridge and create on the Boston Harbor island a campus focused on substance-abuse treatment and especially on the opioid crisis. Perhaps it could become a center serving all of southern New England.

Tim Faulkner: Governor wants to talk to Interior chief about offshore drilling

Photo by TheConduqtor

From ecoRI News (ecori.org)

Florida recently received an exemption from a new plan to revive offshore drilling and other states, including Rhode Island, hope to receive the same treatment from the Department of Interior.

Gov. Gina Raimondo's office spoke with the Department of Interior on Jan. 10 to schedule a call with Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. No date and time for that call have been announced.

After traveling to Florida to meet Gov. Rick Scott,  a Republican, Zinke removed the state from a proposal to open federal waters off the East and West Coasts and Alaska to oil and gas drilling.

“I support the governor’s position that Florida is unique and its coasts are heavily reliant on tourism as an economic driver,” Zinke said.

Zinke made the Florida decision five days after a Jan. 4 announcement of a sweeping proposal to expand drilling in areas long closed to fossil-fuel extraction, including in many prime commercial fishing grounds. Most of these proposed zones are in federal waters that typically begin just three miles off the coast.

Condemnation of the proposal was swift, with bipartisan opposition from governors of coastal states who see the same risks that Florida raised. Many governors threatened to sue the Department of Interior over the proposal, including Maryland Republican Gov. Larry Hogan.

Maine Gov. Paul LePage, a Republican, is the only governor from a coastal state to support the offshore drilling proposal.

The Department of Interior said governors are welcome to meet with Zinke to plead their case. So far, North Carolina and South Carolina had made requests to meet. Raimondo is seeking a phone call.

Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker said he also opposes the drilling proposal, but didn't respond to inquiries about seeking an exemption from the Department of Interior or a meeting with Zinke.

Political pundits claim the Florida exemption was a gift to Scott by President Trump who is urging the Republican governor to run for the U.S. Senate this year.

Details of the proposal will be open to public scrutiny during public workshops that begin this month and run through Feb. 28. Providence hosts a meeting Jan. 25 at the Marriott hotel, 1 Orms St., from 3-7 p.m. Boston hosts a meeting Jan. 24 and Hartford hosts a meeting Feb. 13. The meetings offer one-on-one conversations with industry experts and scientists from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. Public comment will be accepted in writing at the meetings but there will be no town hall-style open discussions with an audience.

Public comments are being accepted online through March.

Local and national environmental groups uniformly oppose the drilling plan.

“At a time when offshore wind projects are gaining traction in our region, the last thing our coastal environment needs is oil drilling and all of the risks that go with it,” according to Providence-based Save The Bay. “Rhode Island has seen its share of petroleum disasters, including the 1989 grounding of World Prodigy on Brenton Reef and the 1996 North Cape oil spill off of Moonstone Beach.”

Tim Faulkner reports and writes for ecoRI News.

Looking deep into the trees

"The Watcher'' (mixed media), by Helen Lozoraitis, in the three-person show "Seeing Through the Trees,'' at Massachusetts Audubon's Moose Hill Wildlife Sanctuary, Sharon, Mass., through Feb.  5.

The gallery says that three exhibiting artists Art Donahue, Helen Lozoraitis and Lindsey Nygaard explore "the endless beauty of nature and the habitats within. Art Donahue brings technology and the aesthetics of photography together, showing the viewer his perspective on naturalistic landscapes. Helen Lozoraitis photographs and creates mixed media from the real world and fictional landscapes. Lindsey Nygaard's oil paintings reveal a simple yet stunning complex image of the natural world. 'Seeing Through the Trees' reveals the hidden beauty of nature that often goes unnoticed in the modern era. Each piece shows the viewer those elusive parts of the natural world; revealing what they might see if they looked deeper into the trees.

Sharon has many scenic trails because of the extensive conservation land within it. Trails include the Massapoag Trail, the Warner Trail, the Bay Circuit Trail (otherwise known as the Beaver Brook Trail), and the King Philip's Rock Trail. There are also some trails in Borderland State Park and in Moose Hill Wildlife Sanctuary.

Chris Powell: Half-naked actresses denounce sexual harassment in always hypocritical Hollywood

Resending to fix word inversion in Carroll quote

MANCHESTER, CONN.

Hollywood -- the movie industry -- has always been a self-congratulatory and hypocritical cesspool and it was no less so at the Golden Globes awards ceremonies Sunday night.

Lots of pretty actresses appeared half-naked, posing in turn for photographs, embodying the sexual temptation on which the industry is built, but this time their skimpy clothing was colored black as a protest against the supposedly unwanted sexual interest they were striving to tempt.

Receiving an award for her contributions to entertainment, media entrepreneur Oprah Winfrey rebuked the predators who long have been in charge of the cesspool. "For too long," Winfrey said, "women have not been heard or believed if they dared to speak their truth to the power of those men. But their time is up."

"Not believed"? Whom was Winfrey kidding? 

Hollywood has been notorious for the sexual predation of its casting couches since movies were invented. The problem has never been that actresses weren't believed but that, single-mindedly pursuing wealth and fame, they played along with the predation, until recently when a few actresses whose positions were secure publicly accused the producer who may have been the worst of the predators. Whereupon dozens more actresses came forward -- and every one was instantly believed, precisely because of Hollywood's sick reputation. 

Indeed, in regard to sex the reputations of Hollywood particularly and the male gender generally are so bad that some politicians and activists, like Connectiut state Sen. Mae Flexer, D-Killingly, propose essentially to repeal due process of law with sex offenses. 

After all, when all men are guilty or at least suspect, why should their accusers have to identify themselves in court, and why should there be any statute of limitations in sex crimes? So what if the premise of statutes of limitations is that it is nearly impossible even for innocent people to document their defense after an extended time, like the five years Connecticut has designated for most crimes? 

A few centuries ago Blackstone's "Commentaries on the Laws of England" held that "it is better that 10 guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer." Today's sex-crime lynch mob holds instead with the Queen in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: "Sentence  first -- verdict afterwards."

Of course sex always has been and always will be problematical. But Western civilization gradually has improved both sexual conduct and justice, despite the movie industry, which, as the Firesign Theatre scoffed in 1970, is always "presenting honest stories of working people as told by rich Hollywood stars." Hollywood and its half-naked actresses have no authority to lecture the country about sex. With its gratuitous violence Hollywood has no authority to lecture the country about anything.  Hollywood is hypocrisy. 

At the awards ceremony Sunday night the actress Meryl Streep condemned the "power imbalance" in society. "It's in the military, it's in Congress, it's everywhere," Streep said. 

Yes, that imbalance is everywhere. But at an Academy Awards ceremony a few years ago Streep joined a standing ovation for the director Roman Polanski, who could not attend to collect his trophy because he long has been on the run from sentencing for his statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl. 

Does Polanski's artistry excuse him? Streep seems to have thought so, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has not yet revoked Polanski's award. But Hollywood's self-congratulation continues.


Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn., and a frequent contributor to New England Diary.

-

Overnight sensation

19th Century mill buildings on the Pawtucket Canal, in Lowell.

"Overnight the brick town of Lowell {Mass.} rose on the Merrimack River, attracting hundreds of farmers' daughters with  relatively high wages. For a generation the Lowell factory girls, with their neat dresses, proud deportment and literary weekly, were one of the wonders of America -- the first which Charles Dickens, arriving in New England, requested to see.

-- From How New England Happened, by Christina Tree

Making URI bike-friendlier

By the URI Quad.

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

Kudos to the University of Rhode Island for working to make the Kingston campus better for bicyclists with, for example, plans to rebuild Flagg Road and Upper College Road into what a URI master plan calls “complete streets’’ that would include bike lanes on both sides. There’s also the idea of connecting URI to the William C. O’Neill Bike Path, reported the Independent newspaper. The program is officially called URI’s Transportation and Parking Master Plan.

The URI campus is mostly lovely, a good reason in itself to lay out more bike paths. And many students can’t afford cars.

The master plan, overseen by Christopher McMahan,  the university’s much admired architect and director of capital planning and design, also envisions further increases in bus service provided by the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority.

These moves will make the campus more attractive, improve its natural environment, reduce the pressure to add more parking and make it easier for students and others to avoid driving. URI has made much progress in recent years in raising its academic and aesthetic stature. The transportation improvements are an important part of that.

Don't give up!

"Thaw on the Way,'' by Julius von Klever.

'' While yet the air is keen, and no bird sings, 
Nor any vaguest thrills of heart declare
The presence of the springtime in the air, 
Through the raw dawn the shepherd homeward brings
The wee white lambs--the little helpless things-- 
For shelter, warmth, and comfortable care. 
Without his help how hardly lambs would fare-- 
How hardly live through winter's hours to spring's! 


So let me tend and minister apart
To my new hope, which some day you shall know: 
It could not live in January wind
Of your disdain; but when within your heart
The bud and bloom of tenderness shall grow, 
Amid the flowers my hope may welcome find. ''

-- "January,'' by Edith Nesbit

Llewellyn King: Weather to be less and less trustworthy; ignored island; banal Andrew Lloyd Webber show

Hurricane Maria damage in Puerto Rico.

The  recent extreme cold across much of the eastern half of the U.S. is a harsh reminder that Mother Nature isn’t as maternal as her sobriquet would imply. She is worthy of respect, even fear. The nation’s electricity system, at this writing, is holding together — often with little margin to spare. It’s an operational and engineering miracle that the lights stay on and we stay warm during weather extremes.

Unless you have open fires a la our ancestors, electricity is a critical player in keeping the nation warm. I wrote this in cozy comfort in West Warwick, R.I., when it was 1 degree outside. While the proximate cause of my comfort is natural gas, it takes that servant of modernity, electricity, to blow the toasty, gas-warmed air through the ducts. Thank you, Thomas Edison et al. Good work back then.

It also raises a cardinal issue: Given the accuracy of our forecasting, how can some authorities (you know who I mean) be so sanguine about climate change?

The cold is a manifestation of severe weather but doesn’t signal a reversal in global heating. It’s just the difference between weather and climate. The Delaware-size iceberg that broke off from Antarctica last July and the glaciers that are melting in the Arctic  aren’t about to reverse course, the ice mass to reattach itself or the glaciers to freeze again.

Instead, think about climate and be scared for your descendants down through time: Flooding in cities on both coasts; disaster accelerating with Arctic permafrost thawing, releasing more gases into the gas-burdened atmosphere. It gives me the shivers even as I sit here, warm and dry and well-fed.

Keeping Puerto Rico Out of Sight and Mind Is Un-American

A thought that disturbs the equilibrium is Puerto Rico: How can we be so indifferent — and we are — to the suffering of so many? Why aren’t we talking about it with the same vengeance as we speak about Congress and the White House? Where are the fearsome resources of the United States? Are the Puerto Ricans the lesser because they speak Spanish and hadn’t ordered their affairs well before Mother Nature acted and swept away the tropical paradise with back-to-back hurricanes?

The dread thought is that even compassion has been politicized.

Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Latest: All Set, No Songs

Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Love Never Dies is touring North America, and will pop up around the country between now and September. It’s a sequel to The Phantom of the Opera, in which the Phantom has left the Paris Opera for Coney Island.

This is a spectacular production, if spectacle is what you’re after. Seldom has so much been done in the way of stagecraft with dramatic and shifting sets and whoop-dee-do lighting. But, oh, where is the music? This time, Lloyd Webber, who sent us home singing after Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, Cats and The Phantom of the Opera, sends us home dazzled with spectacle, but with nothing to whistle. The music here doesn’t measure up and neither, for that matter, does the story, set in 1907.

If you’ve loved Lloyd Webber down through the years, you’ll be disappointed — although, I must say, the Providence, R.I., audience loved it. You’ll wonder if the Phantom has worked his final revenge: stolen the tunes and made off with them.

The Things They Say

“I became a journalist to come as close as possible to the heart of the world.” — Henry R. Luce (1898-1967), co-founder of Time  and founder of Life and Fortune magazines

 Llewellyn King  (llewellynking1@gmail.com) is host of White House Chronicle, on PBS, and a veteran publisher, editor, columnist and international business consultant.

Todd McLeish: How New England wildlife deals with extreme cold

River otters like to slide across the ice of a pond.

Via ecoRI News (ecori.org)

The recent extreme cold has New Englanders avoiding the outdoors as best as they can and loading on extra layers when they must go outside. Which raises the question of how wildlife fared during this unusually cold period.

Local biologists agree that most species of wildlife that spend their winters in Rhode Island are well adapted to weather the cold. They have evolved numerous strategies to deal with the conditions, from hibernation and torpor to thick fur coats and layers of fat.

Birds, for instance, have developed a number of adaptations that enable them to survive the extreme cold. According to Scott McWilliams, a physiological ecologist at the University of Rhode Island, ducks can stand on ice for hours at a time and swim around in the icy water without suffering frostbite in their feet thanks to a counter-current heat exchange system in their legs. The warm blood flowing down to their feet warms up the cold blood flowing back to their core, and the blood in their feet is so cold that the difference between their foot temperature and the ice ensures that they lose little heat through their feet.

Birds also huddle together to stay warm, fluff up their feathers to provide an insulating layer around them, and lower their body temperature to save energy.

But not all birds are prepared for the cold.

“Most sensible birds will migrate to warmer places, thereby avoiding having to contend with the cold,” McWilliams said.

Some of those that stick around, however, “are less well-insulated or otherwise poorly adapted to living in cold places.” He noted the Carolina wren, a southern species that has expanded its range northward in recent decades, as an example. Southern New England is at the northern part of its range, and during extreme and extended cold spells in Rhode Island, many of the birds don’t survive. That was the case during the winter of 2015, when the state had a record snowfall and Rhode Island’s Carolina wren population declined. When favorable weather returns, however, the wren population bounces back again until the next severe winter.

Cold-blooded creatures such as reptiles and amphibians — animals that can’t regulate their own body temperature — are also well prepared for extreme cold. Wood frogs, for instance, have what some scientists call “antifreeze” in their blood that enables their tissues to freeze solid without harmful effects. In some winters, the frogs experience several freeze-thaw cycles.

Herpetologist Scott Buchanan said adult painted turtles, snapping turtles, and spotted turtles are also extremely cold tolerant and will likely fare well. But some painted turtle hatchlings, which overwinter in their nest cavity, may die if the temperatures are extreme for an extended period of time.

“The invasive red-eared slider, on the other hand, is less tolerant of extreme cold — both the adults and hatchlings,” Buchanan said. “Hatchlings, which also overwinter in the nest, are more vulnerable to these cold periods and would exhibit a greater rate of mortality than painteds or snappers.

“From a conservation perspective, this would be a good thing, as it would slow down the invasion.”

Wildlife that lives in the upper layer of the soil or in the grass at the surface may be particularly vulnerable to extreme cold, especially cold temperatures without a thick layer of snow to serve as insulation. 

David Gregg, director of the Rhode Island Natural History Survey, speculated that the d that the dearth of leaves on the ground — thanks to two years of gypsy moth defoliation — may mean there will be less insulation for species that hibernate in the forest floor, such as box turtles and salamanders.

“Low temps and thin snow is also probably tough for small mammals like voles, which tunnel around in the grass,” Gregg said before the Jan. 4 blizzard. “Of course, that might make life easier for owls and hawks that need to be able to find voles.”

He also wondered about the impact of the cold weather on aquatic mammals, when all of the local ponds are frozen solid. During the week before New Year’s, he twice observed a muskrat wander up from a nearby frozen river to scratch for food in his lawn. And in the winter of 2015, a river otter emerged from the same frozen river to forage in Gregg’s compost pit.

Charles Brown, a wildlife biologist with the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management, isn’t worried about those aquatic mammals, however. He said the range of muskrats, river otters, and beavers extends far to the north in Canada, where they likely experience much longer periods of extreme cold than they do in southern New England.

“So around here, they’re probably living the easy life,” he said.

Those animals typically gravitate to areas of moving water, like dams and spillways, during extreme cold, Brown said, and otters can even chew holes in the ice to gain access to pond water.

Brown is more concerned about how big brown bats will fare. He noted that most bat species that spend time in Rhode Island migrate to caves to hibernate or travel south to warmer climates to avoid the winter conditions. Big brown bats are the only species that lives in the state all year. And even those should survive without much difficulty.

“We’ve had some pretty cold winters in the past, but rarely have I ever seen any evidence of bats dying from exposure,” he said.

The big picture, according to Gregg, is that the creatures that winter in the state do so for a reason, and there’s probably a logical reason for those that don’t survive the chill.

“I think that hard cold like this helps to hold back the northward expansion of southern species, like fire ants, kudzu, and lizards,” he said. “The kind of animals and plants we think of as typical here are either helped or hurt in the appropriate ways by cold, so the net effect is good even though there are animals and plants that go up and others down.”

Rhode Island resident and author Todd McLeish runs a wildlife blog.

Where anyone could be a critic

"Exhibition of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in the Grand Gallery of the Louvre, 1699'' (engraving), by A. Hadamart, in the show
"Modernity vs. Tradition: Art at the Parisian Salon 1750-1900," at the Redwood Library and Athenaeum, Newport, through April 8. The Salon is an annual art exhibition started by the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture  to foster artistic competition and let  common folk critically view and analyze the work of its Academicians. By the mid-18th Century, it had become a public forum for intense debate on  art and politics.