A more and less innocent time

Why teenagers in the '60s longed to  cross the line from Connecticut into New York. Hit this link.

Maine fights 'Big Sugar'

The official name of the Food Stamp program.

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

Maine deserves a lot of credit for seeking to improve the health of low-income people on Food Stamps while trying to cut the cost of the state-federal program in the Pine Tree State. (The federal government pays 100 percent of Food Stamp benefits  but shares administrative costs with the state.)

The state wants to ban the purchase with Food Stamps of candy and soda. New York, Illinois and Minnesota  have also sought approval from the U.S. Agriculture for similar bans.

Sadly, as anyone who watched checkout lines in supermarkets can confirm, many people buy lots of candy, soda and other junk food with Food Stamps. But consuming candy and soda, whatever the quick pleasure they provide, do far more harm than good, among other things in raising the incidence of obesity and diabetes, which are epidemic in America, where poor people tend to be fatter than more prosperous ones. The science is clear.

When Food Stamp recipients get sick because of their over-consumption of this junk, the taxpayers must pay for much of the cost of their care through Medicaid.

As Maine Gov. Paul LePage (a Tea Party Republican!), said the other week: “The time has come to stand up to Big Sugar and ensure our federal dollars are supporting healthy food choices for our neediest people.’’

Seems very fair and reasonable.

But the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the Food Stamp program, has rejected Maine’s request, using  such vague excuses as concerns about administrative costs for retailers and the alleged difficulty of deciding on which products to take off the Food Stamp list. But seems to me that these problems, especially in the computer age, can be very easily overcome. And again, the science on the effects of consuming large quantities of candy and soda are clear.

I suspect that the USDA’s opposition to Governor LePage’s proposal reflects the Trump administration’s disinclination to displease the powerful U.S. sugar lobby, based in swing state Florida, and other players in the junk-food world.

Wealth of a summer

-- Photo by Peng

"Not even dried-up leaves,

skidding like iceboats on

their points down winter streets,

can scratch the surface of

a child's summer and its wealth:

a stagnant calm that seemed

as if it must go on  and on....''

-- From "Thesis, Antithesis, and Nostalgia,'' by Alan Dugan

But will they vote?

"We the People'' (on on canvas), by Mia Cross, in the show "Thrive: Core Member Exhibition,'' at Fountain Street Fine Art, Boston, Jan. 31-Feb. 25.

Llewellyn King: The scary future of work and nonwork

Your replacement.

It used to be that when you left  high school or college, you sought to hook up with an employer who would offer you a whole bunch of goodies: things that were taken for granted then, such as job security, health insurance and a defined pension.

You could work for, say, General Electric, AT&T or Marshall Field. And you'd be on a kind of employment plateau.

Those were the days when most unionized employees, such as truck drivers, would reasonably count themselves as middle-class. They'd expect their children to do even better than they had.

But stagnant wages and disappearing benefits are booting millions out of the middle class. They can’t afford the genteel life anymore.

In today’s workplace, keep your resume burnished and your home in good repair, in case you need to downsize quickly. Damocles’s sword hangs over the head of every employee: It could fall in a merger, if production is moved to another state or offshore, or if your company tried for a leveraged buyout and sank under massive debt.

With just 10.7 percent of U.S. workers belonging to unions in 2017, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, things are not pretty for those who thought they would lead a life shielded from the buffets of the economy. Now no one is shielded -- unless you are rich, in which case you're likely to be one of those doing the buffeting. Or, you chose the security of government employment. That way you're in a cocoon that private industry no longer offers.

At present, the enormity of this uncertainty in the workplace is concealed with the giddy stock market and full employment. But it's there. When there's a stock market correction or we have a recession (both of which history says are inevitable), the plight of working people will become more obvious. Also, the attendant plight of new retirees -- more and more without pensions and relying, if they're lucky, on 401(k) plans. They won’t have lifetime pensions, guaranteeing glitter in their golden years.

But worse may be to come. Meet the gig economy, where contract employment replaces formal employment: no employer medical plan, no paid vacation, no sick leave.

Hanging over all this gloom is the existential worry about artificial intelligence. One argument is that its predecessor, automation, always created more jobs than it cost. Mechanized woolen mills made cloth for the many. Production lines produced goods that more consumers could afford like cars and washing machines. Win-Win.

Artificial intelligence, though, threatens simply to replace workers, not to make new products. Already, banks and some retailers are working to get people out of transactions, an indication of the workerless future.

Euro Trains Have Borrowed Pricing from Amtrak

While making a round-trip reservation from Brussels to London on the super-fast Eurostar, I find that it's embraced one of the horrors of super-slow Amtrak: dynamic pricing. That's the system where the cost of tickets is what the market will bear.

European trains, like Amtrak, have public subsidies. So the governments on both sides of the Atlantic are actually squeezing out people with limited budgets. Shame.

It seems to me if it's the intent of government to subsidize transport, it should do so with an eye to the poor -- with fixed pricing -- not the rich.

This Was Not Your Grammy's Grammys

Was I wrong in thinking the that the Grammys this year were strictly for the young? Bono and Sting looked decidedly uncomfortable.

There's an age chasm between Bruno Mars listeners and, well, those of us who heretofore thought we were cool when we listened to Bono and Sting.

The Things They Say

“Before you judge a man, walk a mile in his shoes. After that who cares? He's a mile away and you've got his shoes!" -- Billy Connolly, Scottish comedian

Llewellyn King (llewellynking1@gmail.com)  is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. 

Web Site: whchronicle.com

Chris Powell: New Haven's mayor has been very busy helping to erase America's borders

New Haven from the air.

President Trump can be counted on to discredit even a legitimate issue, as he did last week at a White House meeting by joking about the absence of New Haven Mayor Toni Harp, whom he had summoned to praise, along with other mayors, for their work on transportation issues.

“Toni Harp. Where's Toni? Toni? Toni?," Trump said, adding, "Uh, can't be a sanctuary city person. That's not possible, is it?”

Of course, Harp is the mayor of the most brazen sanctuary city in the country and, having learned a few hours earlier of the Trump administration's new demand for immigration policy information from other such cities, she seems to have suspected, rightly, that, to score political points, the president might change the meeting's subject from transportation to immigration. So Harp skipped the meeting.

Whereupon the president blustered, "The mayors who chose to boycott this event have put the needs of criminal illegal immigrants over law-abiding America."

Of course the immigration issue is not that simple. Yes, some illegal immigrants are criminals but most are not. The real issue is whether immigration is ever to be controlled and, if so, how.

So it might have been helpful if Harp had attended the meeting and had replied to any demagoguery from the president.

But just as Trump demagogues the immigration issue by overstating its criminal aspects, Harp and other proponents of sanctuary cities and states -- like the mayor nearly all of them Democrats, including Connecticut Gov. Dannel  Malloy -- claim to find virtue in nullifying federal law as the old segregationists did. It is actually the position of the nullifiers that anyone who breaks into the United States and makes his way to New Haven should be exempt from immigration law.

The president's demagoguery has made it nearly impossible to have an intelligent and civilized debate on the immigration issue. But his opponents are fortunate about this, since they don't want such a debate. They would lose it. For the logic of their position is that the United States shouldn't even be a country.

xxx

Connecticut's latest sad deportation case is that of Joel Colindres, an illegal immigrant living in New Fairfield with a U.S. citizen wife and two young U.S. citizen children. He says he came to the United States from Guatemala in 2004 to escape violence and persecution, surrendered to immigration authorities in Texas, and got regular stays of deportation until recently. Now the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency may expel him in a few days.

Presumably Colindres enjoyed the infamous "catch and release" policy of previous administrations, whereby, rather than being sent back immediately, illegal immigrants were given years to stay in the country, marry and start families to use as hostages against deportation by future administrations if their overused claims of fleeing persecution were ever doubted. Indeed, most illegal immigrants from Latin America are really only economic refugees, not political ones.

While it may be hard to see the point of deporting an illegal immigrant who has a citizen wife and children, there is one. It is to frighten and deter other illegal immigrants and induce their Democratic supporters to accept the obvious political compromise -- another immigration amnesty like the Simpson-Mazzoli Act of 1986, which promised but never delivered border security, in exchange for another such promise, this time the president's border wall. But erasing the border remains more important to the Democrats than legalizing the illegals and preserving families.


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

After some decades of steep decline, parts of New Haven have become much more prosperous, and, well, gentrified, in the past couple of decades, including this stretch of upper State Street.

Dr. Elliot's very vivid historical novel

A. John Elliot, M.D., is an old friend of mine who has written a wild ride of a historical novel called  The Last Trumpet. He practiced in Rhode Island and Connecticut, and has lectured widely. His teaching experience includes Yale Medical School and in Tibet and China, where he is an honorary professor at the West China Medical School. He has also taught in Tibet. Elliot has done extensive nonprofit and for-profit medical consulting work. In 1994, Dr. Elliot was the Republican candidate for in Rhode Island Second Congressional District in 1994.

His book:

In the Thirties,  we find the book’s deeply flawed German hero, Andreas von Eckhart, as a tortured yet brilliant physician, famed mountain climber, war veteran and womanizer and a loner who trusts no one. Now that his general father is dead and his sister has mysteriously disappeared, Andreas is left to wander within his inherited castle and contemplate his place in a chaotic world.

The Last Trumpet takes you on his torturous, colorful journey from London to the Himalayas in search of the truth amid the evils of the Third Reich.

No, I’m not getting any money from his book sales!

For more information, see: https://www.archwaypublishing.com/Bookstore/BookDetail.aspx?Book=762512

-- Robert Whitcomb

Jim Hightower: Jeff Bezos wants the key to your house

Amazon is watching you.

Via OtherWords.org

Would you give your house key to a complete stranger, letting that person (whose name you don’t even know) walk right into your home when you’re not there?

One stranger who’s brazenly asking you and millions of other people to do just that is Jeff Bezos.

He’s the head honcho of Amazon, the e-commerce behemoth whose vast supercomputer network routinely compiles and stores dossiers on every one of his customers. He’s obsessed with having the most data on the most people — it’s a little creepy.

Now, adding to the creep factor, Bezos literally wants Amazon to get inside your home. And, ironically, he’s using “security” as his rationale.

Rather than simply delivering the products you order from Amazon to your doorstep, the corporation wants a key to unlock your door, allowing its delivery crews to go inside and do you the favor of placing the packages securely in your abode.

What could possibly go wrong with that?

Other than you being robbed, of course, either by rogue Amazon employees or by hackers who will certainly gain access to the corporation’s computerized key codes. Or maybe “Crusher,” your pitbull, mauls the Amazon intruder and you get sued.

Need I mention that Bezos expects you to pay for the privilege of having his employees enter your home? First, his dicey, open-sesame program, which he calls “Amazon Key,” is available only to customers who shell out $99 a year to be “Amazon Prime” members.

Second, you must buy a special Internet-unlocking gizmo and a particular camera to join his corporate key club. And guess where you must go to buy this entry technology? Yes, Amazon — where prices for the gizmo and camera setup start at $250.

This is Jim Hightower saying… What a deal! For Amazon, that is.

Bezos’s  real goal — indeed, his only goal, always — isn’t so much to get inside your home. It’s to get inside your wallet.

Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker. He’s also the editor of the populist newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown.

Joanna Detz: Facebook changes: Disaster or renaissance for U.S. journalism?

Via ecoRI News (ecori.org)

Facebook's algorithm changes coupled with other challenges could presage a total extinction event for digital publishers

Hope you like your friends' cat photos. You'll probably be seeing more of them on Facebook, and fewer posts from news organizations like this one.

Facebook's recent announcement that it is changing the algorithm driving its news feed to prioritize posts from friends and family has news organizations worried that Facebook users will be seeing fewer of their news posts.

Over the past several years, news publishers have made huge investments in their Facebook audiences. And, at least until the middle of last year, those investments were paying off in clicks — Facebook was the top referrer to news websites.

For its part, Facebook played the (albeit unintentional) role of the printing press for many digital publishers, distributing their original content to a wider audience and driving traffic and clicks to publishers' websites.

And, make no mistake, Mark Zuckerberg's social-media empire profited greatly from providing a platform for news content. Facebook quickly became the world's biggest distributor of content without actually producing any of its own original content.

When Facebook got in trouble in 2016 for taking ad money from foreign agents looking to influence the presidential election, soul-searching ensued. And now Facebook is turning its back on media outlets and betting on a return to the company's roots of "connecting people to people."

So what does this mean for publishers like this one?

Only the future will tell, but it clarifies that Facebook was never an ally to news organizations; it was always just a marketing platform that kept changing the rules to suit its needs and its bottom line.

For news organizations, it's exhausting to pander to a third-party algorithm and chase clicks. Let’s hope that this monumental shift isn't the end of the news but the beginning of a return to media's traditional role of writing stories that shine a light in dark places and hold the powerful to account.

Let's hope that most Facebook users care enough to frequent the Web sites and subscribe to the newsletters of their favorite news organizations to get news directly from the source without an algorithm telling them what to read. 

As a news organization focused on covering ecosystems in southern New England, we understand how a small change can have system-wide ramifications. We can only hope that the media ecosystem our reporters inhabit isn't lost to (social media) developers.

Joanna Detz is the executive director of ecoRI News and has never owned a cat.

'American exceptionalism'?

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

Politicians and other leaders and some intellectuals like to repeat that America is uniquely “exceptional’’ in its glory and goodness. But of course in many ways it’s like many other countries in its vulnerability to corruption and demagoguery. It has been very lucky: A vast country rich in natural resources (to be taken away from the relatively few Indians and, for a long time, exploited in part with slavery), English common law, Enlightenment ideas about the rule of law and human rights and some of that good old Puritan ethic. And of course protection for a long time by oceans shielding it from bad guys (or even good guys) in Eurasia. No more!

To read historian Joshua Zeitz’s rumination on “American exceptionalism,’’ please hit this link:

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/01/07/trump-american-exceptionalism-history-216253

A biological approach

"Scrunched down in the seats

of my frozen car,

I told you with smoking breath

how I wanted to piss on the windshield,

both relieving myself

and clearing visibility

in  one masterful stroke.

...And there while the engine warmed

and your your head bobbed

in and out of your coat,

we made some sense of winter.''

-- From ''Winter,''  by D.W. Donzella

Sliding down winter in Camden

At the U.S. National Toboggan Championships, in Camden, Maine.

Camden, Maine, on the Pine Tree State's Mid-Coast and, very unusual for New England, with (low) mountains behind its gorgeous harbor, is a famed summer place for the affluent "from away''. But it's beautiful and fun  year round. 

The high point of the winter is the annual U.S. National Toboggan Championships, this year to be held Feb. 9-11, as usual at the Camden Snow Bowl.  It includes a party in the woods, with a bonfire, food and music. In warmer weather, admire Camden's famous schooner fleet.

Works for now

"Allegory of Winter'' by Jerzy Siemiginowski-Eleuter.

"Is there any better tonic for living than a climate that ranges from 15 above a night to 35 above in the afternoon, that has air both windless and dry, that has the sun rising though frost mist and its moon lavishing itself on a white world?....

"We are forced by pleased experience and reviving logic to concede that a perfect day in any one season is the equal of a perfect day in any other season. This, just as we had formed the rigid opinion that winter was one season we could do without.''

-- From In Praise of Seasons, by the late Alan H. Olmstead, a Connecticut-based editor and essayist.

West Africa's spectacular cultures

Friends of The Foundation for West Africa and the Warwick (R.I.) Center for the Arts (WCA) are hosting an exhibit of photographs, textile and cultural artifacts from West Africa  from Jan. 31  through Feb. 23.

The opening reception will be on Thursday, Feb. 1, 6-8 p.m., at the WCA, 3259 Post Road in Warwick.

The photographs and most of the items on display are from visits to Sierra Leone, Liberia, Senegal and The Gambia over the past 15 years by foundation founder and president Christopher Hamblett.  The Warwick Center for the Arts is a beautiful space for the exhibit  Please stop by the reception this Thursday, or any time during gallery hours.  It's a great way to learn about The Foundation for West Africa's support of community radio stations, and the spectacular cultures of the region.   

Film about Robert Frost

Hit this link to see a superb documentary on Robert Frost.

Reading by Robert Lowell

Hear/see this reading by  the poet Robert Lowell by hitting this link.

Tradition vs. modernity

From "Tradition and Irreverence: Exploring the American Diaspora,'' Nathan Clark Bentley's show through Feb. 23 at ArtSpace Maynard, in Maynard, Mass. The show looks  at American culture through symbols and language. The gallery says that Bentley's work "is robust with color and purpose. The paintings show the dichotomy between tradition and modernity present in America's urban landscape and try to find the places where the two connect.''

Of course, the images recall the power, offensiveness and sometimes quirky charm of the graffiti that bedevils many cities.

Downtown Maynard. The old mill town turns out to be quite arty and there's some nice countryside in the town, about 20 miles west of Boston. Thoreau wrote about a walk he took there in 1851.

Better class of people

"I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.''

-- The late William F. Buckley Jr.
 

'A busy cry'

"Today the leaves cry, hanging on branches swept by wind,
Yet the nothingness of winter becomes a little less.
It is still full of icy shades and shapen snow.

The leaves cry . . . One holds off and merely hears the cry.
It is a busy cry, concerning someone else.
And though one says that one is part of everything,

There is a conflict, there is a resistance involved;
And being part is an exertion that declines:
One feels the life of that which gives life as it is.''

-- From "The Course of a Particular,'' by Wallace Stevens (great poet and insurance executive in Hartford).

Stephen J. Nelson: John Hennessey, a great academic and a great reformer

John Hennessey speaking at a Tuck School function.

 Via the New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

John W. Hennessey  Jr. lived a remarkable, full life as a professor, as a leader in his field of management and business, and moral, ethical leadership, and as dean at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business and provost at the University of Vermont. He was extraordinary on many fronts, a great man who lived in tumultuous times marked by world war as a young man, later as a graduate student and then professor and dean during the massive social and culture changes wrought by the 1960s and ‘70s. He was ahead of his times in ways that were noteworthy then, but now are even more so as we look retrospectively at his life. He died Jan. 11 at 92. 

Hennessey was part of “the greatest generation,” those who were teenagers as a horrific war broke out, served as young men and women, and then came home to continue college careers and get on with their personal and early professional lives. Following his recent death, an article about his life in The Boston Globe captured Hennessey’s early-on bewilderment and criticism of the many discriminations of his time.

Of particular note for him were the barriers  that many institutions, among them our most elite, constructed against women, including his wife. After graduating from the Harvard Business School, Hennessey wondered about whether attending there made him complicit in Harvard’s discrimination policies. After all, his wife who wanted a law degree, could not even apply to Harvard’s Law School. Those personal lessons, coupled with the feminist activism of his mother as a suffragette at Vassar College and a similarly inclined sister at Vasser decades later, were in Hennessey’s gestalt as a young faculty member at the Tuck School.

When in 1968, Dartmouth’s president, John Dickey, approached Hennessey to become the dean of the Tuck School, his response was clear. Hennessey's quid pro quo: He would become Dickey’s dean only if he agreed to permit Hennessey to accept women to the Tuck School, which at the time, like all of Dartmouth College, was an all-male institution. Dickey agreed and the first women came to Tuck three years before Dartmouth decided to admit women undergraduates and four years before their arrival on campus. Hennessey was graduating his first women from Tuck before Dartmouth made the move to co-education in its undergraduate ranks.

But he was by no means done with that stroke. While making those commitments for women in business, he was also actively involved both at Tuck and with business school colleagues across the country to recruit racial minorities and opening doors for them into the business and corporate world. He invented the case-study approach to teaching business ethics, led the Tuck School to growth and expansion, and was an enormous influence in the leadership and wisdom of Dartmouth.

A fellow alumnus from the late 1940s at Princeton, John Kemeny, was Dartmouth’s president, in the 1970s. Kemeny turned to Hennessey repeatedly for advice and counsel. When Kemeny left the presidency, in 1981, many a rumor at Dartmouth had it that Hennessey was on the short list of successors. That did not turn out to be the case, one might say sadly for Dartmouth. Here was maybe the greatest man not to become a college president.

Hennessey then went on to a distinguished career as provost at the University of Vermont and for a short time acting president there.

What are the testimonies from this distinguished life in the halls of the academy? What does his forward-looking leadership and vision for higher education and society say to us today?

First, we need to be ever ahead of the curve. Hennessey did not wait for the civil-rights legislation of the 1960s and '70s, affirmative action, Title IX and all the rest to animate, motivate and move him in the direction of equality and equity. It was in his gut and in his heart, and he had the courage to give voice to those principles. Our colleges and universities today need to witness this legacy and build on it. That includes issues and contentions that Hennessey would have thought  that we had conquered, yet today continue to require revisiting and conquering anew.

Second, and more critically, check your ego and your self-righteousness at the door. It is easy for those who aspire to promote change to do it with their chests out. John Hennessey was as reserved a man, as he was an intelligent and forceful leader. But leadership was not about him, and more importantly even the good that he sought to do was not a testimony to his goodness.

The Globe piece quotes him in words that stand on their own and form a coda about the life of John Hennessey. As the undergraduate wave of women of Dartmouth began to take courses at the Tuck School, Hennessey commented late in his oral history that his upper-level administrative colleagues didn’t realize the ways in which they were “being paternalistic and fatherly.” As said noted, “The idea that it can all be done with good intentions and with ‘good old boys’ simply being gooder, isn’t going to work. And you’re going to have to listen to wise women.”

John Hennessey enriched the halls of academe, the quest for the life of the mind, and for lives well-lived.

Stephen J. Nelson is professor of educational leadership at Bridgewater State University and Senior Scholar with the Leadership Alliance at Brown University. He is the author of the recently released book, The Shape and Shaping of the College and University in America: A Lively Experiment. Nelson served on the student affairs staff at Dartmouth College from 1978-1987. He is currently working on a biography of John G. Kemeny, Dartmouth math  and computer-science professor and president, 1970-81.