Pau Sutliff: Yale accepts dhimmitude

Yale Law School, in New Haven, one of the university's lovely neo-Gothic buildings.

In 2008 Basak Otus, a writer for the Yale Daily News, the leading news source for Yale University, wrote an article that started:

“English majors getting tired of Shakespeare and Wordsworth will soon be able to turn to Yale’s libraries for a poet of a different kind altogether: Osama bin Laden”.  (Osama, the leader of the 9/11 attacks, was killed  by U.S. Navy SEALs in 2011.)

The backlash to this article should have been taken as a prophetic warning of what was to come, akin to the handwriting on the wall of King Belshazzar of Babylon in the Book of Daniel. In that story the fingers of a man’s hand appeared and wrote on the wall an ominous warning that the prophet Daniel interpreted as meaning:
 

1) God has numbered your kingdom, and finished it.

2) You have been weighed in the balances, and found wanting

3) Your kingdom has been divided, and given away.

Basak Otis’s article in 2008 pointed out that Yale no longer had America’s best interests at heart, but had begun a love affair with one of the most notorious men of the modern era: Osama bin Laden. Perhaps the article would have faded into the background and remained forgotten if Yale woke up when it was attacked that June by a jihadist firebombing, which was intended to destroy their power plant. But Yale slumberously ignored that wake-up call!

Yale  reverted to its love affair with Osama  and published a Sharia-compliant version of a book about cartoons staring Mohammed,   taking care to censor illustrations that, in Paris, had inspired the murder of a dozen staffers at“Charlie Hebdo,” a publication that had printed cartoons about Mohammed. This occurred in September 2009, less than three months after the attempted fire-bombing.

It was Yale University’s overt attempt to display “dhimmitude”—submission to Muslims -- rather than display its heritage as a great defender of the First Amendment. Yale had the opportunity to take a strong stand for America and her beliefs in liberty for all her citizens! It was a chance to be seen as the university that defends the First Amendment. Yale, however, chose to become an example of “being weighed and found wanting” in its defense of the U.S. Constitution.

In 2014 Yale Law School hosted Rachid Al-Ghannouchi to speak to its students and the community as well. Rachid is a member of the Ennahda Party in Tunisia. Ennahda is the Muslim Brotherhood entity in Tunisia. Osam bin Laden was  counted as a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Yale University has people that vet public speakers. How is it possible they did not know that Al-Ghannouchi was a staunch defender of Hamas[1], a U.S.-declared terrorist entity?

Yale’s last act of dhimmitude was its receipt of $10 million in 2015 from the son of Saleh Abdallah Kamel, a documented financer of  Al-Qaeda  who had had  banking ties with Osama bin Laden, himself. Yale agreed then to place an Islamic Law Center in its law school, but  still refuses to acknowledge that Islamic law is Sharia law. This act equates Sharia with the U.S. Constitution.

The act of placing an Islamic Law Center at Yale forces the university to fight itself. Those studying at Yale to earn degrees in its divinity school must take a stand, it is their Christian duty. The Music School also must join the struggle, as Sharia requires the destruction of musical instruments and  opposes the very concept of a music school[3].

The writing was on the wall in 2008. It seems  that 2015 was the year that Yale became a house divided against itself; soon it may no longer exist as the great educational institute it once was.C an Yale survive its Dhimmitude? I think not?

Yale President Peter Salovey  refused to debate me on this.

Paul Sutliff is the author of  Civilization Jihad and the Myth of Moderate Islam and
Stealth Jihad Phase 2: Infiltrate American Colleges. He is a radio commentator on the Muslim Brotherhood. His blog site is  http://paulsutliff.blogspot.com/

[1] "Taamulat Fiddine Wa Siyassa Al Hiwar TV, 22 February 2009." Broadcast Bulletin. December 10, 2009. Accessed October 17, 2015.

[2] Email from the Office of the President of Yale University.

[3] http://listverse.com/2012/11/12/top-10-everyday-things-banned-in-saudi-arabia/

Now it's Apple's turn to ask localities for a huge handout

Apple headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., in Silicon Valley.

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

Apple says it plans to build another corporate campus. It also says it will hire another 20,000 workers, in  part because of the new U.S. tax law, which cuts corporate income taxes. (Not all of the windfall will go to investors in the form of stock buybacks and dividend increases!)_

Of course, Apple’s announcement means that various cities and states around America are already looking into how they can bribe the Cupertino, Calif., company to build its new campus in their jurisdiction. Presumably vast tax breaks, to be subsidized by the individuals and businesses already there,  will be offered, along with very expensive physical-infrastructure improvements. As with Amazon, Greater Boston (which you might say now sort of includes northern Rhode Island) would be in the running because of the huge technology complex there. But would such legal bribery be worth it for the macro-economy of Greater Boston?

Local politicians’ and some business leaders’ obsession with luring huge, rich, sexy tech companies may be popular in the short term but the diversion of so many public resources to a few extremely profitable big companies could have a very big long-term cost. The problems of General Electric that were revealed after it was lured to set up its headquarters in Boston  provide a useful caution sign.

'Welcome when he goes'

-- Photo by Schnobby

"Winter is good - his Hoar Delights
Italic flavor yield -
To Intellects inebriate
With Summer, or the World - 

Generic as a Quarry
And hearty - as a Rose -
Invited with asperity
But welcome when he goes.''

-- Emily Dickinson

Layering on, layering off

"Accumulation Cycles'' (mixed media tubular drawing front and back), by Rebekah Lord Gardiner, in her show "Accumulations of Time and Place,'' at Bromfield Gallery, Boston, through Feb. 25. Her show explores accretions and erosions of our personal histories from past to present.

Jim Hightower: Bribing big firms to lure them to your area is a fool's game

"Eve Tempted by the Serpent,.'' by William Blake.

Via OtherWords.org

Governors and mayors insist that giving our tax dollars to corporations to lure them to move to our cities is good public policy. The corporations create jobs, those workers pay taxes, and — voila! — the giveaway pays for itself!

Does it really work that way? Unfortunately, no.

Good Jobs First tracked the 386 incentive deals since 1976 that gave at least $50 million to a corporation, then tallied the number of jobs created. The average cost per job was $658,427 — each! That’s far more than cities and states can recover through any kinds of taxes those jobholders would pay in their lifetimes.

The rosy job-creation claims by incentive dealmakers also tend to be bogus, because they don’t subtract the number of jobs lost as a result of these deals.

Amazon, for example, has leaned on officials in every major metro area to subsidize its creation of a nationwide network of warehouses, data centers and other facilities.

In a 2016 report titled “Amazon’s Stranglehold,” the Institute for Local Self-Reliance found that more than half of Amazon’s facilities had been built with government subsidies. And Good Jobs First found that since 2005, Amazon has received more than $1 billion from taxpayers to build their private business.

Each handout was made in the name of local workers — and, yes, Amazon does employ thousands. But the subsidies enable the retail giant to undercut local, unsubsidized competitors, driving them out of business and causing devastating job losses that greatly outnumber jobs gained.

The Institute reports that at the end of 2015, Amazon employed 146,000 people in its US operations. But the taxpayer-supported giant had meanwhile killed some 295,000 U.S. retail jobs.

Check out the report for yourself at ilsr.org/amazon-stranglehold.

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

James P. Freeman: R.I.'s moderate Democrat Gina Raimondo a very consequential governor

The Slatersville Stone Arch Bridge, in  the old Blackstone River Valley industrial zone.

For more than 200 years water has flowed underneath a bridge in North Smithfield, in the Blackstone Valley corridor of the smallest state in the Union, which helped usher in  the American Industrial Revolution. The Slatersville Stone Arch Bridge, the oldest masonry bridge in Rhode Island -- built in 1855 to replace the original wooden structure and subsequently listed on the National Register of Historic Places – was for decades neglected and structurally deficient. Now it’s undergoing a complete rehabilitation at a $13.5 million cost. The bridge is symbolic of the state’s rise and fall. And now its revival.

Much of that effort is being spearheaded by Gov. Gina Raimondo.

Amidst the partisan tempest -- The Great Political Uncentering -- Raimondo, 46, the state’s first female executive, stands in defiance of political trends. And recent history. She’s seeking re-election this year, after a record of public service that has been a series of calculated experiments. She is arguably the nation’s most consequential reform-minded, results-oriented politician. She is resuscitating a nearly extinct species -- Truman Democrats. She is a pro-growth moderate and has handled heavy turbulence.

For an insular and provincial state -- where coffee milk is the official drink, Catholic Mass is still televised on Sunday mornings and, unbelievably, New England Cable News is not offered for viewing by the largest telecommunications provider -- the last decade was particularly cruel. Nothing went as planned and many plans went for nothing.

In the wake of The Great Recession of 2008-2009, Rhode Island’s already corroded economy saw unemployment spike close to 12 percent while housing prices plunged 27 percent. In 2010, after luring it away from Massachusetts, the state financed Curt Schilling’s scandal-plagued video-game start-up, 38 Studios, with $75 million in bonds before the company went bankrupt, two years later. And in 2011, sparking national headlines, Central Falls, a city with a population of 19,376, covering an area a little over a square mile (more densely populated than Boston), filed for bankruptcy, raising concerns that other heavily encumbered municipalities (including the capital, Providence) might follow suit.  

Residents probably needed a professional psychologist to lead them out of their depressed state.

Instead, they chose a thoughtful capitalist. Raimondo -- a Rhode Island native with degrees in economics (Harvard), sociology (Oxford) and law (Yale), and co-founder of the state’s first venture-capital firm, Point Judith Capital -- was elected state treasurer in 2010. So began the secular resurrection.

Raimondo immediately understood a law of modern politics that most public officials refuse to acknowledge or act upon: Demographics is destiny.

Overly generous and ambitious, yet massively underfunded, pension assurances to Rhode Island’s aging population coupled with a rapidly hemorrhaging fiscal condition (exacerbated by the recession) were certain to wreak financial havoc. A series of cascading municipal failures would likely render the state itself technically insolvent. And that would be unchartered territory (a state declaring bankruptcy is not a contingency properly addressed under current bankruptcy laws). Raimondo foresaw that imminent horror.

So, the treasurer did something astounding. She conducted town-hall-style meetings exposing the severity of the crisis. And she told the unions and pensioners something that  few Democrats ever say to those loyal constituents: “No!”

She engineered an overhaul by suspending cost-of-living increases and raising the retirement age for retirees, pointing the system towards solvency. Raimondo also understood state law. While many state pension systems are determined by contract (making modifications more difficult under constitutional law), Rhode Island’s, by statute, lets the government, if so inclined, make changes via swift legislative maneuvering, not protracted judicial wrangling.

It worked.

Predictably, though, public-sector unions fulminated and sued. A September 2014 Washington Post editorial noted, “In the face of ferocious opposition from labor, she explained the plain budgetary impossibility of maintaining pensions at the levels promised by politicians in Providence.”

Still, she was able to win the governorship that year with 41 percent of the vote in a three-way race. Later, in 2015, she negotiated legal settlements that preserved the reforms in the face of continued legal opposition. Her efforts are proof that pension reforms can be administered and may prove to be a model for other states suffocating under mountains of indebtedness.  

Just after Raimondo was elected governor (the first Democrat in over 20 years to win the office despite Rhode Island being heavily Democratic) and after the national Republican congressional victory in 2014, The Daily Beast’s Joel Kotkin demanded that Democrats go back-to-the-future: “Time to Bring Back the Truman Democrats.”

“To regain their relevancy,” he hypothesized, “Democrats need to go back to their evolutionary roots. Their clear priorities: faster economic growth and promoting upward mobility for the middle and working classes. All other issues -- racial, feminine, even environmental -- need to fit around this central objective.”

Raimondo, perhaps instinctively, has embraced much of this sensible framework. Most of it via a back-to-basics moderate agenda. Actually, future-to-the-basics.

In February 2016, she launched Rhode Works, a comprehensive 10-year transportation improvement program to repair crumbling roads and bridges. Rhode Island ranked dead last (50 out of 50 states) in overall bridge condition and is one of the only states that did not charge user fees to large commercial trucks on its roadways, which do most of the damage to roads and bridges. Tolling on certain roads begins this winter. Unsurprisingly, she is facing more opposition. This time from trucking associations, leery of the legislation; claiming that they’re being  unfairly discriminated against, they are threatening lengthy lawsuits. But her infrastructure initiative might be a template for the anticipated trillion-dollar federal program.

Raimondo has also looked north for much of her inspiration. It’s home to another moderate.

In her fourth State of the State address she made this startling admission: “For decades, we just sat back and watched as Massachusetts rebuilt and thrived. Boston and its suburbs flourished, while the mill buildings along {Route} 95 and the Blackstone River stood vacant and crumbling. The resurgence in Massachusetts didn't just happen. It wasn't an accident. They had a strategy and a plan to create jobs and put cranes in the sky. They used job-training investments and incentives to create thousands of jobs in and around Boston.”

Why not study a success story?

Unlike many parochial powerbrokers of the past who were content to resist change, at the state’s peril, Raimondo recognizes that Rhode Island’s is  part of a regional economy. Indeed, in many ways it is dependent on Massachusetts’s economy. Two-thirds of Rhode Island’s population is within a 20-minute drive to any Massachusetts border. (Incidentally, she made the trip at least twice last year by appearing on WGBH’s Greater Boston program, marketing her ideas and progress.)

Massachusetts’s Charlie Baker is the most popular governor in the country, with a 69 percent approval rating. He too is a moderate (a Rockefeller Republican), a technocrat, and also up for re-election this year. While Raimondo’s most recent approval rating stands at only 41 percent, that figure may be distorted and artificially low. Baker’s reforms have centered on the inner workings of government, largely lost on everyday residents. Raimondo’s reforms, meanwhile, have been about the very public machinations and expressions of government. Her controversial actions have directly affected,  and been clear to, the entire electorate.

Today, the unemployment rate is 4.3 percent. Last March, The New York Times wrote, “Ms. Raimondo’s frenzy of economic and job development is striking because Rhode Island has long been in a slump. It was the last state to emerge from the recession that began in 2007. As recently as 2014, it bore the nation’s highest unemployment rate for seven months in a row.” At the same time, private-sector employment has reached its highest level ever.

Even with forward momentum, the governor may be more popular outside the state than within. Two years ago, Raimondo and then-Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, a Republican who is now the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., were cited by Fortune Magazine as two female governors being among the world’s 50 greatest leaders. And last month, she was named as new vice chair of the Democratic Governors Association.

Big challenges, however, still loom large locally. The Pawtucket Red Sox, Boston’s minor-league affiliate, are threatening to leave the state. (Will the public finance a nine-figure stadium for a rich, privately owned team?) Nearly a third, or $3.1 billion,  of the state budget is funded by the federal government. And opioids continue to consume lives.    

But due to Raimondo’s centrist leadership -- despite the occasional progressive flourish (tuition-free community college) -- she has largely validated Kotkin’s hypothesis by focusing primarily on economic matters. Rhode Island might finally be poised for a 21st Century renaissance.

As the Slatersville bridge undergoes its third iteration in its third century, Rhode Island voters are reminded of this possibility in 2018 -- the Year of the Woman.  Should Raimondo be re-elected and serve a full second four-year term, she would be just the third woman (all Democrats) in American history to do so (after Michigan’s Jennifer Granholm and Washington’s Christine Gregoire).

And with the Clintons out of the running,  serious Democrats must consider her fortitude and record of accomplishment  when they’re looking for vice-presidential timber for 2020.

James P. Freeman, a former banker, is a New England-based writer and former columnist with The Cape Cod Times. His work has also appeared in The Providence Journal, newenglanddiary.com and nationalreview.com.

Billboard Boulevard: Sex, fireworks, guns and God

The former railroad depot in Rural Retreat, Va., on our route. A lot of "former'' this and that on our route.

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

Leaving our wives behind in Rhode Island (they had better things to do), an old friend and I drove the inland route to Florida the other week, mostly to check out what was happening in the inland southeastern corner of “Flyover Country.’’  We traveled in a huge Chevy Suburban, whose gas-guzzling appetite was gargantuan. Thus we did our part to boost global warming as we drove through weather that stayed nippy until we got to not-very-lovely Ocala, Fla., where it finally warmed up.F

Much of the route was in  the Appalachians, with the most spectacular sections, of course, in Virginia, East Tennessee and North Carolina. I was particularly eager to see the Smoky Mountains again. Some of my East Tennessee relatives had taken me up there when I was a boy. On this trip, the mountains still looked softly spectacular.

Most of the folks we met on the way were at least superficially friendlier than New Englanders, who tend to be guarded. I’m mostly referring to hotel staffers, restaurant workers serving deliciously unhealthy  fatty and salty Southern food, the personnel in a Civil War museum in the Shenandoah Valley, in Virginia, who had good feelings about the Confederacy and the good ole fraternity house boys near the campus of the University of Georgia, in  Athens. In front of their plantation-style house, they gave us directions to a couple of quirky restaurants, one of which would have fit in well in late ‘ 60s San Francisco, with waiters in clothes that looked like Hippie outfits, or at least Halloween versions of same.

Athens and  Asheville, N.C., (also a college town) were the most engaging cities we visited.

There were innumerable attractions along the way, with seemingly every burg with more than 5,000 people with a museum or other attraction peddled on roadside signs, with such curiosities as upside down airplanes as graphic blandishments. I particularly liked such examples of local charm as the large but mysteriously closed auto museum (with big car models  sticking out from the brick exterior walls) in a remote area of Georgia; the billboard advertising “Virginia’s only cavern with elevator service’’;  a Virginia town named “Rural Retreat,’’ and a village in North Carolina called “Forks of Ivy.’’

But most illuminating were the big billboards along the Interstates seeming to give contradictory messages about the region’s moral climate. Hypocrisy, or just psychological/ sociological complexity in the Bible Belt?

Among the most numerous billboards were for those “Adult Superstores’’ (porn and sex toys), along with such related enterprises as strip joints (“Café Risque: We Bare All’’);  gun markets and such related attractions as “Machine Gun America,’’ and Protestant evangelical churches (“Jesus Paid for All’’), some of them put up to promote attendance at an individual institution in a small town. There are lots of simple crosses but we didn’t spot any roadside crucifixes. This  was Protestant Bible-thumping country.

And, yeah, fireworks signs remain plentiful. But with the loosening of fireworks-sale controls in the Northeast, that draws much less excitement for travelers from up here these days. I remember my father filling the back of our station wagon with fireworks he bought in South Carolina back in the early ‘60s on our way back from Florida. That both my parents smoked added a touch of suspense to the rest of the trip home.

The billboards become more conventionally commercial from Orlando south, but then as they say, the further south you go in Florida, the further north you go.

Site-specific show in hard-drinking, arty New Canaan

Sculpture by Jeremy Holmes to be shown in his show at Heather Gaudio Fine Art, New Canaan, Conn., starting Feb. 10. 

His site-specific bentwood installations fill voids of unused space. He works with the shapes of walls and ceilings to create what he calls “abstract wood sculptures.” His work emphasizes his preoccupation with materiality.

East view of Church Hill, the central part of New Canaan (1836), by John Warner Barber

New Canaan, which is not on Long Island Sound, looks more like an old New England town than does much of the rest of Fairfield County. Much of it is bucolic and it has drawn many writers and artists to live there. It also has had the reputation of being a hard-drinking town, for youths and adults and, unfair or not, a reputation for having a surplus of spoiled rich kids.

Bridges for kissing and civic life

Plank-lattice truss interior structure of Green River Bridge in Guilford, Vt.

“They were called kissing bridges, and indeed many’s the kiss that was stolen in the darkened interiors of covered bridges. But covered bridges were more than convenient trysting spots for couples passing through in one-horse shays. They represented a triumph of local craftsmanship – and a surge of the spirit. {The late author} and artist Eric Sloane says that the covered bridge was to the nineteenth century what the barn was to the eighteenth. In the sense the covered bridge reflected the impulse to forge rivers, shift roots, and expand horizons, he is correct. But the covered bridge was also an expression of community, an eagerness to be closer to the folks “on the other side.’’ It is not surprising, therefore, that the covered bridge was often a meeting place for groups of citizens.’’

-- From the late John Deedy, in his essay in Arthur Griffin’s New England: The Four Seasons.

Editor’s note: A couple of years ago my wife and I attended a wedding in a New Hampshire covered bridge. It was musty.

Covered bridge in Newport, N.H.

Philip K. Howard: How to make a deal to address America's infrastructure crisis

A photo by Philip K. Howard in his "Peripheral Visions'' series, much of it about transportation infrastructure, some of it crumbling. To see more, please hit this link.

President Trump this week reiterated his commitment to “rebuild our crumbling infrastructure.” He called upon Congress to enact a law that “generates at least $1.5 trillion” and also to “streamline the permitting and approval process — getting it down to no more than two years, and perhaps even one.”

This would be an enormous boon to society, improving not only America’s competitiveness, but also creating a greener environmental footprint — while adding more than a million new jobs.

But environmental groups are lining up in opposition even before they’ve seen the details. Streamlining red tape, they argue, requires gutting environmental regulations. Are they really in favor of bloated processes that can take a decade or longer and produce impenetrable 5,000-page environmental review statements?

The facts are not on their side. A 2015 report by my organization, Common Good, found the following:

Other greener countries such as Germany approve large projects in less than two years, including environmental review.

 A typical six-year delay in large projects more than doubles the effective cost of the projects.

 Lengthy environmental reviews often harm the environment by prolonging polluting bottlenecks.

Modernizing America’s infrastructure is a necessity, not an ideology. Rickety transmission lines lose 6 percent of their electricity, the equivalent of 200 coal-burning power plants. About 2,000 “high-hazard” dams are in deficient condition. Century-old water-mains leak over 2 trillion gallons of fresh water a year. Over 3 billion gallons of gasoline are consumed by vehicles idling in traffic jams. Half of fatal car accidents are caused in part by poor road conditions.

Fixing this doesn’t require changing, much less gutting, environmental protections. Common Good has presented Congress with a three-page legislative proposal that creates clear lines of authority to make decisions on a timely basis: An environmental official would be authorized to focus the review on material issues, not thousands of pages of trivial detail; the White House could resolve disagreements among bickering agencies; federal law would preempt delays by state and local governments on interstate projects; and lawsuits would be expedited and limited to material environmental harms, not foot faults.

No one intended environmental review or permitting to take a decade. Current regulations say that analyses in complex projects should not exceed 300 pages. But the review for raising the roadway of the Bayonne Bridge, a project with virtually no environmental impact (it used the existing bridge foundations), was 20,000 pages including exhibits. This is bureaucratic insanity.

What the current process does is give environmental groups a veto. Just by threatening to sue, they can drag processes on for years. But where in the Constitution does it empower naysayers to call the shots? Environmental review should not be used to prevent elected officials from making decisions.

Funding is also obviously needed. The political deal is obvious: Democrats should agree to streamline permitting as long as Republicans provide adequate funding. Most roads and other such projects lack a revenue stream and require public funds. It’s a good investment, returning about $1.50 for every dollar spent, according to Moody’s. It’ll be an even better investment when effective costs are cut in half by streamlining permitting.

Trump’s initiative is a moral as well as a practical imperative. We are living off the infrastructure built by our grandparents and their grandparents. What shape will it be in when we bequeath it to our grandchildren?

New York has choke points that can’t tolerate any further delay. The two rail tunnels coming into Penn Station from New Jersey are over 100 years old, and were badly damaged by Superstorm Sandy. When they shut down for repairs the result is “carmageddon” — 25-mile gridlock.

The approach bridge to those tunnels is made of iron and wood, and occasionally catches fire or gets stuck when pivoting open for barge traffic — causing trains to wait for hours. The “Gateway project” for two new tunnels is essential to avoiding economic and environmental chaos, and almost ready for construction. It needs permits and money. Congress has to provide it.

On fixing America’s transportation woes, it’s time to link arms, not use any pretext to oppose this plan.

Philip K. Howard is chairman of the nonpartisan Common Good (commongood.org) reform organization and a New York-based civic leader,  lawyer, author (including the best-selling The Death of Common Sense), and photographer. He's also an old friend, classmate and sometime colleague of New England Diary editor Robert Whitcomb.  This piece first ran in The New York Post.

After the storm in Sandwich

"Not In Kansas Anymore'' (aluminarte print), by Bobby Baker

Comment by Mr. Baker: 

"A January storm took its fury out on the Sandwich (on Cape Cod)  boardwalk. To the left of this image is a pile of twisted wood, rope, grasses, and whatever - all that is left of the end of this boardwalk. While walking Town Neck Beach on a recent winter day, I looked up at the open end of the devastated boardwalk, and saw someone approach the fall off. I quickly captured my shot, and just as quickly the subjects disappeared - stunned and sad at what they saw, they must have fled to the safety of solid ground. ''

Assume nothing

An airliner descending to land at Logan International Airport, in East Boston, aka "Eastie''.

"You can't assume anything in politics. That's why every Saturday I walk around my district. I talk to the longshoremen in Charlestown. I listen to the people in East Boston and their concern on the airport noise. I walk down to the Star Market in Porter Square, and people tell me about meat prices.'' 

-- Thomas P. ("Tip") O'Neill, the late U.S. House speaker.

'Delving into the past'

"Untitled #16" (mixed media on paper), by Jamal Thorne, in his show "Bootleg Delorean,'' at Kingston Gallery, Boston, Feb. 28-April 1.
 

The gallery says:

"These new paintings by Jamal Thorne {are} composite experiences that embody the dynamic of delving into the past while being confronted with the idiosyncrasies of the present. Events unfold and time moves forward. Thorne builds layers of paint and tape covering textured surfaces, with a process informed by the Civil Rights Movement, current and past. Each new layer preserves and makes an impression while some elements from the previous layers are lost. For Thorne the process of cutting deep into the accumulating layers serves to mimic the act of reclaiming a connection to the past, while the finished work is a documentation of shared experience.''

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