'Mysteries of life'

The Chandler Gallery, in Cambridge, says: "One could argue that the way a story is told can be just as important as the story itself. Exploring those nuances is exactly what local artist Bill Porter intends for his new show 'Impart.'''

Porter has constructed "a stunning narrative between contrasting visuals that expresses themes of heritage, identity and the mysteries of life as seen through a child's eyes.''

 

James P. Freeman: Curling toward GOP victory

Curling in Toronto in 1909.

“Cry out full-throated and unsparingly,

Lift up your voice like a trumpet blast…”

                                                --Isaiah 58:1a

If voters mean what they say -- constantly expressing dissatisfaction with the current hyper-partisan political class and calling for its removal -- they could convert hyper-pandemonic emotion into action by dismissing Massachusetts’s Elizabeth Warren in 2018. An able replacement would be Beth Lindstrom. She is the saucer that could cool the Senate’s tea. And, maybe, ferocious minority factions.

If this is, as we are reminded daily, the Year-of-The-Woman in American politics, Lindstrom, a moderate Republican, counters the argument that her party is comprised of old white men, tired and empty. And should she win her party’s nomination to unseat Warren this autumn, her candidacy removes one stone from the hand holding the political rocks  that Warren likes to throw: the progressive granite of gender politics.

If you are Warren, you must hope that Lindstrom is not your challenger in November. For Lindstrom, personable and perspicacious, makes the improbable seem possible -- Warren’s wicked claw paralyzed; the screech silenced; the progressive oppression lifted.

For this column, appearing sturdy, cheerful and thoughtful over English Breakfast, fittingly, at a Boston hotel, the single biggest take-away is that Lindstrom is serious and compelling.

“A strong economy,” she says, is still the biggest issue for Massachusetts residents. Ever since Donald Trump won the presidency stock markets have anticipated the unbridling of America’s economic might. Higher wages, bigger bonuses and lower taxes (mere crumbs to likes of Warren and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi) are filtering into wallets and purses. A recent national poll found that the second and third most important issues to respondents were, respectively, the economy and taxes. (Healthcare ranked number one; a relative non-issue in Massachusetts since Romneycare in 2006.) This bodes well for Lindstrom’s focus on economics.

Though never elected to office, Lindstrom brings just enough public-sector experience (executive director of Massachusetts State Lottery (1997-1999); director of Consumer Affairs in Gov. Mitt Romney’s cabinet -- overseeing regulatory agencies including banking, telecommunications, energy, insurance and licensure (2003-2006)) and private-sector experience (a founder and owner of small businesses) to understand the complexities of modern government.

As President Calvin Coolidge noted nearly a century ago, “the chief business of the American people is business.” But today much of America’s business is government. Lindstrom’s skill-sets and her MBA degree, therefore, will come in handy as Trump steers his massive $1.5 trillion infrastructure initiative into a hybrid of public-private partnerships (with lots of still-unknowns).

In January, Lindstrom launched a Business Growth Tour, intended to “collaborate with Massachusetts business owners on the steps that can be taken to help them grow and expand.” Lowering costs and reducing regulation present a “fair opportunity,” she insists. Small business owners make a big voting bloc. In 2016, there were nearly 640,000 small businesses in Massachusetts. They employed 1.4 million workers, representing nearly 47 percent of all  workers in the commonwealth. And nearly 90,000 of these businesses are minority-owned.

Warren, meanwhile, defends her questionable lineage, and her support of Dodd-Frank and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau -- both saturated with excessive regulations. Do small-business proprietors think that  there are too few regulations?

Perhaps unintentionally, Lindstrom’s presence is that of a restorer of Rockefeller Republicanism -- to frustrate today’s right-wing pathology; and repairer of the breach -- the chasm between professional politicians and everyday citizens. She speaks in tones of incrementalism, not extremism.

For the doubters -- those wondering if she knows how to win in liberal Massachusetts -- Lindstrom managed Scott Brown’s successful Senate campaign eight years ago. The inconceivable to the achievable.

Lindstrom senses a tremulous electorate in 2018, like what she felt in 2010. But today it’s harder to define; and it’s not yet articulated into a slogan. (In 2010, Brown ran to capture “the people’s seat.”) She may be forgiven for defining herself as an abstraction: “A common-sense Republican.” But what does that mean? Standard definition is yesterday’s technology and yesteryear’s candidacy. It will need some high-def refinement before Warren pounces. (In 2012, incumbent Brown called himself a “Scott Brown Republican,” letting Warren ill-define him.)

Her fractured party and its national leaders pose problems, too.

Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky bemoans Republicans embracing Trump’s $1.5 trillion in new debts (reminiscent of Obama-era levels) and projections for unbalanced budgets for the next decade. Ironically, Rand joined Warren in opposing the recent “Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018,” which increases the debt ceiling and spending by hundreds of billions of dollars over the next two years. Lindstrom believes that the GOP must remain “the party of fiscal responsibility” and determine whether spending that is “necessary versus nice.” She favors congressional term-limits and a presidential line-item veto to force the government to think long-term, not each election cycle.

Like many Americans, she winces at the president’s “tone, temperament and tweeting” but thinks that more Americans will continue reaping the benefits of Trump’s economic policies by this year’s mid-terms. And, like many Americans, she supports his tax cuts; she expects that higher growth rates (not the paltry, so-called “new normal” touted after the Great Recession) will “temper higher debts and deficits.”

Talk of voters abandoning the GOP en masse in November may be premature. Just this month, a Politico/Morning Consult poll showed Trump’s approval rating equaling the percentage of voters who disapprove of his job performance (47 percent). And on a “generic congressional ballot” basis, the same poll found that the GOP now enjoys a one-point advantage over Democrats, as of Feb. 12. Will Americans reward his policies and ignore his personality this fall?\  

Still, while Trump may be the elephant in the room, he is not on the ballot in 2018.

Fortunately for Lindstrom, Republican Gov. Charlie Baker will be on the ballot. Baker, like Lindstrom, is a moderate. And more importantly, he is also the most popular high-level politician in Massachusetts. A January WBUR poll found that 74 percent of Massachusetts voters approve of the job that Baker is doing. That means  that he is more popular than Warren, and Lindstrom hopes  that his coattails will carry Republican votes down ballot.

(Incidentally, the same poll found that: “The one somewhat positive number for Trump is that a plurality of Massachusetts voters (43 percent) say the president has been good for the overall economy.”)  

For the next few months, Lindstrom looks to build her brand. Currently fewer than 8 percent of Massachusetts residents know who she is; Warren is recognized by nearly 95 percent of residents. That’s a challenge also facing her principal Republican opponents, state Rep. Geoff Diehl and former hedge-fund executive John Kingston. But all three Republicans are confident that they will meet April’s GOP state convention threshold to appear on September’s primary ballot. It’s still early.

Voters have been watching more Olympics than politics lately. Nevertheless, they may soon understand that Lindstrom’s campaign is analogous to the winter sport of curling, which requires resistance, patience and persistence to win. Whereas Diehl and Kingston are the two-man luge. Exciting and daring, certainly, but susceptible to crashing.

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.

Soothing or spooky?

"Dreaming'' (oil and fabric), by Linda Klein, in her show "Family Matters,'' paintings based on her old drawings of children, at Bromfield Gallery, Boston, Feb. 28-April 1.

'only with spring'

"earth how often have

the

doting

fingers of

prurient philosophers pinched

and

poked

thee

, has the naughty thumb

of science prodded

thy

beauty, how

often have religions taken

thee upon their scraggy knees

squeezing and

buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive

gods

(but

true

to the incomparable

couch of death thy

rhythmic

lover

thou answerest

them only with

spring)''

"Sweet Spontaneous,'' by E.E. Cummings, who, while he lived in Paris, New York, and elsewhere, remained at heart a  quirky, ingenious and skeptical New Englander. He was born in Cambridge, Mass., and died in Madison, N.H. His remains are in  Forest Hills Cemetery, Boston.

Thursday is the first day of meteorological spring 2018.

Submarine city

Replica of Turtle at the Submarine Force Library and Museum, in Groton, Conn.

Check out the Submarine Force Library and Museum, on the Thames River in Groton, Conn., near the huge submarine base and submarine-construction complex there, right across the Thames River from New London, whence you can take a ferry to Long Island and Block Island and get on an Amtrak train, too.

In 1775, at the start of the Revolutionary War, David Bushnell, then a Yale student, was said to have designed and built the world's first submarine used in combat -- a one-man boat that could be used to mine ships with explosives.

He called it  Turtle. He developed the ideas of using water as  ballast for submerging and raising submarines as well as  for the screw propeller, which was used in  Turtle.

Bushnell also proved that gunpowder could be exploded under water and made  the first time bomb.  Thus Turtle  was designed to be used to attack ships by attaching a time bomb to their hulls, using a hand-powered drill and ship auger bit to penetrate the hulls.

On Sept. 6, 1776, Turtle, manned by Sergeant Ezra Lee of the Continental Army, was used to attack the British 64-gun ship of the line HMS Eagle, which was moored in New York Harbor. However, Turtle's attack failed.

But Bushnell pressed on.

You can see a replica of Turtle in the museum.

Yankee ingenuity indeed!

USS Nautilus, the first nuclear sub, at the museum.

David Warsh: Russian suicide attack on American base in Syria is casting a very long shadow

The city of Deir ez-Zor.

The assault on the outpost reads like Hemingway story, from the Spanish Civil War. That a hundred or more Russian mercenaries were killed in what amounted to a suicide attack on an American base along the Euphrates River has been known in Moscow more or less since it happened, on the of the night Feb.  7-8, not far from the city of Deir ez-Zor, in in eastern Syria.

Last week a team of reporters for The Washington Post, citing “U.S. intelligence reports,” wrote that the Russian oligarch who is thought to control the mercenaries was “in close touch with both Kremlin and Syrian authorities in the days before the attack.”

Russian soldiers are positioned within a few miles of each other on opposite sides, west and east, of the Euphrates.  U.S. troops are there supporting a considerably larger force of Kurdish soldiers who are battling the remnants of ISIS forces in the area. Russian soldiers have been in Syria since their government intervened on behalf of President Bashar al-Assad in 2015.  Officers on both sides confer daily by telephone to avoid direct conflict.  

Also in the area had been a Russia mercenary unit of the shadowy Wagner Group, a larger and more widely deployed Russian version of the Blackwater Company that the U.S. employed heavily in Iraq. 

According to the Post, oligarch Yevgeniy Prigozhin is thought to control the Wagner force in Syria. In communications intercepted in January, he was said to have told Syrian officials that he had “”secured permission” from a high Kremlin official to launch a “fast and strong” initiative in early February. The Syrians, in return, assured him he would be repaid for his efforts. 

Prigozhin, a close associate since St. Petersburg days of Russian President Vladimir Putin, has been indicted  by  a federal grand jury in the probe led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller into U.S. election meddling by his Internet Research Agency.

A good account of the assault on the American base is to be found in Bloomberg Businessweek: some 300 killed or wounded among an attack force estimated to have been 600 soldiers.

Russia’s military has asserted that it had nothing to do with the attack.

“The Russians may have allowed the attack to take place simply to make it clear to Assad that you can’t do things without coordination with Moscow,” said Yury Barmin, a Middle East analyst at the Russian International Affairs Council, a research group set up by the Kremlin.

From a slightly different angle, Jonathan Haslam, Kennan Professor at the Institute for Advance Study in Princeton, N.J., offered an illuminating account of the murderous folly, although the B-52 strikes he reported may have been AC-130 gunship support.

That some of the wounded have been evacuated to military hospitals in Moscow and St. Petersburg had been confirmed by Russian authorities. The echoes of Russia’s war in Afghanistan are melancholy.

In half a dozen capitals, the reporting has only just begun. There is much to be learned. The Russian elections next month will be an occasion for a thoroughgoing appraisal, in the U.S., as well as in Russia, of Vladimir Putin’s 18 years in power.

David Warsh, an economic historian and long-time columnist on business, politics and media matters, is proprietor of economicprincipals.com, where this first ran. He is based in Somerville, Mass.

Griffin Bird: Stop this gas pipeline, which would be slashed through the Appalachian Trail

The Appalachian Trail.

Via OtherWords.org

I’m an Eagle Scout from Virginia.

Troop 149, an enthusiastic and lively troop from Arlington, made me the person I am today. Being a member of Troop 149 meant a lot of things, but most importantly it meant incredible outdoor expeditions on the Appalachian Trail.

The Appalachian Trail, a treasured 2,200-mile hiking trail that traverses the Appalachian Mountains, from Georgia to Maine, was a mainstay of my youth.

I spent countless hours and made lots of memories on the trail — learning how to cook on a smoky campfire, leaving my tent to greet the crisp morning air, watching the sun dip below the mountains after a long day of backpacking. I wouldn’t trade these memories for anything.

My visits to the Appalachian Trail became more infrequent as I got older and my Scouting career came to a close. I shipped off to a college on Virginia’s coast, far away from the mountains.

Even as I grew older and busier, I found myself longing to be back out on that well-worn trail.

I wasn’t too troubled, though, because I knew it would always be there.

That is, until I learned about the Mountain Valley Pipeline.

The Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) is a proposed 300-mile natural gas pipeline that would cut right through the Appalachian Trail, and it promises to be a disaster.

The MVP poses an unprecedented menace to the Appalachian Trail, threatening to clear a 125-foot wide gash on either side.

This gash, which would be roughly the size of 12-lane highway, would extend far beyond the sides of the trail and would accompany the pipeline everywhere it goes. Iconic views of pristine wilderness would be marred by the MVP’s barren service corridor.

But it’s not just the view that would be at risk.

Pipelines leak, and they leak a lot. From 1986 to 2013, pipelines have spilled more than 3 million gallons of hazardous liquids around the country. That’s equivalent to leaking 200 barrels every day.

These leaks have devastating impacts on the environment and nearby communities, and it breaks my heart to imagine them in that Virginia wilderness.

Even if the MVP never leaks, it will still hurt communities. With the MVP would come three new compressor stations, which subject communities to air pollution, groundwater contamination, and unsafe noise levels.

As if these threats aren’t enough, building the pipeline would also set a dangerous precedent for development on our public lands. The pipeline would undermine the Forest Service’s Roadless Rule, which protects 58.5 million acres of public lands from development, and carve out 3.4 miles of Jefferson National Forest.

If this pipeline gets built, many more forests would be at risk.

The threats posed by the Mountain Valley Pipeline are grave, but they’re not unique. What’s going on in my home state of Virginia is a microcosm of what’s happening around the country.

Pipelines are spreading around the country like wildfire. And the Trump administration’s long-awaited infrastructure plan, unveiled this February, would turn many protected areas into firewood.

If approved, the plan would make it easier than ever before to run pipelines through national parks. It would push states to hastily grant permits to pipeline projects, and completely undermine the environmental review procedures that safeguard our environment from the destructive forces of pipelines.

The thing is, these pipelines often aren’t even necessary. Even without the MVP, Virginia’s existing natural gas infrastructure would cover our energy needs well into the future. But even if this wasn’t the case, the tradeoffs simply wouldn’t be worth it — not in Virginia, and not anywhere else.

I’m an Eagle Scout from Virginia, and I know that more pipelines aren’t what America needs.

Griffin Bird is a Next Leader on the Climate Policy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. 

Tim Faulkner: Mass. may get electricity from Hydro-Quebec another way

The spillway at Hydro-Quebec's  Robert-Bourassa generating station can deal with a water flow twice as large as the Saint Lawrence River.

Via ecoRI News (ecori.org)

The Northern Pass power-line project may be on life support, but controversial Canadian hydropower might yet reach southern New England if Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker gets his way.

The New Hampshire Site Evaluation Committee rejected the 192-mil-long Northern Pass project on Feb. 1. While Eversource Energy has until March 27 to salvage its $1.6 billion transmission plan, Massachusetts has announced negotiations with a Maine utility for a backup plan to deliver imported hydropower to the Bay State.

The New England Clean Energy Connect, developed by the Central Maine Power Co., proposes a 145-mile power-line network to transmit 1,200 megawatts of hydropower from the Canadian border to Lewiston, Maine, where it will connect to the New England power grid. The $950 million cost for the project would be spilt by ratepayers and Hydro-Québec, an energy company run by the Canadian government.

Baker is banking on Canadian hydropower to fulfill his goal of 1,200 megawatts of new renewable energy under contract by April 1. The terms of the deal, as set by state law, have been criticized for excessively benefiting the utility, which in this case is Eversource or Central Maine Power. The terms for a hydropower-transmission project allows the utility to collect an annual payment, as well as receive a fully funded, high-voltage transmission system.

New Hampshire Republican Gov. Chris Sununu supports the Northern Pass proposal, but there was overwhelming opposition from local politicians, environmentalists and the public. In a unanimous vote, the state siting board ultimately rejected the proposal 7-0 because of concern that it would damage scenic areas, tourism and local businesses.

In Massachusetts, the bidding process has been accused of favoring the utilities, who make up a majority of the selection committee. Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey is reviewing the bidding process for any violations.

Less publicized is the threat hydropower inflicts on the environment and indigenous communities in Québec. Hydro dams require massive reservoirs that swamp dry land and low-lying wetlands while distressing fish and their habitat.

Indigenous groups such as the Pessamit Innu, Cree and Inuit claim that hydropower causes permanent damage to their land, food supply and the salmon population, one of the primary sources of revenue in the Betsiamites River. The Pessamit Innu tribe says exporting additional Hydro-Quebec electricity would cause greater changes in the water level of the reservoirs and further damage the environment.

The New Hampshire energy siting board denied the Pessamit Innu a request to intervene in the Northern Pass application review. The Pessamit grievances date back to the 1950s, when the first dams were built on their tribal land without approval, by Hydro-Quebec, which runs 62 hydro projects in the region. The company maintains that it has worked with the indigenous groups to protect and restore the salmon population while paying the Pessamit $80 million over 20 years. Hydro-Quebec notes that the company has signed 30 agreements with indigenous groups, known as first nations, since 1975.

Hydro-Quebec chasticed the Pessamit for partnering with Sierra Club to advance its opposition to exporting hydropower. The power company also criticized the environmental group for arguing that hydropower doesn't reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

Yet, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, large-scale hydropower contributes to global warming, as flooded land releases carbon dioxide and methane from decaying vegetation and erosion caused by runoff.

A 2016 study by Washington State University suggests that methane and CO2 emissions released as the water level fluctuates in hydropower reservoirs should be considered in the lifecycle emissions of an energy facility. A 2016 study published by PLOS One reaches a similar conclusion, but suggests that the emissions can be offset by generating biogas electricity and timely management of power generation.

Tim Faulkner is a reporter and writer for ecoRI News, where this article first appeared.

Chris Powell: Government employees above the law in Conn.

Not always? WPA poster from the Great Depression.

What happens when someone asserts that the compensation of members of state and municipal government employee unions, being the biggest expense of government in Connecticut, should be determined through the ordinary democratic process and not through secret negotiations between unions and politicians or by the decisions of unelected arbiters who answer to no one?

When that happens the unions shriek: You hate working people!

What happens when an academic study concludes that the compensation of Connecticut's state and municipal government employees is far more generous than that of most states because it is determined by a system that puts the government employee unions above the law?

The political allies of those unions, like state Senate's Democratic leader, Bob Duff of Norwalk, let loose the same shriek: You hate working people!

Such a study was published the other day by the Yankee Institute for Public Policy and Duff accused it of trying to "dismantle the middle class for the oligarchy" and to create an economy "where everyone works for a minimum wage."

Of course this shrieking fails to addresses the issues being raised. It aims to prevent those issues from being addressed. But thanks to the Yankee Institute study, at least those issues now are in the spotlight.

The study, "Above the Law," by Priya Abraham Brannick of the Pennsylvania-based Commonwealth Foundation for Public Policy Alternatives and F. Vincent Vernuccio of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, in Michigan, is indisputable in its basic points:

-- Connecticut law subjects to collective bargaining more of the compensation and working conditions of state and municipal employees than most other states do.

-- Binding arbitration of state and municipal employee union contracts in Connecticut prevents elected officials from exercising much authority over the terms of government employment. Indeed, that is the very point of binding arbitration: to diminish the authority of elected officials.

-- Connecticut law even allows state and municipal employee union contracts to take precedence over state law. For example, while ordinarily the disciplinary records of government employees are public records, union contracts can nullify the public's right to know so misconduct and incompetence on the public payroll can be concealed.

Nobody should feel sorry for Connecticut's elected officials because of this. They don't want authority over the biggest costs of government. They don't want to get caught between taxpayers and the government employee unions. As employee compensation cannibalizes the government, Connecticut's elected officials want to be able to shrug and say they can't do anything about it, though this inability to control the costs of government employment is a primary driver of the state's disastrous decline.

Democratic elected officials especially don't want the government to regain control of its employment costs, because their party is dominated by the government employee unions.

But collective bargaining for government employees and binding arbitration of their union contracts should be repealed because they destroy democracy and their premise is that the only working people are those on government's payroll, that people who merely pay taxes are properly slaves.

So why do Connecticut's government employee unions hate taxpayers so?


Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn., and a frequent contributor to New England Diary.

 

Images of reinvention in delightful Duxbury

"Henry'' (transparent watercolor), by Irena Roman, in her show "Second Wind: Journeys of Re-Invention,''  at the Art Complex Museum, Duxbury, Mass., through May 13.

Duxbury is a very affluent South Shore-of-Boston town with beautiful sandy beaches,  oyster beds, cranberry bogs, piney woods and kettle ponds, along lots of 18th and 19th Century houses. Geologically, it's Cape Cod- like.

Inlet scene in Duxbury.

Duxbury has long been  a summer place for the well-off, mostly from the Boston and Providence areas, but some from Greater New York, too, although the ocean water there is much colder than in Buzzards and Narragansett bays, to the south.

The John Alden House, built in 1653, when Duxbury was becoming a sort of suburb of still-small Plymouth.

Boycott Sinclair's WJAR

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

The TV station chain Sinclair Broadcast Group, which has polluted its stations with political propaganda, a few weeks ago gave each of its employees a highly publicized $1,000 bonus and thanked Trump for signing the tax law, which mostly benefits companies (which doesn’t bother me in itself) and rich folks. Now the company is pressuring its employees (including its journalists) to donate to the Sinclair Political Action Group, which supports Trump and other Republican politicians.

It used to be that news-media employees were discouraged from giving to politicians lest they appear to be overly biased. But in the much more corrupt political world following the Citizens United case, of 2010, such scruples are disappearing fast.  It would be nice if viewers of, and advertisers on, Providence’s WJAR (Channel 10) boycotted the station, which used to be well-respected and still has some good people, though it’s hard to understand how any self-respecting journalist would want to work for such a sleazy company.

Back to Connecticut: Picking a place to live involves a lot more than economics and politics

The Black Horse Tavern, in  Old Saybrook, Conn., built about  1712 by John Burrows. It is  just west of the site of the historic Fort Saybrook, the major fortification of the 17th-Century  Saybrook Colony. The building served as a tavern and inn until 1924. It's now a private house.

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

Jeff Larder wrote a charming piece in the Jan. 19 Hartford Courant headlined “Why I Came Back to Connecticut.’’ It could apply to any place with problems, which means any place. Mr. Larder, who lives in Old Saybrook,  on Long Island Sound, had previously lived in Boston and Cape Cod. He moved back to the Nutmeg State in 2015.

There he has found plenty of things to complain about, including a “dysfunctional statehouse” (how many are highly functional?), “an exodus of jobs’’ and the “state full of suburbs flailing in a post-suburban world.’’  Further, the state’s “casinos are gross.’’ Yep, they are intrinsically gross.

Of course, some or even all of his complaints could be heard in many other states.

But economics isn’t everything. There are many reasons to live someplace.

He writes:

“....Connecticut more generally is at the happy middle of a diversity of experiences that comprise life at its best. In the span of a month, I had the best barbecue pork I've ever eaten in Hartford and the tastiest faux-chicken sandwich I've ever eaten at a vegetarian place in New Haven. Rolling farms, open space and hiking trails are minutes from downtown music venues and indie bookstores and record shops. The beaches aren't Malibu-caliber, obviously, but they're calm enough to teach your toddler to love the water….

“If Connecticut occasionally feels like an afterthought between two cities, remember that Manhattan is priced for wide-eyed optimists and pulseless corporate assassins, and the cranes in Boston seem hell-bent on building luxury apartments and the world's largest food court. Major metropolises are having trouble keeping around artists and creatives — the same people who make cities exciting places to live and can least afford the rent — and they've long been beyond the reach of middle-class families. Meanwhile, Connecticut's colleges, small and underutilized cities, and proximity to those same high-priced locales amount to an abundance of potential energy.’’

Sounds applicable to the cute little state to its east.

To read his essay, please hit this link:

Under attack from the inside

"Under Attack'' (encaustic relief over mixed media ), by Stephanie Roberts-Camello, in the group show "We the People,'' through March 14 at the James Library and Center for the Arts in Norwell, Mass. -- a suburb south of Boston on the North River.

 

Job is the measure

"Job,'' by Leon Bonnat.

"Wake when dog whimpers; Prick

Finger. Inject insulin.

Glue teeth in.

Smoke cigarette.

Shudder and fret.

Feed old dog. Revise syllabic

On self-pity. Get Boston Globe.

Drink coffee. Eat bagel. Read

At nervous speed.

Smoke cigarette.

Never forget to measure oneself against job.''

 -- From "Death Work,'' by Donald Hall, former U.S. poet laureate and resident of Wilmot, N.H.

Scroll of the Book of Job.

Llewellyn King: My long but now failed love affair with guns

A Colt AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, the kind of weapon used in the Lakeland, Fla., attack that killed 17 people at a high school.

I have until now eschewed writing about guns. It’s personal. I like guns.

I grew up in what might be called a gun culture, but it was very different from today’s gun culture in the United States. It was in colonial Africa and guns were for hunting. They were also, as here today, just for having, works of art to be revered.

Many boys, at age 13 or 14, got a .22 rifle. Some got a combination rifle and shotgun: a .22 rifle on the top and a .410 shotgun on the bottom.

Handguns didn’t figure: They were illegal. The only man I knew who had one was always worried that he’d be discovered and prosecuted. Automatic weapons were still on the horizon where we were in a British colony -- what was then called Southern Rhodesia and  is now called Zimbabwe

Military training, though sketchy, started early, when we were still in high school. We were issued British army, circa 1918, Lee Enfield .303 rifles — heavy, durable and lethal. We were told — as soldiers everywhere are — that our weapons were our best friends and would save our lives one day. We took the friendship part very seriously. People with guns do.

I still had some of that when I moved to the United States, in 1963. But my friendship with guns deteriorated in the era of the Saturday-night special.

Now in this era of the assault rifle, I believe that our gun tolerance is a fatal social disease. It’s a public-health issue right up there with the big killers and more terrible because so many of the victims, and most of the perpetrators, are children.

I was once the keynote speaker at a pro-gun group’s event. It was a seminal day, Nov. 5, 2008: the day after Barack Obama was elected president.

At that point, Obama had said nothing that I’d been able to find about guns. I told them that.

I told them about myself. I told them that members of my family, including my mother, had been professional hunters in the 1920s when felling large animals was acceptable, indeed regarded as a serious sport and as a way of harvesting nature’s bounty, even for ivory.

I didn’t tell them that I was leaning toward gun registration or my thoughts about the need to begin to turn the culture against guns, just as the culture had turned against homophobia and segregation. Just the facts. That’s what I tried to give them and what I had agreed with my speakers bureau. Yet when I sat down, the chairman said, “I think we have to read between the lines with journalists.”

The audience wasn’t what you might think of as gun extremists. They were serious, middle-class business people, mostly men; some were in the gun industry working for manufacturers. They believed that they were the victims of a vast left-wing conspiracy to destroy their businesses, their sport and their culture. They also believed, despite what I’d said, that I was the agent of that conspiracy.

So it is with my friends who are gun owners, from Florida to New Hampshire and across the country to Arizona. They vary from an erudite historian who has a collection of ancient and modern weapons in working order, to an electrician who believes he’s defending the people from the government by owning an AR-15, to a conservative economist who took to guns when he took to Republicanism.

Michael Gerson of The Washington Post has pointed out that the real child carnage, the senseless ghastly slaughter often over a gesture or an imagined slight, is in the inner cities. Tonight and tomorrow night, on and on, in the inner cities, children with guns will kill children, teenagers will kill teenagers. It’ll happen in Chicago and Baltimore and Detroit and across America to Oakland, Calif. Those who’ve been betrayed by their upbringing, by their absent fathers, and by their schools will be betrayed again. This time by the false security of their friend: the gun.

We have an estimated 300 million guns in America and 265 million passenger vehicles. The difference is we know the whereabouts of the vehicles: We register them. We also engineer them for safety, and we teach the drivers to drive. With guns we do just the opposite.

Wake up America and smell the cordite. It’s going off and killing someone near you right now.

On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King (llewellynking1@gmail.com) is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS.

Little Compton's splendid Stone House

The Stone House.

Visit the uber-charming Stone House, in Little Compton, R.I., across from Newport and on bucolic Sakonnet Point. It's on the National Registry of Historical Places.

It's made to order for honeymoons.

For more information, please hit this link.

The air was too clear

Summer sailing off Acadia National Park, in Downeast Maine. Actually,  pea soup fog is more common than blue sky in much of the summer on the Maine Coast.

"I taught up in Maine a couple of times and wasn't able to take a single picture. All that blue sky! Ugh. Sparkling clear air, just terrible. I couldn't do it.''

-- Controversial photographer Sally Mann
 

Don Pesci: Why does prison so rarely rehabilitate convicts?

Down the Rabbit Hole:

How the Culture of Corrections Encourages Crime

By Brent McCall & Michael Liebowitz
Available at Amazon

Price: $12.95/softcover, 337 pages

Down the Rabbit Hole, a penological eye-opener, was written by two Connecticut prisoners, Brent McCall and Michael Liebowitz. Their book is an analytical work, not merely a page-turner prison drama, and it provides serious answers to the question: Why is reoffending a more likely outcome than rehabilitation in the wake of a prison sentence?

The multiple answers to this central question are not at all obvious. Before picking up the book, the reader would be well advised to shed his preconceptions and also slough off the highly misleading claims of prison officials concerning the efficacy of programs developed by dusty old experts who have never had an honest discussion with a real convict. Some of the experts are more convincing cons than the cons, possibly because prisoners, many of them victims of programs that do not reduce recidivism rates, are not credentialed. Most people in prison are graduates of the school of hard knocks, not Harvard.

McCall and Liebowitz, serious criminals, are mechanics uniquely situated to answer the question:  Why doesn’t rehabilitative imprisonment usually rehabilitate?

There are four criminological pillars to incarceration: incapacitation, punishment, deterrence, and rehabilitation. The authors find all four goals defensible, even desirable. However, the thesis of this book, very hard to dispute, is that only one engine, incapacitation, is pulling the train.

Punishment, in their view, does not rehabilitate because in most cases punishment is not viewed by prisoners as punishment: “We witness it every day. In a nutshell: prisons are often too comfortable; discipline is frequently too lax, inconsistent and arbitrary; and the staff generally doesn’t take rehabilitative programs any more seriously than the inmates do.”

The four goals of incarceration can only be met “… if there is proper implementation. When offenders are allowed to lay back in the relative comfort of an air conditioned cell watching color TV, listening to CD’s or playing video games, it can hardly be considered severe enough punishment to deter anything. Hell, that’s what most of the guys in prison enjoyed doing prior to their incarcerations. Couple this with the fact that inmates know that the vast majority of rule violations they commit will be ignored – even when committed in clear view and with the full knowledge of institutional staff members –and that effectively there are no performance expectations placed on them in either their job assignments or the programs they take – and you have a veritable recipe for failure.”

Young students confronting authority demands engage in what used to be called, before the collapse of public education, “reality-testing.” Will the authority figure apply his sanction equably? Will he apply it at all? If not, the efficacy of the sanction disappears. More destructively, the failure to apply sanctions will be interpreted as a failure of will and a sanctioning of illicit behavior. Sanctions unapplied or indifferently applied are, quite literally, dead.

The book finds that attempts to change rooted behavior in criminals fail for two principle reasons: 1) the content of the reform is wrong. You cannot teach dolphins to play pianos; better to teach them how to swim; 2) the messenger is wrong. Many of the messengers, and prison officials teach every day through example, are poorly instructed and fatally disengaged in what should be a primary mission -- changing the culture of prisons.

The authors note that the arc of penology, driven by perceptions of failure, has in the past moved between deceivingly opposite poles. “Every twenty years or so,”  they write, “the pendulum swings from an ostensible focus on rehabilitation, with its apparent emphasis on prison programs, job training and compassion towards offenders, to get tough on crime policies, which supposedly means longer sentences and harsher prison conditions.”

This is a false either-or: “Firm condemnation of offenders and rehabilitative efforts can go hand in hand… punishment and reforms are not mutually exclusive objectives. In fact, punishment, or the threat of punishment is crucial to generating the motivation to change.” The culprit in prisoner reform – the authors assiduously avoid the word “rehabilitation” -- is an unjust and random implementation of both sanctions and reform efforts. As in the broader society, culture -- the real-time application of both punishments and reform efforts -- determines the success of penological programs.

Down the Rabbit Hole, suffused with hope, is remarkably free of bitterness. Still, an honest review of the tangle of unworkable prison reforms that do little to reduce the recidivism rate in Connecticut or other prisons -- "Statistics show that 67.8% of inmates released from prison nationwide are charged with at least one serious new crime within three years of their release" -- calls forth this sulfurous appraisal: “During the course of a single prison sentence, the offender can attend a series of programs that convey fundamentally different and often contradictory ideas about what the cause of his criminality is and what is required of him to correct it. In one program, he is told that he is the hapless victim of an inherently unfair societal power structure and that he simply needs to be open to the benevolent intervention of an inscrutable cosmic force. Another program teaches that he is the victim of a pernicious disease that robs him of the ability to choose and induces him to behave poorly. Still another program informs him that he is really just the victim of a cruel world that has mistreated him from birth and continues to fail to acknowledge his innate goodness, thus causing him to express himself through artificial sub-personalities he was forced to create in an effort to merely survive… And every once in a while, someone might mention that he needs to take responsibility and correct his thinking errors – though how exactly that is to be accomplished puzzles even those offering the admonition.”

The book offers constructive remedies. What is wanting in the confusing slop of pretend-reform programs is a conversion regimen that will purge the demons within that thrive on confusion, disorder and despair. There is life and hope at the end of the rabbit hole. The book, which pulls no punches and is what politicians might call a “frank and honest” discussion of life behind bars, is an easy read, free of suffocating academic jargon, though some destructive reform remedies do not survive the authors’ petri dish.

The audience targeted by the authors is the general public, and the book itself may best be appreciated as a message in a bottle sent to the wide world by Robinson Caruso, who is best able to provide the reader with the clearest understanding of Caruso’s island, which regularly ships island dwellers, hopefully reformed, to the mainland.

Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based columnist and frequent contributor to New England Diary.

Ethanol from the air

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

Sometimes what might turn out to be a big story is lurking nearby with little attention. Consider the tiny startup company in Fall River called Catalytic Innovations. There, scientist Stafford Sheehan and his team are developing a  reactor system that uses air, water and sunlight (which turns into electricity in the company’s solar panels) to transform atmospheric carbon dioxide into clean-burning ethanol. Carbon dioxide has been  ominously increasing with our burning of coal, oil and natural gas. Catalytic Innovations’ work might profoundly strengthen efforts to combat global warming while providing an abundant source of clean energy.

Reuters has a short video on this exciting company.  (No, I do not own stock in it.) To see it, hit this link.

https://www.reuters.com/video/2018/02/12/catalyst-makes-alcohol-and-perfume-from?videoId=400622152&videoChannel=118065&channelName=Moments+of+Innovation

Bringing back the Rutgers tomato

Via OtherWords.org

Food corporations and their academic cohorts keep trying to “make” an industrial tomato to rival Mother Nature’s product. And they keep failing. They might consider this instead: the Rutgers 250. It’s a revived version of the classic hybrid tomato bred in 1934 by Rutgers University and Campbell Soup. The Rutgers tomato’s excellent flavor and texture made it the variety choice for years, eventually accounting for 60 percent of all tomatoes grown commercially in the United States.

But it fell out of favor in the 1960s, when big industrial growers in California and Florida switched to hard — and tasteless — tomatoes bred to withstand the crushing power of the harvesting machines they’d begun using.

That year — with the Good Food movement mushrooming and with consumers demanding that supermarkets sell truly flavorful tomatoes — plant breeders discovered that Campbell still had genetic material from the parent plants used 75 years earlier to develop the original Rutgers variety.

Since then, they’ve been working with it again, using cross-breeding techniques that go back to Latin America’s pre-Columbian natives. Slowly but surely, they brought back the Rutgers and its natural flavor, glowingly described as “the very taste of summer.”

The resurrected Rutgers tomato isn’t hard enough to be machine-harvested and shipped across country — which is one its major virtues. The fact that this tomato must be grown and marketed regionally is one step towards a decentralized, deindustrialized, and better food economy.

Instead of trying to squeeze nature into a high-tech, corporate model, this tomato represents an understanding that our food system can — and should — cooperate with nature and foster the growth of regional economies.

Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, public speaker and editor of the populist newsletter.