Vox clamantis in deserto
Smells from the past
In Riverside Park, Manhattan
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com:
As we slide into fall and the rays of the sun slant lower, I’ve been thinking of the past more, and especially about New York City, where I lived in 1971-75. I especially remember the smells, such as the unexplained (to me) whiff of old wet bread almost every day when I walked up and down Riverside Park, on Manhattan’s West Side. The park is dramatically sited along the Hudson River, but in my time could be a tad dangerous and “exotic’’ (Haitian Voodoo specialists sacrificed animals there.) I always walked fast. Other New York smells: rotting garbage during sanitation workers’ strikes, the stink in hot weather off the East River, which is now much cleaner, and hot dogs and pretzels at those food carts.
Indeed, smells send one back deep into the past. When I smell diesel, I think of Paris in the ‘70s and ‘80s, where most vehicles were/are powered by that foul fuel. When I smell oysters and crabs at restaurants, I think of Delaware, where I worked for a few months and nearby Chesapeake Bay – what H.L. Mencken called “the immense protein factory.’’ Then there’s the smell of wet green leaves ripped off trees in tropical storms in the early fall and, later in the season, the sweet aroma of burning dried-up leaves that we’d raked (creating whispering sounds) into piles – a practice now banned in most places; too much air pollution. And wood smoke takes me back to New Hampshire, especially in those damp, corn snow March days.
As for Providence, I’ll always associate it with the seaweedy scent of Narragansett Bay when the wind starts coming in from the south and crooked but “colorful’’ Buddy Cianci’s powerful cologne as he walked into my office at The Providence Journal.
Todd McLeish: And now, invasive worms
Snake worm
Just hearing the name of one of Rhode Island’s newest invasive species is enough to make local residents queasy: snake worms.
Even though snake worms look similar to the region’s more common earthworms and they’re not much larger, their behavior easily identifies them. Not only do they slither through the grass like snakes, they also jump away if you try to pick them up. In their native Korea and Japan, they are called Asian jumping worms.
“That jumping is how they get away from predators,” said worm expert Josef Gorres, an associate professor of plant and soil science at the University of Vermont who formerly taught at the University of Rhode Island. “It scares them.”
It scares people, too.
“They can be a bit of a pest when you have a Fourth of July party and you have a new patio and they crawl around like snakes,” said Gorres, who has found the worms in his home garden in Vermont. “They make people squeamish.”
This invader has probably been in the United States for more than 50 years. The story told about their arrival involves a shipment of cherry trees from Japan that was sent to Washington, D.C., and the worms were in the soil around the tree roots. Whether that’s true, Gorres isn’t sure, but he believes the worms have probably been in Rhode Island for a decade or more. Residents are just now beginning to notice them.
A survey of URI master gardeners conducted by Gorres in 2015 found snake worms in Slater Park in Pawtucket and in gardens and mulch piles in Barrington, Jamestown, North Kingstown, South Kingstown and Richmond. Today, the worms are common at URI’s East Farm, where master gardeners maintain several gardens and greenhouses, and they have been reported at other scattered locations around the state as well.
Nan Quinlan, who coordinates the master gardeners’ vegetable demonstration garden at East Farm in Kingston, said the worms may have arrived there in deliveries of mulch, soil, or potted plants, or even on the tires and fenders of cars and trucks.
“There are so many possibilities here that I strongly hesitate to blame any one source,” she said. “What makes the most sense is that the Asian worms were already present in the soil at East Farm for a long time and found their way to areas like mulch piles and the compost pile we built and maintain inside the garden.”
Quinlan’s speculation that they may have come from deliveries of soil or potted plants aligns with Gorres’ understanding that they are commonly transported in plant material via the horticulture and nursery industry.
“Folks in horticulture should worry because the worms can negatively affect their stock of plants,” Gorres said. “The castings the worms produce are very granular, very loose, so if anything tries to grow in the castings, the roots will have a hard time getting a foothold. Plants need something more stable to hold onto. It makes the plant wilt and look like they’re experiencing drought symptoms.”
Snake worms can be a problem in forests as well. They consume the top layer of the soil and dead leaves — called the duff layer — where the seeds of plants germinate.
“Once that layer is gone, the plants don’t have a place to put their seeds where they will survive until the following year,” Gorres said. “You end up with a forest with fewer understory plants, and all that’s left are saplings of trees that deer will feed on. The end result is a lack of regeneration of the forest.”
This concern is also true of the other earthworms found in the Northeast, all of which are non-native and could be impacting forests in a similar way. Any native earthworms in the region were crushed by glaciers during the last ice age. Most of the worm species found in New England today arrived following European colonization of the area.
“We’re now experiencing the second wave of earthworm invasions,” Gorres said. “One of the things I’m especially worried about is that the loose castings will make the soil highly erodible. Castings from European worms stick together. The soil on a slope where snake worms are found might easily erode away.”
To reduce the likelihood of the spread of snake worms, Gorres suggested that consumers ask vendors selling plants, mulch, or soil whether the worms have been found in their products.
“They’ll probably say they haven’t been, but if they’re truthful they may say it’s the new normal, which it may be,” he said.
Gorres is studying several varieties of insect-killing fungi that may control the worms.
David Gregg, director of the Rhode Island Natural History Survey, cautioned that those investigating whether they have snake worms in their gardens shouldn’t confuse them with worm snakes, which are native to New England and may be Rhode Island’s rarest snake. Worm snakes grow only about 10 inches long and may look like a large scaly worm.
“Worm snakes = good, snake worms = bad,” he wrote in an email.
Rhode Island resident and author Todd McLeish runs a wildlife blog.
'Encaustic shrouds' in Cambridge
Encaustic painting by Stephanie Roberts-Camello, in her show “Many Miles,’’ Sept. 30-Oct. 8 at Maud Morgan Arts Chandler Gallery, Cambridge, Mass.
She says: “Discovering a box of old family letters in my family's basement would change the way I painted and how I thought about my work. There were stacks of letters bound in twine according to who sent them. They dated back as far as 1919 through 1946. Many of these letters reference the dust bowl days of Texas and the Great Depression.
”Encaustic is a medium that can be worked flat or sculpturally. One of its many attributes is it can retain any stress mark or scrape once it cools. It has an innate feature for documentation. These letters; represent a period of suffering, loss and endurance in our country, and for me, the intricately worked encaustic shrouds became metaphors for struggle and change.’’
A menu from the '50s to savor
Howard Johnson’s was founded and based in Quincy, Mass., in 1925.
A tunnel and strip-joint strip in Providence's Atlantis
On Kennedy Plaza, Providence City Hall, built in 1978
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
Rhode Island officials propose to have a tunnel for buses built under Kennedy Plaza, in downtown Providence, to reduce vehicular (and human?) density in the plaza area and better connect it with Burnside Park. We need to study the engineering plans for this but it seems that it would be very expensive to construct such a tunnel in such an area, which is virtually at sea level.
To take some of the vehicular pressure off the plaza why not create a secondary bus hub in the Route 195 relocation area? This would be within walking distance of Kennedy Plaza, and perhaps small buses could be used in a shuttle service between the hubs, or perhaps electric trolleys.
Kennedy Plaza has the bones to be one of America’s most beautiful squares – not quite up to the glory of Boston’s Copley Square, but impressive. Creating a nearby transit hub would makes its improvement easier to achieve, and would be a lot cheaper than a tunnel.
Having said that, I’d add that while police activity could be stepped up to stop rowdy and worse behavior among a few of those using buses at Kennedy Plaza, the environment is not as problematical as has been presented. And there is a police station there.
xxx
Dylan Conley, chairman of the Providence Board of Licenses, has suggested creating a 24/7 entertainment district in the form of a strip of bars and nightclubs on gritty Allens Avenue. The idea is to draw away and concentrate some of the establishments now dispersed around downtown Providence. Their sometimes raffish activities can antagonize neighbors, scare tourists, lure some folks looking for trouble, and distress citizens worried about the reputation of Rhode Island’s capital.\
A hoped-for benefit of Mr. Conley’s idea would be creating a larger source of sales- and property-tax revenue from this sector by promoting the new district as a sort of Bourbon Street, New Orleans, attraction. However, by intensifying Providence’s (exaggerated) reputation as a sleazy and unsafe place, such a district might have the opposite effect in the long term by scaring away more respectable and conventional -- and affluent -- businesses and individuals. As for New Orleans as a model: It’s infamous for the high crime rate in its entertainment strips.
And you can imagine the number of drunk drivers that such an Allens Avenue entertainment district would put on Route 95. Few customers there would want to just drink one glass of heart-healthy red wine….
Is this really the sort of industry Providence wants to expand? And Allens Avenue, for all its grittiness, is along the water. Surely there are classier ways to take better advantage of that than creating what would probably become a new Mecca for many dubious people. Before, of course, global warming puts Allens Avenue underwater.
Tracey Aikman: I'm one of those factory workers Trump lied to
From OtherWords.org
My entire working life has been dictated by offshoring. I’ve spent my career jumping from one factory closing to another.
When President Trump was elected, he said: “Companies are not going to leave the United States anymore without consequences.” His promises ring hollow to me after I got my latest layoff notice.
My first job out of high school was at a factory owned by United Technologies in Wabash, Ind. I showed up to work in March 1991 and a sign on the door read: “Moved to Mexico.” My mother, who worked for a sister factory, also lost her job when her factory was sent south of the border.
I eventually got a union job at Chrysler in Kokomo, Indiana, which allowed me to give my family a middle-class life and build our dream house on five acres of land. In 2008, I got laid off. I lost my house and had to start over financially.
When I got my job at Schneider Electric’s “Square D” plant in Peru, Ind., five years ago, making electrical boxes and equipment, I hoped that this job would sustain me until I was ready to retire.
Unfortunately, the multinational corporation that owns our plant announced this summer that they would be moving our work to Mexico and other plants. Once our plant closes, all of Schneider Electric’s North American factories will be non-union.
Now I’m facing another layoff, even though our Peru plant was profitable. In fact, the same week I was laid off, Schneider Electric announced profits of $2.2 billion for the first half of 2019.
I’m not alone. Workers across the Midwest are suffering the same fate. And President Trump continues to fail us. Instead of punishing companies like Schneider Electric, he has rewarded them with $120 million in federal contracts and a massive tax break. The closure of my factory is sad proof that Trump’s lies have consequences.
Trump’s broken promises have become a broken record destroying our communities, even though here in Miami County, we gave him the vast majority of our votes in 2016.
Right now, Our Revolution, a political advocacy organization inspired by Sen. Bernie Sander’s historic presidential run in 2016, is helping to organize a miracle effort to save our plant. Joined by workers from the shuttered GM plant in Lordstown, Ohio, and workers from the Carrier plant in Indianapolis, we are calling on Trump to sign an executive order that would prevent taxpayer dollars from going to companies that are shipping American jobs overseas.
With the next round of layoffs scheduled for Sept. 27, there is no time to waste.
We have one request for President Trump: Use the power of the government over federal contracts to stop our jobs from leaving the United States. Show us that you mean what you said when you promised to be a workers’ champion.
We need your help now — and we’ll remember if we don’t get it.
Tracey Aikman has been laid off by global corporations United Technologies, Chrysler and now Schneider Electric. He is married and is a father of two.
The fight for Mass. offshore wind goes on
From The New England Council (newenglandcouncil.com)
Orsted and Eversource have submitted a proposal to construct an wind energy farm off the Massachusetts coast. The proposed project, named Bay State Wind, includes a 400-megawatt project and an 800-megawatt project.
The companies’ proposal for Bay State Wind comes after Orsted’s federally approved offshore wind farm, Vineyard Wind, was put on hold for further review of its impact on fish and fisherman. Orsted, however, has been working closely with various commercial and local fisherman to accommodate their practices and projects in their own wind-turbine proposal. The companies said the project would bring hundreds of construction jobs to the state and, if selected, they plan to commit hundreds of millions of dollars to direct community investments.. Orsted and Eversource have worked together before, most recently on the Revolution Wind project planned for Rhode Island.
“We are thrilled to once again help Massachusetts take the next step to grow its clean energy economy,” said Lee Olivier, Eversource executive vice president for enterprise energy strategy and business development, in a statement. “Our team has been in the local communities, meeting with residents and stakeholders, to ensure their feedback is built into Bay State Wind’s proposal, which is the most mature, comprehensive and thorough offshore wind project available.”
Trying to go with the flow
“All I want is to be the river though I return again and again to the clouds. (detail) (etching, paper, fabric, mahogany), by Nancy Diessner, in the show “Memory, rivers and urban debris,’’ at Bromfield Gallery, Boston, in October.
David Warsh: 'The Book of the Grotesque'
SOMERVILLE, Mass.
I returned to the office Saturday from a reporting trip to read a week’s-worth of the four English-language newspapers I follow. The fat was back in the fire, what with the so-far anonymous whistle-blower and President Trump’s July 25 telephone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky,
Having watched a couple of hotly contended soccer games on television while in Europe I had been thinking about referees and what we expect of them.
What caught my attention in those couple of hundred pages of newsprint I read yesterday were the lofty claims in which the various stories were situated. I always wince at The Washington Post’s portentous flag: “Democracy dies in darkness.” The Financial Times’s “without fear and without favour” is suitably restrained. The Wall Street Journal’s presentation is the least heavily inflected; the NYT’s the most strident these days. {The NYT’s motto is “All the News That’s Fit to Print’.’)
It was a two-page house ad in the Saturday Sept. 20 NYT, under the headline “The Truth Has a Voice,” that brought me up short. “Capturing the full story on every story we report takes diligence, persistence and an unwavering commitment to the truth,” the advert copy began.
In this case was the truth was that of gender equality. The ad stated, “New York Times journalists have long reported on the specific challenges and inequalities women face – and the strides women have taken towards change. We are committed to covering gender inequality, whether elevating women’s voices, debunking misconceptions or producing deeply-reported stories on pressing issues.”
It concluded, “Your support of today’s independent press is and investment in tomorrow. Thank you.”
On the page opposite, NYT gender editor Jessica Bennett put it this way: “We want gender coverage to exist across sections, platforms and subject matter. It is a lens through which we cover the world. It’s all part of our larger mission to pursue the truth, shine a light on overlooked stories and hold power to account.”
What struck me was the tension between competing views in the ad behind its definite and indefinite articles: “the” truth. vs. “a” lens. The NYT’s “Truth” campaign has bothered me from the beginning, because of the immodesty of its claims. The boast of “truth” goes far beyond what most journalists know themselves to be pursuing: a provisional, partial kind of truth, the best that can be said quickly.
The NYT ad yesterday reminded me of the prologue to Winesburg, Ohio (1919), by Sherwood Anderson, a book of 21 short stories I read as a copy-boy at the City New Bureau of Chicago, in 1964. I looked at the hundred-year-old book again this morning. It seemed as germane as ever. Winesburg is in the public domain; the prologue is 1,200 words long. I am appending it here:
. The Book of the Grotesque
The writer, an old man with a white mustache, had some difficulty in getting into bed. The windows of the house in which he lived were high and he wanted to look at the trees when he awoke in the morning. A carpenter came to fix the bed so that it would be on a level with the window.
Quite a fuss was made about the matter. The carpenter, who had been a soldier in the Civil War, came into the writer’s room and sat down to talk of building a platform for the purpose of raising the bed. The writer had cigars lying about and the carpenter smoked.
For a time the two men talked of the raising of the bed and then they talked of other things. The soldier got on the subject of the war. The writer, in fact, led him to that subject. The carpenter had once been a prisoner in Andersonville prison and had lost a brother. The brother had died of starvation, and whenever the carpenter got upon that subject he cried. He, like the old writer, had a white mustache, and when he cried he puckered up his lips and the mustache bobbed up and down. The weeping old man with the cigar in his mouth was ludicrous. The plan the writer had for the raising of his bed was forgotten and later the carpenter did it in his own way and the writer, who was past sixty, had to help himself with a chair when he went to bed at night.
In his bed the writer rolled over on his side and lay quite still. For years he had been beset with notions concerning his heart. He was a hard smoker and his heart fluttered. The idea had got into his mind that he would some time die unexpectedly and always when he got into bed he thought of that. It did not alarm him. The effect in fact was quite a special thing and not easily explained. It made him more alive, there in bed, than at any other time. Perfectly still he lay and his body was old and not of much use any more, but something inside him was altogether young. He was like a pregnant woman, only that the thing inside him was not a baby but a youth. No, it wasn’t a youth, it was a woman, young, and wearing a coat of mail like a knight. It is absurd, you see, to try to tell what was inside the old writer as he lay on his high bed and listened to the fluttering of his heart. The thing to get at is what the writer, or the young thing within the writer, was thinking about.
The old writer, like all of the people in the world, had got, during his long life, a great many notions in his head. He had once been quite handsome and a number of women had been in love with him. And then, of course, he had known people, many people, known them in a peculiarly intimate way that was different from the way in which you and I know people. At least that is what the writer thought and the thought pleased him. Why quarrel with an old man concerning his thoughts?
In the bed the writer had a dream that was not a dream. As he grew somewhat sleepy but was still conscious, figures began to appear before his eyes. He imagined the young indescribable thing within himself was driving a long procession of figures before his eyes.
You see the interest in all this lies in the figures that went before the eyes of the writer. They were all grotesques. All of the men and women the writer had ever known had become grotesques.
The grotesques were not all horrible. Some were amusing, some almost beautiful, and one, a woman all drawn out of shape, hurt the old man by her grotesqueness. When she passed he made a noise like a small dog whimpering. Had you come into the room you might have supposed the old man had unpleasant dreams or perhaps indigestion.
For an hour the procession of grotesques passed before the eyes of the old man, and then, although it was a painful thing to do, he crept out of bed and began to write. Some one of the grotesques had made a deep impression on his mind and he wanted to describe it.
At his desk the writer worked for an hour. In the end he wrote a book which he called “The Book of the Grotesque.” It was never published, but I saw it once and it made an indelible impression on my mind. The book had one central thought that is very strange and has always remained with me. By remembering it I have been able to understand many people and things that I was never able to understand before. The thought was involved but a simple statement of it would be something like this:
That in the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as a truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world were the truths and they were all beautiful.
The old man had listed hundreds of the truths in his book. I will not try to tell you of all of them. There was the truth of virginity and the truth of passion, the truth of wealth and of poverty, of thrift and of profligacy, of carelessness and abandon. Hundreds and hundreds were the truths and they were all beautiful.
And then the people came along. Each as he appeared snatched up one of the truths and some who were quite strong snatched up a dozen of them.
It was the truths that made the people grotesques. The old man had quite an elaborate theory concerning the matter. It was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.
You can see for yourself how the old man, who had spent all of his life writing and was filled with words, would write hundreds of pages concerning this matter. The subject would become so big in his mind that he himself would be in danger of becoming a grotesque. He didn’t, I suppose, for the same reason that he never published the book. It was the young thing inside him that saved the old man.
Concerning the old carpenter who fixed the bed for the writer, I only mentioned him because he, like many of what are called very common people, became the nearest thing to what is understandable and lovable of all the grotesques in the writer’s book.
David Warsh, an economic historian and veteran columnist, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this column first ran.
'On its hinge'
“Autumn,’’ by Frederic Edwin Church
“An agitation of the air,
A perturbation of the light
Admonished me the unloved year
Would turn on its hinge that night.’’
— From “End of Summer,’’ by Stanley Kunitz
Llewellyn King: Drones pose growing menace to energy infrastructure
Launching a drone
Energy company executives went to bed Sept. 14 with a new existential worry: drone attacks. These are added to general fear of a cyberattack that could hobble an oil company or bring down the electric grid, or parts of it.
Final details are not in yet, but it is believed that an army of drones hit two Saudi oil processing facilities early on the morning of Sept. 14, causing huge fires.
Heretofore energy companies, especially pipelines and electric utilities, found drones to be a gift. Drones have enabled oil and gas companies to monitor pipelines and electric utilities to monitor their transmission lines.
They are doing the jobs that were done initially by men on horses, then by teams in trucks and jeeps and by line technicians in helicopters. Less expensive, less dangerous and more efficient, drones have been a godsend.
Much of this surveillance is now done by these small electric aircraft, not appreciably different than those the general public can buy in a sophisticated toy store.
The attack on the Saudi oil installations, with its resultant destructive fires, harbors horrors for the future that haven’t been part of the portfolio of future uncertainties faced by companies with large installations or thousands of miles of exposed lines and, in some cases, over-the-ground pipes.
The traditional posture of utilities to this kind of physical threat has been not to try and meet every possibility with a tailor-made defense, but rather to respond quickly.
In fact, rapid response is in the utility DNA -- and honed in foul weather events. If lines come down, the utilities, with military precision, try to get them up again. They stock replacement parts and have a network of crews from neighboring utilities on call. Worst case, they hope, will be a short blackout.
“It’s like a military operation. Think of action stations aboard a ship,” a utility executive says.
But as climate change has increased expectations for extreme weather events, and as the digital society has put new demands on electricity resilience, rapid response is inadequate going forward.
Undergrounding electric lines, previously thought to be prohibitively expensive, is now on the table in the C-suites of some utilities. Worry about drones is another endorsement of that option, where possible. But undergrounding is only a limited defense and it is very expensive and not suitable for major lines carrying vast amounts of power.
Oil and gas companies are more worried about the central facilities than they are about the distribution systems, as far as drone attacks are concerned. Oil refineries have always been vulnerable and now that vulnerability is exposed. While most refineries won’t go up in flames because a small drone with an ignition source hits them, this threat will increase as weaponized private drones grow in power and carrying capacity.
There is a growth industry in protecting vulnerable infrastructure. From secure communications to shields against drone attack, the battle for safety on the home front has been joined.
Drone terrorists have the advantage that drones are cheap, anonymous and the threat is disruption and panic, even if the actual damage is trivial. Off-the-shelf terrorism has arrived.
The public will worry about the security of nuclear plants. Actually, these are probably the safest of large energy facilities from aerial attack. The nuclear vitals are encased in feet of concrete, steel and lead that protects them from bombs and cruise missiles, let alone the new threat coming from those once-fun toys: drones.
The departments of Homeland Security and Defense are acutely aware of the threat from drones and are examining ways to defend against these, sources say. They see a battlefield where the location of the enemy might not be known and where it will be harder to determine whether the perpetrator of an attack is a state player or a terrorist organization.
Warfare is going retail.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com.
Fall River's electorate: Corrupt or delusional?
St. Anne’s Church in Fall River. The church, whose membership had been declining for years, had recently been the topic of demolition talks but now seems safe. The hilltop church, once home to a large French Canadian parish, may be the best loved building in the city. The brutalist City Hall, below, may be the most hated.
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
Massachusetts’s system of local control over marijuana businesses that apparently often gives a single municipal official, such as Fall River’s brazen, sleazoid and perhaps crazy mayor, Jasiel Correia II, power to authorize a pot business to open is of course a wide-open door for corruption. In the latest scandal involving the 27-year-old statesman, he’s been arrested on charges that he extorted cannabis companies for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Mr. Corriea has long displayed a love of a fancy, glitzy lifestyle; his wants seem to far exceed his needs.
So it was good to hear Gov. Charlie Baker tell The Boston Globe last week:
“Maybe the state needs to put something in place that says, ‘It needs to actually be a governing entity, not a single person’ because that’s a legit concern.” Yes, a “governing entity’’ acting with transparency.
As disturbing as Mayor Correia is, much blame also goes to those citizens of Fall River who voted for him despite impressive intimations of his greed, immaturity and megalomania and to those who didn’t vote at all in the elections that put him in and kept him in office. Not voting has the effect of a vote – usually for someone you don’t like. Corrupt politicians often reflect a corrupt and/or lazy electorate. Or maybe just depressed….
Animals in Middlebury
“The Messenger,’’ by Dana Simson, in her show “the animals are innocent,’’ at the Henry Sheldon Museum, Middlebury, Vt., through Jan. 11.
The museum says that the exhibit features the mixed-media work of artist, ceramist, author and illustrator Simson. “Her ceramic boat sculptures with their animal passengers, along with her paintings of animals, appear whimsical and charming at first glance. However, there's a more serious side to the works, as they're meant to represent the potential effects of climate change on animals.’’
Middlebury is best known as the home of Middlebury College and, especially for the college’s Bread Loaf School of English, a graduate school associated with many celebrated writers, but especially the great poet Robert Frost, who lived part of the year in nearby Ripton, Vt. , in a homestead now owned by MIddlebury College. The area also has many beautiful and highly productive farms. The Green Mountains rise to the east of Middlebury.
Middlebury College, which is considered elite
Downtown Middlebury
Lithograph of Middlebury from 1886 by L.R. Burleigh with list of landmarks
Chris Powell: Racism doesn't explain why the white guys won these mayoral primaries
In downtown Hartford
Since sometimes, as Freud is supposed to have said, a cigar is just a cigar, maybe sometimes an election for mayor in Connecticut is just an election, not part of a longstanding scheme to keep uppity women and minorities in their place.
But more than ever these days such complaints of prejudicial discrimination can intimidate, and last week Connecticut's Hearst newspapers pandered to them. The papers proclaimed disappointment that white men had won the Democratic primaries for mayor in Connecticut's three biggest cities -- Hartford, New Haven, and Bridgeport -- even though those cities are full of women and minorities.
The most mistaken complaint about the primary results came from state Rep. Robyn Porter, D-New Haven. "It's just hard for people to accept change," Porter said. "White men have ruled this country since its inception, so the barriers we're talking about bringing down are so entrenched that it's going to take time. That it's going to be all white men representing majority-minority cities is something that needs to be addressed."
But as even Porter acknowledged, in those three cities white men themselves are a minority, since barely a third of the population of the three cities is white and only about half of that third is male.
Yes, Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin, a white guy, defeated a black candidate and a Hispanic one, but Bronin did not win because the two minority candidates split the minority vote. Instead Bronin won with 59 percent, signifying he had support from many blacks and Hispanics. Of course it helped Bronin that one of his rivals, former Mayor Eddie Perez, had been convicted of corruption in office. But good for Hartford that integrity could trump mere ethnicity.
Besides, Hartford already has had black, Hispanic and women mayors. Despite Porter's hallucination, nobody in Hartford is being excluded because of race, ethnicity, or gender.
Yes, New Haven Mayor Toni Harp, a black woman, was defeated in the Democratic primary by another white guy, Justin Elicker, after a campaign in which Elicker was challenged about his ability to represent black people when he doesn't look like them. This challenge was racist but it was taken seriously. To oblige his doubters should Elicker have put on blackface instead of sticking to the issues?
Like Bronin in Hartford. Elicker could not have won in New Haven without support from blacks and Hispanics, and there was plenty of reason for everybody to vote for him, from Harp's recent 11 percent tax increase to the frequent reports of expensive incompetence and arrogance in her administration. Harp long has seemed to think that facilitating illegal immigration is what her constituents care about most. While Elicker probably will pose as politically correct, too, at least he may realize that good public administration is more compelling.
"Hard for people to accept change"? But change is exactly what New Haven's Democrats voted for.
And yes, Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim, another white guy, narrowly won renomination in his primary with state Sen. Marilyn Moore, who is black. But Ganim won because Moore's campaign failed to corral absentee ballots as well as everyone knew Ganim's would, being backed by the city's Democratic machine.
Moore still would have had an excellent chance to become mayor if her campaign could have obtained 207 valid petition signatures to gain an independent ballot line in the general election. That should have been easy, but Moore's campaign submitted only 168. That wasn't racism but incompetence.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer ,in Manchester, Conn.
Portland mulls building higher on its waterfront
The Portland waterfront. It’s a favorite port for cruise ships plying waters between New York, the Maritime Provinces and Quebec in the summer and fall.
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
City planners in Portland, Maine, have come up with some interesting ideas for adapting that city’s waterfront, much of it a real “working waterfront’’ (fishing boats, etc.), to rising seas. Their proposed Coastal Resiliency Overlay Zone would, The Portland Press Herald reports, let developers “build taller buildings in those areas if they prove the additional height is being used to prepare for sea-level rise and storm surges associated with a changing climate.’’
Design of such buildings would include “the elevation of the first floor above highest adjacent grade building design that allows for future modification of the ground elevation.’’ And in some cases, “the new rules would allow developers to build an extra floor.’’
Of course, some people whose view of the water might be limited by higher buildings would complain, but Portland’s planners are just being realistic. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) projects that some now low-lying areas of Portland might be under a under a foot of water at normal high tide in 2100, but 6 to 10 feet underwater when high tide and storm surge combine, probably during a Nor’easter.
To read the Press Herald story, please hit this link.
To look at NOAA’s “Sea Level Rise Viewer’’ please hit this link.
Watery Portland from above
In Milton, artists contra compressor
A charcoal drawing of a new gas compressor station in Detroit, by Margaret Bellafiore, in the show “The Eye Sees, the Mind Wonders: South Shore Artists Work to Save their Coast‘‘ through Sept. 30 at the Milton (Mass.) Art Center.
The gallery explains that artists from towns across the South Shore have joined to create a case against the fracked-gas compressor station proposed by Enbridge Gas Transmission for Weymouth. The artists assert that the station could destroy the Fore River Basin by filling it with toxins and sickening residents by polluting the air.
Milton's Walter Baker Chocolate Factory to the right.
The Blue Hill Meteorological Observatory, on top of Great Blue Hill, in Milton, founded in 1884, is the oldest continuously operating weather recording station in North America. It was also the location of the earliest kite soundings of the atmosphere in North America, in the 1890s, as well as the development of the radiosonde, in the 1930s.
During the Great New England Hurricane of 1938, the observatory measured the strongest wind gust ever directly measured and recorded in a hurricane in North America, at 186 mph, at which point the wind disabled the measuring device. Some have estimated that the gusts may have reached 200 mph in the storm.
The site was chosen because the elevation of 635 feet is the highest point within 10 miles of the Atlantic on the East Coast south of central Maine.
Jessicah Pierre: What the college-admissions scandal says about America
Felicity Huffman in happier days
From OtherWords.org
Earlier this year, a number of wealthy parents, celebrities, and college prep coaches were accused of offering large bribes to elite universities in order to get their children into schools they didn’t qualify for.
Federal prosecutors charged at least 50 people in the criminal investigation named “Operation Varsity Blues.”
Among those charged was actress Felicity Huffman, who was recently sentenced to 14 days in prison after pleading guilty to fraud. In Huffman’s case, she’d paid $15,000 to have someone cheat on an SAT exam for her daughter as part of the effort to get her admitted into the University of Southern California.
Many parents want a better education for their child — and higher education, after all, has long been considered a path to the American dream. But Huffman’s case shows an obvious bias in the system toward people who achieved it long ago.
Her light sentence is being compared to the five years given to Tanya McDowell, a homeless Bridgeport, Conn., mom who was arrested and charged after enrolling her young son in a school in a neighboring public school district that posted better test scores.
For many low-income families, the promise of education providing a pathway out of poverty is slipping further out of reach. Many are mired in underfunded public schools with few resources to provide a quality education.
It’s no surprise that many of these communities are also home to people of color. A new report released earlier this year found that nonwhite school districts get $23 billion less than white districts, despite serving about the same number of students.
As someone who grew up in a low-income household and attended public schools, I’m a product of that system. Each morning, my high school welcomed me with metal detectors and police officers.
I was one of the very few lucky students that beat the odds, graduated, and made it through college. Most don’t.
These disparities force parents from low-income backgrounds and communities of color to take risks — like using the addresses of friends or family members to get their kids into better school systems. “I would still do it all over again,” said McDowell after serving her time. “My son exceeded all of my expectations” in the better district, she said.
On the other hand, for parents like Huffman — who have access to a plethora of economic and social resources already — bribing colleges and universities to secure a slot for her children isn’t a means of survival. It’s an abuse of power and privilege.
Varsity Blues has been deemed the largest college admissions scandal in U.S. history. For sure, it highlights how the inherited advantages of our country’s wealthiest people have shaped our education system. Even more than that, though, it’s part of the bigger scandal that so many more have so much less.
As wealth continues to concentrate at the top, the extremely wealthy are using it shut out students who are already hundreds of steps behind on the road to success — all to give the already affluent another boost along the way.
Jessicah Pierre is the inequality media specialist at the Institute for Policy Studies.
Emma Yasinski: Many addicted health-care workers denied an effective treatment
Suboxone pills
Dr. Wesley Boyd, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard, has spent years working with state programs that help doctors, nurses and other health care workers who have become addicted to opioids get back on their feet professionally.
He supports these non-disciplinary programs, in which doctors and nurses enroll for a number of years and are closely monitored by addiction specialists and state authorities as they seek to maintain or restore their medical licenses. But, he said, he is perplexed as to why these programs and other efforts to help health care providers generally do not stress a recovery method that has long been shown to be effective: the use of drugs like buprenorphine and methadone, known as opioid agonists, to relieve cravings.
“Obviously the data are clear that medication-assisted treatment is the best course of action,” said Boyd, who worked for Massachusetts’ Physician Health Services (previously known as the Society to Help Physicians) from 2004 to 2010. “Whether they’re doctors, nurses or anybody else, [they] can function perfectly well at work and in their lives generally while they’re using medication-assisted treatment.
Furthermore, he said, “the odds that they’re going to stay clean and sober while using medications for treatment are better.”
Clinical studies show medication-assisted treatment significantly decreases the rate of relapse and overdose more than other interventions alone. Most advocates advise using it in conjunction with regular therapy or counseling. Legal and medical researchers also made this point in the New England Journal of Medicine last month, calling it “ironic that clinicians, who are better positioned than most people to acquire and afford opioid-agonist therapy, are often denied it.”
But some health care professionals believe opioid agonists are just a substitute for the drugs a doctor is addicted to, and, since they bind to the same brain receptors as opioids, may affect providers’ ability to do their jobs. The opioid agonists help reduce relapses and cravings by stimulating the same pathways opioids do, but in a controlled manner that prevents a person from feeling high.
Non-Disciplinary Treatment Programs For Addiction
Non-disciplinary treatment programs have been operating in most states since the 1970s to help health professionals overcome their addiction. Instead of revoking the license of an individual who is found to be impaired on the job, these peer-run programs try to get participants back to work with mandated treatment plans that include intensive therapy, monitoring their behavior in and out of the workplace and, of course, drug testing. Throughout treatment, participants are actively discouraged, if not outright banned from, using opioid agonists that could aid their recovery.
Members of the non-disciplinary program may advocate for a participant’s return to work when they believe the individual is ready, but, ultimately, it is the state board that determines when an individual is fit to care for patients.
Bill Kinkle, a registered nurse in Pennsylvania, developed an addiction to opioids more than a decade ago and lost his license. He tried several recovery programs but relapsed and overdosed several times.
He has been working with the state’s Peer Nurse Assistance Program to get his license back. When he asked if he could use Suboxone, a brand name for a combination of buprenorphine and naloxone, he was told that the nurse assistance program would not allow it unless he had a detailed plan for tapering off the drug.
So he is treating his addiction through the state program without the medication. He was required to participate in a 30-day inpatient program, undergo partial hospitalization (in which a participant is treated for several hours a day but can go home in the evenings) for an additional three weeks, receive three months of intensive outpatient therapy, attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings three to five times a week and pay for expensive random urine screenings
The Peer Nurse Assistance Program did not respond to requests for comment.
Some state officials are beginning to consider the use of drugs like methadone and buprenorphine. The North Carolina Medical Board, which handles physician licensing and discipline, is encouraging the state program for doctors with opioid addictions to introduce these medications.
Critics argue that the non-disciplinary programs can, in fact, feel more disciplinary than supportive and don’t help as many people as they could if opioid agonists were made available.
The programs “have no independent oversight and patients don’t have a recourse,” said Dr. Peter Grinspoon, an internist in Boston who had an opioid addiction and was both a participant in, and eventually a board member of, Massachusetts’ Physician Health Services program for addicted doctors
Grinspoon, who also teaches at Harvard, said that although he was unaware of any formal state policy against medication-assisted treatments, none of the program’s participants with opioid addictions used opioid agonists while he served.
Impairment in Safety-Sensitive Positions
Scott Teitelbaum, medical director at the University of Florida Recovery Center, which treats health care professionals from all over the country, said he sometimes prescribes the medicines to the half of his patients who don’t work in “safety-sensitive positions.”
But, he said, it makes sense to have a different strategy for patients in those positions. When the programs ask him if a person should return to practice, they’re not asking what’s best for the individual; they’re asking whether it’s safe for the public. And when patients are using agonist therapies, Teitelbaum, who also was treated for cocaine and marijuana use, said he isn’t sure it is.
A review in Mayo Clinic Proceedings of several studies in 2012 showed small effects of both methadone and suboxone on performance in measures such as reaction time and memory. The review was criticized for weak evidence and a lack of appropriate control groups.
Grinspoon noted that doctors could be taking other medications that affect their performance but face no repercussions. For example, he said, they may take benzodiazepines for anxiety or Ambien to help them sleep.
“There are tons of pharmaceuticals that could affect our performance — all of which doctors are allowed to take,” he said. “And it’s just because of the stigma that they’re singling out addiction.”
Success Rates
Critics of medication-assisted treatment often point to the overwhelming five-year success rates reported by the non-disciplinary programs — generally between 70% and 90%.
But Boyd is wary of those rosy statistics. First, he noted, they rarely count people who dropped out of the program or died by suicide. He said some professionals who never suffered from substance use disorder are forced into the program by bad evaluations.
So far, Kinkle, the nurse in Pennsylvania, has stayed on track, “white-knuckling it” without Suboxone. If all goes according to plan, his license will be reinstated in another 13 months.
“My wife found me multiple times after an overdose lying on the floor unconscious,” said Kinkle. “All that could have been prevented had I been offered” Suboxone.
Emma Yasinski is a Kaiser Health News reporter.
Providence a growing center for study of Alzheimer's
Comparison of a normal aged brain (left) and the brain of a person with Alzheimer's (right). Characteristics that separate the two are pointed out.
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
With the aging of the U.S. population (and far too many policymakers and others sticking their heads in the sand about its vast social, economic and political implications) it was happy news, especially for our region, that the National Institute on Aging has awarded Brown University and Boston-based Hebrew SeniorLife a $53.4 million grant as part of an effort to improve the health care and quality of life for those living with Alzheimer’s Disease, which affects millions of people. The official count of those Americans suffering from the disease is about 5.8 million (with about 5.6 million 65 or older) but I suspect that’s a big undercount because many victims and their families cover up cases. (And let’s not forget that there are other forms of usually age-related dementias too, such as Frontal-Lobe Dementia and Lewy Body Dementia.)
The award is Brown’s biggest federal grant so far and will further amplify its reputation for advanced work in neuroscience-related matters.
Vincent Mor, a nationally known expert on aging and a Brown professor of health services and policy, told GoLocal:
“This grant will revolutionize the national infrastructure for research into how care is delivered to people living with dementia and their caregivers. The key is figuring out how to take an idea that worked in an ideal situation and adapt it so it can be piloted in the messy real-world system of care providers that exists across the U.S.’’
I hope that the news will lure more researchers to Brown to work on the scary challenges associated with aging.
By the way, there are plenty of local samples available. Rhode Island has the 11th oldest population in America, with 15.84 percent of the population 65 or over. Massachusetts is 25th, with 15.06 percent in that cohort, which may say a little bit about why the Bay State is more economically dynamic than the Ocean State.
To read the GoLocal article, please hit this link.
To see a hauntin movie about treating Alzheimer’s with art, please hit this link.
Auguste Deter in 1902. She had what became known as Alzheimer's Disease, named for Alois Alzheimer, M.D., her physician/psychiatrist, who first described the disease.