Vox clamantis in deserto
‘The boozing, the anger’
"It’s {the Boston area} just a really interesting place to grow up. The sports teams, the colleges, the racial tension, the state workers, the boozing, the anger. All of that stuff. I don’t think I ever appreciated the amount of maniacs that live in Massachusetts until I left. When I lived here, I took it for granted that everyone was kind of funny and a bit of a character."
— Bill Burr (born 1968 in the Boston suburb of Canton, Mass.), standup comedian and actor
The name "Canton" comes from the erroneous early belief that Canton, China, was on the complete opposite side of the earth (antipodal). New England merchants in the 18th and 19th centuries had many lucrative commercial links with the Chinese port city of Canton (now called Guangzhou). Canton, Mass. was originally part of Stoughton.
Part of Great Blue Hill is in Canton, whose summit, at 635 feet, is the highest point in Greater Boston and Norfolk County and also the highest within 10 miles of the Atlantic coast south of central Maine.
Chris Powell: Landslides can bring out the worst in pols; casino fallacy
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Should every Republican on the party's ticket with President Trump this year be defeated if he won't denounce or at least criticize the president for his demeanor, policies, or both?
That's the suggestion of New London Day columnist David Collins, who complained the other day that he could not find one Republican candidate in eastern Connecticut willing to discuss the president. Noting the president's unpopularity in the state, Collins wrote: "Surely I can't be the only one who wouldn't consider voting for anyone who won't even comment about the head of their party and his agenda for the country."
Of course, Collins isn't the only one who feels as he does, but there are a few problems with his position.
First is that turnabout is fair play, and Collins lately has expressed outrage about Gov. Ned Lamont's disregard for the New London area. Since the governor is a Democrat, won't re-electing Democrats to the General Assembly vindicate the governor's disregard? Will electing Republican legislators produce any better results for the area? Republicans don't seem to have given much reason to think so.
The second problem, a bigger one, is the difficulty of punishing Trump's ticket mates for his offenses without also punishing the whole state. Yes, in general Republican state legislators are uninspired and timid, not much interested in gaining a majority, mainly content with escaping responsibility for governing, but at least they are much less enthusiastic tools of the government-employee unions and welfare class than Democratic legislators are.
So what is one to do if he detests Trump but also would prefer not to pay more in state taxes for Democratic policies and patronage that only impoverish the state? What if someone wants to avoid not just highway tolls but more raises and pension benefits for government employees while the private sector is crashing? Someone who feels that way and sets out to punish all Republicans for complicity with Trump ends up punishing himself as well.
The third problem is that political landslides such as Collins seems to be advocating can bring out the worst in elected officials, making them arrogant, corrupt, and stupid, as Connecticut might have learned after electing John G. Rowland to a third term as governor in 2002.
President Lyndon B. Johnson's big win at the top of the Democratic ticket in 1964 unleashed his escalation of the Vietnam War. But by 1967 even as the war was plainly a futile enterprise incompetently pursued, few Democratic officials dared to say a word against the president, just as few Republican officials dare to say a word against Trump today. Only when public opinion, without any help from most Democratic leaders, turned against Johnson in 1968 did the president withdraw from re-election -- and only after a Republican, Richard Nixon, was elected president did most Democratic leaders decide that the war was a disaster.
Similarly, Nixon's landslide re-election in 1972 only deepened his administration's criminal corruption. In less than two years both he and his vice president, Spiro Agnew, were exposed and compelled to resign.
Connecticut already suffers inefficiency and corruption in state government because of the state's lack of political competition. Shrinking the Republican minority in the General Assembly to spite the party for Trump won't provide any incentive for state government to improve. It will just give the majority party more license.
xxx
The MGM Springfield casino and hotel complex. Casinos redistribute money from the many to the rich few.
CASINO FALLACY: MGM's casino in Springfield is thumping its chest about all the jobs and tax revenue it has brought to western Massachusettts. But the jobs and revenue are not what was projected, and such claims are inherently misleading anyway.
For casinos produce nothing of value. People who spend their money at casinos no longer spend it on amusement somewhere else. Casinos merely redistribute money from the many -- the public, disproportionately the poor -- to the few, the casino operators, disproportionately the rich, and to the government. That is, casinos are mechanisms of regressive taxation.
A casino adds economically to an area only insofar as it attracts people from elsewhere, and so the only claim genuinely in favor of the Springfield casino is that it may have kept many Massachusetts gamblers spending their money at home instead of at the casinos in southeastern Connecticut.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.
COVID-19 wrapup
From The New England Council’s (newenglandcouncil.com) latest wrap up of COVID-19 news:
“Eli Lilly Find Drug to Improve Clinical Outcomes – Eli Lilly and Company has found that baricitinib, used alongside remdesivir, reduces recovery time and improves clinical outcomes for patients infected with COVID-19 more so than patients treated only with remdesivir. Eli Lilly originally developed baricitinib – marketed at Olumiant – as a treatment for rheumatoid arthritis, but has been studying the drug as a COVID-19 treatment as part of a trial sponsored by the National Institute of Allery and Infectious Diseaseas (NIAID). The most signifiant impact was observed in patients placed on supplemental oxygen. Read more here.
“Harvard Street Neighborhood Health Center Utilizes Mobile COVID-19 Testing Unit – Early in the pandemic, Harvard Street Neighborhood Health Center launched a mobile COVID-19 testing unit, which has since tested thousands of patients at Dudley Square, Prince Grand Hall Lodge, Children’s Services of Roxbury and other locations. Read more here.
“Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Grants Additional $400,00 to COVID-19 Fund – Blue Cross Blue Shield has donated $400,000 to go towards supporting communities of color most affected by the pandemic, as well as Massachusetts regional funds community health centers, nonprofits, and teacher organizations. Read more here.’’
Largest self-reported ancestry groups in New England. Americans of Irish descent form a plurality in most of Massachusetts, while Americans of English descent form a plurality in much of central Vermont and New Hampshire as well as nearly all of Maine.
Glitter in the gutter
Deer Isle’s rather unsettlngly vibrating bridge
“Gather up whatever is
glittering in the gutter,
whatever has tumbled
in the waves or fallen our of the sky….’’
— From “Holding the Light,’’ by Stuart Kestenbaum, Maine’s poet laureate
A ceramicist, as well as poet, he was the director of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, in Deer Isle, Maine, for 27 years.
‘Willingness to be reformed’
The skeptical Charles Ives
“It is the courage of believing in freedom, per se, rather than of trying to force everyone to see that you believe in it – the courage of the willingness to be reformed, rather than of reforming – the courage teaching that sacrifice is bravery and force, fear – the courage of righteous indignation, of stammering eloquence, of spiritual insight, a courage contracting or unfolding a philosophy as it grows—a courage that would make the impossible possible.’’
-- Charles Ives (1874-1954), in Essays Before a Sonata. This Danbury, Conn., native composed many avant-garde musical works and was an insurance executive and brilliant essayist. He is considered one of the greatest American composers. During his career as an insurance executive and actuary, Ives devised creative ways to structure life-insurance packages for people of means, which laid the foundation of the modern practice of estate planning.
Not wearing masks, not crowds, is the big peril
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
Studies of some transit systems suggest that they’re not dangerous unless people don’t wear masks against COVID-19. Very crowded subway systems in Asia and Europe, where people are bumping up against each other, have not seeded pandemic outbreaks, because unlike in crazy Trumpian America, just about everyone wears a mask. Social distancing per se is overrated, as is that theatrical spraying with disinfectant.
Unfortunately, there’s no nationwide mask mandate for U.S. public transit, unlike in many other countries. It’s been politicized here, mostly because Trump supporters state their affiliation by refusing to wear masks, thus jeopardizing everyone else’s health.
Meanwhile, some states may have to declare harsh new lockdowns because of COVID seeding going on in bars, restaurants, colleges and public events.
The MBTA, by the way, is quite safe. Yes, I’ve used it recently to do business in Boston. It’s safer than driving into that city! But given how few people are using it, and the fact that conductors now sometimes don’t collect fares, the agency’s finances are in dire straits.
Tough like the Blue Jay
From the Art Complex Museum, in Duxbury, Mass.:
“In 2019, on the grounds of The Art Complex Museum, Donna Dodson and Andy Moerlein installed ‘Seeking Higher Ground.’ This is the second outdoor sculpture that the museum has been lucky to display. According to folklore, the Blue Jay is symbolic of clarity of thought and taking action. ‘Seeking Higher Ground’ is a clarion call to heed the warning signs of climate change. It reflects a hope that humans can unite to affect those changes needed to adapt and survive - like the Blue Jay.’’
“To see more of their work and to watch a short video they have created please
Don Pesci: My Journal of the plague year, continued
Thank God for such friends.
October 25, 2020
VERNON, Conn.
Life goes on. {My wife} Andree’s brother Ernie died in Florida. Titan, Andree’s guide dog for the last dozen years, died as well. And my cousin, the city mouse, writes to tell me: “There are two kinds of cynics among us, Republican cynics and Democrat cynics. The Democrats are better able than Republicans to dress their cynicism in gorgeous, empathetic cloth. They are here, they want us to know, to help with the problems they have caused. It all reminds me of a quip by Karl Kraus on psychoanalysts – they are the disease they purport to cure”
In an earlier letter, he wrote, “Whatever the problem is, you may be sure that a political solution to it can only make matters worse.”
And he wonders why cultural antibodies in the United States have not yet produced an Aristophanes or a Lucian, author of the biting satirical play The Sale of Philosophers. Instead we are confronted daily with unintentionally comic politicians. And our too, too serious politics has murdered comedy. Lincoln could never have survived this poisonous sobriety.
Fall has arrived. Brown leaves are scattered across the property. I’m waiting for the wind to do the work of raking. The wood pile and the furniture out front and down by the lake, now sprinkled with a bib of leaves, have been covered with tarpaulins. We are waiting on winter. Certain as the arrival of dawn and midnight, it will come and cover all in a blanket of purist white silence.
Andree is having some difficulty in attaching the new dog’s name, Dublin, to her commands, and the commands too have changed. Thank God and Fidelco for Dublin, a sleek and attentive, male German Shepard with large eyes and silver-tipped fur. Andree mentions to the many strangers who pause to comment on the dog, “He is the only Irish German Shepard in Connecticut.”
Every so often, Titan’s name is mentioned. This is usual; in our naming and our prayers, we cling to a safe and bountiful remembered past. I have had two dreams in which my father was a presence. This is very unusual for me. One does not dream of the center joist of a house. It is simply there in one’s life, preventing the whirlwind from carrying away all treasures; for that is what a home is – a bank of treasures much more reliable than bank notes.
The pandemic, the city mouse tells me, is useful primarily as a political hobgoblin to frighten people into an attitude of compliance and submission, not to say that it is not a serious threat.
He certainly has his finger on something there.
Did I watch the last presidential debate, he asks?
God no!
To the country mouse,
Well then, you missed a gaudy show, a significant part of it – Hunter Biden’s delinquencies, and his father’s memory lapses -- unreported by Connecticut’s left of center media. Trump was his usual solipsistic best. Biden looked as if he had been biting bullets for weeks while hunkering down in his bunker. The less one sees of Biden, the more popular he becomes. His is the first “front-porch-campaign” the nation has seen since the McKinley’s 1896 campaign and the advent of 24/7 news.
The opposite is true, of course, with {Connecticut} Governor Ned Lamont. As befits an autocrat, he is seen everywhere, rearranging the constellations in the sky, crowing up the sun, destroying yet another business, citing for the hundredth time the death toll in Connecticut, 60 to 70 percent of which is attributable to bad political decisions made by the autocratic governor.
There will come a time when even the most insensate retailer of fact in Connecticut realizes that Coronavirus is not responsible for a single business closure in the state – all of which have been shuttered by politicians, not a virus – and that our economic malady is every bit as serious AND DEADLY as Coronavirus.
But not yet. Perhaps after the November elections have been concluded to the satisfaction of the state’s dominant left of center party, the truth may once again resurfaced and break the hard-shelled exterior of campaign propaganda.
My city cousin certainly is right there. Coronavirus is a viral infection, not a politician, and viruses, unlike governors out rigged with plenary powers, are powerless to close by gubernatorial edict a school or a nail salon.
A Hartford Courant front page, above the fold, headline screams, “Just how bad could the latest spike get?”
About a week and a half before Election Day, Lamont, it would appear, has hoisted himself on his own petard. Connecticut’s Coronavirus numbers, though still far below spring numbers, are rising steadily. Connecticut is now “on the pathway to being bad.”
“I am concerned,” Lamont said. “I take nothing for granted.”
Sure, sure, but when will be pull the lockdown trigger?
“We need to slow the resurgence right away,” a Courant editorial barks this Sunday. Clamp down on the number of people allowed at indoor gatherings; stop playing softball with coaches and sport parent; order all schools to revert to hybrid learning models, and stop saying the surge was “expected.”
Find a hole, jump into it, pull the hole in over your head. Don’t worry about Connecticut’s economy. The state is in arrears in payments to its public employees by about $68 billion; we are among the highest taxed, most progressive states in the nation; businesses have fled the state for greener pastures elsewhere; clamorous state employee unions are still petted by the progressive politicians they help to re-elect; and the only sunbeam shining through the darkness is that the real-estate sector is flourishing, because whipped millionaire New Yorkers are fleeing that state and settling in Connecticut’s Gold Coast, abandoned by companies such as GE and Raytheon Technologies, formerly United Technologies.
Lucian, where are you?
... to be continued
Don Pesci is a columnist based in Vernon.
Words, words!
“Never better, mad as a hatter,
right as rain, might and main,
hanky panky, hot toddy,
hoity-toity, cold shoulder,
bowled over, rolling in clover….’’
— From “Sweater Weather: A Love Song to Language,’’ by Sharon Bryant (born 1943), a New England-based poet who teaches creative writing at Lesley University, in Cambridge, Mass.
‘On behalf of all humanity’
The Montreal Biosphère, formerly the American Pavilion of Expo 67, a geodesic dome designed by Buckminster Fuller, on Île Sainte-Hélène, Montreal.
“Dare to be naive.’’
— Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983), inventor of , most famously, the geodesic dome and the Dymaxion car, futurist and theorist, in Moral of the Work
A 1933 Dymaxion prototype
He was born of an old Massachusetts family and was the grand-nephew of Margaret Fuller, an American journalist, critic and women's rights advocate associated with the American transcendentalist movement, which was based in the Boston area. He was mostly known by his middle name, Buckminster, an ancestral family name. But many called him “Bucky.’’
He wrote in the year of his death:
“I am now close to 88 and I am confident that the only thing important about me is that I am an average healthy human. I am also a living case history of a thoroughly documented, half-century, search-and-research project designed to discover what, if anything, an unknown, moneyless individual, with a dependent wife and newborn child, might be able to do effectively on behalf of all humanity that could not be accomplished by great nations, great religions or private enterprise, no matter how rich or powerfully armed.
xxx
Margaret Fuller, for her part, once wrote in her diary: “Genius will live and thrive without training, but it does not the less reward the watering pot and the pruning knife.’’
The only known daguerreotype of Margaret Fuller (by John Plumbe, 1846)
Glory 'contained'
October scene in Granby, Conn.
“It was a radiant October day. Connecticut suggested an outrageous show-off, the low hills overflowing with autumnal brilliance, eruptions of golden leaves, friezes of crimson, the pines maintaining their sober greenness amid the blaze like sentinels.
“All this last glory of the growing season was nevertheless contained, neat, firmly — for centuries now — under control: this was New England.’’
From the novel A Stolen Past (1985), by John Knowles (1926-2001)
Joshua Cho: Even in Pennsylvania, opposing fracking isn't 'political suicide'
Fracking in progress
Via OtherWords.org
In this year’s vice presidential debate, Sen. Kamala Harris reiterated Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s rejection of a fracking ban, despite her earlier call for one when she was a presidential candidate.
“I will repeat, and the American people know, that Joe Biden will not ban fracking. That is a fact,” Harris said.
Whenever there are discussions about banning fracking, media coverage seems to prioritize potential “risks” to Democrats’ electoral prospects, or potential economic downturns. Unfortunately, a lot of this coverage is quite sloppy.
For instance, The New York Times quoted absurd claims that a fracking ban would mean “hundreds of thousands” of Pennsylvanians would be “unemployed overnight.” In reality, about 26,000 people work in all of Pennsylvania’s oil and gas sector.
Still, The Times suggested that any presidential candidate who supports a national fracking ban would risk losing Pennsylvania, calling the issue “a political bet.” A fracking ban “could jeopardize any presidential candidate’s chances of winning this most critical of battleground states — and thus the presidency itself,” the paper wrote.
NPR likewise made dubious pronouncements on the opinions of swing-state voters the focal point of the story, reporting that “aggressive” climate action “could push moderate voters in key swing states to reelect President Trump,” and even cited — without rebuttal — a claim from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that a fracking ban would eliminate 17 percent of all U.S. jobs.
Soon after the debate, Quartz explained that Biden and Harris don’t support a fracking ban because it “tempts political suicide in swing states like Pennsylvania and Ohio where fossil fuels still rule.” And the Los Angeles Times described Biden’s opposition to a fracking ban as a “nuanced position.”
There are two big problems with these arguments.
First, as journalist David Sirota pointed out, “the idea that a fracking ban is political poison in Pennsylvania” simply “isn’t substantiated by empirical data.”
A January poll of Pennsylvania voters found that more registered voters support a fracking ban (48 percent) than oppose it (39 percent). A later CBS/YouGov poll in August found 52 percent of Pennsylvania voters supporting a fracking ban. These numbers hardly suggest “political suicide.”
Second, there’s simple climate science.
In 2018, the U.N. announced that carbon pollution needs to be cut by 45 percent by 2030 to prevent irreversible planetary devastation.
Unfortunately, fracking releases large amounts of methane into the atmosphere, which can warm the planet 80 times more than the same amount of carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. And recent reporting has suggested that fracking is an even bigger contributor to global warming than previously believed.
At the debate, Harris emphasized that Biden “believes” in science.
She claimed he “understands that the West Coast of our country is burning” and “sees what is happening on the Gulf states, which are being battered by storms,” and that he has “seen and talked with the farmers in Iowa, whose entire crops have been destroyed because of floods.”
But on this issue, the science clearly points in one direction: away from fracking.
Finally, banning fracking doesn’t need to mean eliminating jobs. Environmental and labor activists, economists, and scientists have for years discussed the need for a full employment program based on green jobs to serve as a just transition for workers. Green industries could employ many, many more workers than fossil fuels.
There is no reason for a fracking ban to be “political suicide” — except, maybe, for the fossil fuel industry.
Joshua Cho (@JoshC0301) is a writer based in Virginia. This op-ed was adapted from a longer piece at FAIR.org and distributed by OtherWords.org.
Metaphors for climate change
See Vicki McKenna’s show “Geology and the Physical World,’’ at Fountain Street Fine Art, Boston. Sadly, the show closes Oct. 25.
She says:
“Trained as a geologist, I see rocks as telling a story if you know how to interpret them. Photographs also require interpretation for they are the ingredients of a story rather than the story itself. The viewer assembles them into a narrative that is personally important.
“My works are photo illustrations that combine multiple photographs and are intended to collapse present and future into one image. All my previous work has been straight photography. I’ve captured an image in the camera, edited, and printed it. My use, here, of editing software to create a composite image is a departure that seemed justified by the challenge of incorporating the element of time into the final image.
“I was motivated by considering the effects of rising sea level. Each image is a montage of two or more photographs. I have merged one photograph representing the current environment with other photographs representing a possible future. The composite image isn’t meant to be a scientific thesis, but a metaphor for a possible result of climate change. In some images it is easy to identify the elements of the individual photographs. In others, the blending of photographs creates an image that almost seems realistic. The ambiguities of scale and detail in the montage are intended to create a sense of discontinuity or unease.’’
See:
https://www.fsfaboston.com/growingagallery/2020/10/23/geology-and-the-physical-world-vicki-mckenna?mc_cid=37b6bc98f3&mc_eid=296ccbd81d
New Bedford, Mass.
Llewellyn King: Can NYC recover its swagger after COVID-19?
In the energy of midtown Manhattan
NEW YORK
Alistair Cooke, the great British journalist who wrote his weekly “Letter from America” – a paean to the United States -- for 58 years, reserved some of his most lavish praise for Manhattan. When Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, visited America and wanted to see Disney World, Cooke told him he’d never see anything as extraordinary as the Manhattan skyline.
I was reminded of this long-ago admonishment recently, when I had the opportunity to see Manhattan from the water, cruising around the island on a friend’s yacht, looking at that skyline, those fingers of buildings, thrusting toward heaven in a forest of architectural and engineering creativity that has no equal on earth. Dubai may aspire but it doesn’t compete.
Manhattan is awe on steroids.
I’ve savored and, at times, detested it for decades. I suffered its awfulness at the bottom when many newspapers closed and I, an immigrant with no resources, found work as a busboy at the Horn & Hardart on 42nd Street – one of the food-service automats which were once a feature of New York City. They were where the hapless could sit unbothered for long hours without buying anything beyond coffee; where they could stay warm and sheltered in the winter.
I’ve also savored Manhattan in good times, staying at the Carlyle Hotel, one of the best hotels in the world, up there with the Ritz in Paris and Brown’s in London.
It was said when I lived there in the 1960s, that New York was a city for the extraordinarily rich and the extremely poor. I found work in Washington and stayed south; New York became a place to visit.
If it was a hard place to be poor in 1965, the extremes of poverty and wealth only increased with time.
More great buildings, enabled by engineering that allowed them to be planted in smaller plots of land, sprouted in Manhattan. Spindle apartment buildings and sprawling waterfront office developments were built with money that flowed in from hedge funds, tech companies, Russian oligarchs, Chinese billionaires, and Middle Eastern oil-garchs.
On Sept. 11, 2001, the Big Apple felt its vulnerability to a hostile, premeditated attack. Now it is facing its greatest crisis, one that will wound it mortally if not fatally: COVID-19.
New York City has an uncertain future. People are moving out, selling their expensive co-ops at a loss, and buying in less-crowded places on Long Island, in the Hudson Valley, Connecticut, and even farther afield.
As I looked in wonder at the city of striving people, epitomized by its buildings that themselves seem to strive to go ever higher, I wondered whether New York is over, destined to a slow death; its apartments in the clouds likely to be abandoned, and its trove of office space to sit empty as a new generation grows into the idea that working from home — home far away — is the norm, the new way to think about work.
The New York Times has looked at the problem and its writers can’t, it seems, bring themselves to answer the question: Is it over?
The city’s impending tragedy will be played out in other cities, but it is in New York that it will be most visible, most painful; the dream most shattered.
Sure, you might say, it was built on greed and now it must pay the price. But it was also built on much else: immigration, diversity, financial acumen, theater, fine art, sweat and toil -- and that most human of emotions: aspiration.
I hope that the new normal will allow cities to recover and New York to swagger forward as it has in the past: difficult to live in and difficult to live without. It’s a miracle of a city, a big shiny apple.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com. and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
Website: whchronicle.com
In Korea Town, one of New York’s many ethnic neighborhoods
Leave fallen leaves
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
It’s been good to read lately a pushback against the American obsession with lawns, which has been a slow-motion environmental disaster, however pretty they can be. To maintain lawns, as opposed to other ground covers, vast quantities of pesticides and toxic fertilizers are used, polluting bodies of water (and ground water) and killing all sorts of creatures. And the erosion from lawns can be severe.
I particularly think of this now, what with leaves covering lawns and homeowners tempted to get the blowers or rakes going and remove all traces of leaves from their lawns. But in fact, decomposing leaves are good for the soil, including the dirt that grass grows in. They add nitrogen and other important nutrients, keep down weeds and harbor microbes and insects that are good for plants and birds.
Mulch the fallen leaves with a lawn mower if you think that they’re getting too thick. If you have a composter put the excise leaves there or let it decompose in a pile in the corner of your yard.
One very unpleasant aspect of autumn life in areas like ours with lots of falling leaves is when homeowners and/or hard-working yard crews (often illegal immigrants), wield shrieking and heavily polluting leaf blowers to clear their lawns. They often blow the leaves into the street, where they clog drains. Many are blown into piles and then trucked to landfills to take up space at those overloaded sites.
Boston high schools sent lab kits for distance learning
— Photo by Zuzanna K. Filutowska
From The New England Council (newenglandcouncil.com)
BOSTON
“Mass Insight Education and Research has partnered with manufacturer miniPCR bio to deliver 225 individual lab kits to high schools across Boston. The ‘Science from Home: Lab Kits for Distance Learning’ program is being piloted in by Advanced Placement (AP) biology classes in eight Boston high schools this fall.
“The Mass Insight program is partially supported by the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center (MLSC) and seeks to support AP biology students with the ability to complete lab assignments from home. The labs are designed to give students a safe, grade-level appropriate lab experience, and will allow students to investigate vital biological processes with minimal equipment.
“Leslie Prudhomme, Mass Insight’s senior content director for AP Sciences and a former AP biology teacher, has spearheaded the effort to get lab kits into students’ hands. ‘The kids are our top priority,’ Ms. Prudhomme said. ‘The question wasn’t are we going to be able to help them get the quality science education they need in the fall semester, it was how are we going to get this done?’’’
'Three aspects of time'
“Under the Juniper Tree’’ (encaustic) by Boston-based painter Lola Baltzell, in the “Brilliance and Celebration” show at Galatea Fine Art, Boston, through Oct. 31. She is a member of New England Wax (newenglandwax.com).
She says:
"This piece represents the past, the present and the future. Three panels, three aspects of time. Mostly I try to stay in the present. I feel like a refugee who has fled the homeland. I now live in a world that feels so foreign. The past — does it exist? It feels like ‘the old world’: The future? I'm trying to hold a sense of possibility."
The gallery says: “Lola Baltzell's works are uninhibited, yet carefully structured. It is not imposed, but appears as a reflection of natural order. Microbes, cells, direction of energy all serve to inform the surface of her works.’’
See:
galateafineart.com
Todd McLeish: Looking for a rare salamander
Marbled salamander
From ecoRI News (ecori.org)
RICHMOND, R.I.
After dark at a well-hidden vernal pool, Peter Paton shined his flashlight back and forth at the moss-covered ground around the nearly-dry pond basin. He was searching for marbled salamanders, the only autumn-breeding salamander in New England, and one that is seldom seen except on rainy fall evenings. It didn’t take him long to spot one.
“I got one,” he called out. “Over here.”
Marbled salamanders, which grow to about 3.5-4.25 inches, are the second-largest salamander in the region — after only the spotted salamander — and their attractive black-and-white patterning makes them unmistakable. The one Paton found, a male, was on his way out of the pond basin, indicating that the animal had completed his mating duties and was headed to the forest to spend the winter underground.
Female salamanders were likely hidden in the sphagnum moss around the pond, where they remain for a month or more to guard their eggs until rain fills the pond and the eggs are protected from predators and the elements. The eggs hatch within days after being covered in water, and the larvae overwinter in the pond.
Paton, a professor of natural resources science at the University of Rhode Island, was confident of finding marbled salamanders at the Richmond site, since it was a place he studied and monitored in 2000 and 2001, when he and colleagues conducted an amphibian survey of 137 vernal pools around the state. Marbled salamanders were found in just four of the pools, however, making it one of the rarest pond-breeding amphibians in the region.
Previous efforts in the 1980s and ’90s by Chris Raithel, a wildlife biologist at the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management, documented as many as 50 marbled salamander breeding sites in the state, mostly in Kent and Washington counties. There are no records from Bristol County or from areas adjacent to Narragansett Bay and few from the Blackstone Valley.
“The present localized distribution of marbled salamanders in Rhode Island may be related to habitat fragmentation and patch isolation,” Raithel wrote in his 2019 book Amphibians of Rhode Island. “If this effect is real, the species is secure only in the larger contiguous habitats of southern and western Rhode Island, and additional range retraction should be evident to future generations.”
Marbled salamanders require a very specific habitat for breeding: ponds that are surrounded by sphagnum moss and dry up in the summer, keeping fish and large dragonfly larvae from inhabiting the pond and preying on the salamander larvae.
“They tend to like relatively small ponds, and there aren’t many sites available that fill their habitat requirements,” Paton said.
In addition to habitat fragmentation, road mortality is also a significant concern for the species, because they are often crushed by vehicles as the adults cross roads to reach their breeding ponds or as juveniles disperse to find territories.
On the other hand, Paton said it’s possible that the changing environmental conditions associated with the warming climate may make southern New England more favorable to marbled salamanders in the future. Their current range extends as far south as northern Florida and eastern Texas, and populations in warmer climates tend to be considerably larger than those in Rhode Island.
“They aren’t very tolerant of the cold, so we’re at the northern limits of their range,” Paton said. “The larvae don’t grow much in the winter because it’s too cold, but once wood frogs arrive to breed in early spring, the salamander larvae feed on the frog tadpoles as their main fuel source to undergo metamorphosis.”
After metamorphosis, the salamanders leave their ponds and spend the rest of their lives in the forest, except for brief breeding periods each fall.
Marbled salamanders require a very specific habitat for breeding and they are not very tolerant of the cold.
Despite how few marbled salamander breeding sites were found during the last amphibian survey, a recent graduate student at the University of Massachusetts at Boston thinks a new survey method may detect the salamanders more effectively than traditional sampling methods.
Jack He, who graduated in May, used eDNA — environmental DNA collected from water or soil — to detect the presence of marbled salamanders even when the animals could not be seen.
“Everything sheds DNA in one form or another, like from skin cells or blood, and they release it into the environment,” He said. “Ideally, we can collect water or soil samples containing those cells and extract that DNA and sequence it to determine what species are present.”
He detected marbled salamander DNA in a number of water and soil samples from vernal pools in western Massachusetts. He calls it a less labor-intensive method of determining if the salamanders are present at a site than using dipnets to capture larvae in the spring, which is how Paton conducted his survey.
“I’ve done dipnet studies and compared them to eDNA, and I found that eDNA was a bit more effective,” He said.
Paton, however, isn’t convinced.
“My impression is that larvae are relatively easy to find, but I could be biased,” he said. “Maybe they’re in there and I missed them a lot. But however you do it, I suspect that marbled salamanders are still fairly rare in Rhode Island.”
Rhode Island resident and author Todd McLeish runs a wildlife blog. He’s a frequent EcoRI News contributor.
Chen Shih-chung: COVID-19 shows importance of Taiwan being admitted to WHO
WHO emblem
Our friends in the Taiwan representative office in Boston forwarded this to us.
— Robert Whitcomb
Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, there have more than 40 million cases and more than one million deaths around the world. The virus has had an enormous impact on global politics, employment, economics, trade and financial systems, and significantly impacted the global efforts to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs).
Thanks to the united efforts of its entire people, Taiwan has responded to the threats posed by this pandemic through four principles: prudent action, rapid response, advance deployment and openness and transparency. Adopting such strategies as the operation of specialized command systems, the implementation of meticulous border-control measures, the production and distribution of adequate supplies of medical resources, the employment of home quarantine and isolation measures and related care services, the application of IT systems, the publishing of transparent and open information, and the execution of precise screening and testing, we have been fortunate enough to contain the virus. As of Oct. 7, Taiwan had had just 523 confirmed cases and seven deaths; meanwhile, life and work have continued much as normal for the majority of its people.
The global outbreak of COVID-19 has reminded the world that infectious diseases know no borders and do not discriminate along political, ethnic, religious or cultural lines. Nations should work together to address the threat of emerging diseases. For this reason, once Taiwan had stabilized its containment of the virus and ensured that people had sufficient access to medical resources, we began to share our experience and exchange information on containing COVID-19 with global public-health professionals and scholars through COVID-19-related forums, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation group’s (APEC) High-Level Meeting on Health and the Economy, the Global Cooperation Training Framework, and other virtual bilateral meetings. As of June 2020, Taiwan had held nearly 80 online conferences, sharing the Taiwan Model with experts from governments, hospitals, universities and think tanks in 32 countries.
Taiwan’s donations of medical equipment and anti-pandemic supplies to countries in need also continue. By June, we had donated 51 million surgical masks, 1.16 million N95 masks, 600,000 isolation gowns, and 35,000 forehead thermometers to more than 80 countries.
To ensure access to vaccines, Taiwan has joined the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access Facility (COVAX) co-led by GAVI — the Vaccine Alliance — and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations. And our government is actively assisting domestic manufacturers in hopes of accelerating the development and production of successful vaccines, bringing them to market as quickly as possible and putting an end to this pandemic.
To prepare for a possible next wave of the pandemic as well as the approaching flu season, Taiwan is maintaining its strategies of encouraging citizens to wear face masks and maintain social distancing, and strengthening border quarantine measures, community-based prevention and medical preparedness. Furthermore, we are actively collaborating with domestic and international partners to obtain vaccines and develop optimal treatments and accurate diagnostic tools, jointly safeguarding global public-health security.
The COVID-19 pandemic has proven that Taiwan is an integral part of the global public-health network and that Taiwan Model can help other countries combat the pandemic. To recover better, WHO needs Taiwan. We urge WHO and related parties to acknowledge Taiwan’s longstanding contributions to global public health, disease prevention, and the human right to health, and to firmly support Taiwan’s inclusion in WHO. Taiwan’s comprehensive participation in WHO meetings, mechanisms and activities would allow us to work with the rest of the world in realizing the fundamental human right to health as stipulated in the WHO Constitution and the vision of leaving no one behind enshrined in the UN SDGs.
Chen Shih-chung is minister for health and welfare for Taiwan (Republic of China)
Flaming near the frost
Swamp maples
“It takes adversity or coming close
To trouble and hard times to make them glow,
Then they really flower as swamp maples
Flower on the edge of frost and snow.’’
— From “New Englanders Are Maples,’’ by Robert P.T. Coffin (1892-1955), a native and long-time resident of Brunswick, Maine, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet
The long-gone Merrymeeting Park Casino and amusement park in Brunswick, circa 1905