Llewellyn King: The disappointing Kamala Harris
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
Kamala Harris shone in the Senate when she was asking questions in hearings. That is where the idea that she might have presidential possibilities flourished. Democrats, observing her surefootedness, were led to think, “Here is the next Barack Obama.”
But the shine is off Harris and the tarnish is setting in.
When Harris ran for president, the only evidence of that hearing-room confidence was when she attacked front-runner Joe Biden in the Democratic debates. She implied that he was the proprietor of old ideas and hinted that he wasn’t up to date on matters of race.
So, it was extraordinary that Biden chose Harris to be his running mate. There were other strong contenders among those who had sought the Democratic nomination, and many more who hadn’t run for president. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D.-Minn.) should have been chosen: a tough, well-qualified woman of her times.
Biden, in choosing Harris, heard the music of diversity, which has been turned up of late. He felt the need to make history and to show that he was in accord with the values of today.
But he must have had some dealings with Harris when he was vice president; observed her in action in the Senate and heard about the difficulty she had organizing her small Senate staff. He must have done the political equivalent of due diligence. And he must have been cognizant of the damage that Sarah Palin did to John McCain’s candidacy in 2008.
Whereas Obama appeared not to think of himself as being of color, Harris clings to it. Her journey intrigues her; Obama’s didn’t intrigue him. He travelled it with purpose and dignity.
Now it must worry the president to learn, as the rest of us have, that Harris seems to have no ideas. Her public remarks are flip at worst and off-the-shelf liberal at best.
What does she see as the future for America? This isn’t laid out or even discernible. We need to know her vision because she is vice president to an old man – the metaphorical heartbeat away.
Harris and Biden have chosen to believe that solidarity at the top is an important message, hence the frequent references in White House announcements to the “Biden-Harris Administration.” In public, Harris is often at Biden’s side. But she often seems to be standing there as his girl Friday, not as the second-in-command.
In his well-reported piece in The Atlantic, Edward-Isaac Dovere hunted for the real Harris and didn’t appear to find her. He notes that she asks good, hard questions, like a good prosecutor, but as she dodges reporters, they aren’t able to ask good, hard questions of her.
It isn’t a given Democrats will back Harris if Biden turns out to be a one-term president, which given his age, 78, is a reasonable supposition. But ditching her would be hard because it might cost the party its progressive wing and keeping her might cost them as dearly in the center.
Republicans are salivating at the thought of running against Harris. She is the bright sun in their darkening sky.
The immigration assignment seems to have been thrust on Harris. It is unlikely she sought it. She doesn’t appear to have grasped it with relish. Save for brief visits to Guatemala and Mexico, she has done and said little.
Harris is finally looking at the chaos on the border herself. She needs to present a better idea than championing what amounts to nation-building in Central America. That has been tried and tried again and failed.
She isn’t going to solve the pain inherent in the immigration challenge, but it is a wonderful opportunity for her to give us her view of America, and what we might expect from a President Harris. Another assignment that could be thrust upon her.
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.
Llewellyn King: A very tricky recovery coming up; beware Western drought effects
Folsom Lake reservoir during the California drought of 2015
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
After the long, dark night of the pandemic, many are predicting a rosy dawn, followed by a bright summer day. The feeling is that we, the people, have borne the battle and can now celebrate the victory.
But recoveries are tricky, and this recovery will be trickier than most because we are coming out of hibernation into a place changed radically from the one where we began our COVID-19-avoidance slumber. We isolated in one world and are reconnecting in another.
Enthusiasm flows from a sense of accumulated demand and already evident brisk economic activity.
There is a labor shortage despite unemployment at 5.8 percent. I have been following job offerings across the country (I review dozens at a time) and this would appear to be a good time to get a new job or change up. Employers are sounding desperate; they are paying more and being accommodating.
Unfortunately, tight labor markets and rising house prices are often a harbinger of inflation.
Yet there are some wondrous possibilities. On the plus side, we are awakening into a new world of technology-driven change.
In transportation, the surge in electric vehicles is here to stay. Ford’s announcement that next year it will offer an all-electric F-150 pickup truck is significant. It breaks down technical barriers and, significantly, it also breaks down social ones.
Working men and farmers who have been dubious about electric vehicles, regarding them as being only for effete liberals, now can embrace the electric vehicle revolution. The electric F-150 will be a milepost in the electrification of transportation and socially changing attitudes.
New materials, such as graphene nanotubes and new ways of production using additive manufacturing, known commonly as 3D printing, will change the factory floor as well as add to the possibility of on-site production and the deployment of new, small factories.
Interconnectivity, sped by 5G, and the massive deployment of sensors will have its impact from the checkout at the grocery store to medical diagnosis, much of it done remotely as part of the swing to telemedicine.
Already, Domino’s Pizza is testing autonomous delivery vehicles in Houston. Like those ubiquitous scooters in cities, this will spread on the ground -- and in the air, as drones get into the game.
COVID-19 has stimulated not just medical research but also a general interest in research which will in turn promote more public funding. The COVID -19 vaccine successes reestablished a certain level of confidence in medical science.
But there are old-economy realities ahead.
Real estate is in boom and bust simultaneously. The future of office towers is uncertain, and the future of big shopping centers is precarious. The possibility of home buyers finding affordable houses is remote. Want to start married life living in a tent pitched in an abandoned department store?
A surge of homelessness is expected to follow the ending of the moratorium on evictions. Tens of thousands may be evicted as they haven’t paid rent for a year and won’t be able to do so. An equal number will be sitting in the dark as utilities finally start disconnecting for unpaid bills. One utility, CPS Energy, in San Antonio, has $105 million in uncollected bills. Multiply that across the country.
The federal government has, as it were, shot its wad, in stimulus and can’t be expected to step in and help renters with their back rent or electricity customers with their accumulated bills.
There is another disrupter on the horizon. It is drought, the worst recorded, which is drying up California and much of the rest of the West.
Expect reduced food production, affecting the whole country with higher prices, a terrible wildfire season, and even a shortage of electricity as dams across the West (including Grand Coulee on the Columbia River and Hoover on the Colorado River) will cut electricity output because of low water.
The mighty Colorado -- the life force for so much in the West, including farming and electricity production -- is running seriously low and will continue to decline as summer progresses. Hardship in the West will be felt in the North, South and East.
A new Dust Bowl? Technology hasn’t yet learned to make rain.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS and his email is llewellynking1@gmail.com.
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Co-host and Producer
"White House Chronicle" on PBS
Mobile: (202) 441-2703
Website: whchronicle.com
Robert Whitcomb <rwhitcomb51@gmail.com>
11:49 AM (3 hours ago)
to White, InsideSources, Llewellyn, Michael
Fine column!!
Llewellyn King
11:50 AM (3 hours ago)
to me
Thank you so much, Bob.
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Executive Producer and Host
"White House Chronicle" on PBS;Columnist, InsideSources Syndicate;Contributor, Forbes; Energy CentralCommentator, SiriusXM Radio
Mobile: (202) 441-2702Website: whchronicle.com
Llewellyn King: Interconnectivity at the heart of the revolution that’s upon us
Visualization from the Opte Project of the various routes through a portion of the Internet
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
When we look back on the convulsion that is going to reset America — the great technology-driven revolution that will extend to nearly every corner of American life — it may be named for President Joe Biden, but it won’t be his revolution. It is innovation’s revolution. He will help finance it and smooth it out, but it is already happening and is accelerating.
Biden’s typically soft speech to Congress (no stemwinder he) was a wish list of things dear to him, but also an acknowledgement of what already is in motion.
Technology is rampant and government’s role should be to provide partnership and, above all, standards, according to two savants of the tech world, Jeffrey DeCoux, chairman of the Autonomy Institute, and Morgan O’Brien, a visionary in U.S. wireless telecommunications, now executive chairman of Anterix, a company providing private broadband wireless networks to utilities. Above all, they said in an interview with me for the PBS program White House Chronicle, standards for the new technology are essential.
Partial interconnection with different appliances, from road sweepers to drone delivery vehicles speaking only to identical devices, will be self-defeating. The internet without international standards would have failed.
Biden is set to preside over the greatest industrial leap forward since steam provided shaft horsepower to make factories a reality. If Congress allows, the Biden administration will finance much of the upgrading of the old infrastructure. It also will be called upon to be part of the new infrastructure, the technological one. That will be expensive; both DeCoux and O’Brien warned that it will take huge sums of money to build out complete 5G broadband networks, which will carry the load of interconnectivity.
For the nation to leap forward, these networks need to bring 5G broadband to every corner of it, O’Brien said. It can’t be allowed to serve only those places where population density makes it profitable.
In his speech to Congress, Biden laid out a revolutionary abstract for the future of the nation. The human side of the Biden infrastructure plan -- things like day care, free community college, better health care, prescription drug pricing -- is the true Biden agenda.
The technology revolution is seen by the president not for what it is, a resetting of everything in America, but rather as a way to job creation. It will create jobs, but that isn’t the driving force. The driver is and has been innovation: science helping people. That, in turn, will bring about a surge of productivity and prosperity and with that, new jobs, quality jobs – robots will soon be flipping hamburgers and painting houses.
This other agenda, the one that will make the fundamental difference between the nation of today and the nation of tomorrow, is the technological revolution. The evolutionary forces for this upheaval have been gathering since the microprocessor started things moving in the 1970s.
At the core of the coming changes is interconnectivity. That is what will craft the future. Cars on highways will be connected with each other through thousands of sensors, and these will speed traffic and enhance safety both for those with drivers and new autonomous ones. Likewise, drones will deliver many goods and they will need to be interconnected and have superior flight management. Every aspect of endeavor will be involved, from managing railroads to increasing electricity resilience and the productivity of the electric infrastructure.
In an interview on the Digital Roundtable, a webinar from Texas State University, this past week, Arshad Mansoor, president of the Electric Power Research Institute, said improved interconnectivity could increase available electricity from dams and power plants often without new construction. He explained that interconnectivity wouldn’t only be essential to managing diverse generating sources, like wind and solar, but also in wringing more out of the whole system.
Technology has gotten us through the pandemic. Most obviously in the huge speed at which vaccines were developed, but also in our ability to meet virtually and the effectiveness of online ordering and delivery.
By nature, and by record, Biden is a get-along-go-along politician, a zephyr, as we heard in his address to Congress. But history looks as though it will cast him as a transformative president, a notable leader presiding over great winds of change.
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.
Autopilot system in Tesla car
Llewellyn King: Alternative energy is disrupting world order
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
Glance up and around and you’ll know the horizon is changing. From Canada to South Africa, Brazil to China, windmills and solar panels are telling a story of change.
In the United States, the landscape is collecting a kind of 21st-Century raiment. Wind farms, solar farms, and just stray windmills and solar panels on roofs are signaling something big and different.
When they were making Tom Jones in 1963, the very funny film based on Henry Fielding’s classic novel, the big problem was finding English villages that dated from the 18th Century and still looked it. The filmmakers found plenty of appropriate villages, but all the skylines were despoiled with television aerials. No filmmaker today can avoid windmills and solar panels, and computer graphics will have to come to the rescue for period dramas.
Alexander Mirtchev, a respected member of the Washington foreign-policy establishment and vice chairman of the Atlantic Council, in a new book based on a study he conducted for the Wilson Center, names this changed horizon for what it is: a megatrend. In doing this Mirtchev joins other megatrend energy spotters of the past, including environmentalist Amory Lovins and economist Daniel Yergin. Mirtchev’s book is titled The Prologue: The Alternative Energy Megatrend in the Age of Great Power Competition.
Energy has been shaping society and the relationship between nations since humans switched from burning wood to coal. The next step after that was the Industrial Revolution, ushering in what might be called “the first megatrend.”
Mirtchev builds on how energy supply changes relationships and looks to a future where the balance of power could be upended, and energy production could affect neighbors in new ways. For example, I have noted, the Irish are unhappy about British nuclear activity across the Irish Sea. There also is tension along the border between Austria and Slovakia: The Slovaks favor a nuclear future, and the Austrians are into wind and opposed to any nuclear power. As a result, windmills line the Austrian side of this central European border.
Mirtchev’s book is a serious work by a serious scholar that pulls together the impact of alternative energy on national security, the interplay between great powers, and the changing landscape between great powers and a few lesser ones. It is wonderfully free of the idealistic tropes about alternative energy as a morally superior force.
There also are changes within countries. Recently, I wrote about how Houston — the holy of holies of the oil industry — is seeking to rebrand the oil capital as a tech mecca as well as holding onto its oil and gas status as those decline.
If you look at the world, you can see how President Biden can stand up to Saudi Arabia in a way that other presidents couldn’t do. Saudi oil reserves don’t mean what they once did. They aren’t as essential to the future of the world as they once were. There is more oil around and the trend is away from oil. Historic coal exporters, such as Poland, Australia, South Africa and the United States, are losing their markets.
Other losses, including U.S. technological dominance in energy technology, are more subtle. For example, although jubilation over solar and wind is widely felt in the United States by environmentalists, it should be tempered by the fact that solar cells and wind turbines are being provided by China. China has seized manufacturing dominance in alternative energy, endangering national security for dependent countries.
Mirtchev’s arguments have found powerful endorsements. A number of big-name, international security thinkers have come forward to endorse the concept of a realignment caused by the megatrend of alternative energy. These range from Henry Kissinger to a who’s who of foreign-policy stalwarts here and in Europe.
James L. Jones, retired Marine general and President Obama’s national-security adviser, said, summing up thoughts expressed by a full panoply of experts, “ ‘The Prologue’ offers a valuable new framework for international strategic action.”
Retired Adm. James G. Stavridis, an executive of the Carlyle Group and other enterprises, said the book is “a masterpiece of original thought, and it should be must-reading in universities and war colleges.”
Who would have thought of the wind and sun as players in the rivalry between nations or that they would spearhead a megatrend?
On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
Wind turbines at Lempster Mountain, New Hampshire
Llewellyn King: Electrification and the Great American reset
Independent (electric grid) system operators and regional transmission operators
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
It is underway. It has huge momentum, and it will change everything we do — work, leisure, health care, education, use of resources — and, as a bonus, how the world sees us.
It is the Great American Reset, where things will be irreversibly changed. It is a seminal reset that will shape the decades to come, just as the New Deal and World War II shoved the clock forward.
The reset is being driven in part by COVID-19, but in larger part by technology and the digitization of America. Technology is at the gates, no, through the gates, and it is beginning to upend the old in the way that the steam engine in its day began innovations that would change life completely.
Driving this overhaul of human endeavor will be the digitization of everything from the kitchen broom to the electric utilities and the delivery of their vital product. Knitting them together will be communications from 5G to exclusive private networks.
President Biden’s infrastructure proposals could speed and smooth the innovation revolution, facilitate the digital revolution, and make it fairer and more balanced. Biden’s plan will fix the legacy world of infrastructure: roads, bridges, canals, ports, airports, and railroads. It will beef up the movement of goods and services, supply chains, and their security, even as those goods and services are changing profoundly.
But if Biden’s plan fails, the Great American Reset will still happen. It will just be less fair and more uneven — as in not providing broadband quickly to all.
Technology has an imperative, and there is so much technology coming to market that the market will embrace it, nonetheless.
Think driverless cars, but also think telemedicine, carbon capture and utilization, aerial taxis, drone deliveries, and 3D-printed body parts. Add new materials like graphene and nano-manufacturing and an awesome future awaits.
We have seen just the tip of digitization and have been reminded of how pervasive it is by the current chip shortage, which is slowing automobile production lines and thousands of manufactures. But you might say, “You ain’t seen nothing yet.” The future belongs to chips and sensors: small soldiers in mighty armies.
Accompanying digitization is electrification. Our cars, trucks, trains, and even aircraft and ships are headed that way. Better storage is the one frontier that must be conquered before the army of change pours through the breach in a great reshaping of everything.
Central to the future — to the smart city, the smart railroad, the smart highway, and the smart airport — is the electric supply.
The whole reset future of digitization and sensor-facilitated mobility depends on electricity — and not just the availability of electricity going forward, but also the resilience of supply. It also needs to be carbon-free and have low environmental impact.
An overhaul of the electric industry’s infrastructure, increasing its resilience, is an imperative underpinning the reset.
The Texas blackouts were a brutal wake-up call. Job one is to look into hardening the entire electric supply system from informational technology to operational technology, from storm resistance to solar flare resistance (see Carrington Event), from catastrophic physical failure to failure induced by hostile players.
The electric grid needs survivability, but so do the data flows which will dominate the virtual utility of the future. It also needs a failsafe ability to isolate trouble in nanoseconds and, essentially, break itself into less vulnerable, defensive mini-grids.
Securing the grid is akin to national security. Indeed, it is national security.
Electricity is the one indispensable in the future: The future of the great reset.
Klaus Schwab, the genius behind the World Economic Forum, called this year from his virtual Davos conference for a global reset to tackle poverty and apply technology and business acumen to the human problems of the world. We are on the cusp of going it alone.
In the end, the route to social mobilization is jobs. The Great American Reset will throw these off in an unimaginable profusion, as did the arrival of the steam engine a little over 300 years ago.
On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
The New England electric grid is managed by ISO New England from Holyoke, Mass., whose skyline is seen here. Note the clock tower of City Hall and the Mount Tom Range in the background,
Llewellyn King: ‘Long COVID’s’ baffling sister
CFS vitim demonstrates for more research
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
“Long COVID’’ is the condition wherein people continue to experience symptoms for longer than usual after initially contracting COVID-19. Those symptoms are similar to the ones of another long-haul disease, Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, often called Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
For a decade, in broadcasts and newspaper columns, I have been detailing the agony of those who suffer from ME/CFS. My word hopper isn’t filled with enough words to describe the abiding awfulness of this disease.
There are many sufferers, but how ME/CFS is contracted isn’t well understood. Over the years, research has been patchy. However, investigation at the National Institutes of Health has picked up and the disease now has measurable funding -- and it is taken seriously in a way it never was earlier. In fact, it has been identified since 1955, when the Royal Free Hospital, in London, had a major outbreak. The disease had certainly been around much longer.
In the mid-1980’s, there were two big cluster outbreaks in the United States -- one at Incline Village, on Lake Tahoe in Nevada, and the other in Lyndonville in northern New York. These led the Centers for Disease Control to name the disease “Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.”
The difficulty with ME/CFS is there are no biological markers. You can’t pop round to your local doctor and leave some blood and urine and, bingo! Bodily fluids yield no clues. That is why Harvard Medical School researcher Michael VanElzakker says the answer must lie in tissue.
ME/CFS patients suffer from exercise, noise and light intolerance, unrefreshing sleep, aching joints, brain fog and a variety of other awful symptoms. Many are bedridden for days, weeks, months and years.
In California, I visited a young man who had to leave college and was bedridden at his parents’ home. He couldn’t bear to be touched and communicated through sensors attached to his fingers.
In Maryland, I visited a teenage girl at her parents’ home. She had to wear sunglasses indoors and had to be propped up in a wheelchair during the brief time she could get out of bed each day.
In Rhode Island, I visited a young woman, who had a thriving career and social life in Texas, but now keeps company with her dogs at her parents’ home because she isn’t well enough to go out.
A friend in New York City weighs whether to go out to dinner (pre-pandemic) knowing that the exertion may cost her two days in bed.
I know a young man in Atlanta who can work, but he must take a cocktail of 20 pills to deal with his day.
Some ME/CFS sufferers get somewhat better. The instances of cure are few; of suicide, many.
Onset is often after exercise, and the first indications can be flu-like. Gradually, the horror of permanent, painful, lonely separation from the rest of the world dawns. Those without money or family support are in the most perilous condition.
Private groups -- among them the Open Medicine Foundation, the Solve ME/CFS Initiative, and ME Action -- have worked tirelessly to raise money and stimulate research. The debt owned them for their caring is immense. This has allowed dedicated researchers from Boston to Miami and from Los Angeles to Ontario to stay on the job when the government has been missing. Compared to other diseases, research on ME/CFS has been hugely underfunded.
Oved Amitay, chief executive officer of the Solve ME/CFS Initiative, says Long COVID gives researchers an opportunity to track the condition from onset and, importantly, to study its impact on the immune system – known to be compromised in ME/CFS. He is excited.
In December, Congress provided $1.5 billion in funding over four years for the NIH to support research into Long COVID. The ME/CFS research community is glad and somewhat anxious. I’m glad that there will be more money for research, which will spill into ME/CFS, and worried that years of endeavor, hard lessons learned and slow but hopeful progress will be washed away in a political roadshow full of flash.
Ever since I began following ME/CFS, people have stressed to me that more money is essential. But so are talented individuals and ideas.
Long COVID needs carefully thought-out proposals. If it is, in fact, a form of ME/CFS, it is a long sentence for innocent victims. I have received many emails from ME/CFS patients who pray nightly not to wake up in the morning. The disease is that awful.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com. He’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
Brain imagining, comparing adolescents with CFS and healthy controls showing abnormal network activity in regions of the brain
Llewellyn King: In the post-talking-on-phone era, cell phones get ever snazzier
Still triumphant iPhones
Scrapped, superseded mobile phones
— Photo by MikroLogika
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
Delve into your bank account or find a credit card that isn’t maxed out and do it. You know you want to. You know you must. You know you can’t resist. You want, must have, to hell with the expense, the latest cell phone.
Of course, the cell phone you have is perfectly good and does everything you want. That isn’t the point. When you are in need of a technology fix, utility isn’t a consideration.
Your old cell phone, truth be told, was such a whizzy little computer that you could ask it to read your e-mail aloud or you could surreptitiously enjoy watching old television shows such as Mister Ed. Now it must be cast out. You have read the CNET review that details pixel counts, camera capacity and battery longevity. The new phone, the one that you may have to raid your child’s college fund to acquire, is a must-have.
Here is a tip: Google until you are bug-eyed. It is lazy just to buy the top Android from Samsung or the latest iPhone from Apple. There are about 120 companies making cell phones. There are a dozen you can buy without going to China.
Imagine that if you have a phone that is unique, the opportunity for one-upping your pals is limitless. Think of these conversations just waiting:
“Bill, is that a new iPhone? I just bought a Blankety Blank. Actually, it is superior. You should see how I mapped a trajectory for a Mars flight on it.”
Or “Susan, you got the latest from Samsung? I guess it is great, but I really need extra functions. I can shoot and edit a feature film on this little beauty from Blankety Blank. It writes the script, too.”
Warning: When you have made one of these asinine comments, move away.
You can spend more than $3 million on a cell phone. An Australian businessman commissioned such a phone. It was replete with a 22-carat gold case, rubies and diamonds. I wonder what it weighed. More, I wonder if it worked. I don’t expect to find that model at Walmart. But don’t be downcast, if you have just $2.5 million to blow on a phone, there are several in your price range. Of course, these have nothing to do with telephony, they are pure fashion -- like those watches that cost millions and are made in Switzerland, the home of great watches, with humble, Chinese-made moving parts.
Even if you hold onto your old instrument or buy the latest, it seems the one thing you won’t be doing is making phone calls.
We are living in the post-phone age. If, God forbid, we are to speak to someone on the phone, an appointment has to be set up by email or text (a cell phone capacity actually used). So a simple phone call becomes work, something to cause tension, apprehension, dread. I don’t think anyone ever made an appointment to call you to tell you that you are coming into money or to tell you they have accepted your marriage proposal.
I have lived through the ages of the telephone, as defined by an instrument connected to similar that enables you to talk to someone else.
The first age was the party line. I call it the public line because you could listen to anyone on the same line.
Then there was the age of the rotary. Dial, dial, dial. If, like me, you had to make a lot of phone calls, it was hell. We had pencils with rubber-blob ends to insert into the dial to ease the finger labor. The pushbutton was nirvana. A huge advance in user-friendliness.
Then came the age of the answering machine. It was the thin end of the wedge which subtracted years from lives because it led inexorably to those automatic phone systems that won’t let you speak to a human being, whether it is a doctor or a manager about your, yes, telephone account.
No doubt there will be sociologists writing about the death of talking on the telephone. I, for one, always loved a ringing telephone, before robocalls, of course, because that call might be something that, as Omar Khayyam said, transmutes “life’s leaden metal into gold.”
Sometimes phone calls (RIP) did that.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, PBS. His e-mail address is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
Llewellyn King: Will classy clothes return after the pandemic?
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
There is a lot of chat about the future of work: Will we do it at home, or will we revert to commuting to the old workplace?
But there is an additional, different question: What will we wear?
Go to the mirror and look at yourself. Except for the odd Zoom meeting you might have tried to dress for, you are a different person.
The fact is that even a traditionalist like me, who has worn a jacket and tie since his first days of school, is, well, letting down.
Worse, after a year of sweats and other baggy, comfortable clothing, I feel constricted and ill at ease when I put on a suit – which is mainly when I record television programs on Zoom or some other video hook-up.
I suspect that you are like me for these Zoom, or the like, formals; you wear a jacket and jeans or exercise pants, hiding your lower half under a table. Notice how cramped you feel above the waist.
Women, do you remember, putting on full makeup -- known in the cosmetic trade as “war paint” – now that you’ve grown accustomed to the au naturel look? Maybe for morale, you wear just a slash of lipstick now and again. Those nice suits in the closet, or flattering dresses, do you remember how confining they were? How hard it was managing that dangling bling?
On that Hallelujah Day when the pandemic is over, will men and women be prepared to get out of those oh-so-comfortable sneakers for Oxfords and pumps?
Was it worth it, yesterday’s clothing? After COVID-19, the way we were isn’t going to be the way it will be. Anyone for going back clotheswise? Or have we been emancipated from wardrobe tyranny and shoe slavery?
There have been various attempts in recent years to dress us down, like Casual Friday. I remember giving a speech at the prestige law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom when they were trying to dress casually all week. The women partners looked miserable; they had made partner, bought Chanel suits, but now they were expected to wear their law school rags. And, oh, the misery of the middle-aged men partners, who had looked to bespoke suits to cover up the expansion of their waists, which had accompanied the collection of fat fees with the advance of age.
The only assault on male fashion before the change agent that is COVID-19 was the abandonment, for reasons unknown, of the poor necktie. What did it do wrong? Let me tell you, no one looks better without them. The naked male throat in a shirt designed for a tie isn’t lovely. Compensation is at hand in a revived interest in the pocket handkerchief or pocket square (which was used for drying the tears of distressed damsels but is used for cleaning one’s eyeglasses in the time of Me Too).
Formality in dress has been under attack for a long time. The tech titans, such as Steve Jobs, and rock musicians were the shock troops. No longer do smart restaurants enforce coats and ties for men and look askance at women in pants. Wearing sweats, shorts, sneakers? “Your table is ready, sir or madam.” Ugh!
Going forward, we may be so casualized in dress that we go to church in pajamas and work in anything that covers the body and is comfortable. The god of comfort has conquered the heavens.
I hope that for the sake of everyone, the fashion mavens, goaded on by the magazines like Vogue and GQ, devise a new era of clothes as comfortable as sweats and as flattering as, well, what we used to wear. Meanwhile, if you know anyone who would like to buy some suits (portly), sport coats (Scottish tweed), and shoes (leather lace-up), have them call me. I’m going to get with the new fashion, where comfort is the only criterion.
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.
Web site: whchronicle.com
Llewellyn King: Social media, GameStop and the mob
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
Social media has an unimagined, unequaled, uncontrollable and unpredictable ability to mobilize groups of people for antisocial action to take a sliver of society and turn it into a mob.
Last month this new force in society was on display, from mobilizing anti-vaxxers in Los Angeles to the U.S. Capitol riot, resulting in five deaths, to the run-up of a weak stock, GameStop, by 1,800 percent.
These events, coupled with some strains of political thought being restricted on Facebook and Twitter, along with the outright banning of tweets from Donald Trump when he was still in office, have some in Congress convinced something should be done -- often the precursor to ill-conceived legislation.
Conservatives want the protections granted by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which provides Google, Facebook and others a liability shield from third-party content posted on their platform, to be reformed. They believe that they are disadvantaged by the networks.
The hot issue of the moment in Congress is the price run-up of GameStop and other companies’ stocks. The primary platform most fingered so far is Reddit, but the active enabler was the app Robinhood, which allows individuals (mostly day traders) to trade stock without commissions and in small amounts.
This Robinhood isn’t to be confused with the English folk hero, who stole from the rich to give to the poor, even though that is the intent of those who named the app. In reality, it is part of the Wall Street system, and makes its money selling all those little trades to market-making firms. Its purpose is to make money not to bring social justice to small traders.
I interviewed Sinan Aral, who studies social media at the MIT Sloan School of Management and is the author of The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy and Our Health -- and How We Must Adapt, for White House Chronicle, the PBS television show that I host. He said of GameStop that it is imperative to find out what really happened. For example: When was the GameStop stock run-up taken over by big funds which stood to make huge profits, and some of which did?
Rep. Maxine Waters (D.-Calif.), who chairs the House Financial Services Committee, has scheduled hearings. That is a beginning, but it certainly won’t be definitive. Congressional hearings seldom are.
Jarrod Hazelton, a University of Chicago-trained economist who once worked for a Connecticut hedge fund, concurred. It looks like GameStop was “the perfect storm,” he said, also on White House Chronicle.
Hazelton told me that this never was a sudden viral event: The groundwork for the Reddit-fueled frenzy over GameStop was laid by professionals nearly a year ago.
It was social media that drove the madness, even though it was the big financial houses, like BlackRock (which reportedly made $3 billion on GameStop stock) that were the big winners. Speculation in the stock was already underway when trades took off, enabled and fed by Reddit posts and other social media shouting in essence “free lunch here.”
MIT’s Aral takes issue with the idea that crowds have a kind of folk wisdom. That idea was endorsed in a 2004 book, The Wisdom of Crowds, by James Surowiecki. But Aral points out that was the same year that Facebook was founded. In other words, a social media crowd isn’t the same as a fairground crowd trying to guess the weight of an ox, an example in Surowiecki’s book.
Crowds, it turns out, are wise if they are polled as individuals, but once they get on social media and have subscribed to a toxic idea, they aren’t wise. They are a single-minded mob, whether opposing vaccinations, trashing the great symbol of democracy or running up a stock.
What is to be done about social media? Probably nothing. It is here like gun ownership or pornography. This one, too, we will have to suck up and live with.
With time we may get inured to social media and get better at discounting a lot of its disingenuous outpourings. But, from time to time, it will be harnessed for evil. Crowds are healthy, mobs not so.
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
Llewellyn King: It was a nice inauguration but is Biden wading in too far, too fast?
At the American College of the Building Arts, in Charleston, S.C. It would be good if President Biden addresses income inequality by touting the benefits of education in the trades as opposed to, say, getting degrees in sociology. The trades offer more secure and higher-paying jobs than do the liberal arts.
The college's model is unique in the United States, with its focus on total integration of a liberal arts and science education and the traditional building arts skills. Students choose from among six craft specializations: timber framing, architectural carpentry, plaster, classical architecture, blacksmithing and stone carving.
ACBA's mission is to educate and train artisans in the traditional building arts to foster high craftsmanship and encourage the preservation, enrichment and understanding of the world's architectural heritage through a liberal arts and science education.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
It was a good day. Warm in its content. Soft in its delivery. Kindly in its message. Generous in its intentions. Healing in its purpose.
Trying to implement the soaring hopes of President Joe Biden’s inauguration began immediately. Maybe too immediately, too fast, and with actions that were too sweeping. Biden signed 17 executive orders that suggested an underlying philosophy of “bring it on.”
Biden doesn’t need to open hostilities on all possible fronts at once. He needs to pick his wars and shun some battles. I have a feeling that 17 battles are too many to initiate simultaneously and, possibly, some are going to be lost at a cost.
In his inaugural address, Biden did well in laying out six theaters where his administration will prosecute its wars. But some of those wars will go on for decades – maybe forever.
Big ships take a long time to turn around no matter how many tugboats are engaged. Actions have consequences and so do intentions.
The Biden wars:
The pandemic: This is the war that Biden must win. It is the one into which he needs to pour all his efforts, his own time and talent, and to focus the national mind.
Americans are dying at a horrendous pace. He has promised 100 million vaccine doses in the first 100 days. If that effort falters, for whatever reason, it will stain the Biden presidency. It is job one and transcends everything else.
The environment: It will remain a work in progress. Rejoining the Paris Agreement on Climate Change is a diplomatic and political move, not an environmental one. It will help with the Biden goal of better international standing. It will make many in the environmental movement feel better, but it won’t pull carbon out of the air.
There have been dramatic reductions in the amount of carbon the United States puts into the air since 2005. Biden is in danger of picking up too much of the environmentalists’ old narrative.
The environmental movement can get it very wrong and maybe has again in pushing the world too fast toward wind and solar. These aren’t perfect solutions.
The amount of carbon put into the air by electric generation in the United States is partly due to the hostility toward new dams and particularly toward nuclear power. These were features of the environmental narrative in the 1970s and 1980s.
Simple solutions seldom resolve complex problems. I have a feeling that we are going breakneck with solar and wind; making windmills and solar panels is environmentally challenging, as will be disposing of them after their useful life is over.
Canceling the Keystone XL Pipeline -- after nearly two decades of litigation, diplomatic and environmental review in Canada and the United States -- would seem to be a concession to a constituency rather than sound policy with virtuous effect.
Biden has identified three other theaters where he plans to wage war: growing income inequality, racism, and the attack on truth and democracy.
Income inequality is escalating because new technologies are concentrating wealth, workers have lost their union voice, and our broken schools are turning out broken people, who will start at the bottom and stay there. Racial inequality ditto. Many inner-city schools are that in name more than function.
If there was one big omission from Biden’s agenda of things he is prepared to go to war for, it was education. Most of the social inequalities he listed have an educational aspect. Primary and secondary schools are not turning out students ready for the world of work. Too many universities are social-promoting students who should have been held back in high school.
More are going to college when they should get a practical education in a marketable skill. People with such skills as carpentry, stone cutting, plastering, electrical and iron work are more likely to start their own businesses than those with, say, journalism or sociology degrees.
Biden’s continuing challenge is going to be how to handle the left wing of his party, stirred up by the followers of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. They haven’t gone away and are expecting their spoils from the election.
The president’s battle for truth is going to be how we accommodate the new carrier technologies of social media with the need for veracity; how to identify lies without giving into universal censorship. That battle can’t be won until the new dynamics of a technological society are understood.
Go slow and carry a big purpose.
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.
Llewellyn King: Internet companies and freedom of speech
Google headquarters, in Mountain View, Calif.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
H.L. Mencken, journalist and essayist, wrote in 1940, “Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.”
Twenty years later, the same thought was reprised by A.J. Liebling, of The New Yorker.
Today, these thoughts can be revived to apply, on a scale inconceivable in 1940 or 1960, to Big Tech, and to the small number of men who control it.
These men -- Jack Dorsey, of Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg, of Facebook, and Sundar Pichai, of Alphabet Inc., and its subsidiary Google -- operate what, in another time, would be known as “common carriers.” Common carriers are, as the term implies, companies that distribute anything from news to parcels to gasoline. They are a means of distributing ideas, news, goods, and services.
Think of the old Western Union, the railroads, the pipeline companies or the telephone companies. Their business was carriage, and they were recognized and regulated in law as such: common carriers.
The controversial Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act recognizes the common carrier nature of Big Tech internet companies by exempting them from libel responsibility. It specifically stated that they shouldn’t be treated as publishers. Conservatives want 230 repealed, but that would only make the companies reluctant to carry anything controversial, hurting free speech.
I think that the possible repeal of 230 should be part of a large examination of the inadvertently acquired but vast power of the Internet-based social-media companies. It should be part of a large discussion embracing all the issues of free speech on social media which could include beefed-up libel statutes -- possibly some form of the equal-time rule which kept network owners from exploiting their power for political purposes in days when there were only three networks.
President Trump deserves censure, which he has gotten: He has been impeached for incitement to insurrection. I take second place to no one in my towering dislike of him, but I am shaken at the ability of Silicon Valley to censor a political figure, let alone a president.
That Silicon Valley should shut out the voice of the president isn’t the issue. It is that a common carrier can dictate the content, even if it is content from a rogue president.
This exercise of censor authority should alarm all free-speech advocates. It is power that exceeds anything ever seen in media.
The heads of Twitter, Facebook and Alphabet are more powerful by incalculable multiples than were Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst and Henry Luce, or is Rupert Murdoch. They can subtract any voice from any debate if they so choose. That is a bell that tolls for all. They have the power to silence any voice by closing an account.
When Edward R. Murrow talked about the awesome power of television, he was right for that time. But now technology has added a multiplier of atomic proportions via the Internet.
The internet-based social media giants didn’t seek power. They are, in that sense, blameless. They pursued technology, then money, and these led them to their awesome power. What they have done, though, is to use their wealth to buy startups which offer competition.
Big Tech has used its financial clout to maintain its de facto monopolies. Yet unlike the newspaper proprietors of old or Murdoch’s multimedia, international endeavors today, they didn’t pursue their dreams to get political power. They were carried along on the wave of new technologies.
It may not be wrong that Twitter, Facebook and others have shut down Trump’s account when they did, at a time of crisis, but what if these companies get politically activated in the future?
We already live in the age of the cancellation culture with its attempt to edit history. If that is extended to free speech on the Internet, even with good intentions, everything begins to wobble.
The tech giants are simply too big for comfort. They have already weakened the general media by scooping up most of the advertising dollars. Will the freedom of speech belong to those who own the algorithms?
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com. He’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
Linda Gasparello
Co-host and Producer
"White House Chronicle" on PBS
Mobile: (202) 441-2703
Website: whchronicle.com
Thanks!1940, “Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.”
Twenty years later, the same thought was reprised by A.J. Liebling of The New Yorker.
Today, these thoughts can be revived to apply, on a scale inconceivable in 1940 or 1960, to Big Tech, and to the small number of men who control it.
These men -- Jack Dorsey of Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, and Sundar Pichai of Alphabet Inc., and its subsidiary Google -- operate what, in another time, would be known as “common carriers.” Common carriers are, as the term implies, companies which distribute anything from news to parcels to gasoline. They are a means of distributing ideas, news, goods, and services.
Think of the old Western Union, the railroads, the pipeline companies, or the telephone companies. Their business was carriage, and they were recognized and regulated in law as such: common carriers.
The controversial Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act recognizes the common carrier nature of Big Tech internet companies by exempting them from libel responsibility. It specifically stated that they shouldn’t be treated as publishers. Conservatives want 230 repealed, but that would only make the companies reluctant to carry anything controversial, hurting free speech.
I think the possible repeal of 230 should be part of a large examination of the inadvertently acquired but vast power of the internet-based social media companies. It should be part of a large discussion embracing all the issues of free speech on social media which could include beefed-up libel statutes -- possibly some form of the equal-time rule which kept network owners from exploiting their power for political purposes in days when there were only three networks.
President Donald Trump deserves censure, which he has gotten: He has been impeached for incitement to insurrection. I take second place to no one in my towering dislike of him, but I am shaken at the ability of Silicon Valley to censor a political figure, let alone a president.
That Silicon Valley should shut out the voice of the president isn’t the issue. It is that a common carrier can dictate the content, even if it is content from a rogue president.
This exercise of censor authority should alarm all free-speech advocates. It is power that exceeds anything ever seen in media.
The heads of Twitter, Facebook and Alphabet are more powerful by incalculable multiples than were Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst and Henry Luce, or is Rupert Murdoch. They can subtract any voice from any debate if they so choose. That is a bell that tolls for all. They have the power to silence any voice by closing an account.
When Edward Murrow talked about the awesome power of television, he was right for that time. But now technology has added a multiplier of atomic proportions via the internet.
The internet-based social media giants didn’t seek power. They are, in that sense, blameless. They pursued technology, then money, and these led them to their awesome power. What they have done, though, is to use their wealth to buy startups which offer competition.
Big Tech has used its financial clout to maintain its de facto monopolies. Yet unlike the newspaper proprietors of old or Murdoch’s multimedia, international endeavors today, they didn’t pursue their dreams to get political power. They were carried along on the wave of new technologies.
It may not be wrong that Twitter, Facebook, and others have shut down Trump’s account when they did, at a time of crisis, but what if these companies get politically activated in the future?
We already live in the age of the cancellation culture with its attempt to edit history. If that is extended to free speech on the internet, even with good intentions, everything begins to wobble.
The tech giants are simply too big for comfort. They have already weakened the general media by scooping up most of the advertising dollars. Will the freedom of speech belong to those who own the algorithms?
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of “White House Chronicle” on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com.
Linda Gasparello
Co-host and Producer
"White House Chronicle" on PBS
Mobile: (202) 441-2703
Website: whchronicle.com
Thanks!
Llewellyn King: Leave Big Tech alone while it’s still innovating
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
When it comes to invention, we ain’t seen nothing yet.
The chances are good, and getting better, that in the coming year and the years after it, our world will essentially reinvent itself. That revolution already is underway but, as with most progress, there are political challenges.
Congress needs restraint in dealing with the technological revolution and not to dust off old, antitrust tapes. With the surging inventiveness we are seeing today across the creative spectrum -- inventiveness that has given us Amazon, Tesla, Uber, Zoom, 3D printing and, in short order, a COVID-19 vaccine – you may wonder why the government is using antitrust statutes to try and break up two tech giants.
Conservatives think big social media companies are unfair to them. Liberals worry about the financial power of the Big Tech companies: The five largest have a market value of over $7 trillion.
The Justice Department has filed an antitrust suit against Google, and the Federal Trade Commission has filed one against Facebook. The only tools it has are outdated, anti-competition statutes -- some passed over a century ago. Sometime in the future, it may be desirable to disassemble Big Tech companies, but not when they are bringing forward new technologies and whole new concepts such as autonomous vehicles and drone deliveries. These need to happen without government shaking up the creators.
Antitrust laws on the books don’t address the internet age when global monopoly is often an unintended result of success; hugely different from Standard Oil seeking to have absolute control over kerosene.
Policy, though, may want to examine the role of Big Tech in relation to startups: the proven engines of change. When today’s tech giants were in their infancy, it was the beginning of the age of the startup as the driver of change. It went like this: invent, get venture-capital financing, prove the product in the market, and go public. The initial public offering (IP)) was the financial goal.
But the presence of behemoths in Silicon Valley has changed the trajectory for new companies. Rather than hoping for a pot of gold from an IPO, today’s startups are designed to be sold to a big company. Venture capitalists demand that the whole shape of a startup isn’t aimed to public acceptance but rather to whether Google, Apple or Amazon will buy that startup.
The evidence is that acquisitions are doing well in the Big Techs, but that doesn’t mean that they won’t be stifled in time. Conglomerates have a checkered past.
Big companies have a lifespan that begins with white-hot creativity, followed by growth, followed by a leveling of creativity, and the emergence of efficiency and profitability as goals that eclipse creativity. Professional managers take over from the innovators who created the enterprises; risk-taking is expunged from the corporate culture.
That is when government should look at the Big-Tech powerhouses and see whether it is in the national interest to break them up, not on the old antitrust grounds but because they may have become negative forces in the innovation firmament; because whether they are still creative or whether they are just drawing rents on previous creations or acquisitions, they will still be hoovering up engineering talents who might well be better employed in a smaller, more entrepreneurial endeavors or, ideally, as part of a startup.
The issue is simple: While the big companies are still creating, adding to the tech revolution which is reshaping the world, they should be left to do what they are doing well, from creating autonomous, over-the-road trucks to easing city life with smart-city innovation.
The time to move against Big Tech is when it ceases to be an engine of innovation.
Innovation needs an unruly frontier. We have had that, and it should be protected both from government interference and corporate timidity.
Happy and innovative New Year! Hard to believe in this time of plague, but much is changing for the better.
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.
Llewellyn King: We impatiently await an extra Christmas coming in a few months with VV Day
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill waving to the joyous crowds from Whitehall on May 8, 1945, which marked the end of World War II in Europe
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
I reckon that there are two Christmases: the one we celebrate on Dec. 25, and the one that happens when something goes terribly right in our lives. Those rare but wonderful days of pure golden joy when something has gone too right to have been anticipated, when you hoot and holler, jump up and down for joy, and run around your house or office or down the street.
Well, I know when my Christmas next year will come. I can’t tell you the day or hang out decorations or send invitations to the party, at least not yet.
But it is coming, that second Christmas, and it is going to be big, like the end of World War II or the moon landing or when the Super Bowl was won by your team.
I can just remember the end of the World War II, when Hitler was defeated — Victory Europe -- and the huge public celebration with lots of kissing and hugging and embracing strangers. For me it was quite innocent and I wish it had all happened, especially the kissing, 10 years later, but you take what you can get when you can. Even at age 5, I realized this was big stuff. That day in Cape Town, I saw the handsomest sailor in the world in his dress uniform, my dad, and I celebrated his survival.
The first time I got published in an adult newspaper as a contributor, that was unscheduled Christmas, and I ran around in an intoxication of joy, as excited as it is possible to be. I thought I had scaled the ramparts and would never come down. I came down. But the celebration was fantastic, a Christmas for sure.
Sometimes it becomes us to think of Christmas past, not those of Dickens’s Scrooge, but those things that happened. Perhaps it was the day when Cupid’s arrow found its mark, and you knew your life was changed for the better when you didn’t expect it -- or felt you didn’t deserve it.
This is a somber Christmas in 2020. But there will be a day of joy in the not too far-off future. That will be when it is clear that Covid-19 will no longer be on its killing spree; when we will have had our jabs, restrained our human contact, worn our masks and celebrated Christmas in a tender but reduced way, thinking on the meaning, on the happiness we have and not what we are postponing. Likewise, New Year’s will be subdued but as anticipatory as ever.
There won’t be just one day, alas, when we ring the bells, blow horns, and hug strangers. But there will be a day sometime next year when we can believe that the wicked witch is dead, that the virus is vanquished, and that life may return to what will be a new normal but nonetheless so welcome.
I wish it were all to happen on the same day, but it won’t. However, I think a day, one day, should be designated when it is clear that Covid-19, like polio, is in the rear-view mirror.
I yearn for that day: when I can go out to dinner, when I can see the faces of the noble clerks in the supermarket, embrace those who have borne the battle, manning the ambulances, the hospitals, and the nursing homes. A day when we remember those we have lost and celebrate those we have.
I would suggest we have a new national day of remembrance: VV Day, for Victory Virus. Happy, safe holidays to you.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com. He’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
Catch the Pawtuxet polluters
Scum at the waterfall on the South Branch of the Pawtuxet River at the grand Royal Mills complex, in West Warwick. The Royal Mills, built in 1890 and then rebuilt in 1920, after a fire, was for years the site of a major textile mill making stuff under the brand name of Fruit of the Loom — a brand still extant.
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary, in GoLocal24.com
Attention Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the State Police! What’s the source of the revolting yellow scum and suds that appear on the South Branch of the oft-scenic Pawtuxet River, particularly when the water is high after a rainstorm? It’s especially noticeable at the otherwise beautiful waterfall along the Royal Mills complex, in West Warwick.
This pollution is killing birds and other wildlife, and proximity to it can’t be good for people either.
Locals have been asking the DEM for several years to find out why this is happening and to stop it, but as yet nothing has happened.
Is this industrial waste? There’s not much industry left in the valley. So is the pollution draining from an old closed factory? From sewers?
Or, as seems much more likely, are people dumping stuff directly into the river, which would be a crime? These sorts of miscreants, often dressing in black to avoid detection, particularly favor dumping at night to avoid the expense and inconvenience of proper disposal.
Anyway, this has gone on far too long!
Sort of the way it should look
Llewellyn King: COVID-19 points way to faster medicines
In a Food and Drug Administration lab in Silver Spring, Md.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
This is the month when the national spirit should start to lift: COVID-19 vaccines could be administered by mid-December. While we won’t reach the summit of a mighty mountain this month, nor well into next year, the ascent will have begun.
It is unlikely to be a smooth journey. There will be contention, accusation, litigation and frustration. Nothing so big as setting out to administer two-dose vaccines to the whole country could be otherwise.
But the pall that hangs so heavily over us with rising deaths, exhausted first responders and overstretched hospitals, will begin to lift very slightly.
For the rest of foreseeable history, there will be accusations leveled at the Trump administration for its handling of the pandemic — or its failure to handle it.
But one thing is certain: Our faith in our ability to make superhuman scientific efforts in the face of crisis will be restored. Developing a COVID-19 vaccine will be compared to putting a man on the Moon.
The large pharmaceutical companies, known collectively as Big Pharma, have shown their muscle. The lesson: Throw enough research and unlimited money at a problem, accelerate the regulatory process, and a solution can result.
Even globalization gets a good grade.
The first-to-market vaccine comes from American pharmaceutical giant Pfizer. But the vaccine was developed at its small German subsidiary, BioNTech, by a husband-and-wife team of first-generation Turkish immigrants. (Beware of whom you exclude.)
Biopharmaceutical research often takes place this way, akin to how it happens in Silicon Valley: Small companies innovate and invent, and larger ones gobble them up and provide the all-important resources for absurdly complicated and expensive clinical trials. These contribute mightily to the cost of new drugs. A new “compound” -- as a drug is called in the trade -- can cost up to $2 billion to bring to market; and financial reserves are needed, should there be costly lawsuits.
The development of new drugs looks like an inverted pyramid. Linda Marban, a researcher and CEO of Capricor Therapeutics Inc., a clinical-stage biotechnology company based in Los Angeles, explained it to me: “The last 20 years have shown a seismic change in how drugs and therapies are developed. Due to the speed at which science is advancing, and the difficulty of early-stage development, most of the early-stage work is done by small companies or the occasional academic. Big Pharma has moved into the role of late-stage clinical, sometimes Phase 2, but mostly Phase 3 and commercial development.”
In the upheaval occasioned by the pandemic, overhaul of the Food and Drug Administration looms large as a national priority. It must be able -- maybe with a greater use of artificial intelligence and data management -- to assess the safety and efficiency of desperately needed drugs without the current painful and often fatal delays.
Marban said of the FDA clinical-trials process: “It is the most laborious and frustrating process which delays important scientific and medical discoveries from patients. There are many situations where patients are desperate for therapy, but we have to climb the long and ridiculous ladder of doing clinical trials due to inefficiencies at the site which include nearly endless layers of contracting, budget negotiations, IRB [Institutional Review Board] approvals and, finally, interest and attention from overworked clinical trial staff.”
This situation, according to Marban, is compounded by the FDA’s requirement for clinical trials conducted and presented in a certain way, which often precludes getting an effective therapy to market. “If we simplify this process alone, we could move rapidly towards treatments and even cures for many horrific diseases,” she added.
War is a time of upheaval, and we are at war against the COVID-19. But war also involves innovation. We have proved that speed is possible when bureaucracy is energized and streamlined.
When COVID-19 is finally vanquished, it should leave a legacy of better medical research and sped-up approval procedures, benefiting all going forward.
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.
Linda Gasparello
Co-host and Producer
"White House Chronicle" on PBS
Mobile: (202) 441-2703
Websi
Llewellyn King: Trust deficit endangers vaccine rollout
An anti-vaccination caricature by James Gillray, “The Cow-Pock—or—The Wonderful Effects of the New Inoculation!’’ (1802)
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
There is a trust deficit in this country, and it may kill a lot of us.
We haven’t been trusting for a long time, but distrust reached its zenith during and after the recent election. The election, still contested, brought with it a massive overhang of distrust. Indeed, the past four years have been marked by wide distrust.
Distrusting the election results isn’t fatal. But distrusting the experts on the need to get vaccinated for COVID-19 is. Yet there are reports that as many as 50 percent of Americans won’t get the vaccine when it is available. That is lethal and a true threat to national security, the economy, our way of life, everything.
If we don’t get our jabs, we will continue to die from coronavirus at an alarming rate. Over 258,000 Americans have perished and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention projects 298,000 deaths by mid-December.
As I recall, it was during the late 1960s that we began wide distrusting. By the end of the Vietnam War, we distrusted on a huge scale. We distrusted what we were told by the military, what we were told by President Lyndon Johnson and then by President Richard Nixon.
We also distrusted the experts. Just about all experts on all subjects, from nuclear-power safety to the environmental impact of the Concorde supersonic passenger jet.
Beyond Vietnam, distrust was fed by the unfolding evidence that we had been the victims of systemic lying. This led to big social realignments, as seen in the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and the environmental movement. These betrayals exacerbated our natural American distrust of officialdom.
The establishment and its experts had been caught lying about the war and about other things. It was a decade that detonated trust, shredded belief in expertise, and left many of us feeling that we might as well make it up as we went along.
Now the trust deficit is back.
If LBJ and Nixon fueled distrust in the 1960s and early 1970s, the current breach of trust belongs to President Trump and his enablers scattered across the body politic, from presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway with her “alternative facts” to the Senate Republicans and their disinclination to check the president.
The trust deficit has divided us. Seventy-three million did vote for Trump and many of those believe what, most dangerously, he has said about the pandemic.
The result has been the growth of diabolical myths about COVID-19. Taking seriously some, or all, of Trump’s outpourings on the coronavirus -- from his advocacy of sunlight and his off-label drug recommendations, such as hydroxychloroquine, to putting the pandemic out of mind as a “hoax” -- fomented its spread.
We have been waiting for a medical breakthrough to repel and conquer COVID-19 and it looks as though that is at hand with the arrival of not one but three vaccines, the first of which should be available in about three weeks to the most vulnerable populations. The development of these vaccines represents a stupendous medical effort: the Manhattan Project of medicine.
But it will all be in vain if Americans don’t trust the authorities and don’t get vaccinated. It looks as though, according to surveys, 50 percent of the population will get vaccinated. The rest will choose to believe in such medical fictions as herd immunity — a pernicious idea that eventually we will all be immune by living with COVID-19. It should be noted that this didn’t happen with such other infectious diseases as bubonic plague, smallpox, polio, even the flu.
My informal survey of research doctors puts the odds on who will get vaccinated a little better than 50 percent. They conclude that one third will get vaccinated, one third will wait to see the results among those who got vaccinated early, and one third won’t get vaccinated, believing that the disease has been hyped and that it isn’t as serious as the often-castigated media says. Some of the “COVID-19 deniers” will be the permanent anti-vaxxers, people who think that vaccines have bad side effects; they believe, for example, that the MMR vaccine causes autism.
This medical heresy even as hospitals are filling to capacity, their staff are exhausted, and bodies are piling up in refrigerated trailers because there is nowhere to put them.
Without near-universal vaccination, the coronavirus will be around for years. The superhuman effort to get a vaccine will have been partially in vain. The silver bullet will be tarnished.
Get a grip, America. Get your jabs.
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.
Before the anti-vaxxers: Administration of the polio inoculation, including by the first polio-vaccine developer, Jonas Salk, himself, in 1957 at the University of Pittsburgh, where his team had developed the vaccine.
In a postwar poster the Ministry of Health urged British residents to immunize children against diphtheria.
Llewellyn King: Rigidity can be deadly to wonderful innovation
Magazine cover in 1928, when radio was becoming very big but inventors were already thinking ahout television.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
Simple advice to innovators and policymakers: Don’t worry about collateral needs or they will distort your good growth and policy efforts.
If we look back, the development of the automobile had collateral effects beyond the ability of the auto pioneers to conceive. Yet there were those who would have restricted automobile development because they worried about the collateral effects, including that there wouldn’t be enough gasoline, oil would run out, cars were dangerous and fueling stations would explode.
The lesson wasn’t that those were minor concerns, but that they were giant and reasonable concerns that didn’t take into account that there would be as much creativity in solving those problems as there was in creating the primary product in the first place.
If the Wright brothers had worried about how we would keep aircraft from colliding with each other, well, we would have more trains and passenger ships.
The message is that innovation begets innovation. Invent one thing and then invest in something else to support it.
Yet there are reactionary forces at work in the creative arena all the time.
To continue with the automobile example, there are naysayers to the electric car everywhere. Sometimes they are driven by economics, but often they are just worried about great change. I can hardly pass a day without reading alarmist pieces about the disposal of batteries, a possible shortage of lithium from friendly suppliers, or that there won’t be enough charging points.
To all that, I say piffle.
History tells us that these seeming problems will be solved by the same inventiveness that has brought us to this time, when we are seeing a switch from the internal combustion engine -- faithful servant though it has been -- to electricity.
The danger is rigidity.
Rigidity is the seldom-diagnosed inhibitor of good science, good engineering and good policy. Rigidity in policy, or even just in belief, restricts and distorts.
A rigid belief is that nuclear waste is a huge problem. I would submit that it is less of a problem than many other wastes we are leaving to future generations. Rigid concerns and rigidly wrong radiation standards led the electric utilities to turn to coal, and now to wind and solar to move away from coal and its successor, natural gas.
Medicine is beset by rigidities and it always has been, from excessive use of bleeding therapy to surgeons who believed it was ungentlemanly to wash their hands. Those who suffer from less common diseases -- Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, also known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, is one -- are hurt by medical profession rigidities. The doctors try to fit disease into what they know and treat patients with known but inappropriate therapies.
Even such great innovators as Henry Ford weren’t without their crippling rigidities. Henry Ford was opposed to 6-cylinder engines and wanted all cars to be black.
Political rigidities are perhaps the most pernicious. I would suggest that the fear of the bogeyman of socialism has prevented America from developing a sensible health-care system — one that is less expensive and has better results. It doesn’t have to be modeled on Britain’s National Health Service, but it could borrow from Germany or The Netherlands, where the health system is universal but provided by private insurance. Ditch the rigidity and start fixing the patient -- in this case, the whole system.
Our educational system is plagued with rigidities. At the lower end, the public schools, children aren’t getting the basics they need to function in our society. At the high end, the universities, there is a new kind of aristocracy where the favored faculty are coddled, shielded and underproductive, while the cost for students is prohibitive.
Our most productive, most gifted graduates are compelled to align their careers with jobs that will pay enough to free them from the debt burden we start them in life with. This might cause a bright student to go into computer science when he or she longed to study astronomy, certainly a less well-paid future.
Rigidities kept women from seeking new roles and responsibilities, and from seeking their own personal and professional identities rather than have them defined by the outside, male-dominated society. Homemaking, yes; corporate management, no.
Rigid doctrine is always at work and is an unseen impediment to future innovation in science, social structure and, above all, in politics Watch for it.
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.
Web site: whchronicle.com
There’s long been pushback against the world-changing innovation of electric cars.
Llewellyn King: Polls are setup shots and a plague for democracies
Nov. 3, 1948: President Harry S. Truman, shortly after being elected as president, smiles as he holds up a copy of the Chicago Daily Tribune issue prematurely announcing his electoral defeat. This image has become iconic about the consequences of bad polling data.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
Damn, damn, damn the polls.
My irritation has nothing to do with how they botched this election, or how they botched the last two British elections or the Brexit vote.
It is not a matter, to my mind, of whether the polls get it wrong. It is a matter simply that they are taken at all. I have been railing against them for years.
I have found pollsters on the whole – I have interviewed quite a few -- to be decent, honest people who believe that they are taking the voters’ temperature scientifically; that their work is helpful, contributing to the national or regional understanding.
But polls are far from the benign things they purport to be. They are a setup shot that becomes the movie; a snapshot that changes the course of events, a contrived intrusion into the public discourse that then monopolizes it.
Polls sideline good people, bring into favor the known over the unknown, and promote a kind of national continuation. They begin to write the narrative, not to reveal it. They terrify timid leaders and office aspirants.
These same arguments can be made against a lot of market research. Ask people what they like, and they will tell you they like what they know.
Imagine if Harold Ross, the genius who was founding editor of The New Yorker magazine, had polled the public about the magazine he was about to start in 1925, and had asked, “Do you want a magazine in which the articles are long, the bylines are at the end of the articles, the headlines are in squiggly type, and there is no table of contents?” Do you think that there would be The New Yorker (it still has long articles, but the bylines are at the beginning, and it has a table of contents) today?
The most blame in the plague of polls that now distorts our elections belongs with the news media.
They commission polls relentlessly and then publicize the results, as though they have been allowed to see the face of God. This synthetic news.
Polls are not the revealed truth. They are an imperfect peek into the national thought portfolio. But once they become part of that portfolio, they corrupt the momentum of events.
Worse, polls sway the politicians. They turn the Pied Piper into one of the rats, getting in line with the rest.
In his Sept. 30, 1941 review of the war to the House of Commons, Prime Minister Winston Churchill chose to address the subject of opinion and leadership. He said, “Nothing is more dangerous in wartime than to live in the temperamental atmosphere of a Gallup Poll, always feeling one’s pulse and taking one’s temperature. I see that a speaker at the weekend said that this was a time when leaders should keep their ears to the ground. All I can say is that the British nation will find it very hard to look up to leaders who are detected in that somewhat ungainly posture.”
Quite right.
The damage is that polls have proliferated in recent years, and they perform various functions for various people. Universities and colleges have found, as in the case of the Quinnipiac University Poll, that polls are a branding asset. The Quinnipiac poll is run by a small college in the rolling hills of Hamden, Conn., with great professionalism and objectivity, which has given it considerable standing in the world of polling. It also has enhanced the standing of the college which runs it.
My quarrel with the polls will be partly assuaged if they continue to get it wrong. That way they will take their place in the background clutter, not the breathtaking political snapshots that undermine elections.
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
Web site: whchronicle.com
Llewellyn King: The right judge at the wrong time
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
It’s not a trial. But last week’s hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court seemed like one.
This juror’s verdict: Guilty as charged in one liberal indictment and a toss-up in the other. Judge Barrett seems destined to vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. But on the Affordable Care Act, which is of more immediate concern to more Americans, she may parse her judgment and endorse the doctrine of selectivity.
Two big things about Barrett: Her opposition to abortion is, one concludes, founded in her devout Catholicism and in her experience among lawyers of the right, led by Justice Antonin Scalia, for whom she clerked.
The other thing about Barrett is that she has seven children, two adopted from Haiti. She used this before the committee as a shield, a defense, and a statement, which said by implication, “See, I’m human, empathetic, caring, and maternal.”
This is important. As Barrett, who almost certainly will be confirmed, matures on the court, her family may be a moderating force, softening her otherwise rigid conservative views. As her children grow and experience the vicissitudes of life, she is likely to trade some of her harsh doctrines for a more humane ambiguity.
Take former Vice President Dick Cheney and his wife, Lynne. Their conservatism, devotion to the right, was never in question. But when their daughter Mary came out as gay, their view of that part of the social-political landscape softened.
It has been declared throughout the struggle to confirm Barrett that somehow it is not nice to bring in her religion.
This juror avers: It is.
When the religion of a public servant, affects political decisions, it has ceased to be a private matter. We’ve come a long way from the days when President John F. Kennedy’s Catholicism was cited in his election. Anti-Catholicism was then alive and well in parts of the political spectrum. Kennedy remained a committed Catholic, but he didn’t bring it into his governance of the country. That was as it should be.
Going forward, as the United States gets more diverse and when we can contemplate a time when Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims and other believers will take their place in national life, it is more, not less, necessary to ensure that separation of church and state is adhered to in everything, especially the Supreme Court. Ergo, it can be argued that Barrett should recuse herself from Roe v. Wade. How much stature she would gain if she did! But it’s most unlikely.
If the Democrats romp home with the White House and both houses of Congress, they would be in a position to legislate at least a quick repair to the Affordable Care Act and to start the process of legalizing abortion by federal law, not constitutional interpretation. But it will continue to fuel the culture wars.
It is not certain how much the Democrats will gain in the election and, as a longtime observer of Washington, I don’t believe long term a Democratic sweep would be good. A bit of tension in Congress is a net benefit. So, the Barrett nomination and confirmation weighed heavy as we watched her parry the Democratic questioners.
Extenuating fact: The judge is much smarter, more personable, and more in charge of her facts than expected. She charmed. She is a power to be reckoned with. Many observers expected to get a candidate who would simply channel Scalia, her old mentor, and that we could know her mind from his writing -- the way we can predict the attitudes of Justice Clarence Thomas.
That, it became clear, is not to be the case.
The verdict of this juror then is: After a rocky start on two difficult issues, Barrett will grow to be a serious, thoughtful justice. Possibly, with time, even a humane one.
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
Llewellyn King: Bundle up for a very bleak winter
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
A winter of discontent looms. Unlike in Shakespeare’s Richard III, no one can say it will be made glorious summer by anything now in sight. Instead, it promises a tsunami of misery for many and the ugliest election in U.S. history.
At a time that calls for new energy, new thinking and a recasting of the social contract, two old men -- who more rightly should be eyeing the sunny side of the veranda at their retirement homes -- are in contentious dispute for the presidency.
Whoever wins, President Trump or former Vice President Joe Biden, the winter will be the harshest in memory for many Americans, particularly those on the lower rungs of the economic ladder.
The COVID-19 pandemic has evaporated millions of jobs and the small companies that provided them. Most obvious in this slaughter are the restaurants. Yelp, the restaurant reporting service, estimates that 53 percent of the restaurants now closed will never reopen.
Restaurants are among the most fragile and perishable of small businesses. At the best of times, most inhabit an inhospitable space between the restaurant chains and their landlords.
Restaurants are quick to hire and quick to fire. It is where the unskilled (dishwashing and prep) to the low-skilled (line cooks and front staff) find work most easily.
Restaurants tell the temperature of the economy ahead of the official soundings. When business turns down, they stumble.
They also are places of hope: The chefs and waiters of today are the restaurant entrepreneurs or stage and screen stars of tomorrow. They’ve put untold thousands through college. When restaurants close jobs go, hopes and dreams go, and often the life’s work of the owners go.
The individually owned restaurant epitomizes entrepreneurism, determination, the capitalist spirit, and the joy of self-employment for the owner. All the virtues of small business, routinely drooled over by the politicians, are present even at the humblest greasy spoon. Free enterprise is always on the menu.
And restaurants are part of the fabric of our lives, where we celebrate, occasionally mourn, and frequently refresh.
Much of what is true for restaurants is as true for the whole hospitality industry. Those who do the housekeeping in hotels, the porters and, of course, the restaurant staff are all semi-skilled and in need of work to survive. They are, I submit, not easily re-trained: You don’t go from making beds to computer programming in a short time.
Only Congress can assuage the immediate suffering at the bottom of the employment pyramid. But a new relief package has been tied up in party strife.
Trump said on Oct. 6 that he had withdrawn from negotiations with the Democrats over the package. Now he says he will sign a simplified measure, guaranteeing a payment of $1,200. That came after the stock market -- the only index Trump follows -- faltered.
Dark as things may be for the workers at the bottom, they are bleak for all. Trump won’t say that he’ll accept the results of the election if he doesn’t win. He’s laid the groundwork for this potential coup by criticizing mail-in voting. Without evidence, he’s sought ahead of the election to invalidate mail-in voting and has even trashed the U.S. Postal Service, maybe to facilitate this election subterfuge.
If Biden wins, he may be presented with his greatest crisis before he is sworn in: leading the movement for accepting the vote. He’ll be required to lead the millions who may flood the streets, prompting violence between themselves and Trump hardliners.
Shiver, people, shiver. There is much to fear as winter unfolds even if you have a paycheck.
If Trump loses and accepts the result, there will be the time from certification of the election to Biden’s swearing in when an unfettered Trump can indulge his passion for executive orders, abrogating treaties and sowing wanton havoc.
The only sunshine may come from science in the form of a somewhat effective vaccine for COVID-19. This won’t occasion us to immediately strip our masks, as it will take a year to inoculate the whole population. But its prospect will put warmth into a cold Christmas.
As the nation returns to health, a hard look at the predicament of those at the bottom will be needed -- an amendment to the social contract, if you will. Top of my list: fix health care and repair education.
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