Fungi festival

Fungus vs. tree stump

Text from Colleen Cronin for ecoRI News

AUKE UT NAHIGANSECK/CHARLESTOWN, R.I. — While mycologist Lawrence Millman waited for his ride to the 24th Annual Rhode Island BioBlitz from the Providence Train Station, he did something he rarely does: he used his cellphone to call the reporter who was supposed to pick him up.

Millman only bought a cellphone two years ago, but often refuses to use it and rarely gives out his phone number. He usually arranges things via email, including rides, because he doesn’t own a car and let his driver’s license lapse years ago.

For the Rhode Island Natural History Survey’s annual BioBlitz, which he comes down from his home in Cambridge, Mass., to attend annually, he wore an old T-shirt aptly screen printed with mushrooms, hiking boots, and a bit of gray scruff.

He has been coming to the event — a 24-hour scramble to survey the number of species at a particular Rhode Island site — for a decade, he thinks. It’s one of the only mycological events that he still likes attending.

“Male myco-files of a certain age are very eager to compete with each other,” Millman said.

The fungi enthusiast doesn’t like crowds and doesn’t much care for the norms and rules of life, much like the numerous but elusive organisms he likes to study.

To read the whole article, please hit this link.

Dedrick Asante-Muhammad: Conn.'s 'Baby Bonds' and promoting racial economic equality

Illustration from the posthumously published biography of Chloe Spear, showing her abduction in Africa as a child; Spear was enslaved in Massachusetts from 1761 to until 1783.

Via OherWords.org

Juneteenth celebrates the end of chattel slavery in the United States. But over 150 years later, discriminatory public policies have prevented African Americans from closing the racial wealth divide in this country they helped build.

Policy created that divide — and policy can close it.

One state is showing how to move forward in advancing racial economic equality. This year, Connecticut is launching the country’s first “Baby Bond” program.

This program will invest $3,200 for every baby born into poverty in the state. The bonds are projected to grow to between $10,000 and $24,000 in value, depending on when they’re used.

When they reach an age between 18 and 30, these Connecticut residents will be able to use that money to start a small business, get a higher education or job training, or buy a home.

That money goes to poor residents regardless of their race. But because Black and Latino residents of the state are poorer than their white counterparts, the program will significantly address the state’s racial wealth gap — even as it gives young people of every race in the state a path out of poverty.

I’ve been researching and writing about the racial wealth divide for the last 20 years. In my view, Connecticut’s Baby Bond program is the most significant step forward in public policy I’ve seen yet. It should be an example for the country.

The program builds off decades of analysis and advocacy.

In 1959, over 50 percent of African Americans lived in poverty — a figure that had fallen to less than 19 percent by 2019. That’s still more than twice the rate for non-Hispanic whites, but it’s an example of substantial economic improvement for African Americans.

How did this happen? By removing barriers to economic and social opportunities and investing in those facing poverty.

The Black freedom movement of the 1950s and 1960s pushed for important legislation like the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968. The movement also helped advance the War on Poverty and its associated programs — including SNAP, Medicaid, and the Earned Income Tax Credit, all of which dramatically decreased poverty for the entire country.

Today we see Connecticut taking the next big step forward.

The idea for Baby Bonds came out of the wealth-building movement popularized by Michael Sherraden’s 1992 book Assets and the Poor: New American Welfare Policy. The book’s theme was the need to shift from simply supplementing people’s income to helping them build real assets — to help poor people get beyond day-to-day survival.

Child Savings Accounts under the Saving for Education, Entrepreneurship, and Downpayment (SEED) Initiative were one step in that direction.

By 2017, there were 54 of these programs serving 382,000 children in 32 states and Washington, D.C. At that time, the most common initial deposit for a Children’s Saving Account was $50 — not enough to make a significant difference in reducing poverty or the racial wealth divide.

Connecticut’s Baby Bond program was inspired by a vision to address racial economic inequality  first proposed in 2010 by economists William Darity and Darrick Hamilton.

Though the return of $10,000 to $24,000 for all babies born in poverty would not bridge the nearly $150,000 wealth divide between Blacks, Latinos, and whites, it would about double the median wealth of Black and Latino households in the state.

Hopefully this is the beginning of states nationwide creating similar wealth-building programs.

It could also build momentum for the national American Opportunity Accounts Act introduced by Senator Cory Booker (D.-N.J.) and Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D,-Mass.). That law would provide a Baby Bond of $1,000 for every American child — with an annual addition of up to $2,000 for the lowest income Americans.

For generations, we’ve done little to bridge the racial wealth divide or get families out of  multi-generational asset poverty. Connecticut’s Baby Bond program, which launches in July, and similar proposals across the country show that we may finally be willing to take the next step.

Dedrick Asante-Muhammad is chief of membership, policy and equity at the National Community Reinvestment Coalition and an associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

Read about Slavery in Connecticut

Where physical and visual meet

“Strange Attractor,’’ by Kathleen Kucka, in her show of the same name at Heather Gaudio Fine Art, New Canaan, Conn., through July 22. She lives and works in Falls Village, Conn., and New York City,.

The gallery says:

“Throughout her career, Kucka has pushed the boundaries of traditional painting, experimenting with unconventional techniques to create works that blur the line between two and three-dimensional art. Utilizing a variety of methods including burning or pouring paint, she creates works that focus on materiality and examines the interplay between physical and visual aspects of her chosen medium.’’

The D.M. Hunt Library in Falls Village, part of town town of Canaan in the Berkshires

Mass. city neighborhood to get geothermal heating/cooling system

Enhanced geothermal system 1: Reservoir 2: Pump house 3: Heat exchanger 4: turbine hall 5: Production well 6: Injection well 7: Hot water to district heating 8: Porous sediments 9: Observation well 10: Crystalline bedrock

“Eversource has officially begun a groundbreaking project to implement a one-of-its-kind heating system in a Framingham, Mass., neighborhood. 

“This program is designed to explore whether geothermal networks can be used in combination with, or instead of, traditional energy sources like natural gas or heating oil. To test this, Eversource plans to install and operate a geothermal network in a neighborhood in Framingham, providing indoor heating and cooling to about 150 customers within the one-mile-long loop that pipes 37 buildings (32 residential, five commercial).  

“‘We continue to invest in different kinds of technologies, but that’s not enough,’ said Joe Nolan, the utility’s president and chief executive officer. ‘That’s why we’re so excited to be here today around geothermal. I spend a lot of time on the road, I talk to our investors, I talk to our key decision-makers. This is one of the most exciting opportunities for me to ship now what is going on in geothermal.”’

The Common in Framingham Center

— Photo by Jerem43

#geothermal

#Eversource

#Framingham

'Sound's visual memory'

“Nightsong” (oil on canvas), by Boston-based artist Aaron Norfolk, in his show “Audio Visio,’’ at the Art Complex Museum, Duxbury, Mass., through Aug. 13

The museum says:

{Norfolk’s} “large, color-rich paintings begin with what he hears, not with what he sees.  He says, ‘Sight and sound run parallel in our perception, and these works do not intend to confound the two.  Rather, the interest is for the viewer to switch back and forth across subjectivity, allowing sound its visual memory.  As a word becomes a sound’s visual placeholder, so these paintings become their portrait.’’’

'Though his pass is middle-class'

James Michael Curley in 1949, in his final term as Boston mayor

Principal streets of the Back Bay, an affluent part of Boston

“I enjoy a tender pass
By the boss of Boston, Mass.,
Though his pass is middle-class
And not Back Bay
But I'm always true to you, darlin', in my fashion
Yes, I'm always true to you, darlin', in my way.’’

— From the song “Always True to You in My Fashion,’’ by Cole Porter, in the 1948 musical Kiss Me, Kate. The “boss” referred to was apparently the colorful and corrupt Mayor James Michael Curley (1874-1958).

Chris Powell: Don’t need to evoke sex to make students behave; deconstructing two big misnomers

The rainbow flag has become a symbol of LGBT culture and is flown a lot during “Pride Month’’. But why be “proud’’ of something believed to be mostly innate?

— Photo by Benson Kua

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Schools in Connecticut aren't doing as well as they once did teaching reading, math and the other academic basics, but they seem to be finding more time to address sexual subjects. The latest examples come from an elementary school in Granby and a middle school in Southington, where “Pride Month’’ videos were shown to students. News reports said the video shown in Granby involved transgenderism, and after it was shown, feminine-hygiene products were distributed to the boys as well as the girls in the audience.

The intent of these exercises is to discourage disparagement and bullying of students who are different or are suspected of being so. But the sexual aspects of these exercises raise questions of propagandizing, age-appropriateness and the pre-emption of parents.

That's why the exercises may be both too explicit and too narrow. For people are different in many ways apart from sexual orientation and gender identity -- different in race, ethnicity, religion, politics, and so forth. So why the emphasis lately on sexual orientation and gender, if not for propagandizing? Where are the tolerance-supporting videos about the many other differences?

Kids can be both cruel and cowardly. They are easily pressured into joining campaigns of bullying. But no lecture on sexual preferences or gender dysphoria is necessary to dissuade them. Instead kids can be instructed simply to behave decently toward their classmates -- to be polite and kind in school, to recognize that people have the right to their personal lives, to keep to themselves their judgments of those personal lives, and to understand that they will be disciplined sternly when they violate these standards.

Discipline long has been lacking in public education in Connecticut, even for the most disruptive students. Parents continue to complain that their children are bullied by classmates and that school administrators do little about it. If disparagement and bullying of students now are also chronic in regard to sexual orientation and gender identity, schools need more discipline, not more videos, propaganda, or distribution of feminine hygiene products to boys as well as girls.

xxx

Besides, Pride Month itself is a misnomer if, as Connecticut has presumed for more than 50 years, sexual orientation is largely innate, a matter of heredity and environment that, while nobody's business but one's own, is nothing to be proud about either, insofar as no one does anything to earn it.

Sometimes courage may be required for being candid about one's sexual orientation or gender identity, but that's a different issue. What should be celebrated here is not sexual or gender identity but the personal freedom the United States affords, its declaration "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

There is already a national holiday recognizing that. It is coming up in three weeks, though schools seem to be teaching less about it than about sexual orientation and gender identity.

xxx

Another misnomer is about to be celebrated: June 19, or Juneteenth, which is erroneously portrayed as marking the end of slavery in the United States toward the end of the Civil War, in 1865. In fact the date notes only the arrival of Union troops in Galveston, Texas, whereupon, in accordance with President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation 2½ years earlier, Gen. Gordon Granger declared the freedom of all slaves in the rebellious state.

But slavery continued in the country for another six months after Juneteenth -- remaining legal in New Jersey, Kentucky and Delaware -- until ratification of the 13th Amendment, on Dec. 6, 1865.

So if a special holiday is needed to mark the end of slavery, the proper date is Dec. 6.

It might be called Freedom Day and used to teach about slavery and the long and heroic political, religious, and military struggles to get rid of it. Such a holiday might teach about inequalities that remain today and can be traced back to slavery.

Instead the one thing people will learn from Juneteenth is false.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net). He’s a former managing editor of the (Manchester) Journal Inquirer

‘On a big expedition’

Shedd-Porter Memorial Library, in Alstead, N.H., was designed in the Beaux-Arts style by Boston architects William H. McLean and Albert H. Wright. It was built in 1910 as a gift from John Graves Shedd and Mary Roenna Porter in memory of their parents.

“The New England Thinkers

”Don't rush my sitting under the finch book tree. It has been dark for ten days and like two eyes feed one brain, we go driving. We are on an expedition to see the big numbers and wreckage of the floods.’’

— From the poem “The Continent Behind the College,’’ by Lesle Lewis

Ms. Lewis teaches at Landmark College (the college referred to), in Putney, Vt., and lives across the Connecticut River, in Alstead, N.H.

Without the aroma

“Graphic Marsh” (oil on gesso board), by Sue Dragoo Lembo, at Alpers Fine Art, Rockport, Mass.

The Great Marsh in Plum Island, Newbury, Rowley and Ipswich, Mass.

— Photo by Don Searls

‘If I can find it’

Ralph E. Flanders

“I’m a New Englander and most of us are pack rats. We save everything, old bedsprings, empty cartons, clothing that went out of style fifty years ago, and trunks full of papers. Every once in a while it’s worth it if I can find what I’ll looking for.’’

— Ralph E. Flanders (1880-1970), U.S. senator from Vermont (1946-1959), mechanical engineer, industrialist. and writer. A Republican, he helped put an end to the career of the demagogic liar Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R.-Wis.) His base was Springfield, Vt.

Black River Falls, in Springfield, Vt., about 1910

Sinewy

“Untitled 375” (marine vinyl and walnut wall sculpture), by Derrick Velasquez, in his show at Lanoue Gallery, Boston, through July 15

The gallery says:

“Derrick Velasquez is known for abstract sculptures that employ industrial materials to investigate people’s relationships with the built environment. His ‘Untitled’ series draws on the sinews of the human body, each wall-mounted piece carefully made with layered vinyl strips to evoke distorted rainbows or the growth rings of trees.’’

Who will fall over first?

“Old Friends” (water color and opaque watercolor over old graphite), by Winslow Homer (1836-1910) in the “Watercolors Unboxed” show at the Worcester Art Museum, through Sept. 10. He was one of New England’s greatest painters.

Sam Pizzigati: CEO's of defense contractors get very, very rich off taxpayers

The Springfield (Mass.)Armory, more formally known as the United States Armory and Arsenal at Springfield, was the primary center for making U.S. military firearms from 1777 until its closing, in 1968.

At Westover Air Reserve Base, an Air Force Reserve Command (AFRC) installation in the Massachusetts communities of Chicopee and Ludlow. Established at the outset of World War II, Westover is now the largest Air Force Reserve base in the United States, home to about 5,500 military and civilian personnel, and covering 2500 acres.

U.S. Naval Station Newport, in Newport and Middletown, R.I., on Aquidneck Island

Via OtherWords.org

BOSTON

Does anyone have a sweeter deal than military contractor CEOs?

The United States spent more last year on defense than the next 10 nations combined. A deal brokered the other week by the White House and House Republicans increases that amount even further — to $886 billion. Defense contractors will pocket about half of that.

Just eight years ago, the national defense community made do with over $300 billion less. But making do with “less” doesn’t come easy to corporate titans like Dave Calhoun, the CEO at Boeing, the nation’s second-largest defense contractor. Lockheed Martin is the biggest.

In March, Boeing’s annual filings revealed that Calhoun had missed his CEO performance targets and would not be receiving a $7 million bonus. As a result, Calhoun had to be content with a mere $22.5 million in 2022 — but to sweeten the deal, the Boeing board granted their CEO an extra stack of shares worth some $15 million at today’s value.

The Government Accountability Office may have had incidents just like that in mind when it urged the Pentagon to “comprehensively assess” its contract financing arrangements a few years ago.

This past April, the Department of Defense finally attempted to do it.

“In aggregate,” its report concludes, “the defense industry is financially healthy, and its financial health has improved over time.” But despite “increased profit and cash flow,” the DoD found, corporate contractors have chosen “to reduce the overall share of revenue” they spend on R&D.

Instead, they’re “significantly increasing the share of revenue paid to shareholders in cash dividends and share buybacks.” Those dividends and buybacks have jumped by an astounding 73 percent!

Contractor CEOs have been lining their pockets accordingly.

In 2021, the most recent year with complete stats, the nation’s top five weapons makers — Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman – grabbed over $116 billion in Pentagon contracts and paid their top executives $287 million, Pentagon-watcher William Hartung noted this past December.

Taxpayers subsidize these more-than-ample paychecks. Corporate giants like Boeing and Raytheon depend on government contracts for about half the dollars they rake in. For Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman, it’s at least 70 percent.

“Huge CEO compensation,” Hartung observes, “does nothing to advance the defense of the United States and everything to enrich a small number of individuals.”

Even before Biden and Republicans agreed to increase spending, the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) calculated the “militarized portion” of the federal budget at 62 percent of all discretionary spending.

We have precious little to show for this enormous expenditure.

“The post-9/11 ‘War on Terror,’ for example, has cost more than $8 trillion and contributed to a horrific death toll of 4.5 million people in affected regions,” the IPS report notes. “Meanwhile, a U.S. military budget that outpaces Russia’s by more than 10 to 1 has failed to prevent or end the Russian war in Ukraine.”

So what can we do? The IPS analysts advocate reducing the national military budget by at least $100 billion and reinvesting the savings in social programs.

Progressive members of Congress, meanwhile, have also been pushing for a major change in contracting standards. Rep. Jan Schakowsky’s (D.-Ill.) “Patriotic Corporations Act” would give companies with smaller pay gaps between their CEOs and workers a leg up in the bidding for federal defense contracts.

Or we could go the Franklin D. Roosevelt route. In the year after Pearl Harbor, FDR issued an order limiting top corporate executive pay to $25,000 after taxes — a move Roosevelt said was needed “to correct gross inequities and to provide for greater equality in contributing to the war effort.”

By the war’s end, America’s wealthy were paying federal taxes on income over $200,000 at a 94 percent rate. That top rate hovered around 90 percent for the next two decades and helped give birth to the first mass middle class the world had ever seen.

Miracles can happen.

Sam Pizzigati, based in Boston, co-edits Inequality.org at the Institute for Policy Studies. His books include The Case for a Maximum Wage and The Rich Don’t Always Win.

The past isn’t past

From the current “Freedom” issue of Lapham’s Quarterly (laphamsquarterly.org), published by the American Agora Foundation and the most fascinating journal in America.

John S. Long: June walks on Gaspee Point

View of Gaspee Point from the north. Taken from across Passeonkquis Cove.

—Photo by Magicpiano

June 3, 2023

I’m walking on Gaspee Point, in Warwick, R.I., again. The wind is out of the northeast at a steady 16 mph, and it feels 10 degrees cooler. I see an Osprey atop its nest, but to my distress the nest seems otherwise unoccupied following days of unrelenting rain. Tomorrow is a full moon (a Strawberry Moon), and the tide is quite low. Gray clouds and a slate-gray Narragansett Bay stretch out, southeast, toward Colt State Park, in Bristol.  Wind is whooshing through the trees. Otherwise, there’s silence except for a weed whacker sounding off above me on Gaspee Point’s high banks.

Only a handful of walkers are on the beach and the breakwater today. Iterations of waves intrude on the silence.  Rain recommences, and I recall (from several weeks ago) a great cacophonous raft of Brant Geese set to embark on their stunning 2,500-mile migration to Greenland’s north coast nesting areas.

There are many seaside thickets, and  pink, red and white beach roses bloom far back from high tide.  Wind-driven drizzle comes, but I’m sheltered by a grove of American Elderberry trees. 

There’s new sand in perfect smoothness--a beach nearly without human tracks.

June 10, 2023

I can hear a pair of Ospreys (cheereek, cheereek) on their nesting platform. Briefly, I think I’m seeing the female Osprey’s head as it pops up from the nest. Immediately, I’m wondering if there are baby Ospreys in the nest, even though it has been an cold fledgling season.

Now it’s high tide, and the wind’s from the southeast. Earlier this afternoon we had a passing shower.

Six Cormorants are resting and drying their wings on a broken erratic boulder 200 feet offshore. In winter water freezes within the boulder’s numerous cracks and pries it open oh so slowly.

A swath of the eastern sky is a robin’s egg blue with puffy clouds drifting in from the southeast.

On a shoal, edging the shipping channel, three quarters of a mile from shore is what had been Bullock Point Lighthouse--but only its granite pier remains. In my mind’s eye images of a Victorian gabled structure (1872) continue to fascinate me.

Walking north up the beach I note that one of the Ospreys (probably the male), with its wings nearly six feet across, brings new nesting branches clutched in his talons in a wide loop toward the nesting platform.  A successful new family of Ospreys?

John S. Long lives in Warwick.

Relishing ruins

At “The Bells,’’ in Newport

— Photo by GoLocalProv.com

The amphitheater, artificial ruins in Maria Enzersdorf, Austria, built in 1810/11

— Photo byu C.Stadler/Bwag

Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

The state-owned, graffiti-rich carriage house and stables of a once stately Newport mansion, which was built in 1876 and called “The Bells’’ and torn down in the ‘60s, will finally be demolished. That’s after four young people who were playing there were injured when part of the roof collapsed. The structures probably should have been demolished years ago.

Newport has its fair share of residential monuments from the first Gilded Age (semi-officially roughly 1870-1900, though some extend it through The Twenties), but I’d guess that few if any, others are in such a mess as “The Bells.’’ The current Gilded Age, still going strong, began in the 1980s, when, under the Reagan administration, taxes were slashed for the very rich.

Places like “The Bells’’ lure young “explorers,” especially boys, intent on mischief or innocent fun. I well remember as a kid entering (i.e., trespassing) such decayed mansions along the Massachusetts Bay shoreline near our house. Most were, or had been, summer places.  Perhaps some were abandoned, or just started to be neglected, when the owners ran out of money in The Depression. Most were gray-shingle houses that started to be put up after the Civil War. But some of the newer ones had Spanish Mission-style stucco walls, fountains and statuary, which were popular in The Roaring Twenties. Newly (if only briefly) rich people liked what they saw of these houses on Florida’s Gold Coast and in Los Angeles.

Kids would smoke in them (raising the danger of fire) or engage in such idiotic behavior as BB gun fights.

In the 18th Century and early 19th centuries in Europe,  especially in England, there was a mania for building fake ruins; some draw tourists to this day. Maybe some falling-down  Newport mansions can someday serve a similar purpose. Crumbling old houses covered with vines can look romantic, and are spawning grounds for entertaining ghost stories. Just kidding. The building inspectors probably wouldn’t allow it.

Art or food?

“The Tree of Crows” (oil on canvas), by Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840)

“Five crows, frock-coated in dignity, have arrived and sit upright and still on a bough. One thinks, ‘Oh beloved symbols of New England’ or ‘Drat those birds,’ depending upon whether one is planning a poem or a cornfield.’’

— Richard F. Merrifield (1905-1977), American essayist and novelist, in Monadnock Journal (1975). He lived in Keeene, N.H.

Stable conditions?

The Boston Athenæum building, as designed by Edward Clarke Cabot with additions by Henry Forbes Bigelow. The first part of the structure was put up in 1847. The institution itself was founded in 1807. It has become more public-friendly in recent years.

”New England is a finished place. Its destiny is that of Florence or Venice, not Milan while the American empire careens onward toward its unpredicted end. . . . It is the first American section to be finished to achieve stability in the conditions of its life. It is the first old civilization, the first permanent civilization in America.’’

Bernard DeVoto (1897-1955), American historian and essayist

The architecture of language

From Massachusetts artist Sarah Hulsey’s show “Source Material,’’ at Bromfield Gallery, Boston, through July 2

She says:

“My work is concerned with the architecture that underpins language, which we use effortlessly but with little awareness of its beauty and complexity. Even a simple sentence has layers and layers of organization, governed by a complex set of rules and interactions happening below the level of our conscious knowledge. Small pieces of information (atomic components, as it were) combine into ever larger units within the concurrent linguistic systems at play. These components are organized into elegant structures that exist only in the mind. In my artwork, I analyze these structures and create visual correlates, looking for poetry and resonance in the rich patterns that emerge. ‘‘

I compose abstract frameworks by building up nested and connected forms set within reticulated grids. Networks of these grids serve as armatures on which small elements abut, merge, and grow into higher order objects. In these pages, the underlying structures of sentences are segmented, excerpted, and then recombined into forms reflecting their core, essential relationships.

Chris Powell: Union secrecy; neither banned nor read; U.S. should pay its own way

“The Secret,’’ by Moritz Stifter (1857-1905), German and Austrian painter

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Congratulations to Connecticut state Rep. Holly Cheeseman for exploding a spectacular hypocrisy of state government arising from its long subservience to the government employee unions.

Last week the state House of Representatives was debating legislation that would conceal from the public the home addresses of nearly every state and municipal government employee. This would have impaired accountability in government, but then that was the point. Cheeseman, a Republican from East Lyme, noted that two years ago the General Assembly and Gov. Ned Lamont enacted legislation to allow unions to obtain the same information in pursuit of enrolling and mobilizing government employees against the public interest.

Another Republican state representative, Craig Fishbein, of Wallingford, noted that the address-concealing bill as it was introduced originally would have concealed addresses for employees in only two state agencies, the state attorney general's office and the Department of Aging and Disability Services.

Other legislators complained that the expansion of the bill had never gotten a public hearing, though of course any such hearing would have been dominated by the unions. As they were about to be given another inch, the unions strove to grab another mile with the help of their tools in the legislature.

With debate making the legislation seem less sensible and starting to consume too much time in the General Assembly's always frantic hours just prior to mandatory adjournment, the House Democratic majority leader, Jason Rojas of East Hartford, took the bill off the agenda. But it will return sooner or later, maybe with a provision to make it illegal to know anything unflattering about a government employee.

xxx

Now that Newtown's Board of Education has decided against removing from the local high school library two books that some townspeople considered too sexually explicit, people are celebrating the defeat of what news organizations like to call book banning.

But the placement of books in a public school library is always fairly a matter of judgment about age-appropriateness, just as the placement of any  book in a public library is always a matter of judgment on several levels. Anyone has a right to challenge these judgments, and democratic government is entitled to make them. There is no book banning here. The challenged books remain available outside the libraries to anyone who wants them. Indeed, challenges to books may increase their readership.

But that does not seem to have been the case with the two sexually explicit books at Newtown High School. As the school board voted to leave them in the library, the superintendent said one of the books had been checked out only once and the other not at all. The books may not exactly be great literature, and their sexual explicitness may not compare to the pornography to which high school students easily can gain access on the internet.

The lack of student interest in the challenged books invites another challenge to school officials. If there is so little interest in the books, why do they remain in the library? After all, every book that is stocked crowds out a book that isn't stocked. What isn't that considered book banning too?

xxx

While three of Connecticut's five U.S. representatives -- John Larson, Rosa DeLauro, and Jahana Hayes, all Democrats -- voted against the deal by President Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to raise the federal debt ceiling, they almost certainly did so by arrangement with the Democratic House leadership and the White House.

That is, the legislation had enough votes so that the three from Connecticut could be spared, allowing the three House members to strike the usual poses in favor of the needy, whose assistance might be slightly reduced by the legislation.

A compelling question remains unanswered. If this assistance is so crucial, why is essentially infinite debt needed to finance it, transferring the cost to future taxpayers and countries that foolishly buy U.S. government bonds?

Why can't the United States pay its own way in the present and the usual way -- with taxes and economizing elsewhere in the government budget?

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut politics and government for many years. (cpowell@cox.net)