Vox clamantis in deserto
Andy Miller/Markian Hawryluk: Do not-for-profit hospitals deserve their big tax breaks?
From Kaiser Family Foundation Health News
“With so many Americans struggling with medical debt and access to care, the need for hospitals to give back as much as they take grows stronger every day.”
—Vikas Saini, president of the Needham, Mass.-based Lown Institute
POTTSTOWN, Penn.
The public school system here had to scramble in 2018 when the local hospital, newly purchased, was converted to a tax-exempt nonprofit entity.
The takeover by Tower Health meant the 219-bed Pottstown Hospital no longer had to pay federal and state taxes. It also no longer had to pay local property taxes, taking away more than $900,000 a year from the already underfunded Pottstown School District, school officials said.
The district, about an hour’s drive from Philadelphia, had no choice but to trim expenses. It cut teacher aide positions and eliminated middle school foreign language classes.
“We have less curriculum, less coaches, less transportation,” said Superintendent Stephen Rodriguez.
The school system appealed Pottstown Hospital’s new nonprofit status, and earlier this year a state court struck down the facility’s property-tax break. It cited the “eye-popping” compensation for multiple Tower Health executives as contrary to how Pennsylvania law defines a charity.
The court decision, which Tower Health is appealing, stunned the nonprofit hospital industry, which includes roughly 3,000 nongovernment tax-exempt hospitals nationwide.
“The ruling sent a warning shot to all nonprofit hospitals, highlighting that their state and local tax exemptions, which are often greater than their federal income tax exemptions, can be challenged by state and local courts,” said Ge Bai, a health-policy expert at Johns Hopkins University.
The Pottstown case reflects the growing scrutiny of how much the nation’s nonprofit hospitals spend — and on what — to justify billions in state and federal tax breaks. In exchange for these savings, hospitals are supposed to provide community benefits, like care for those who can’t afford it and free health screenings.
More than a dozen states have considered or passed legislation to better define charity care, to increase transparency about the benefits hospitals provide, or, in some cases, to set minimum financial thresholds for charitable help to their communities.
The growing interest in how tax-exempt hospitals operate — from lawmakers, the public, and the media — has coincided with a stubborn increase in consumers’ medical debt. KFF Health News reported last year that more than 100 million Americans are saddled with medical bills they can’t pay, and has documented aggressive bill-collection practices by hospitals, many of them nonprofits.
In 2019, Oregon passed legislation to set floors on community benefit spending largely based on each hospital’s past expenditures as well as its operating profit margin. Illinois and Utah created spending requirements for hospitals based on the property taxes they would have been assessed as for-profit organizations.
And a congressional committee in April heard testimony on the issue.
“States have a general interest in understanding how much is being spent on community benefit and, increasingly, understanding what those expenditures are targeted at,” said Maureen Hensley-Quinn, a senior director at the National Academy for State Health Policy. “It’s not a blue or red state issue. It really is across the board that we’ve been seeing inquiries on this.”
Besides providing federal, state, and local tax breaks, nonprofit status also lets hospitals benefit from tax-exempt bond financing and receive charitable contributions that are tax-deductible for the donors. Policy analysts at KFF estimated the total value of nonprofit hospitals’ exemptions in 2020 at about $28 billion, much higher than the $16 billion in free or discounted services they provided through the charity care portion of their community benefits.
Federal law defines the sort of spending that can qualify as a community benefit but does not stipulate how much hospitals need to spend. The range of community benefit activities, reported by hospitals on IRS forms, varies considerably by organization. The spending typically includes charity care — broadly defined as free or discounted care to eligible patients. But it can also include underpayments from public health plans, as well as the costs of training medical professionals and doing research.
Hospitals also claim as community benefits the difference between what it costs to provide a service and what Medicaid pays them, known as the Medicaid shortfall. But some states and policy experts argue that shouldn’t count because higher payments from commercial insurance companies and uninsured patients paying cash cover those costs.
Bai, of Johns Hopkins, collaborated on a 2021 study that found for every $100 in total spending, nonprofit hospitals provided $2.30 in charity care, while for-profit hospitals provided $3.80.
Last month, another study in Health Affairs reported substantial growth in nonprofit hospitals’ operating profits and cash reserves from 2012 to 2019 “but no corresponding increase in charity care.”
And an April report by the Needham, Mass.-based Lown Institute, a health-care think tank, said more than 1,350 nonprofit hospitals have “fair share” deficits, meaning the value of their community investments fails to equal the value of their tax breaks.
“With so many Americans struggling with medical debt and access to care, the need for hospitals to give back as much as they take grows stronger every day,” said Vikas Saini, president of the institute.
The Lown Institute does not count compensating for the Medicaid shortfall, spending on research, or training medical professionals as part of hospitals’ “fair share.”
Hospitals have long argued they need to charge private insurance plans higher rates to make up for the Medicaid shortfall. But a recent state report from Colorado found that, even after accounting for low Medicaid and Medicare rates, hospitals get enough from private health insurance plans to provide more charity care and community benefits than they do currently and still turn a profit.
The American Hospital Association strongly disagrees with the Lown and Johns Hopkins analyses.
For many hospitals — after dozens of closures over the past 20 years — “just keeping your doors open is a clear community benefit,” said Melinda Reid Hatton, general counsel for the AHA. “You can’t focus entirely on charity care” as a measure of community benefit. Hospitals deliver nine times the community benefit for every dollar of federal tax avoided, Hatton said.
The 2010 Affordable Care Act, she noted, imposed additional community benefit mandates. Tax-exempt hospitals must conduct a community health needs assessment at least once every three years; establish a written financial assistance policy; and limit what they charge individuals eligible for that help. And they must make a reasonable attempt to determine if a patient is eligible for financial assistance before they take “extraordinary collection actions,” such as reporting people to the credit bureaus or placing a lien on their property.
Still, the Government Accountability Office, a congressional watchdog agency, argues that community benefit is poorly defined.
“They’re not requirements,” said Jessica Lucas-Judy, a GAO director. “It’s not clear what a hospital has to do to justify a tax exemption. What’s a sufficient benefit for one hospital may not be a sufficient benefit for another.” The GAO, in a 2020 report, said it found 30 nonprofit hospitals that got tax breaks in 2016 despite reporting no spending on community benefits.
The GAO then recommended Congress consider specifying the services and activities that demonstrate sufficient community benefit.
The tax and benefit question has become a bipartisan issue: Democrats criticize what they see as scant charity care, while Republicans wonder why nonprofit hospitals get a tax break.
In Georgia, Democratic lawmakers and the NAACP spearheaded the filing of a complaint to the IRS about Wellstar Health System’s nonprofit status after it closed two Atlanta-area hospitals in 2022. The complaint noted the system’s proposed merger with Augusta University Health, under which Wellstar would open a new hospital in an affluent suburban county.
“I understand you pledged over $800 million” in the deal with AU Health, state Sen. Nan Orrock, an Atlanta Democrat, told Wellstar executives at a recent legislative hearing, citing the system’s disinvestment in Atlanta. “Doesn’t sound like a nonprofit. It sounds like a for-profit approach.”
Wellstar said it provides more uncompensated health care services than any other system in Georgia, and that its 2022 community benefit totaled $1.2 billion. Wellstar attributed the closures to chronic financial losses and an inability to find a partner or buyer for the inner-city hospitals, which served a disproportionately large African American population.
In North Carolina, a Republican candidate for governor, state Treasurer Dale Folwell, said many hospitals “have disguised themselves as nonprofits.”
“They’re not doing the job. It should be patients over profits. It’s always now profits over patients,” he said.
Ideas for reforms, though, have run up against powerful hospital opposition.
Montana’s state health department proposed developing standards for community benefit spending after a 2020 legislative audit found nonprofit hospitals’ reporting vague and inconsistent. But the Montana Hospital Association opposed the plan, and the idea was dropped from the bill that passed.
Pennsylvania, though, has a unique but strong law, Bai said, requiring hospitals to prove they are a “purely public charity” and pass a five-pronged test. That may make the state an easier place to challenge tax exemptions, Bai said.
This year, the Pittsburgh mayor challenged the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center over the tax-exempt status of some of its properties.
Nationally, Bai said, “I don’t think hospitals will lose tax exemptions in the short run.”
But, she added, “there will likely be more pressure from the public and policymakers for hospitals to provide more community benefit.”
Andy Miller and Markian Hawryluk are KFF Health News reporters. KFF States editor Matt Volz contributed to this report.
Borders, seen and unseen
“The Beirut Memory Project #56, 2018-2021,’’ in the show “Disrupted, Borders,’’ by Ara Oshagan (digital collage, archival pigment print on velvet fine art paper), at the Armenian Museum of America, Watertown, Mass.
— Photo courtesy of the Armenian Museum of America
The museum says:
Oshagan is a "diasporic multi-disciplinary artist, curator, and cultural worker whose practice explores collective and personal histories of dispossession, legacies of violence, identity, and (un)imagined futures." The show "weaves together different geographies and spaces that considers the impact of borders (both visible and invisible) on our personal and collective history, past-present-future, and the disruption of dislocation."
Chris Powell: Wretched excess in the deep; Ellsberg’s lesson
— Photo by Jjm596
MANCHESTER, Conn.
As they descended toward their target 2½ miles under the North Atlantic, the five people aboard in the OceanGate Expeditions submersible vessel Titan were, at least superficially, aware of the risks they were taking for a close look at the wreck of RMS Titanic. They apparently had been compelled to provide a waiver of the company's liability, a waiver that repeatedly noted that the journey could be fatal.
But no one had been killed yet on such expeditions, and the five could consider themselves heroic explorers.
Since the wreck of the Titanic already had been discovered and extensively photographed, there was no necessity for the trip. To the vessel's pilot, the CEO of OceanGate Expeditions, it was a way of making a lot of money -- $250,000 per passenger. For his passengers the trip was more than a bit of arrogance and wretched excess.
Because the vessel imploded at great depth, there is little chance that its occupants suffered or even knew they were being killed. As many in the submarine service and industry in Connecticut know, death by implosion in the deep is instantaneous, a matter of milliseconds, too fast for the human brain to perceive.
In exchange for this mercy there will be no bodies to recover.
Many prayers sought the rescue of the occupants of the Titan, and their loss has been felt throughout the world. Instead of the granting of those prayers, the world has gotten two valuable reminders: first, of the limits imposed on mankind by the natural world, and second, of the incredibly precious smallness of the environment in which humans can survive. Despite many science-fiction movies to the contrary, the environmentalists are right in one respect: There is no Planet B.
While the ocean bottom holds many secrets, as the infinity of the universe does, mankind hardly needs to learn them as much as how to get along with itself and improve life where it can be lived: on the surface of the planet. Lives can be expended far better than in pursuit of another look at a shipwreck, and while the deep will always have to be challenged now and then, the poet George Gordon Byron (1788-1824) saw long ago that it would remain master.
Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean -- roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain.
Man marks the earth with ruin. His control
Stops with the shore. Upon the watery plain
The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain
A shadow of man's ravage, save his own,
When, for a moment, like a drop of rain,
He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,
Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown.
xxx
How should the country remember Daniel Ellsberg, who died the other week?
As national security adviser in 1971, Henry Kissinger called him “the most dangerous man in America” for copying classified documents about the Vietnam war -- the Pentagon Papers -- and distributing them to news organizations.
Ellsberg was charged with espionage. But the Pentagon Papers revealed nothing of battlefield use to the enemy. Instead they showed that the administrations of Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon had been lying to the country about the war. Ellsberg was dangerous only to dishonest and criminal government officials.
Ellsberg might have been convicted except for the crimes the Nixon administration committed in pursuit of him, illegally wiretapping him and burglarizing his psychiatrist's office. So the charges against him were dismissed.
The Ellsberg affair may have been understood best by Nixon aide H.R. Haldeman, a criminal himself. He was taped telling Nixon: "To the ordinary guy, all this is gobbledygook. But out of the gobbledygook comes a very clear thing. .... You can't trust the government. You can't believe what they say. And you can't rely on their judgment. The implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this, because it shows that people do things the president wants to do even though it's wrong, and the president can be wrong."
Has anything changed in 50 years?
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics and other topics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
WPA art
"Skyscrapers” (circa 1937) (oil on canvas), by Joseph Stella (1877-1946), in the WPA Collection, at the T.W. Wood Gallery, Montpelier, Vt.
The Federal Art Project (1935-1943) was a New Deal program to fund America’s arts projects under the Works Progress Administration (WPA). It sustained some 10,000 artists during the Great Depression.
In 1940, Magnus Fossum, a WPA artist, copying the 1770 coverlet "Boston Town Pattern" for the WPA’s Index of American Design.
WPA Pump Station, in Scituate, Mass., built in 1938
Study says New England needs to protect much more wildlands
Excerpted from ecoRI News by Rob Smith
PETERSHAM, Mass. (home of Harvard University’s research forest)
“New England isn’t conserving enough wildlands to mitigate climate change or meet conservation goals.
“That’s according to a new study released late last month by Wildlands, Woodlands, Farmlands and Communities (WWF&C), a coalition group of conservation organizations, educational institutions, local governments and private nonprofits.
“The first-of-its-kind analysis, performed jointly by (the} Harvard Forest of Harvard University, the Northeast Wilderness Trust and Highstead Foundation, examined how much wildlands — tracts of land where the management policy is to leave nature ‘alone’ and allow natural processes to prevail without human interference — are preserved across the region, and the answer is: not much.
“‘The wild condition of the land derives not from the land’s history, but from its freedom to operate untrammeled, today and in the future,’ wrote the study’s authors.
“The study lays out three criteria for land to meet its wildlands definition: the land must have a deliberate wildland purpose; it must be allowed to mature freely under prevailing environmental conditions with minimal human intervention; and it must be protected in perpetuity.
“The key factor in wildlands is time. In New England, where much of the land has been developed and used, wildlands are more likely to develop via natural rewilding, an ecological restoration practice that aims at reducing the influence of humans on ecosystems. Wildlands are more likely to look like recently clear-cut areas or former pastures than old growth forest.
“Only 1.3 million acres, around 3.3% of New England’s total land area, protects wildlands across 426 individual properties, with much of it limited to the remote and rural areas of the region, a band of land that stretches from northwestern Connecticut to Baxter State Park in Maine. Meanwhile WWF&C has set a goal of preserving 10% of the region as wildlands.’’
Diorama at the The Fisher Museum at the Harvard Forest, which offers exhibits on current research as well as 23 dioramas portraying the history, conservation and management of New England woodlands.
Llewellyn King: What happened to the kingmakers of journalism?
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
What happened to the kingmakers of journalism?
They seem to have died in 2011 with David Broder, of The Washington Post. In an age when columnists could still influence the flow of events, Broder stood out as much for what he wasn’t as for what he was.
He wasn’t, for example, a flashy writer. He didn’t have George Will’s turn of phrase. He didn’t add to the language like another kingmaker a generation before him, Walter Lippmann. Lippmann gave us “Great Society,” “Cold War” and “stereotype.”
What set Broder apart was the depth of his political reporting.
I worked with Broder at The Post, and he was relentless. If you were into politics, you were grist to his mill. From precinct captains to senators, they were all of interest to Broder, all worthy of his probing; all had a tale to tell, and Broder wanted to hear it.
Journalists at The Post used to drink in a genuinely downmarket bar called The New York Lounge, next to the better-known Post Pub, which, ironically, was eschewed by most of the editorial staff. Incongruously, Broder would be found there occasionally with some political apparatchik, notebook out and drinking a Diet Coke.
A reporter who traveled with Broder described how when they arrived in Midwestern city at 10 p.m., Broder got on the phone to see who of the local political establishment was up. It could have been a candidate or the local state party chairman; all were worth talking to in Broder’s world.
Whereas some newspaper grandees talked to presidents and the power elite (Lippmann helped Woodrow Wilson write his Fourteen Points, Joe Alsop shared sessions with Lyndon Johnson on the Vietnam War, and George Will rehearsed Ronald Reagan for his debates with Jimmy Carter), Broder reported relentlessly at all levels.
For all but the very end of his career, Broder worked as a reporter who wrote two columns a week. This industrious reporting underpinned the columns. They were magisterial and analytical.
You didn’t pick them up to be entertained but to get insight. That is where Broder’s strength lay, and that is what made him a kingmaker. Other political journalists and writers read Broder and were informed by him.
He told them which way the wind was blowing, and that filled their sails and influenced their work. Broder informed the political universe.
That is how he affected the careers of many a political grandee. He said in his studious and understated way, “Look at so-and-so.” And they looked, and then they wrote, and the landscape was changed.
I recall vividly a lunch at the Financial Times headquarters in London in 1975. Apart from FT people who included, as I recall, David Fishlock, the science editor, there was Virginia Hamill from The Washington Post News Service and Bernard Ingham, who was to become Margaret Thatcher’s press secretary.
The talk was about who would win the Democratic nomination. I had flown in from Washington the day before and had read Broder in The Post, so I blurted out, “Jimmy Carter.” The group looked askance and wanted to know why I had such a crazy idea. I replied, “Because Broder has discovered him.”
Broder’s influence was subtle but pervasive. He was the reporter’s reporter, the columnist’s columnist.
In the time since Broder’s death, everything has changed. There is so much commentary based on little reporting and politics is dominated by click-bait politicians — for example, Donald Trump, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert.
Analysis has been replaced with tribal bellowing, and social media has taken the debate off the editorial pages and handed it to influencers, who wouldn’t have gotten a letter to the editor published before the internet.
While dwelling on the kingmakers of old, it is worth mentioning the king-humblers, particularly Robert Novak. Novak got the goods.
Again, Novak wasn’t a great writer but was the source of hard gossip. If you wanted to point to wrongdoing in high places, a call to Novak would set the wheels of justice, or at least the downfall would be in motion.
Novak, a friend, thought that you should tell readers what they didn’t already know — and he did, often changing career trajectories for politicos.
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.
White House Chronicle
Just ignore the Canadian smoke
Looking west toward the Adirondack Mountains and Lake Champlain from Charlotte's, Vt.
— Photo by Niranjan Arminius
Riverbank restoration project along the Connecticut River in Fairlee, Vt.
”Look. And smell. Breathe deeply. Feel the air; touch it now and sense its purity, its vigor, its super-constant rejuvenation (that supposedly has given Vermonters their long life — if you discount their stubbornness).’’
— Evan Hill, in The Connecticut River (1970
‘Dig out King George’s coffin'
Federal marshals escort slave Anthony Burns to a ship amidst protests by Boston’s many abolitionists.
To get betimes in Boston town, I rose this morning early;
Here’s a good place at the corner—I must stand and see the show.
Clear the way there, Jonathan!
Way for the President’s marshal! Way for the government cannon!
Way for the Federal foot and dragoons—and the apparitions copiously
tumbling.
I love to look on the stars and stripes—I hope the fifes will play
Yankee Doodle.
How bright shine the cutlasses of the foremost troops!
Every man holds his revolver, marching stiff through Boston town.
A fog follows—antiques of the same come limping,
Some appear wooden—legged, and some appear bandaged and bloodless. 10
Why this is indeed a show! It has called the dead out of the earth!
The old grave—yards of the hills have hurried to see!
Phantoms! phantoms countless by flank and rear!
Cock’d hats of mothy mould! crutches made of mist!
Arms in slings! old men leaning on young men’s shoulders!
What troubles you, Yankee phantoms? What is all this chattering of
bare gums?
Does the ague convulse your limbs? Do you mistake your crutches for
fire—locks, and level them?
If you blind your eyes with tears, you will not see the President’s
marshal;
If you groan such groans, you might balk the government cannon.
For shame, old maniacs! Bring down those toss’d arms, and let your
white hair be; 20
Here gape your great grand—sons—their wives gaze at them from the
windows,
See how well dress’d—see how orderly they conduct themselves.
Worse and worse! Can’t you stand it? Are you retreating?
Is this hour with the living too dead for you?
Retreat then! Pell—mell!
To your graves! Back! back to the hills, old limpers!
I do not think you belong here, anyhow.
But there is one thing that belongs here—shall I tell you what it
is, gentlemen of Boston?
I will whisper it to the Mayor—he shall send a committee to England;
They shall get a grant from the Parliament, go with a cart to the
royal vault—haste! 30
Dig out King George’s coffin, unwrap him quick from the grave—
clothes, box up his bones for a journey;
Find a swift Yankee clipper—here is freight for you, black—bellied
clipper,
Up with your anchor! shake out your sails! steer straight toward
Boston bay.
Now call for the President’s marshal again, bring out the government
cannon,
Fetch home the roarers from Congress, make another procession, guard
it with foot and dragoons.
This centre—piece for them:
Look! all orderly citizens—look from the windows, women!
The committee open the box, set up the regal ribs, glue those that
will not stay,
Clap the skull on top of the ribs, and clap a crown on top of the
skull.
You have got your revenge, old buster! The crown is come to its own,
and more than its own.
Stick your hands in your pockets, Jonathan—you are a made man from
this day; 40
You are mighty cute—and here is one of your bargains.
— “A Boston Ballad” (1854), by Walt Whitman (1819-1992). This poem protests the case of escaped slave Anthony Burns in 1854, wherein a federal judge decreed Burns should be returned to his owner. Because Boston was strongly abolitionist, masses came out to jeer at the marshals who were charged with escorting Burns to the ship that would take him back to the South.
Before we go extinct, too
“Where Did the Dinosaurs Go?’’, by Connecticut artist and art teacher Lily Morgan, at The Norwalk (Conn.) Art Space.
The gallery says:
“Her work explores the relationship between abstraction, geometry and realism. Her paintings are built, layer by layer, and increase in complexity as they move towards the surface.’’
Coastal atmosphere
“William Shattuck: Paintings, Drawings and a Book!” (opening July 8) at Dedee Shattuck Gallery, Westport, Mass.
This quote from Mr. Shattuck is via the New Bedford Whaling Museum:
“Drawn in by color, composition and light, I find I’m also inspired just as easily by the temperature, the character of the air and atmosphere in the moment. I am not a Plein Air painter by any means, but I do spend a good deal of time walking through the fields, woods and marshes along this shoreline, noting the beauty and interplay between land, water and sky. I’ll sometimes make a line drawing with color notes, then eventually execute a finished piece in my studio.”
xxx
The Whaling Museum’s note:
“William Shattuck lives in Southeastern Massachusetts. His paintings reflect a fascination with the tidal marshes, estuaries and woodlands along that coastline. Having moved there in 1980 from New York, he has appreciated the changing patterns of light and weather throughout different seasons and times of day.’’
#Dedee Shattuck Gallery
#Westport, Mass.
#William Shattuck
Jim Hightower: Roger Payne was the man who discovered the music of whales
Humpback whale breaching
Via OtherWords.org
When you think of Americans whose music has made a lasting difference, you might think of Scott Joplin, Woody Guthrie, Maybelle Carter, Harry Belafonte … or Roger Payne.
Who? I came across Payne in an obituary reporting that he’d died at age 88 on June 10 at his home, in South Woodstock, Vt.
Yes, I occasionally scan the obits, not out of morbid curiosity, but because these little death notices encompass our people’s history, reconnecting us to common lives that had some small or surprisingly large impact.
Payne’s impact is still reverberating around the globe, even though few know his name. A biologist who studied moths, in the 1960s he chanced upon a technical military recording of undersea sounds that incidentally included a cacophony of baying, shrieking, mooing, squealing, and caterwauling.
They were the voices of humpback whales.
What others had considered noise “blew my mind,” Payne said, describing them as a musical chorus of “exuberant, uninterrupted rivers of sound.” His life’s work shifted from moths to whales and finally to the interdependence of all species..
At the time, whales were treated by industry and governments as dull, lumbering nuisances. But Payne’s musical instincts came into play, sensing that the “singing” of these magnificent mammals might reach the primordial soul of humans. Perhaps that Payne’s mother was a music teacher had a role.
So he collected their rhythmic, haunting melodies into a momentous 1970 recording titled Songs of the Humpback Whale. It became a huge best-seller, altered public perception, and spawned a global “Save the Whales” campaign — one of the most successful conservation movements ever.
Without writing or performing a single musical note, this scientist produced a truly powerful serenade from nature that continues to make a difference.
To connect with Roger Payne’s work and help extend his deep understanding that all of us beings are related, contact the global advocacy group he founded, Ocean Alliance, at whale.org.
OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker.
Classic New England church in South Woodstock, Vt.
— Photo by Doug Kerr
#Roger Payne
#humpback whales
Information, please
We seek suggestions about interesting, dynamic people aged 70 or over, and in New England, to interview who are still working because they want to.
Please send suggested names to:
rwhitcomb4@cox.net
But beware the jungle
”Terrace Oasis” (watercolor), by West Barnstable, Mass.-based Brenda Bechtel, at the New England Watercolor Society Gallery’s 2023 “Celebrating New England’’ show, at the gallery, in Plymouth, Mass., through Sept. 7.
The gallery says:
“{The} exhibition … brings together 49 works from New England Watercolor Society members. The show is juried by Vladislav Yeliseyev, a Signature Member of the National Watercolor Society and the American Impressionist Society.’’
#Brenda Bechtel
#New England Watercolor Society
Don Pesci: In Connecticut (!) at a glorious center of conservatism on the Glorious Fourth
“Writing the Declaration of Independence, 1776,” a 1900 painting by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris depicting Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson working on the document.
SOMERS, Conn.
The Fourth of July this year, as everyone in Connecticut who has tolerated the weather the past few days well knows, was wet. The weather, along with fidgety concerns about the effect of fireworks displays on an apparently violated environment, have thrown cold water on John Adams’s view of a proper celebration of independence.
“The Second Day of July 1776,” Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail, on the occasion of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, “will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival [of Independence] …It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.”
The official celebration of Independence on July 4, pedants will note, is off by two days.
The weather did not matter on this July 4, as the Blake Center for Faith and Freedom, an offshoot of Hillsdale College, in the city of the same name in Michigan, celebrated the real founding in 1776 of the United States of America. All the fireworks were inside the center in Somers.
My wife, Andree, and I were in attendance and found the building itself, a brick-by-brick recreation of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, astonishing, along with the company in attendance, a crowd who draw comfort and illumination from the Founding Fathers of the country; the Blake Center’s executive director, Labin Duke, and the two speakers – Hillsdale Professors Thomas West and David Azerrad, – who shed illumination, if not pomp, on the subjects they chose to present.
The first speaker, West, the author of The Political Theory of the American Founding; Natural Rights, Public Policy, and the Moral Conditions of Freedom, limited his remarks to a discussion of the foundational understanding of modern views concerning the odd shape of our post-liberal foreign and domestic policy. What would the Founders, for instance, have thought of an interventionist foreign policy – that is, an activist foreign policy in which one nation imposes its political views upon another?
Most of them would have felt, as John Adams did, that “America is the friend of liberty everywhere, but the custodian only of our own.” And then, too, there is Washington, the weld of the American Revolution, warning his fellows to avoid “entangling alliances.”
The second speaker, David Azerrad, ventured into our current Marxist-inflected mare’s nest – are we all racists?
The short answer, although there continues to exist in our relatively racist-free society some real racists who continue by their morally offensive and unorthodox behavior to prove the rule that the United States has left racism behind us. Such obnoxious idiots might well profit from a Hillsdale education and a careful reading of the Declaration of Independence, written chiefly by Thomas Jefferson -- “We hold these truths to be self-evident, 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” -- himself a slave owner.
That declaratory bit concerning “natural rights” having been authored by the Christian God who endowed mankind with “certain unalienable Rights,” among which are “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness…” is the wooden stake thrust into the heart of a vampire-like slavery, done to death in a Union-shattering Civil War watered with the blood of patriots at Shiloh and Gettysburg.
The founder of the Friendly’s restaurant chain, S. Prestley Blake, and his wife, Helen, at first sold the property to one buyer, later repurchased it and then more or less gifted it to Hillsdale, in 2019.
In four short years, The Blake Center for Faith and Freedom has become, its patrons realize, an inestimable pearl of wisdom located providentially on the border of Connecticut and Massachusetts.
We should count ourselves lucky – though the center itself regards such “luck” as providential – to have in our presence such a pearl buried deep in an ocean of muddy neo-progressive nonsense. And all of us know for a certainty that no one may reach the pearl without a deep personal dive into history, the U.S. Constitution, the deposit of Christian faith and morals, and the luminous writings of honored precursors of the American experiment in ordered liberty.
Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based columnist.
#Blake Center for Faith and Freedom
Stare from the deep past
“Athenian fragment of a face,’’ (archival pigment print, oil, resin, wood ), by Boston-based artist Jennifer Liston Munson, in her show “Looking In + Looking Out,’’ at Kingston Gallery, Boston, July 5-July 30.
Her artist’s statement includes:
“Jennifer Liston Munson’s work for her show …. creates lenses for the viewer to look in and for the subjects themselves to look back out. Her selection of art objects, ghostly figures, and landscapes call into question historical collection practices, the complexity of narratives, and the notion of belonging. ‘Looking In + Looking Out’ incorporates images of objects held in museum collections, photographs of unknown relatives, and abandoned historically significant interiors. In some of the pieces, Liston Munson makes the landscape the subject; spaces, trees, and enigmatic watery pools that remain while the bodies they contain dissolve to time, as layers of paint ooze from the edges to mark the art making process and the past. Other works look at architecture and history close up, making the past present.’’
#Kingston Gallery
‘Dread revelations’
“Maine Woods” (oil paint), by Marsden Hartley (1877-1943)
Mount Katahdin in October
“Oh that we might be left alone for hours, to watch the changes of the landscape and hear the secret voice and dread revelations of these magnificent mountains! There are thoughts, deep and holy, which float through one’s mind, as, gazing down upon such a scene, one contrasts the smallness of man with the magnitude of God’s works, and in the weird silence contemplates the perishable of this world with the everlasting hills.
— From Canoe and Camera: A Two Hundred Mile Tour Through the Maine Forests, by Thomas Sedgwick Steele (1845-1903), American painter, photographer, writer and outdoorsman
Llewellyn King: Beware the dead hand of bad regulation
The Seabrook Nuclear
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
It is argued that if the Titan submersible had been certified (read peer-reviewed), the deadly accident, which killed all five on board, wouldn’t have taken place. That may or not be true.
Now there are calls for adventurism tourism to be regulated. I submit that if it is subject to regulation (read licensing), there will be very little of it — and it will be more expensive.
These days, there are calls to regulate everything from artificial intelligence to social media. Be warned: Whereas regulation does and should protect the public’s safety, it also has a dead hand. It curbs invention. It is comfortable with the known not the unknown. Purely seeking safety sets up a timid regime.
You want inventions to be safe but also free to evolve. The dynamic of the undertaking is crucial.
Regulations can have a negative dynamic or a positive one. They both seek to protect the public’s health and safety but with differing results.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has the duty to regulate nuclear power and materials. It does this conscientiously but not progressively.
Evolution in nuclear power is very slow and difficult because of the NRC. Every wire, nut and bolt, pump and pipe in the nuclear steam supply system gets certified. And every change needs certification.
The result is that engineers design to pass NRC muster, not to reach into the great unknown of possibility or the soaring spirit of creative invention. The problem isn’t with the NRC staff but with its mandate.
Nowadays, there is a resurgence of interest in nuclear power with small modular reactors, some using unproven but promising designs and technologies that haven’t been investigated since the 1960s, which was the end of the first wave of nuclear invention.
Some small modular reactors are being developed by U.S. companies in Canada and China so as to avoid initial NRC approval. Not that the promoters want to make an unsafe reactor but because if you are at the cutting-edge of invention, it is hard to deal with the safety mandate that is the driving force in the NRC.
Originally, safety and promotion were both handled by the Atomic Energy Commission. That agency had promotion as its primary function but as it well understood that nuclear can be very dangerous, it also had a regulatory function.
I covered the AEC as a reporter and, frankly, its regulation worked as well as what has succeeded it, namely the NRC.
The argument against the AEC reached a crescendo in the early 1970s, with relentless pressure from environmentalists and consumer groups, spearheaded by Ralph Nader, behind the slogan,“It’s its own policeman.”
But what the AEC had, which is now lacking, is a creative dynamic to develop new uses for nuclear but safely. It worked: Experimental reactors were built and experimentation with everything from nuclear stimulation of natural gas reserves — basically nuclear fracking — to a variety of cutting-edge reactors at the Idaho and Oak Ridge national laboratories.
Contrast the stultification in nuclear with the progress in aviation where the Federal Aviation Administration both promotes flying and regulates it, and certifies airplanes.
Of course, there have been mistakes and there are frequent accusations that the FAA is too close to Boeing and the airlines. The most egregious failure might have been in certifying the Boeing 737 Max without insisting on better pilot training on a tricky airplane. The result was two catastrophic crashes with non-U.S. airlines.
Yet the skies are still safe, and they are filled with passenger and cargo aircraft that are evolving with each new technology coming along. When it comes to light aircraft, the FAA has been able to accommodate and find airworthy many new airplanes, from ultralights to aerobatic-certified engines and airframes, some from overseas.
These are exciting times for technology and the recreation it makes possible, and we shouldn’t regulate with the wrong dynamics.
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.
Dragons on the other side of the fog?
Foggy Cotuit Harbor, on Cape Cod, on this long, long July 4th weekend.
— Photo by Lydia Whitcomb
Close-up view of the dragons on the 1265 Psalter world map. Medieval mapmakers would often draw dragons to populate unexplored parts of the world.
Six historic New England Fourth of July celebrations; deconstructing inherited patriotic ‘pride’
Poster for the 1942 hit movie about Providence native George M. Cohan, starring the mega movie star and part-time Martha’s Vineyard resident James Cagney
Bristol, R.I.’s 232nd Fourth of July parade, in 2017
Read here about six historic New England Fourth of July celebrations.
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
Especially on “The Glorious Fourth,’’ we’re all supposed to say that we’re proud to be Americans, though most of us became citizens through the accident of birth; we didn’t choose to be here, however much we like it or not. If we had been born in another nation and stayed there, we’d probably be waving its flag and saying how “proud’’ we are to be its citizens. Call it passive pride. Or vacuous.
Of course, there are some American things to be “proud of’’’ and some to be ashamed of. I’ve never quite gotten all this “proud” stuff – “proud to have blue eyes,’’ “proud to be black and gay,” “Pride Week,’’ etc.
“Proud to exist”?
It’s one of those quirky things, such as religious believers and their clergies saying that they firmly believe that such and such dead person is heading to eternal joy in heaven even as they call the death a tragedy. And why have so many people become so afraid of death that more and more of them say someone “passed’’ instead of died? That reminds me of when writers of newspaper obituaries were warned by survivors, funeral homes and editors not to give “cancer” as the cause of death. Too scary. It was almost as if they feared using the word would give them the disease.
Like patriotism, religion is mostly inherited. If we’re born in, say, Iran we’re almost certainly Muslim, in India, Hindu, and in America, probably Christian. Not a lot of personal theological exploration going in.
I’ve never been particularly patriotic in the “my country right or wrong’’ way. Rather, I’m “proud’’ to say that I support the principles of liberal democracy and open societies that originated in Western Europe and are always under attack, including, increasingly, in the United States in the past few years.
To me, the real patriots are those who openly recognize America’s good and bad elements and try to help make the nation more just, fair and prosperous, not those who wrap themselves in flags and yell “USA! USA! USA!’’.
Don’t blow off your fingers with an illegal M-80 on Tuesday! When I was a kid, we often set off our July 4 explosives on a beach -- less chance of starting a conflagration. I still can smell the rich mingled aromas of black powder and seaweed.