Tenacious and beauteous
“You can see the goldenrod, that most tenacious and pernicious and beauteous of all New England flora, bowing away from the wind like a great and silent congregation.”
— Maine-based novelist Stephen King (born 1947), in Salem’s Lot
Linda Gasparello: ‘Smart City’ on the Athens Riviera
Mural across the street from the Wyndham Grand in Athens. The mural’s title is “So many books, so little time.’’
In the Hellenistic age, which began with the death of Alexander the Great, in 323 B.C. and ended with Rome’s conquest of Egypt, in 30 B.C., Greek architects went colossal. The ruined Temple of Olympian Zeus, which stands in the center of Athens, exemplifies the temples, theaters and stadia that were the main features of the towns and cities of the age.
Today, just a half hour’s drive southeast of Athens, on the Athens Riviera, a mega-city is under construction, harkening back to the Hellenistic age cities.
The $8.2 billion Ellinikon project is underway on the site of Hellinikon International Airport, which closed in 2001. The site also housed facilities for the 2004 summer Olympics.
The Ellinikon is supposed to be a “smart city,” with high-end shopping, restaurants, housing, an athletic club, hotels and a sprawling public park.
Now open: the Experience Center, in the largest of the three airport hangars, and Park, where visitors can get an idea of what will be built via a series of virtual exhibitions.
One of the interactive models at the center’s ‘‘Living a New Era’’ exhibition uses more than 25,000 individual pieces to highlight the Ellinikon’s green spaces, next-generation designs and infrastructure projects. Visitors can also cruise the coastline aboard a simulated speedboat at the ‘‘Living by the Sea’’ exhibition or check out the Botanical Library. You can even take a virtual stroll through the ‘‘Night Garden Dome,’’ which emulates the park at night with a series of light strips, sounds and scents, according to the Robb Report, the luxury lifestyle magazine.
The Ellinikon will open in phases. The first phase, including Marina Tower — Greece’s first residential high-rise, designed by Britain’s Foster + Partners — and a retail and dining galleria, is expected to open in 2025. This will be followed by the launch of a sporting complex, marina and next-generation transportation system.
A number of international architectural firms are involved with the Ellinikon. From what I have seen of Foster + Partners’ work in the capital cities of Astana, Kazakhstan and Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, they will do the Hellenistic age proud.
Down to the Sea in Ships
Cape Sounion, on the southernmost tip of the Attica peninsula, was an emotionally important place for the ancient Athenians.
According to the myth, Aegeus, king of Athens, threw himself from a cliff into the sea because of a misunderstanding: Aegeus had told his son, Theseus, that upon returning to Athens, he was to fly a white sail if he had triumphed over the Minotaur, and to instruct the crew to raise a black sail if he had been killed. Theseus, forgetting his father’s direction, flew a black sail as he returned. The grieving king fatally jumped from a cliff into the sea, giving the sea its name, Aegean, and his son the kingdom.
The Temple of Poseidon
The ancient Athenians decided to build a temple there, dedicated to Poseidon, the god of the sea, to ensure fair winds and following seas for their seafarers and warriors. The temple was rebuilt three times, the last by Pericles, the Athenian statesman, probably around 440 B.C., but only some of the Doric columns stand today.
During a visit in 1810, poet, Grecophile and graffitist Lord Byron engraved “Byron” on one of the columns.
At a Temple of Poseidon overlook, I watched a sailboat in irons — the sails were luffing, it was drifting. The captain and crew were struggling to resume forward motion.
The scene was poignant — a reminder that the ancient Greeks feared ships and the sea. But most of all, they feared disappearing without a trace at sea. Death by drowning meant you gained no fame — no one to tell the tale of how you died — and no closure for yourself and your loved ones.
Telemachus, the son of Odysseus, the wandering hero of Homer’s epic poem, yearned to stop grieving and get on with his life.
In the Robert Fagles translation of The Odyssey, Telemachus — now a 20-year-old, but just a babe when his father set sail for Troy — says bitterly, “I would never have grieved so much about his death if he had gone down with comrades off Troy or died in the arms of loved ones, once he had wound down the long coil of war.
“Then all united Achaea would have raised his tomb and he would have won his son great fame for years to come.
“But now the whirlwinds have ripped him away, no fame for him! He is lost and gone now — out of sight, out of mind — and he has left me tears and grief.”
On June 14, a fishing vessel carrying hundreds of refugees, the Adriana, sank off the Greek port city of Pylos. About 600 people, including children, drowned. Investigations by numerous organizations are close to concluding that the Adriana was towed by the Greek coast guard towards Italian waters and then, when this was unsuccessful, capsized.
Hundreds from Africa and the Middle East — mostly from Pakistan — are lost and gone, and their loved ones have been left with tears,
From Dereliction to Destination
The Metaxourgeio neighborhood around the Wyndham Grand in Athens, where my husband and I and a friend stayed for a week, is tumbledown.
It is one of the oldest neighborhoods in Athens. The upper class lived there until the opening of the Athanasios Douroutis silk factory, which gave the neighborhood its name (metaxourgeio means “silk mill”) and brought in the working class.
When the silk factory closed down in 1875 (it now houses the Municipal Art Gallery), the neighborhood started its long slide into dereliction.
Some tourism Web sites describe it gently as a “transition neighborhood” in the city center, which is gaining a reputation as an artistic neighborhood, due to the opening of art galleries, theaters and cafes. Others say is known for its large number of cheap brothels, drug addicts, transsexuals and Middle Eastern immigrants.
One cab driver fumed about the ticky-tacky tourist shops on a street near the Wyndham Grand.
“They are owned by the migrant criminals from Pakistan. Their gangs rob people on the streets and in the metro,” he said, referring to the Metaxourgeio Metro Station.
Such anti-migrant sentiment has been growing in Greece, and lead to the biggest surprise in the country’s parliamentary elections on June 25: The little-known, far-right Spartans party, which campaigned strongly on the idea that Greece was threatened by uncontrolled migration, won 4.7 percent of the vote, becoming the fifth biggest group in the 300-seat parliament, according to newspaper reports.
I must report that I had an encounter with a criminal in Athens: A Greek cabbie whose preposterous fare from the National Archaeological Museum to the Wyndham Grand gave new meaning to the Golden Fleece.
Metaxourgeio Murals
Athens has some of the finest street art in the world — and it has brightened up the blighted Metaxourgeio.
On the side of a building across the street from the Wyndham Grand, there is a mural of a young woman sitting on a window seat, reading a book and revealing a knee. There are books piled up behind her. The title of the mural, painted by SimpleG, is “So many books, so little time.”
Across the circle in front of the hotel, there is a mural, painted by Leonidas Giannakopoulos, that will stop you in your tracks. It depicts a fish disgorging a woman, upon whose wavy hair a twin-masted ship is sailing.
As noted on a bottom corner, the mural was painted during the Petit Paris d’Athene, 2021 — the eighth year of a 10-day art and culture festival in underserved areas of the city, co-organized by the Athenian Art Network and the Cultural, Arts and Youth Organization of the Municipality of Athens, and supported by the French press and the French Institute in Greece.
Alexander the Great
There are great restaurants all over Athens. And there is the Alexander the Great: a restaurant where performance art meets culinary art.
While the owner, Alexander, greets and gabs with the customers, applause-worthy traditional food — taramosalata, grilled fish, moussaka, pork souvlaki and lamb chops — comes out of the kitchen. Dinner theater — and so reasonably priced.
On the day we arrived in Athens, we ate there for convenience — the restaurant is across the street from the Wyndham Grand and has tented, sidewalk seating on the same side of the street as the hotel. But we kept returning for what was some of the best food — and often just for Alexander’s great coffee — and fun on our trip. Bravo, Alexander!
Linda Gasparello is co-host and producer of White House Chronicle, on PBS. She is based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
The genius of Robert Cray
Robert Cray in concert in 2007
PROVINCETOWN, Mass.
"To say that Robert Cray is a transformational figure for my generation, Gen-X, would not be hyperbole.’’
— "Braintree Jim," the DJ who spins for WOMR , on Cape Cod.
Cray is a singer, songwriter guitarist, known for his unique hybrid of blues and soul. He is a five-time Grammy award winner who has released 19 studio albums, along with an assortment of live recordings and compilations. The Robert Cray Band may not be a household name today, but it has achieved international recognition in the nearly 50 years it, and various iterations, have performed during that time. Cray, who turned 70 earlier this month, regularly visits New England on a relentless, annual touring schedule. He will be spending time here on the Outer Cape during August and into September.
The DJ, who hosts the radio show called Target Ship Radio, further explains his rationale. "I was attending Providence College during the mid-’80’s when Cray's breakthrough album 'Strong Persuader' was released, in late 1986. When I first heard the single 'Smoking Gun' on the radio I simply had to get the album. I was totally taken by it and played it repeatedly. I still have the cassette today."
He recalls that pivotal time for young music fans. "Back then, the ascendant genre was hip hop. Many of my friends were attracted to that whole scene. And by the late 80s, even MTV was showcasing that music. But when I heard Robert Cray, principally a blues guy back then, I went back, not forward. Not only did I buy his back catalog work, which was fantastic, he really helped me discover the blues as a whole other art form.
"Cray, along with Stevie Ray Vaughan, Eric Clapton -- and even Albert Collins and Billy Gibbons -- were part of this exciting blues revival in the 80s and into the early 90s. For me, Cray played an instrumental part in this movement. Cray was affable, the music was accessible. In fact, his whole persona was quite approachable. He was making MTV-style videos that both young men and women found entertaining. And remember, his first national TV debut was on Late Night With David Letterman. By the ‘90s, he was morphing into a soul and R&B performer. He could deliver searing blues numbers for sure, but his music was adapting. That's why I think he's retained this rather remarkable staying power."
Braintree Jim is planning a Robert Cray retrospective on his next show on the Provincetown radio station. "I really think," he reasons, "that Robert Cray should be a bigger name. He's got an unbelievable canon of work that I wish more people heard. So, I want to dedicate three hours of my next show and pay tribute to his music. And he has collaborated with so many people, like Tina Turner, BB King, and Chuck Berry, just to name a few. And he still rips it up on tour. His voice is still the same after all these years and his guitar chops are also still intact."
The radio host further adds that, "I may have eventually discovered the blues without Robert Cray. But It's safe to say that his music really inspired me to appreciate the art form and dig into its rich history. Many of my generation discovered the blues because of Robert Cray. That alone makes him worthy of a three-hour radio show. But the music is so good that it will be tough to boil it down into that time frame. But I'll have fun doing it! That's the great thing about WOMR. I have this incredible level of autonomy in what I can play. That's virtually unheard of in radio today. I will be representing the station at the upcoming concert, too. It doesn't get much better than this."
The Robert Cray Band will be performing at the Payomet Performing Arts Center, in North Truro, Mass., on Tuesday, Aug. 29, beginning at 7 p.m. Tickets are still available.
Payomet is celebrating its 25th year in 2023 as one of the Cape's leading producers of live music, circus, theatre, and humanities.
The next Target Ship Radio show will be on Sunday, Aug. 20 at 1-4 p.m. The live broadcast can be heard on 92.1 FM Provincetown, and 91.3 FM Orleans, streaming on womr.org and beaming on the free WOMR app.
Connecting kids with heart disease and horses
At Windrush Farm
Edited from a New England Council report (newenglandcouncil.com)
“Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH), in its treatment of patients with complex congenital heart disease, is connecting young children with horses to bolster their emotional and physical strength. The New England Council member has seen success with the unique program.
“Since 2017, BCH has partnered with Windrush Farm, in North Andover, Mass., to offer equine-assisted therapy to patients. The children have the opportunity to bond with and ride a horse, receiving the fulfillment of accomplishment. Additionally, patients receive many physical benefits, as riding trains their balance, strength, and flexibility. For these children who have battled with this disease since birth, there is great value in experiencing the confidence, assertiveness, and collaboration required in riding horses. Furthermore, the animals offer an emotional outlet, where patients can release the anxiety and stress that develops after a childhood affected by the disease.
“‘For kids who haven’t felt successful in much of their lives, this helps them build independence, confidence, and self-esteem,’ said Kate Ullman-Shade, the director of education for the cardiac neuro-developmental program at BCH. ‘I’ve had kids say to me, ‘I’m so proud of myself.’”’
Immigrant artists
“Heroic Harvest” (archival pigment print with hand-sewn embroidery), by Boston-based photographer Astrid Reishwitz, in the group show “There Are No Strangers,’’ at Hera Gallery, Wakefield, R.I., through Sept.
— Photo courtesy Hera Gallery.
The gallery says the show features “the work of 11 artists who were born outside of the United States: Anthony Abu, Nenée Angulo, Joseph Mushipi, Zuly Palomino, Julio Berroa, Agustina Markez, Becky Behar, Astrid Reischwitz, Mari Claudia Garcia, Edward Vasquez and Fritz Eichenberg. With this exhibition, which is based in part on an essay written by Thomas Merton, Hera Gallery acknowledges that, except those of us who are Native People, all of us are immigrants and that this nation was built by immigrants.’’
David Warsh: Of economics ideas and the power of big business to shape policies
Theater lobby card for the American short comedy film Big Business (1924)
SOMERVILLE, Mass.
Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, by Nami Oreskes and Erik Conway, was a hard-hitting history in 2010 that catapulted its authors to fame – Oreskes all the way to Harvard University; Conway remained at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech.
Their new book – The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market (Bloomsbury, 2023) – the authors describe as a prequel. In identifying the doubters, it exhibits the same strengths as before. It displays greater weaknesses in establishing the various truths of the matter. It is, however, a page-turner, a powerful narrative, especially if you are already feeling a little paranoid and looking for a good long summer read.
It’s all true, at least as far as it goes. Those three powerful intellects – Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and Ludwig von Mises – started with unpopular arguments and won big. From the National Electric Light Association and the Liberty League in the Twenties and Thirties, the National Association of Manufacturers and the US Chamber of Commerce in the Fifties and Sixties, to the Federalist Society and the Club for Growth of today, business interests have been spending money and working behind the scenes to boost enthusiasm for markets and to undermine faith in government initiative.
To tell their gripping story of ideas and money, Oreskes and Conway rely on much work done before. Pioneers in this literature include Johan Van Overveldt (The Chicago School: How the University of Chicago Assembled the Thinkers who Revolutionized Economics and Business, 2007); Steven Teles (The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law); 2008); Kim Phillips-Fein, (Invisible Hands: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics, 2009); Jennifer Burns (Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, 2009); Phillip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (The Road to Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, 2009); Daniel Rodgers (Age of Fracture, 2011); Nicholas Wapshott (Keynes Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics, 2011); Angus Burgin (The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression, 2012); Daniel Stedman Jones (Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics, 2012); Robert Van Horn, Phillip Mirowski and Thomas Stapleford, (Building Chicago Economics: New Perspectives on the History of America’s Most Powerful Economics Program, 2011); Avner Offer, and Gabriel Söderberg (The Nobel Factor: The Prize in Economics, Social Democracy, and the Market Turn, 2016); Lawrence Glickman (Free Enterprise: An American History, 2019); Binyamin Appelbaum (The Economists’ Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society) 2019); Jennifer Delton (The Industrialists: How the National Association of Manufacturers Shaped American Capitalism, 2020); and Kurt Andersen (Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America a Recent History, 2020). Biographies of Robert Bartley and Roger Ailes remain to be written.
So about those weaknesses? They boil down to this: In The Big Myth you seldom get the other side of the story. Take a fundamental example. Oreskes and Conway assert that “the claim that America was founded on three basic interdependent principles: representative democracy, political freedom, and free enterprise,” cooked up in the Thirties by the National Association of Manufactures for an advertising campaign. This so-called called “Tripod of Freedom” was “fabricated,” Oreskes and Conway maintain; the words free enterprise appear nowhere in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, they declare. That stipulation amounts to a curious “blind spot,” Harvard historian Luke Menand observed in a lengthy review in The New Yorker. There are mentions of property, though, writes Menand, “and almost every challenge to government interference in the economy rests on the concept of property.” See Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became an Icon of American Capitalism (Princeton, 2022), by Glory Liu, for elaboration.
Similarly, the previous Big Myth with which the market fundamentalists and the business allies were contending received little attention. As the industrial revolution gathered pace in the late 19th Century, progressives in the United States preached a gospel of government regulation. Germany’s success in nearly winning World War I received widespread attention. Britain emerged from World War II with a much more socialized economy than before. And in the U.S., government planning was espoused by such intellectuals as James Burnham and Karl Mannheim as the wave of the future.
Finally, The Big Myth largely ignores the experiences of ordinary Americans in the years that it covers. For all the fury that Big Coal mounted against the Tennessee Valley Authority, its dams were built, nevertheless. There is only a single fleeting mention of George Orwell, though his novels Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949) probably influenced far more people than Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. Paul Samuelson’s textbook explanation of the workings of “the modern mixed economy” dominated Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom tract for forty years and probably still does.
Yet there can be no doubt that there was a disjunction. Oreskes and Conway mention that in the ‘70’s conservative historian George Nash considered that nothing that could be described as a conservative movement in the mid-’40s, that libertarians were a “forlorn minority.” President Harry Truman was reelected in 1948, and Dwight Eisenhower, a moderate Republican, served for eight years after him. Suddenly. in 1964, Republicans nominated libertarian Barry Goldwater. Then came Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
What happened? America’s Vietnam War, for one thing. Globalization for another. Massive migrations occurred in the US, Blacks and Hispanics to the North, businesses to the West and the low-cost South. Civil rights of all sorts revolutions unfolded, at all points of the compass. The composition of Congress and the Supreme Court changed all the while.
In Merchants of Doubt, Oreskes and Conway were on sound ground when making claims about tobacco, acid rain, DDT, the hole in the atmosphere’s ozone layer and greenhouse-gas emissions. These were matters of science, an enterprise devoted to the pursuit of questions in which universal agreement among experts can reasonably hope to be obtained. It was sensible to challenge the reasoning of skeptics in these matters, and to probe the outsized backing they received from those with vested interests. The interpretation of a hundred years of American politics is not science; much of it is not even a topic for proper historians yet. Agreement is reached, if at all, through elections, and elections take time.
Again, take a small matter, the interpretation of “the Reagan Revolution.” Jimmy Carter started it, Oreskes and Conway maintain; Bill Clinton finished it via the “marketization” of the Internet, and most persons have suffered as a result. It is equally common to hear it proclaimed that Reagan presided over an agreement to repair the Social Security system for the next fifty years, ended the Cold War on peaceful terms, and, by accelerating industrial deregulation, ensured on American dominance in a new era of globalization.
In arguments of this sort, EP prefers Spencer Weart’s The Discovery of Global Warming to Merchants of Doubt and Jacob Weisberg In Defense of Government: The Fall and Rise of Public Trust to The Big Myth. But I share Oreskes’ s and Conway’s concerns while searching for opportunities to build more consensus. A century after today’s market fundamentalists began their long argument with Progressive Era enthusiasts for government planning, sunlight remains the best disinfectant.
David Warsh, a veteran columnist and an economic historian, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this column originated.
'Engrossed with contrivances'
“Professor Butts and the Self-Operating Napkin” (1931), by Rube Goldberg (1883-1970). Soup spoon (A) is raised to mouth, pulling string (B) and thereby jerking ladle (C), which throws cracker (D) past toucan (E). Toucan jumps after cracker and perch (F) tilts, upsetting seeds (G) into pail (H). Extra weight in pail pulls cord (I), which opens and ignites lighter (J), setting off skyrocket (K), which causes sickle (L) to cut string (M), allowing pendulum with attached napkin to swing back and forth, thereby wiping chin.
Goldberg was an American cartoonist, sculptor, author, engineer and inventor best known for his popular cartoons depicting complicated gadgets performing simple tasks in indirect, convoluted ways.
“We are swallowed up in schemes for gain and engrossed with contrivances for bodily enjoyments, as if this particle of dust were immortal —- as if the soul needed no aliment, and the mind no raiment.’’
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), American poet, translator and literature professor at Harvard. He was a native of Portland, Maine
Pinnacle of puppetry
”Turkey Gobbler Balloon, Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, 1929,’’ by German-American artist Tony Sarg (1880-1942), in the show “Tony Sarg: Genius at Play,’’ at the Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Mass., through Nov. 5
— Photographer unknown, from the collection of the Nantucket Historical Association
The museum says:
The show “is the first comprehensive exhibition exploring the life, art and adventures of Tony Sarg, the charismatic illustrator, animator, puppeteer, designer, entrepreneur and showman who is celebrated as the father of modern puppetry in North America. His vast knowledge of puppet technology was instrumental in his design of the inaugural Thanksgiving Day parade balloon for Macy’s Department Store, in 1927, as well as subsequent parade balloons and automated displays for the company’s festive holiday windows, which were imitated nationwide. The creator of a host of popular consumer goods, from toys and clothing to home décor, Sarg also envisioned fanciful illustrated maps and created mural designs for the Oasis Cafe in New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel.’’
Sarg's “Nantucket Sea Serpent,’’ 1937.
— From the Nantucket Historical Association
The famed Austen Riggs Center, in Stockbridge, a mental hospital known for, among things, very quietly treating celebrities.
— Photo by Joe Mabel
Llewellyn King: Three huge bumps to buckle up for
The record-breaking temperatures that hit Europe in July contributed to an increase in the surface temperature of the Mediterranean Sea. This visualisation, based on Copernicus Marine Service models , shows the sea surface temperature anomaly for July 24, 2023. The data show an anomaly of up to +5.5° celsius along the coasts of Italy, Greece and North Africa.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
The future has arrived. Those things we were warned about for decades are here. They are now palpable.
In the 1950 film All About Eve, aging actress Margo Channing, played by Bette Davis, warned at a party, “Fasten your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.”
For the world, it will get bumpy for the next decade and beyond as we adjust to three massive, disruptive realities: climate change, artificial intelligence and brutal competition among countries for raw materials for new, carbon-saving technologies like electric vehicles.
This summer, with its aberrant weather the world over, is a clear declaration that climate change is upon us. It is no longer hypothetical; it is here.
The process of living with it begins now.
This summer isn’t a template, it is the first manifestation, from wildfires in Hawaii to elevated temperatures in Argentina’s winter to heat in the Middle East that approaches the point after which life becomes impossible to sustain.
It isn’t all heat, either.
It is storms, deluging rain and previously unexperienced cold. David Naylor, who heads Rayburn Electric, near Dallas, told me what worries him, what keeps him awake at night, is the weather. The cold — new for Texas — is a significant challenge to keeping the lights on for his customers, he said. Weather has pushed out cybersecurity on the list of worries for many utility executives.
Climate change has also brought droughts. The mighty Zambezi River, in Africa, has run so low in recent years that there hasn’t been enough water for hydroelectric production from the Kariba Dam, which spans the river between Zimbabwe and Zambia. Power shortages and blackouts are now endemic.
Mass migration is another consequence of climate change.
Artificial intelligence will be a big disrupter, with some significant benefits. But for now, AI is a daisy chain of question marks.
What is known is that truth is endangered. Stuart Russell, professor of computer science at University of California at Berkeley and one of the leading authorities on AI, told me when I interviewed him on the PBS program White House Chronicle that the “language in, language out” professions are in danger. Lawyers and journalists had better watch out. Much of their work can be done by AI. Already in India, AI newscasters are interfacing with live reporters. In New York, a lawyer went into court with a case based on AI, down to citations. All of it was fiction.
The world is already awash in misinformation and “alternative facts,” as Kellyanne Conway famously declared in defending then-President Trump. Prepare for the era of fabrication where certifying facts will get harder and harder, and provable truths will be the new gold.
Finally, the materials essential in the recent technologies — those that will help us fight global warming — are pointed to be the cause of severe disruption and some ugly realpolitik.
Supplies of some vital materials are controlled by China. It has been relentlessly buying up the sources of rare earths and other minerals for decades in Africa and South America. Seventy percent of the lithium — essential for the batteries in mass electrification — is processed in China. Lithium deposits exist worldwide, from Zimbabwe to the United Kingdom, and from Chile to Australia, but the processing is centered in China.
Likewise, gallium, used for computer chips, and a whole array of precious metals are either sourced in China or processed there.
In dealing with this imbalance, it would be a mistake to think this new disruption is a reprise of the Cold War. It is quite otherwise. The Soviet Union sought to export ideology, which aroused fear in capitalist nations or those wanting a private sector to flourish. The Chinese are ambivalent about ideology outside of China but offer trade and investment on a global scale.
China has bought up much farming and most African mineral production. In South America — the new Aladdin’s cave of mineral wealth — China is buying up and financing.
Around the world, there is a reluctance about choosing sides; jobs and money talk.
The Economist points out that attempts to curb Chinese dominance in critical-materials processing and manufacturing aren’t working because countries from Mexico to Vietnam are transshipping.
Bette Davis’s character might have suggested a shoulder harness and a seat belt.
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.
Greetings, uninvited guests
Painting by Massachusetts artist James M. Coburn (1955 - 2012), at the New England Visionary Artists Museum, Northampton, Mass.
'Lonely, happy child'
Newly emerged adult cicada
— Photo by Ollllonate
“Parents open their shutters and call
the lonely, happy child home.
The child who hates silences talks and talks
of cicadas and the manes of horses.’’
— From “All Summer Long,’’ by Carol Frost (born 1948) in Lowell, Mass. She has taught at the Vermont Studio Center, in Johnson, Vt.
Chris Powell: Saudi connection of governor’s wife; using old motels to help the homeless
The Saudi flag
MANCHESTER, Conn.,
During last year's campaign for governor, leading Connecticut Democrats from Gov. Ned Lamont on down may not have known that they were probably being hypocritical by criticizing the Republican nominee, Bob Stefanowski, for doing consulting work for a company connected to the Saudi Arabian government.
But now that it has been disclosed that the investment fund company run by the governor's wife, Ann Huntress Lamont, has a partnership with a Saudi government investment fund, try to find those Democrats.
The governor himself can assert that he didn't know about his wife's own connection to the awful Saudis and can note that the connection was listed in a public financial filing somewhere -- as if there is enough journalism left in Connecticut to review such filings promptly, and as if Mrs. Lamont's investment fund issued a press release about its Saudi connection any more than Stefanowski did about his.
Bad as the Saudi government may be, totalitarian and theocratic, it long has been a crucial financial and military ally of the United States, and Stefanowski had a plausible defense for his work in the country, which was to speed the transition from the country's oil-based economy to “green” hydrogen-based energy.
For all anyone knows -- Mrs. Lamont isn't talking -- her partnership with the Saudi government may have similar objectives. Or Mrs. Lamont's company may just be helping to invest some of the U.S. dollars that the kingdom has earned selling its oil to the United States and the rest of the world, oil purchases that long have implicated all Americans in Saudi totalitarianism.
Was Mrs. Lamont's company in partnership with the Saudi company even when her husband and his Democratic colleagues were denouncing Stefanowski for a similar connection? Maybe.
Did she not mention the irony to her husband? Who knows?
Since the hypocrisy and sleaze here involve Democrats instead of Donald Trump, will mainstream journalism let it drop?
xxx
Homelessness has risen in Connecticut for a second straight year, even as the state is full of hotels and motels that are operating at less than capacity or aren't operating at all.
City government in New Haven, where homelessness is acute, is aiming to acquire a local motel to turn it into "supportive housing," providing not only basic shelter but also connection to medical, psychological, and employment services.
Meanwhile, Danbury's zoning board is still disgracefully blocking a bid by a social-service agency to use a defunct motel for similar purposes.
Under-used and defunct motels and hotels are perfect for addressing homelessness. They require no extensive conversion to become “supportive housing” and are in commercial zones -- and lovely as summer in Connecticut is, winter will be here soon enough.
The homeless, many of whom are mentally ill or drug-addicted, have no political constituency. The economy is not half as good as elected officials claim after they manipulate economic data, and times are getting harder, so escaping from homelessness, addiction and long-term unemployment is more difficult than most people think.
Of course most state residents don't want "supportive housing" nearby any more than they want "affordable" housing nearby, since "affordable" housing can shelter not just young people starting out in life but also the demoralized, addicted, broken-down, and anti-social. But if Connecticut is to remain decent, these people have to be accommodated somewhere so they don't have to sleep under bridges and risk death in the street.
For many months now Governor Lamont has taken the lead with the motel in Danbury, issuing and renewing an executive order exempting it from city zoning. But the order has expired even as homelessness is worsening.
So the governor should use whatever emergency authority he can still muster, calling the General Assembly into special session if necessary, to authorize state government to acquire such property as necessary and to supersede municipal zoning to put a roof over the heads of the forsaken before winter arrives and help them restore themselves, and to ensure that no municipality has to use its own funds to do this.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Point us to charging stations
Several Chevrolet Volts at a charging station partially powered with solar panels in Frankfort, Ill.
Text from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
Federal and state highway officials need the authority to direct drivers to electric-vehicle-charging stations with signs. This information could be added to roadside signs (before exits) that point to gas stations, food and lodging, or be on separate signs. They’d encourage more people to buy electric cars. Many potential EV buyers shy away from them because of fear that they won’t be able to recharge on longish trips. (Bathroom signs would be nice, too.)
There are already quite a few charging stations in allegedly environmentally conscious southern New England, but they can be hard to find. It sure would be handy if most highway rest stops had them.
Many highway signs include corporate logos of gasoline companies, such as Mobil and Gulf. Signage rule changes would let them include the logos of such electric-charging station operators as Electrify America and EVgo and Tesla (only for its cars). Since not every EV can be charged at every kind of EV charging station, this specificity is important as we try to get people out of their climate-warming, foreign-dictator-boosting gasoline-powered vehicles. We tend to forget that signs are an important part of transportation infrastructure.
But will NIMBY’s block so much potential solar- and wind-power infrastructure that we don’t have enough electricity in the New England grid to charge all these additional vehicles without large continuing use of fossil fuel to generate electricity?
Multi-faceted rapping
Work from the show “Nelson Stevens: Color Rapping,’’ at the D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield, Mass., through Sept. 3.
The museum says:
“Nelson Stevens (American, 1938-2022), an artist and educator, is renowned for creating powerful, rhythmic compositions that celebrate Black life and reveal his technical mastery of the figure.’’
“Stevens lived in Springfield. In the early 1970s, {where} he initiated a groundbreaking public art project that resulted in the creation of over 30 murals throughout the city. Like Stevens’s colorful paintings, the murals promoted Black empowerment and brought the pride and activism associated with the Black Arts Movement to western Massachusetts. Fifty years later, his message, artwork, and influence continue to be celebrated locally and nationally.”
“I create from the rhythmic color-rappin-life-style of Black folk. I believe that art can breathe life, and life is what we are about.’’
— Nelson Stevens
Art history comes alive when you’re not looking
“In the Museum’’ (Gouache on illustration board), by Jennifer Gibson, a featured artist at Spectrum Gallery’s Summer Art Festival on the town green of Essex, Conn., which has a very colorful history,.
View from Essex Park, in Essex, Conn., on the Connecticut River
—Photo by Joe Mabel
Plant mint
Eastern Cottontail rabbit
New England Cottontail
Excerpted and edited from an ecoRI News article written by staff reporter Bonnie Phillips:
“…. Anecdotal evidence seems to indicate that this is a banner year for bunnies.
“There could be a few reasons for that, according to Mary Gannon, a principal biologist and wildlife outreach coordinator for the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management.
“Rabbit populations ‘can certainly boom … due to natural absence or fewer predators and a subsidized abundance of food,’ she said. In the case of rabbits, that hop-through restaurant is probably your beloved flower or vegetable garden.
“‘They particularly love beans, peas, and lettuce, and will munch on annual flower seedlings,’ Gannon said. ‘Clover is a big favorite as well.’
“What they don’t like, Gannon said, is plants in the mint family, milkweed, onions, and garlic — although she has seen young milkweed and allium stems nibbled by curious rabbits.
“The rabbits you are seeing in your yard are either Eastern Cottontails or New England Cottontails. The Eastern Cottontail was introduced in the 1900s to revive the declining native New England Cottontail population, according to DEM. During the past 50 years the range of this once-common rabbit has shrunk and its population has dwindled. Today, biologists believe there are only around 13,000 New England Cottontails left, according to New England Cottontail.’’
Safer outside
“Debate,’’ by Czech sculptor Tomas Kus, at the Andres Institute of Art Sculpture Garden, in Brookline, N.H.
Potanipo Pond, in Brookline, N.H., a small town that’s become part of Greater Boston’s exurbia.
—Photo by John Phelan
Chris Powell: Juvenile cases highlight social disintegration in Conn.
Anti-juvenile crime poster, c. 1913
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Recent days in Connecticut have provided more than the usual causes for alarm.
-- In Hartford a two-year-old boy fell out the window of a third-floor apartment and soon died of his injuries. He and his four siblings, all under 12, had been left alone by their mother as she went to work as a taxi driver. There was no sign of the children's father or fathers, but then public policy considers fathers unnecessary and journalism never notices that their absence correlates strongly with poverty's daily disasters. Police said the family's apartment was an unsanitary shambles, though the state child protection agency, the Department of Children and Families, said it checked on the family a month earlier and found their situation OK.
-- In Waterbury a 14-year-old girl riding in a stolen car with three other young teens at 2:20 a.m. was killed when they ran a red light and smashed into another car. The girl and the driver, 15, were reported to be well known to police.
-- In New Haven a 13-year-old girl riding in a stolen car involved in a chase with another stolen car was shot several times from the other car at 2:50 in the morning. Fortunately the incident took place next to Yale New Haven Hospital, which has extensive experience with gunshot wounds, and she will survive. Police believe the shots were meant for the girl's boyfriend, who was driving the stolen car in which they were riding. He is also 13.
-- The state child advocate reported that eight Connecticut children under age three died last year after ingesting the deadly narcotic fentanyl. The report said more than a quarter of the 97 young children who suffered untimely deaths in the state last year lived in homes that were being or recently had been monitored by DCF.
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-- Indeed, with drug abuse and addiction exploding in Connecticut and throughout the country, controversy has erupted in New Haven over whether city government should open clinics where addicts can inject illegal drugs under the supervision of nurses equipped to treat overdoses. Would such clinics save lives or rationalize and facilitate addiction? Probably both. In any case many New Haven residents don't want such clinics near them.
-- Gov. Ned Lamont attended the opening ceremony in Hartford for one of four new state-funded crisis clinics for children, the others being in New Haven, Waterbury and New London. The clinics will treat children for depression, thoughts of suicide or self-harm, drug abuse, and "out-of-control" behavior and will try to keep them out of hospital emergency rooms, which are likely to remain busy enough with gunshot victims.
The clinics are among a dozen new state programs to help disturbed children, including a psychiatric ward at the Connecticut Children's Medical Center in Hartford and an outpatient clinic in the Waterbury area.
xxx
These initiatives are separate from the nearly $800 million state government spends annually on the Department of Children and Families, which deals with the thousands of households whose children are in danger of neglect or abuse.
The department has been hiring to reduce the case loads of its social workers so they can pay more attention to clients, but it remains difficult work, and not all child neglect may be threatening enough to come under the department's jurisdiction, as with the 25% of Connecticut students lately classified as chronically absent from school. In the cities the figure is around 50 percent.
The governor, some of his commissioners, and many state legislators may be old enough to remember a time in Connecticut when so many children were not fatherless, neglected, disturbed, taking drugs, riding around in stolen cars at 2 in the morning, and causing other trouble. This social disintegration had become rampant before the recent COVID pandemic, though government's response to the epidemic, like closing schools under the pressure of the teacher unions, made the disintegration worse.
Something has been changing for a long time -- but what exactly? Perhaps more important, who is striving to discern and address the cause of social disintegration rather than just deal with its ever-increasing symptoms?
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
All wet in the Green Mountain State
Work by Clinton, Mass.-based Peter Moriarty (born 1952) in the show “No Place Like Home,’’ at the BigTown Gallery, Rochester, Vt., through Oct. 29.
Civil War memorial in Rochester, Vt.
— Photo by Kenneth C. Zirkel
David Warsh: Why I hope that Biden decides, after all, not to run again
Confronting global warming is our greatest challenge.
SOMERVILLE, Mass.
What are the chances that Joe Biden will take himself out of the 2024 presidential campaign, perhaps with a Labor Day speech? Not good, based on what I read in the newspapers. Yet I have begun hoping that Biden just might drop out of the race. Here’s why.
It is not because Biden would fail to win re-election if he sticks to his plan to run. He promised to serve as a bridge and he has done that. His takeover of Donald Trump’s Big Talk platform of 2016 seems nearly complete. “Bidenomics,” which boils down to strategic rivalry with China, is the right road for American industry and trade for many years to come.
The problem is that a second term would almost certainly end in disaster, for both Biden and for the United States. The dismal war in Ukraine; the threat of another in Taiwan; the impending fiscal crises of America’s Social Security and medical-insurance programs: these are not problems for a good-hearted 82-year-old man of diminishing mental capacity, much less his fractious team of advisers.
Most of all, there is the challenge of global warming. It seems safe to say that there can no longer be doubt in any quarter that the problem is real. Perhaps this year’s strong demonstration effects were required to galvanize public opinion for action. But what action to take?
With respect to climate change, I’d written many times that the best introduction available is Spencer Weart’s 200-page book, The Discovery of Global Warming (Harvard, 2008.) Weart maintains a much more extensive hypertext version of the book on site of the Center for the History of Physics, which he founded in 1974. The digital edition was most recently updated in May 2023.
A distinguished historian of science, author of several books on other topics, including governance, Weart is a man of balanced and temperate views. Here is what he wrote in his book’s sobering “Conclusions: A Personal Statement:”
Policies put in place in recent decades to reduce emissions have made a real difference, bringing estimates of future temperatures down to a point where the risk of utterly catastrophic heating is now low. If we are lucky, and the planet responds at the lower limit of what seems possible, we might be able to halt the rise with less than another 1°C of warming, putting us a bit under 2°C above 19th-century temperatures. That would be a world with widespread devastation, but survivable as a civilization….
Yet the world’s scientists have explained that we need to get the emissions into a steep decline by the year 2030. Yes, that soon. What if we fail to turn this around? The greenhouse gases lingering in the atmosphere would lock in the warming. The policies we put in place in this decade will determine the state of the climate for the next 10,000 years….
If we do not make big changes in our economy and society, in how we live and how we govern ourselves, global warming will force far more radical changes upon us. In particular, we must restrain the influence of amoral corporations and extremely wealthy people, who have played a despicable role in blocking essential policies. To allow ever worse climate disruption would give those who already hold too much power opportunities to seize even more amid the chaos….
So, what to do about global warming? Negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine. Avoid war in Taiwan. Put the military-industrial complex on pause. Send Biden home to Wilmington, to nurture his family.
Throw open the race. Let other newspapers start writing stories like this one. Trust in the election to produce a young leader. American democracy has done it before. We don’t have four years to wait.
David Warsh, a veteran columnist, is proprietor of economicprincipals.com