Webcast: Using 'white hat hackers' to thwart cybercriminals
From The Boston Global Forum (bostonglobalforum,org), see a Webcast on using "white hat hackers'' to to fight cybercrime.
http://bostonglobalforum.org/2016/03/white-hat-hacking-presentation-to-the-bgf/
'T' is for terrified
"T,'' by Russell duPont, which won "Best in Show'' at the exhibition "Con/TEXT,'' to run at the South Shore Art Center, Cohasset, Mass., April 8-MaY 22.
Jim Hightower: Scalia was a frequent flyer on 'Conflict-of-Interest Airlines'
Via OtherWords.org
The late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s demise at a Texas resort shows why we can't trust judges to police their own integrity.
How curious that he died, of all places, in an exclusive West Texas hunting lodge.
Yet more curious, all expenses for hizzonor’s February stay were paid by the resort’s owner, John Poindexter. He’s a Houston manufacturing mogul who won a favorable ruling from the Supreme Court in an age-discrimination case last year.
In another curiosity, the names of some 35 other people who were in Scalia’s hunting party are being kept secret. Moreover, the late judge — an ardent promoter of corporate supremacy over people’s rights — was flown to the remote getaway for free aboard someone’s or some corporation’s private jet. The name of this generous benefactor has also been withheld.
Curious, huh?
This isn’t a murder mystery — by all accounts, Scalia died of natural causes. It’s a moral mystery: Who was buying (or repaying) favors from an enormously powerful member of America’s highest court?
There’s a bit of poetic justice in the fact that Justice Scalia, in particular, passed away under such circumstances, for his expiration exposes a little known ethical loophole through which moneyed interests can curry special favors from Supremes: judicial junkets.
The West Texas hunting excursion was hardly Scalia’s first freebie. He was the Supreme Court’s most frequent flyer aboard “Conflict-of-Interest Airlines,” accepting more than 280 privately paid-for jaunts in the past dozen years to luxury destinations, including Hawaii, Hong Kong, Ireland, Napa Valley, Palm Springs and Switzerland.
Every lower-court judge is subject to a formal code of conduct, but the nine top court judges have exempted themselves from those rules. Scalia’s inconvenient demise shows why we can’t trust them to police their own integrity.
For more information, go to www.FixTheCourt.org.
Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker.
And renting of cloth
"Grief'' (fabric), by Liz Collins, in the show "Intimacy + Materiality,'' at the Helen Day Art Center, Stowe. Vt., through April 10.
Clean and cook before eating
"Mackerel on Spade'' (watercolor) by Amy Hourihan, in the show "3x3: 3 Artists, 3 Media,'' at Centennial Gallery, Peabody, Mass., through April 15.
Donald Kaul: This liberal's fond words for Nancy Reagan
Via OtherWords.org
I was late to the Nancy Reagan Admiration Society. She had arrived on the political scene, after all, on the arm of Ronald Reagan, a man I neither liked nor admired.
I thought he was a phony — a B-movie star who seemed either unwilling or unable to differentiate between movies and real life. He was fond of telling stories like that one about the wounded airman and his fatherly senior officer who, as their disabled bomber rocketed toward the earth, comforted the boy by saying, “Don’t worry, son. We’ll ride this down together.”
I wondered how “Dutch” could have known the final words of the officer, who presumably died in the subsequent crash. Years later I found the answer. The scene was in a World War II movie.
He was always doing things like that, copping a scene here or a line there from an old movie and making it his own.
And Nancy Reagan was part and parcel of that act — a clotheshorse whose main job was to sit slightly behind her husband at speeches, gazing at him admiringly while nodding at appropriate moments.
In the years since those early days, my opinion of both Reagans has changed.
He never shed his willful ignorance of most matters, but he had a certain charm. And he excelled in his greatest role, that of the grievously wounded president wisecracking with emergency room doctors as they fought to save his life after he was shot.
And I realize now that Nancy was far more than an adoring spouse. She was a silent partner who was always there to give him support and advice.
And after his presidency, when he was being assailed with Alzheimer’s, she became his rock.
Anyone who’s had the experience of caring for a loved one suffering from the disease knows what an all-consuming, pitiless task it is. She endured it bravely and uncomplainingly for 10 years.
I don’t buy the notion that Reagan was a great president. Yes, he made some positive contributions. But he also convinced Republicans that the way to prosperity was to allow the government to spend lavishly on things like the military so long as it didn’t tax. We live with the burden of that malign idea even now.
Nancy Reagan, however, was one of the great first ladies. All in all, she was a noble, even heroic figure, and she deserves all the accolades now coming to her as the nation mourns her passing.
And she must have been appalled by the floating food fight at most of this year’s Republican presidential debates.
Her beloved husband was the author of what he called the Eleventh Commandment: Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican.
But the Republicans have opened up their big guns on the Donald Trump bandwagon, hoping to derail his glide to the nomination. And he’s returned fire.
Establishment Republicans seem to think they can deny Trump the number of delegates needed for an automatic, first-ballot victory and to take him to a floor fight at the GOP convention.
It’s a hare-brained scheme.
Do they really think that if Trump is denied a victory he won at the ballot box by a parliamentary trick, his supporters will just acquiesce and support the hand-picked Republican nominee?
The Reagan era is officially over, usurped by the age of Trump.
OtherWords columnist Donald Kaul lives in Ann Arbor, Mich.
Chris Powell: Applying the Looney Principle to a deserving Yale University
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Let no one accuse Connecticut's Democratic Party of not having any principles. The party seems to be operating on a principle of state Senate President Martin Looney. The Looney Principle is simply: What's yours is mine.
The Looney Principle is on display more than ever now with his legislation to tax large private college endowments, the threshold set so that only Yale University's endowment, nearly $26 billion, would be subject to taxation. Looney and other supporters of the legislation say it would prod Yale to invest more in ways beneficial to New Haven, as if Yale doesn't have a right to spend its own money in its own interests.
But the core constituencies of Connecticut's Democratic Party, the government and welfare classes, are growing anxious as their parasitism and mistaken policy premises keep driving the state down and tax revenue with it, and they see Yale's endowment as ripe for plunder. After Yale's endowment is taxed, maybe private endowments and savings will be next.
For Connecticut must not ever tell its government employees that they no longer can take Columbus Day off with pay, nor its welfare recipients that they should stop thrusting on state government the support of children they never were in a position to support themselves.
Despite the assertion that Yale should do more for New Haven, Yale already does a lot for the city, voluntarily paying the city millions of dollars each year out of guilt for being tax-exempt like other colleges and nonprofit civic organizations. Indeed, without Yale and its thousands of middle-class employees and its students bringing a lot of money into the city from all over the country and the world, New Haven, impoverished as much of it is, would be Bridgeport, whose miles of crumbling industrial hulks along the Northeast Corridor railroad tracks give rail passengers the impression that a nuclear war broke out shortly after they left New York.
Actually what broke out was the Looney Principle.
Yale officials have responded indignantly to it, but the endowment-tax legislation is just what the university deserves for long having subsidized the parasitism that is now turning on it. No college in the country has been more politically correct than Yale. From nullification of federal immigration law to nullification of free speech to the coddling of the fascist impulse of its students demanding "safe spaces" against disagreement, Yale has supported many of the movements that are wrecking the country.
So if the endowment tax gives Yale ideas like those recently entertained by General Electric as it considered Connecticut's future, saw ahead only decades of tax increases, and began packing up in Fairfield to depart for Boston, at least Connecticut would be rid of a bad influence and New Haven's government and welfare classes would have to turn their parasitism on each other.
As for the state's premier purportedly public institution of higher education, the University of Connecticut, it again has defeated demands for greater accountability for its own endowment, managed by the UConn Foundation, which has enjoyed exemption from state freedom-of-information law.
Instead of subjecting the UConn Foundation to that law as all other public agencies are subjected, state legislators have agreed to require only that the foundation submit an annual report summarizing its financial transactions. The foundation would remain free to conceal the identity of donors and thus free to keep selling them university favors, as it did several years ago when an especially arrogant donor purchased the dismissal of the university's athletic director.
Since UConn will remain in effect a private university, state government might as well tax away its endowment too.
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.
Love 'em all
"To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring."
-- George Santayana
When it 'easters out of the dimness'
“There is a fragrance in the air, a certain passage of a song, an old photograph falling out from the pages of a book, the sound of somebody’s voice in the hall that makes your heart leap and fills your eyes with tears. Who can say when or how it will be that something easters up out of the dimness to remind us of a time before we were born and after we will die?”
-- Frederick Buechner
Robert Whitcomb: 'Not a problem to be solved'
Here’s an edited version of the preface I wrote a few weeks ago for the 50th reunion book for my boarding-school class.
To the Class of 1966
‘’And they shall seem to us in that far day
Like unforeseen, fond meetings with old friends’’
-- From the school song (actually more like a hymn)
Now we are well into that ‘’far day’’. It seems paradoxically predictable and startling.
As I sit here, occasionally looking out the window at the trees after a very pretty but inconvenient snow and ice storm, I’m struck again at how much time speeds up even as we wish to slow it for reflection in the autumn of our years. “Where are the snows of yesteryear?’’ and all that.
While the weeks often dragged on when we were at school and February and March particularly seemed to stretch to afar gray horizon, now we know that the lushness of Connecticut in May, and our reunion, will be here in a flash.
Between now and then seems a good space to consider where we’ve been, if not where we’re going. As Orwell wrote: “{I}t can also happen that one’s memories grow sharper after a long lapse of time, because one is looking at the past with fresh eyes and can isolate and, as it were, notice facts which previously existed undifferentiated among a mass of others.’’
We have been privileged to have had a fine education and to have lived in a very dynamic period in modern history, as social change (some good, some not), technology and globalization have brought us daily lives quite different from ours in a school in the early and mid ‘60s.
When we were there, daily school life there, I suspect, wasn’t all that different from what it had been in the ‘30s and ’40s. Yes, television had become pervasive in American life, but with few exceptions, we weren’t allowed to watch it. A memorable and moving exception were the hours after the John F. Kennedy assassination. I can still hear the Navy Hymn on the TV in the common room. And the Sexual Revolution had begun, but we isolated boys weren’t yet in it.
We had the daily rhythms of classes, sports and vespers (with those stirring old Protestant hymns), we wore coats and ties and were at least in public very respectful of the teachers. Little emphasis was placed on food, and “mystery meat,’’ with its greenish tint, was frequent fare. Now there’s fine dining (explaining some of the astronomical tuition?), no vespers and, to say the least, informal clothing rules among the boys and girls in our Gothic revival school. But no smoking for seniors. \
Those of us there for the full four years were ruled in our first year by a kindly but firm, dignified and gray-suited headmaster who had run the show since 1936! That style would soon change with his immediate successor, who felt that he had to get the school more in tempo with the (sometimes chaotic) times.
Of course, we weren’t all friends. And most of us wore a protective adolescent carapace of superficial cynicism. Open displays of sensitivity weren’t encouraged, and weakness was to be hidden. Still, some of us became lifelong friends, with, in some cases the real friendships starting years after we graduated. And certainly the Internet has made reconnecting and maintaining old relationships easier.
Soon, pushed by intensifying awareness of our mortality, many of us will meet again at the school and celebrate both our differences and what we have had in common in the stretch of history we have shared. For many, perhaps most of us, it will be our last meeting.
I suspect that we’ll be surprised again by the solidity of our core personalities. I still remember what my father told me when I asked him after he got back from his 25th college reunion if his classmates had changed. He said: “I was surprised at how much they hadn’t, except for a guy who had been in a Japanese prison camp during the war {World War II}. Before the war he was jokey and relaxed. Now{1964} he is quiet and twitchy.’’
At the reunion, we’ll get more lessons in how our ratio of nature – our fundamental personalities and hard wiring – and nurture/experience has played out over the half century since we left our school.
Thanks to all who have sent biographical sketches. In them, classmates show an impressive range of skills, achievements, successes, failures, triumphs and tragedies in their public and private lives. In other words, we’re roughly like our age cohort in general but I think (as an elderly journalist) with more variety and color than most elderly Baby Boomers.
That’s admittedly in part because the majority of us came from more privileged socio-economic backgrounds than most Americans: Most of us have had more options than most men of our era. As these bios suggest, most in the Class of ’66 didn’t waste those options, and those who did generally had good medical, psychological and/or social reasons. We see a panorama in this book of vastly different jobs, places lived and passions pursued.
Of course, classmates who are either deceased or declined to send in sketches also had engaging stories. We hope to hear about some of them at the reunion and after. Who knows? Perhaps some of them can be put into a book, too.
Kierkegaard famously wrote: “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.’’ Well, “understanding’’ the past may be as beyond us as is answering such questions as “why is there something instead of nothing?’’
But one thing is clear: Long friendships are central to emotionally and mentally rich lives. We’ll celebrate those friendships at the reunion and some of us may even make some new ones before it’s too late. And for those who can’t make it, please get in touch.
Kierkegaard also said: “Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be
experienced.’’
Robert Whitcomb is overseer of New England Diary.
Early spring on the New England coast
"It was cold and windy, scarcely the day
to take a walk on that long beach
Everything was withdrawn as far as possible,
indrawn: the tide far out, the ocean shrunken,
seabirds in ones or twos.
The rackety, icy, offshore wind
numbed our faces on one side;
disrupted the formation
of a lone flight of Canada geese;
and blew back the low, inaudible rollers
in upright, steely mist."
-- Elizabeth Bishop, "The End of March''
Ignorance is bliss
"Know Not Thy Pending Fate,'' by Christina Mastrangelo, at the "New Members' Exhibition'' at the Guild of Boston Artists.
Giles Knight: Wacht auf, America
The race of the Republican Party as we have known it toward oblivion has been orchestrated by a new social order called “Trumpism,” which in spite of the name is not really new but rather consists of old-fashioned nationalism and authoritarianism with a fascist streak.
Donald Trump has become the messiah for many people who feel left out economically and socially by those in power or “the system.” The complain angrily about foreign economic competition, the media, immigration and, of course, the current government in Washington, D.C.
Trump’s bombastic, hate-filled speeches seem to be just the right ticket to usher in a “new America.” Whether the “new America” is the same as “make America great again” we do not know yet, but his actions during this campaign bear a passing resemblance to other fire-breathing demagogues, such as Joe McCarthy, George Wallace, Mussolini and one of the most famous of all, Adolf Hitler, to name a few.
Go back to the 1920’s in a war-shattered Germany when a fellow named Hitler attracted a fanatical following with rousing speeches and programs for making Germany “great’’ again. Nationalism, bigotry and militarism were his main messages.
How did he win over one of the most civilized countries in Europe? Remember that at that time Germany was in bad shape economically. People wanted to believe his oratory and what better way to make them believe than to find scapegoats to blame for their troubles. Taking top ranking on his list were theWestern Allies (the U.S, Britain, France and a few others), a relative lack of living space in the densely populated country, and least understandable, Jews and other people not of “pure Aryan origin.’’
The SA (Stormabteilung or Assault Division) was founded by Hitler in 1921 and was made up of angry, unemployed people, thugs really, who abused and even murdered those speaking out against The Leader.
After Hitler’s arrest by the Weimar government, in 1924, he wrote a book in prison called Mein Kampf (My Struggle), which outlined in detail his idea of a new Germany. He followed the script exactly until his suicide, in 1945. His career resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people.
By 1925, he also began to be concerned about his ability to control the SA, which had grown large. And so he established the SS (Schutzstaffel or “Protective Echelon’’) as his personal bodyguards.
The SS made the SA look like choirboys in putting down opposition. He appointed his close associate Heinrich Himmler as SS leader in 1929, thereby resulting in a more loyal, tightly organized group reporting directly to him.
Things did not go well for the SA when on June 30, 1934, some of its leaders were killed by Hitler’s people --- “the night of the long knives.”
Then, on Nov. 9-11, 1938 hundreds of communities in Germany experienced wholesale destruction and looting of Jewish stores and businesses -- “Crystal Night” or “Night of the Broken Glass.” By this time most of the newspapers and radio stations were effectively closed down, or taken over by the Nazi regime, ensuring that everyone followed the party line, and the SS, along with the Gestapo, became the chief unit of surveillance and terror in Germany.
The SA was eventually combined with the SS, which, in turn, was incorporated into the German army as the Waffen SS. It grew into a huge force of hundreds of thousands, including such notable units as the Death Head Division, which oversaw concentration camps. All military people and many civilians were forced to sign a loyalty oath to Hitler.
The most fanatical and elite SS Division was the Adolf Hitler Division, which caused havoc in numerous battles against the Allies. Many of these fellows met a timely end during “the Battle of the Bulge,” in December 1944, preferring to die rather than surrender as Allied air power obliterated their armored vehicles.
Hitler’s policy of intimidation illustrates how quickly democracy can be destroyed by someone who controls the masses.
This brings us to “Trumpism” in America. Mr. Trump is not a replica of Adolf Hitler, but he exhibits some disturbingly similar characteristics. The most obvious is his ability to sway masses of people by appealing to their grievances. His animated, dramatic power of delivery puts his followers into almost a fanatic frenzy.
This tactic is typical of most demagogues, and was a major reason for Adolf Hitler’s unexpected success. Recent horrifying video clips of a Trump rally show American college students raising their right hand arms in a Nazi salute in answer to Mr. Trump’s request for a loyalty pledge.
Other characteristics of Mr. Trump are worth noting, including a policy of one man, one rule, a vindictive and hair-trigger personality and a belittling attitude in general, but especially against those who disagree with him. And his many business dealings show enough lawsuits and other disagreements to raise serious questions about his honesty. His vicious rhetoric ensures that he will meet with antagonism globally.
The good thing is that presidents do not run the federal government alone. There are also Congress and the federal courts. However, the president can have great deal of influence on the other two branches of government. Trump’s extraordinary ability to mesmerize parts of the American public could easily be used to bring Congress and the Supreme Court under his brand of rule. True, his views deserve to be heard in a democracy. But does his brand of democracy fall under the letter and spirit of the Constitution in all respects?
When groups follow the siren song of a messiah, social unrest follows, and while history does not repeat itself exactly, it can, as Mark Twain said, rhyme.
Fiery speeches filled with hatred, intolerance and authoritarianism can not help but lead to domestic and global unrest. America is the strongest country. The real danger we face lies within, not outside. We know what happened to Nazi Germany. A fanatical leader persuaded the country to follow him, assisted by intimidation by such groups as the SA and SS.
“Wacht auf” in German means “wake up’’. We should look very closely at “Trumpism” as our election process continues. Every American must ask him or herself: “Do we really want this type of person representing our country, the Constitution and the world’s pillar of democracy?
Giles Knight is a retired international equity mutual fund manager.
Llewellyn King: Muslim immigrants demand that Western nations bow to them
In the aftermath of the Brussels attacks, critics are blaming Belgium for not assimilating immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa.
The fact is that Europe does not do assimilation. Europeans widely practice what might be called “anti-assimilation.” Instead of engagement with their immigrants, they practice a kind of look-the-other-way stance.
Muslim immigrants on the whole do not seek to integrate into European societies, but rather to demand that European societies adopt their ways. In Belgium, which has three official languages, Dutch, French and German, there are constant demands that Arabic become a fourth. Muslims in Britain, and throughout Europe, demand shari'a, or Islamic law, for their communities. Muslims in Europe, and the United States, demand that Eid al-Adha (Feast of the Sacrifice) be accorded the same recognition as a public holiday as Christmas.
Muslim defenders, after the bombings in Brussels, insist that Western countries with large Muslim minorities should do more to integrate them into national life. But this integration mostly means that the host culture should bow to the insurgent one.
In ancient lands, like Britain and France, this is an affront; as though the extraordinary traditions of those countries should be shoved aside to accommodate the cultural demands of an a very antagonistic minority. That is asking too much.
Europe has mostly dealt with the challenge by hoping that new generations born in Europe and subjected to the influence of European education, the arts and media will become little Europeans: little Frenchmen, little Belgians, little Englishmen, versed in European history and imbued with European values. There are such people throughout Europe, from those of Turkish descent in Germany to those of Indian descent in Britain and North African descent in France.
But by and large the Muslim minorities remain separate, unequal and belligerently hostile to the countries that have given them shelter and opportunity. Rather than the generations born in Europe adopting European norms, they have ended in an unfortunate place where they are outcasts by their own inclinations and by the difficulties posed by European societies, which are quietly nationalistic, closed, eyes-averted.
If anything, the separation has grown worse for generations that know no life other than the one they lead in Europe. This is often marginal, lived in ghettos like the banlieues, the suburbs to the north of Paris, the troubled Brussels neighborhood of Molenbeek, or Bradford in the north of England.
The original immigrants could look back to what they had escaped, whether it was war and persecution in Algeria, in the case of those who migrated to France, or the grinding poverty that prevailed in Pakistan, in the British case. People move for safety or for a better life. They do not move because they want a new food or a new religion: They want the old food and the old religion in a better place.
Trouble is that three or four generations on, the immigrant descendants may not feel they are in a better place. They are isolated, largely unemployed and subjected to the preaching of murderous extremists.
Once in Brussels, my wife and I were walking down a side street not far from the Grand Place. My wife, who lived in the Middle East and speaks Arabic, remarked that we had left Europe within a few streets and entered North Africa.
As we passed some young men standing outside a cafe, she heard one say to another in Arabic, “What are they doing here? They don’t belong here.”
When the London suburb of Brixton was becoming a black enclave, favored by West Indian immigrants, I lived nearby. “Don’t go there. Maybe they will leave one day,” my neighbors said when I wanted to go there.
No-go areas are not always that: they also are not-want-to-go areas. Someone has to want assimilation, if that is the answer.
Llewellyn King, host and executive producer of White House Chronicle on PBS, is a iong-time publisher, editor, columnist and international business consultant. This piece originated on InsideSources.
Charles Chieppo: Ex-Bridgewater State University president gave a course in cheating the taxpayers
BOSTON
As we watch a presidential campaign that serves as a cautionary tale for what can happen when people grow sufficiently disillusioned with government, a story out of Massachusetts provides a reminder of why so many voters feel that way.
When Bridgewater State University President Dana Mohler-Faria retired last year after 39 years in state service, he did so with a $183,421 annual pension. But that wasn't what really caught people's attention. It turns out he also received a cash payout of $269,824 for unused sick and vacation time.
When most Massachusetts state employees retire, they can receive payment for up to twice their annual allotment of vacation days and for 20 percent of their accrued sick days. But those rules -- generous as they might seem to private-sector workers, few of whom can cash out unused sick and vacation time -- don't apply to state public higher education officials who aren't covered under a collective-bargaining agreement. They are entitled to the full value of up to 64 days of unused vacation time, about twice what most state employees get. And unlike other state workers, they can roll any additional unused vacation time into the sick-leave bank, 20 percent of which they can collect in a lump sum.
Mohler-Faria, who earned $285,600 in his final year at Bridgewater State and is now paid $100,000 annually as a senior adviser to the university, was eligible to take a total of 61 paid days off in each of the last 15 years. In addition to holidays, they included 15 annual sick days and 30 vacation days. If he took all the time available to him, his schedule would have worked out to an average work week of 3.8 days. As president, Mohler-Faria signed off on his own sick time and vacation schedule.
During his first 10 years at Bridgewater State, Mohler-Faria did use an annual average of 21 sick and vacation days. But over his final six years, he didn't take a single sick day. And although he used just nine vacation days during that period, from 2012 to 2015 alone he took 29 foreign and domestic trips on Bridgewater State's dime, including at least four to his ancestral home of Cape Verde and two to Belize.
While Mohler-Faria's was the biggest payout, during the last five years three other state higher-education officials received cash-outs of more than $200,000 upon retirement. In the wake of the news about Mohler-Faria's payout, Gov. Charlie Baker is reviewing public higher education pay policies.
Let's hope that sunlight proves to be the best disinfectant in this case. Many state governments have moved to curb perks like the ones Mohler-Faria received for most of their retirees.
But whether its higher education or certain quasi-public authorities, there are still too many corners of the public sector that play by different rules. Until the practice of maintaining places where the well-connected can go to reap a windfall is ended, look for the voter revolt to continue.
Charles Chieppo (Charlie_Chieppo@hks.harvard.edu) is a research fellow at the Ash Center at Harvard's Kennedy School. This piece first ran on governing.com.
A sense of place
One of the mixed-media pictures by Stacey Durand at the Museum of Art at the University of New Hampshire.
Much of her work involves exploring the visual environments of New Hampshire towns and cities.
The map in this picture makes us wonder how much of future mapmaking will be hurt by the use of GPS. Will many people in 20 years not know how to read a map? Of course maps can be beautiful -- indeed an art form. It would be very sad if the physical-mapmaking craft fades away.
Medicated America
"Assembly Line'' (oil on canvas), by Tess Barbato, in the show "NOW! New Work, New Artists,'' at ArtsWorcester, through April 16.
'Keep us here'
"Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers in the flowers today;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.
Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white,
Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night;
And make us happy in the happy bees,
The swarm dilating round the perfect trees."
- Robert Frost, "A Prayer in Spring''
Crime scene?
"Border #15,'' by Elizabeth Ferrill, in the group show "Works on Paper,'' March 30-May 1, at Dedee Shattuck Gallery, Westport, Mass.