
Daniel Regan: Climate-change denial and the limits of higher education
Via the New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org):
Last year, I attended my 50th reunion at Amherst College, in Amherst, Mass.. One evening at dinner under a tent, a former roommate, “Nick,” dominated the conversation with assertions that claims about human-induced climate change were a hoax and those about global warming a fraud. At first, I thought he was trying to be entertaining—or provocative.
But after a while, I realized my error. His was no parlor game; nor was he merely pushing his dinner partners by challenging the basis for their own strongly held convictions. He was a climate-change denier and a true believer when it came to denialism.
Since that dinner, I have wondered: How could an Amherst graduate arrive at these conclusions in the face of overwhelming evidence and scientific consensus? Similar questions could be asked of graduates from colleges and universities across the nation. Had the lessons of rigorous thinking, widespread reading, respect for evidence and trustworthy sources been lost on Nick? He had been, as I recalled, a brilliant student. So the answer was not, simply, that a college education had failed somehow to “take.”
On the contrary. He had fully internalized the critical thinking skills at a premium in his college days, but placed them now in the service of climate-change denialism. His lengthy enumeration of purported holes in the evidence was skillful. Indeed, it was strongly reminiscent of Big Tobacco’s methodological arguments in the highly orchestrated, sophisticated and clever campaign to fend off and postpone the inevitable declaration of tobacco as a carcinogen.
Nick was more a product of his regional background—in a hotbed of skepticism about human-induced climate change—than a product of Amherst. He was more a member of that region’s upper-class—its social networks, media preferences and economic interests—than of the Amherst class of ’66.
A higher education—what our college and university students learn both inside and beyond their classrooms—emerges as one of multiple influences but maybe not the most important one. A striking example of this hierarchy of influences emerges in a series of voting studies conducted in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Not very long after the war’s conclusion, sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset and political scientist Everett Carll Ladd Jr. produced a small avalanche of studies examining the voting patterns and preferences of 1960s college students.
Within a decade, the researchers were able to document shifts in students’ political orientations. Those who came from more liberal or radical backgrounds remained on the left. Those who came from more conservative or centrist backgrounds shifted rightward. The collegiate generation that had seemed so univocal was, in fact, increasingly divided.
Lipset and Ladd found that family background was a key factor in explaining the resulting voting patterns and ideological preferences. Although colleges and universities in the 1960s were viewed as possibly permanent bastions of liberalism, the generational shift to the left may have left its mark upon the lifestyles of those on campus, but did not necessarily leave a lasting impact upon their politics.
There was little chance that a higher education could compete with Nick's social background and current circumstances in influencing his eventual stance of climate change. His higher education was important, just not all-important.
The distinction should be both humbling and liberating. It can allow faculty, staff and administrators to take a deep breath, relax a little and adopt a spirit of what I would call well-considered but “playful experimentalism.” Such an ethos is sorely needed to spur much-needed innovation in higher education. This means risk: trying out that new advising model; experimenting with a novel course format and set of exercises, even though the tried and true ones have served well enough; trying out a new orientation for students at risk; collaborating in untested ways with a sister institution, and so on, through every level of the institu
But paralysis has its own perils in today’s more challenging environment for higher education. Thoughtful experimentation, despite the risks, is by far the wiser strategy for today's higher educators.
Daniel Regan is accreditation liaison officer and former dean of academic affairs at Johnson State College, in Vermont.
Chris Powell: Spoiled NFL players' protests are too vague
MANCHESTER, Conn.
What exactly are the National Football League players trying to accomplish with their protest by kneeling during the National Anthem?
President Trump's assertion that standing should be mandatory rather than done sincerely has focused the controversy on the players' freedom of expression rather than the target of the protests, vaguely described as racial injustice.
Back in the heroic era of civil rights, the 1950s and 1960s, the movement for racial justice had a specific and compelling agenda: voting rights; ending segregation in schools, public accommodations and housing; and improving job opportunities so that the formerly oppressed could advance. Voting rights have been achieved and segregation in public accommodations has been ended, but schools and housing remain segregated informally and racial minorities remain underemployed. Criminal justice and police misconduct increasingly raise racial issues as well.
The players have not articulated what they want the country to do about these issues, and it is little help just to harrumph that racial justice has not yet been fully achieved. It probably never will be.
Whatever the players want, the controversy they have caused shows that they are pursuing their objective in the wrong way, alienating more people than they are gaining sympathy from. For the players have failed to learn from the heroic era of the civil rights movement, whose success resulted in large part from the movement's patriotism, its seizing the flag on behalf of the nation's founding ideals, such as "all men are created equal."
The movement's participants had no special wealth and often put themselves at great risk by confronting armed racists.
By comparison, the players look like spoiled children, rich guys parading what they purport to be their virtue while risking nothing.
This is too bad because the players might accomplish something for racial justice and improve the country if they applied their celebrity to specific legislative proposals and volunteer work to help the disadvantaged. The players' resentment is hollow and they are lucky that the president's usual thoughtless bluster has changed the subject for them.
TRUMP NEEDS TO FIGHT EVERYONE: While he was never a sympathetic character in public life, when he was President Richard Nixon once managed to admit a mistake and thereby resolved an embarrassing problem.
It happened in August 1970 when, at an impromptu press conference in Denver, Nixon remarked on what he saw as the news media's glorification of cult leader Charles Manson, then on trial with his followers for murders in California. Manson, the president said carelessly, was "guilty, directly or indirectly, of eight murders."
That indeed was the charge but nobody had been convicted yet. Within hours the president's remark prompted a defense motion for a mistrial.
Nixon's press secretary quickly tried to clarify things and upon returning to Washington that day the president issued a formal statement saying that he did not know whether Manson and his followers were guilty, adding that they had to be presumed innocent during trial. The mistrial motion was denied and the trial continued and resulted in convictions.
But with President Trump everything has to be a personal challenge and a fight. About his telephone call to the widow of a soldier killed in Niger the other week, Trump could not say simply that he was sorry that he had been misconstrued as callous. No, he said the people on the other end of the call were lying about him.
The next 3½ years may be long ones.
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.
Boston sports teams announce anti-racism initiative
This is from The New England Council
The five major sports teams from the Boston area – the Boston Red Sox and Celtics, New England Patriots, Boston Bruins and New England Revolution – have teamed up to spearhead a campaign to combat racism.
The New England Council reported:
"The 'Take the Lead' initiative was launched with the support of Boston Mayor Marty Walsh at Fenway Park. In a PSA broadcasted in Fenway Park, Gillette Stadium and TD Garden, players urge fans to have open conversations about race and speak up when they hear offensive statements. Team executives spoke about their teams’ efforts to become more racially inclusive and engage in local communities. As part of the initiative, teams will participate in fellowships and career fairs to help all members of the community be on 'an equal playing field.'
“'We, like many Americans, made the mistake of thinking that our region’s and country’s less-than-stellar pasts were firmly behind us, that 21st-century America was becoming a more inclusive nation committed to celebrating diversity. That is not the case,' said John Henry, the Sox’ principal owner. 'Our sports teams, our athletes, are woven into the fabric of our society. For that reason, we cannot remain silent nor still.'''
The Sacklers' deadly drug peddling
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal2.com
The Sackler drug-fortune family, whose total wealth is estimated at around $15 billion, recalls the over-the-top Balzac line that “behind every great fortune is a great crime.’’ Theirs was to help create the opioid epidemic.
The Sacklers are the status-obsessed clan that puts its name in large letters on bronze and other fancy signs announcing members’ gifts to already rich museums and colleges and universities (including New England Ivy League schools) to affirm their membership in the social/mercantile aristocracy. Most of their money comes from their closely held company Purdue Pharma, which hugely hyped their painkiller OyxContin to physicians and patients. Purdue lied that the opiate was remarkably safe. No. It's a menace.
The company’s outrageous marketing of OxyContin has led to massive addiction and the overdose deaths of many thousands of people.
Even before OxyContin, Arthur Sackler, one of the three brothers who bought then tiny Purdue Pharma in 1952 and then built it up in a vastly profitable behemoth, heavily and misleadingly promoted the glories of the benzodiazepine Valium when he was an ad man. Valium is also very addictive and potentially lethally dangerous. What an innovative family!
From the start, the family-held firm’s secrets to success have included (as with some members of Big Pharma) its relentless pushing of its products to physicians, with junkets to fancy places, paying doctors big fees to give very short speeches and other perks that some might simply call bribes in the world’s most avaricious health “system.’’
Instead of showing off its money with well-advertised contributions to institutions catering to the elite, the Sacklers would do far better to set up a nonprofit chain of drug-rehabilitation clinics to address the vast damage that they have done.
In a weird way, New Englanders have seen this sort of money-laundering before, when the “China Trade’’ of the late 18th and early 19th centuries earned fortunes from opium sales. Some of it ended up in (what are now called) Ivy League colleges and other prestigious institutions. Opiates forever!
Nihilistic November
"No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member -
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds -
November!"
-- Thomas Hood
Greater Boston forgets the Berkshires
Mt. Greylock, in the northern Berkshires.
"Remember that famous cartoon that spoofed the average New Yorker’s view of the world? (Kansas city was just past the Hudson River and New Jersey; Las Vegas bordered Nebraska.) It’s not entirely different for the average Greater Bostonian’s view which, when picturing the west, undoubtedly imagines Chicago and LA before North Adams or Stockbridge.
"Mention Monterey to a Bostonian, and they will think of Pacific Route 1, not Massachusetts Route 23.
"Always been that way. And in Monterey, North Adams and Stockbridge—as well as Lenox, Otis, and Pittsfield—they’re used to it. It’s no mystery in Monterey, Mass., or anywhere else in the Berkshires. They know the numbers: Fully two-thirds of the Bay State’s population lives in the Greater Boston area.
“'Do you ever feel like second-class citizens in your own state?' I once asked a woman in Great Barrington on that subject.
“'Out of sight, out of mind,' she sighed wistfully.
"When those in eastern Massachusetts do travel west to the Berkshires, it is almost invariably in the fall or, more likely, in the summer, to take advantage of the many cultural activities (Tanglewood, Jacob’s Pillow, Shakespeare & Co., etc.) there.
"But I recently spent a couple of days on a story about the Berkshires in winter.
"And I can confidently report that, even long after the music stops and the lawn picnics are a distant memory, there is still life in them thar hills. Good life, too.''
-- Ted Reinstein on the Web site of WCVB TV, Boston, in 2013. He's the author of the travel book New England Notebook.
The general store in Monterey, Mass.
-- Photo by ToddC4176 at en.wikipedia
Suburban heavy industry
"Wrentham Asphalt Plant'' (oil), by Lorraine Hynes, in the current group show "The Edge of Light,'' with Mary Jane Begin and Kelly McCullough, at the Providence Art Club.
Tim Faulkner: Gov. Baker still won't oppose natural-gas projects
Opponents of a proposed natural-gas pipeline compressor station recently protested outside a local restaurant, where Gov. Charlie Baker stumped for Attleboro's mayor.
-- Photo by Tim Faulkner for ecoRI News
Via ecoRI News (ecori.org)
ATTLEBORO, Mass.
Even though Spectra Energy Partners has withdrawn plans for a natural-gas pipeline compressor station in Rehoboth, Mass., opponents of the project don’t want it coming back.
Groups such as Citizens Against the Rehoboth Compressor Station (CARCS) have been pleading with Gov. Charlie Baker to take a stand against the compressor station and other pipeline expansions, but so far the governor has refused to bend to public pressure and oppose the natural-gas infrastructure projects proposed for the region.
CARCS activists protested Oct. 28 outside the Uno's Pizzeria & Grill on Route 1, where Baker stumped for local politicians. Baker arrived late and didn't address the demonstrators, including members of the MBTA bus maintenance union who were protesting Baker’s efforts to privatize their jobs.
The International Association of Machinists Union Local 264 protested Baker's efforts to privatize their jobs.
Attleboro Mayor Kevin Dumas was one of the politicians whom Baker has endorsed. Dumas, however, opposes the compressor project. “It’s dead and I hope it stays dead,” Dumas told ecoRI News.
Dumas, a Republican, has been an outspoken critic of the compressor station and signed a resolution opposing the project, the proposed site close to the city’s border with Rehoboth.
Baker has only said that the project is a federal decision and outside of state control. But opponents such as Brian Hatch, a lawyer from Attleboro, said Baker could do more to impede or even stop the compressor station. Recent appeals court decisions, he said, give states more say in the permitting of energy projects that are under the purview of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
The site of the proposed compressor station poses a health threat to residential neighborhoods and youth who frequent the nearby park and athletic fields, Hatch said.
Kathleen Boivin of Rehoboth referred to a 2015 report by Attorney General Maura Healey showing that the growth of renewable energy and energy-efficiency improvements reduce the demand for natural gas and therefore pipeline enhancements.
Boivin said the common belief about the buildout of the Spectra pipeline isn't to provide natural gas for New England but to deliver it to export terminals north of Boston.
“There’s no need for our communities to bear the health, environmental, and financial detrimental effects of this additional infrastructure when it’s not needed,” she said.
Last week CARCS members also hand-delivered a petition signed by 2,500 opponents of the compressor to Baker’s office in Boston.
CARCS Director Tracy Manzella said after 19 months of organized opposition Baker hasn't budged.
“We’ve gone door to door, staged countless community events, sponsored letter-writing campaigns, given interviews, published articles, met with local, state, and federal government officials, drafted bylaws, and even given a Powerpoint presentation at the governor’s executive office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, but the governor himself? So far, no luck.”
The proposed 10,320-horsepower Rehoboth compressor station was halted by Houston-based Spectrain June. The project was one of several Access Northeast projects paused along the Algonquin pipeline. The compressor station was proposed for a privately owned, 120-acre site close to Attleboro and Seekonk, and Pawtucket, R.I., and about 10 miles from downtown Providence.
The projects were withdrawn because of financing trouble, created when the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that a plan by National Grid and Eversource to charge electricity customers for the projects was unconstitutional. It’s expected that Spectra, National Grid, and Eversource will revive the projects if a new funding scheme is approved.
Tim Faulkner is reporter/writer for ecoRI News.
Sam Pizzigati: Payroll tax deeply discriminates against low- and middle-income people
Via OtherWords.org
How much did your paychecks total last year? You know the answer, of course. So does the Social Security Administration. The totals for every American’s paycheck income are sitting in Social Security’s computers.
Once every year, Social Security does a serious data dump out of those computers to let us know just how much working Americans are actually making. The latest totals — covering 2016 — have just appeared.
Most of us, the new numbers show, are simply not making all that much.
In fact, nearly half of our nation’s employed — 49.3 percent — earned less than $30,000 in 2016. A good many of these Americans lived in poverty. In 2016, families of four that earned less than $24,339 ranked as officially poor.
We don’t have an “official” figure for middle class status. But the Economic Policy Institute has calculated the costs of maintaining a no-frills middle class existence in various parts of the United States. In Houston, one of our nation’s cheaper major cities, a family of four needed $62,544 in 2016 to live a bare-bones middle class lifestyle.
Nationally, according to the new Social Security payroll income numbers, over three-quarters of working Americans — 76.4 percent — took home less than $60,000 in 2016.
Some Americans, on the other hand, took home a great deal more. The Social Security Administration counts 133,119 Americans who pocketed over $1 million in paycheck income last year.
Now which of these two groups — the millionaires or the under-$60,000 crowd — do you think paid a greater share of its income in Social Security taxes?
The millionaires could certainly afford to pay the bigger share. But they didn’t.
Individuals who took home $1 million in 2016 had $16,265 deducted from their paychecks for Social Security and Medicare. Those deductions totaled a meager 1.6 percent of their paycheck income. Working Americans making $60,000 last year, by contrast, had 7.65 percent of their take-home deducted for Social Security and Medicare.
In other words, Americans making $60,000 paid over four times more of their income for Social Security and Medicare than Americans who made $1 million.
How could that be?
Our tax code currently has a ceiling on earnings subject to the Social Security tax. That ceiling this year rests at $127,200. All paycheck income up to that level faces a 6.2 percent tax for Social Security and a 1.45 percent tax for Medicare.
Income above that ceiling faces no Social Security tax at all.
Until the Obama years, income above the earnings ceiling faced no payroll tax for Medicare either. But President Obama succeeded in getting that changed. Individual income over $200,000 now faces an additional 0.9 percent Medicare tax.
If all income over $200,000 faced a Social Security tax as well, we’d have enough new revenue to significantly improve Social Security benefits.
The Trump administration is moving in the opposite direction. Earlier this year, the White House tried and failed to get the Obama Medicare tax on the rich repealed.
Now the administration is pushing a tax “reform” that totally ignores the unfairness of the current Social Security payroll tax and instead hands America’s wealthiest a stunningly generous assortment of tax giveaways.
If this Trump tax plan passes, Americans making $60,000 will still be paying over four times more of their income in payroll taxes than Americans who make $1 million. And America’s millionaire-packed top 1 percent will get 80 percent of the new Trump tax cuts, the Tax Policy Center calculates.
The Trump tax plan, in other words, makes the U.S. tax code even more millionaire-friendly than the current code. The White House calls that “reform.” The rest of us ought to call it an outrage.
Sam Pizzigati, an Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow, co-edits Inequality.org.
Chris Powell: Maybe Conn. is starting to gets its government under control
After three months of fecklessness, delusion, incompetence and disorder that embarrassed the state throughout the country, Connecticut may be grateful for any budget at all, even if the compromise budget developed this week by the General Assembly's Democratic and Republican leaders is found to contain more than the usual hurtful, stupid, and dishonest provisions.
In any case if the compromise wins Gov. Dannel Malloy's signature or is enacted over his veto, it will restore at least the semblance of government and end the governor's allocation of money on an emergency and arbitrary basis. That will be a great relief to most municipalities, since the governor has been threatening their school money.
But the budget may cause pain, not relief, for many other recipients of state money, whose funding will have been sharply reduced or even eliminated without much if any public discussion. That pain will be the other side of the budget compromise's not raising taxes sharply and its failure to control state employee and municipal teacher pensions and benefits.
Many more years of such pain are probably ahead for government in Connecticut as people increasingly understand that it is failing to achieve its nominal objectives and is alienating and starting to lose Connecticut's productive, self-sufficient population. A political consensus that state government has to start serving the public more and itself less just may be developing.
If such a consensus is developing, it will have been sparked by the three moderate Democratic senators and five moderate Democratic representatives who undid their party's narrow majorities in the legislature by voting for a Republican budget, thereby forcing their party to settle for something less than another huge tax increase. Another huge tax increase would have only fed the machine of state government, which isn't much more than a pension and benefit society.
Indeed, pension and benefit costs for state employees and municipal teachers cannibalized state government more than ever this year. Yes, the pensions long have been underfunded, but most people in state government and the state employee and municipal teacher unions knew this. The unspoken agreement has been that union members would get contracts making them state government's only secured creditors when the crackup in the state's finances and demographics began. Public services and government's other dependents would suffer but not the union members.
The unions have known this better than many of the public's supposed representatives, so it will be no offense if a new political consensus strives to revise pensions and benefit costs in the public's favor, as the compromise budget has started to do by requiring teachers to contribute more toward their pensions. This provision is remarkable, since teacher unions are the most feared special interest in the state and surely will retaliate, especially against Democratic legislators they had considered their mute tools.
The governor must be credited for forcing the pension issue this year by insisting on maintaining the proper level of contributions to the pension funds. He would have deserved a lot more credit if he had insisted on serious concessions from the state employee unions instead of giving them another generous contract prior to the budget's adoption.
The governor also must be credited for prompting the budget compromise by threatening to cut off the school money. Without that threat by the governor, legislators might have dithered a lot longer.
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.
Before the leaves are blown off
At the farm in Little Compton, R.I., before the storm.
-- Photo by Lydia Davison Whitcomb
Llewellyn King: The Internet of Things has turned on me
Dear Diary,
Dear Diary,
I’m writing by the light of a candle, with a pencil in the bathroom. I have to sit here in the dark. You see, the Internet of Things is driving me mad, out of my mind. The appliances in my home are ruining me; sliming me.
I always had trouble with inanimate objects: doors that hit me, shoes that hid from me, hammers that sought out my thumbs and carpets that wanted me flat on my ass. But that was before the Internet of Things; before Silicon Valley issued them with brains.
That nice, useful microwave is a malicious devil. Would you believe that it has gotten the other appliances – all those with computers built in — to conspire against me because of something I wrote belittling the Internet of Things?
Well, the things have taken up arms against me. It is war, plain and simple, in my home.
They bully me. The washing machine emailed me, “I know what you and the boys did last night. Spaghetti and Chianti again?”
The television in the bedroom tweeted, “You’re cut off. No more binge-watching ‘Married with Children.’ ”
How can I tell my dear wife that I have to sleep on the couch because the microwave is in cahoots with the washing machine and the bedroom TV to torment me? Even my i Phone threatened to put pictures of me in the buff on Facebook.
I’ve tried to reach out to the appliances, tried to make peace with them. I’ve pleaded with the smart meter in the kitchen, “Can’t we just get along? After all, we live in the same house.”
My life is utterly destroyed.
It all began with one of those smart domestic assistants that communicated with the smart devices in your home. I knew about its artificial intelligence but I didn’t think it was intelligent enough to prevail on all the appliances in my home to drive me mad.
How did I get on the wrong side of my appliances, which I bought and installed? Even my video game console is a double agent. It lulls me into a false sense of trust with games, then it hands over the results of secret IQ tests to my boss.
I can’t tell anyone. “Who you going to tell? You’ll be committed,” the cruel refrigerator emailed me.
I begged the appliances collectively to accept my apology, to let me make amends. That set off a torrent of abuse on social media. My smart watch started flashing, “Nice try, big guy.”
I’m now all alone with my toilet bowl. I could hug it because it’s not part of the Internet of Things. It’s solid, old-fashioned and even, in my mental state, lovable.
I had a plan which I broached with my wife. I asked her, out of earshot of anything connected to the Internet, whether she would like to join the Amish, to live simply with a horse-drawn buggy. Then I realized that we couldn’t buy a buggy because the mixer in the kitchen has been monitoring my credit cards obsessively.
Like President Trump, these gadgets don’t brook criticism. Even an innocent clock-radio can turn on you. Mine did. It woke me up on Nov. 9, 2016 to tell me that Trump had won. That’s when I began losing it.
On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS.
Ready for winter
"Stock Pile'' (acrylic on panel), by Jeremy Miranda, in the two-man show with David Barnes "The View From Plato's Man Cave,'' at Atelier Newport (R.I.), Nov. 12-Dec. 10.
What makes a New Englander?
Apple orchard in Hollis, N.H.
From a 2002 commentary by the Voice of America
Every region of the United States has its bittersweet stereotype. People from the American West are reputed to be long of limb, folksy, at home with nature. Those from the Midwest are solid, corn-fed, plain-speaking "heartlanders." "Yankees", who hail from the older, more settled regions of New England in the northeastern United States, are said to be stubborn people of few words.
Ninety-two-year-old Ruth King-Sanborn sits on a horsehair couch overlooking the hardscrabble New Hampshire farm and mill her ancestors bought back in 1773, when this part of the world was still a remote British colony. But don't ask her to get too emotional about the place.
"New Englanders are loath to discuss their feelings. I think the first thought that occurs to me is that people kept their thoughts to themselves. People did not say that they feel bad about something. I'm using the past tense now. I think it was the isolation. We were isolated here. If I didn't go to school, it would've been weeks when I wouldn't have seen anybody outside of the family!" she said.
Colin Cabot and his wife recently bought the farm and mill from Ms. King-Sanborn's family, hoping to restore it. Before moving here, the couple had lived in a small farming community in the rural Midwest. That was a place where people tended to spend time only with their own religious and ethnic kind.
"… and there it is very clearly either Catholic or Lutheran, and the Catholics and the Lutherans don't talk to each other very much. And they can live across the street from each other, and they don't like it. So when I came to New Hampshire, I thought I'd have the same kind of farming community. But the difference is the New Englanders are individualists, they are completely independent. There may have been political differences or religious difference before the Revolution back in 1770. And now, those differences are forgotten, but the fact is they know they are different than their neighbor. And it doesn't take any specific form, but that's not the way I do it," Mr. Cabot said.
To underscore this idea, Mr. Cabot points to the dented New Hampshire license plate on his pick-up truck. It bears the state motto: "Live Free or Die."
"Yeah, right. Some people say the real Yankees are the way they are because they didn't leave when everyone else went away and therefore they are sort of the cantankerous ones, because they could have gone to the Midwest and made a killing. They were insane and stubborn then, and they are more stubborn now because the genes have been perpetuated," he said.
Not everyone feels that way.
"Sometimes people think of Yankees as being cantankerous [grouchy] [and] as being a little bit aloof. But in fact, that is not the case at all. It's just that people are very thoughtful, they do want to make up their own minds."
That's Jean Sheheen, the {then} governor of New Hampshire. She is proud of the legendary independent-mindedness of people in her state, which is on national display every four years during the early days of American presidential campaigns.
"People are used to having candidates for president come through their living rooms and having the opportunity [to talk with them], and I think many people feel like they have the right to ask those people why they are running for president and what they want to do and challenge their thoughts and their issues. And that's good for the democratic process in this country," Ms. Sheheen said.
Norman Macintyre, who runs a fish auction up in Portland, Maine, to the north of New Hampshire, agrees that his fellow New Englanders tend to keep their own counsel. But he adds that they are also very supportive of each other.
"My example for that is the ice storm we had in the winter of 1997 and 1998. There was very severe ice storm here. Many people were out of power for two weeks or more. Shelters opened up immediately. Teenagers went to work in the shelters just volunteered automatically. You would find ads in the newspaper that said 'I have a generator, I've got my power back. If someone wants to borrow my generator, just call such and such a number.' There was no looting. There was no theft. There were no crimes against the public during that period. Whereas, if it was in South Central Los Angeles, I think it would have been different," he said.
Some predict the demise of the traditional crusty New England personality, due to the influence of global media and the influx of immigrants to the region. But this outcome is far from certain. Even Robert Frost, the quintessential Yankee poet, expressed competing sentiments about this in the same poem. He wrote, "Good fences make good neighbors." But he also wrote, "Something there is [in us] that doesn't love a wall."
Nothing is certain
"A genuine New Englander learned by example never to take anything for granted. Once, when I remarked that it was a nice day, my Uncle Henry looked up at the sky, turned in every direction, and seeing there wasn't a cloud anywhere, took the pipe from his mouth and finally conceded, 'Well. maybe.'''
-- From Fetched-up Yankee, by Lewis Hill
Amazing amphibian
-- Photo by Lydia Whitcomb
Amazing plus-two-foot-long yellow spotted salamander found in a garage near a stream in bucolic Little Compton, R.I. It and other salamanders that joined it were perhaps drawn by the light in the garage Thursday night.
And now, seaweed as fuel
Seaweed being lifted out of top of algae scrubber/cultivator, to be discarded or used as food, fertilizer, or skin care.
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com:
The green-energy revolution goes on: As GoLocal24 has reported, the U.S. Energy Department has awarded Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution researchers $5.7 million to advance technology leading to the mass production of sugar kelp, a seaweed, to make biofuels and bio-based chemicals.
The grants are from the Macroalgae Research Inspiring Novel Energy Resources (MARINER) Program (what a name!). A biologist with the group, Scott Lindell, told GoLocal: “Seaweed farming avoids the growing competition for fertile land, energy-intensive fertilizers, and freshwater resources associated with traditional agriculture.’’
Many readers may have eaten seaweed salad in an Asian restaurant; it’s delicious. Seaweed has some other uses, including cosmetics. It’s nice to know that New Englanders might soon grow it for food and fuel, anything to reduce our energy dependency on other regions.
Don Pesci: Fact-checking Sen. Murphy's claims on gun control
An AR-15.
FactCheck.org recently examined a proposition put forward by Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy who, according to some of his gun-toting critics, will not rest content until he has repealed the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, abolished the National Rifle Association (NRA), and confiscated every "assault weapon" – assault guns, assault knives and, especially prominent just now in Europe, assault vans – from sea to shining sea.
“What we know, Murphy said, "is that states that have tougher gun laws, that keep criminals from getting guns, that keep those dangerous weapons like AR-15s out of the hands of civilians, have dramatically lower rates of gun violence."
FactCheck found that while Murphy was entitled to make up his own mind on assault weapons, he was not entitled to make up his own facts, and the senator was given three Pinocchios.
Let’s deal first with Murphy’s AR-15 claim, Fact Check began. In support of Murphy’s claim that tough gun laws in such places as Connecticut and Chicago that “keep criminals from getting guns, that keep those dangerous weapons like AR-15s out of the hands of civilians, have dramatically lower rates of gun violence," a Murphy spokesperson pointed to “several studies” that backed Murphy’s assertion.
Fact Check examined the studies, the bedrock upon which Murphy’s claims rest, and found: “None of the studies [cited by the spokesperson] address bans on assault weapons such as the AR-15, but the effectiveness of an assault weapons ban was widely studied after Congress imposed a nationwide 10-year ban in 1994.”
Pointing to one such study undertaken by Christopher Koper, of George Mason University, and his colleagues, FactCheck summarizes the finding of that study: “The effectiveness of the ban was inconclusive. Gun violence declined nationwide into the 2000s, but the researchers ‘cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation's recent drop in gun violence.' The researchers estimated that the effects of the ban 'may not be fully felt for several years into the future,’ and ‘'should it be renewed, the ban's effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement.’ The ban was not renewed.” Murphy’s claim is not supported by the study.
FactCheck notes the deficiencies of the ban itself: The 1994 ban “may not have covered all forms of assault weapons because it did not ban all semiautomatic weapons. Instead, it banned semiautomatic weapons with large-capacity magazines and weapons that ‘appear useful in military and criminal applications but unnecessary in shooting sports or self-defense.’"
The observation raises the ticklish question: What weapons would an effective ban exclude? And the honest answer to the question is all "assault weapons" -- possibly including the recently favored weapons of terrorists, such as knives, vans and exploding pressure cookers -- not to mention a repeal of the Second Amendment supported by former Hartford Courant columnist Bob Engelhart, and the confiscation of all guns in the United States, the Australia solution to gun violence.
The problem with partial bans is that they are “not comprehensive,” a favorite expression of the anti-Second Amendment left. Englehart is right: We should learn to speak of partial weapons bans with the same smiling contempt used by people who speak of partial pregnancies, partial round circles and partial square holes. The ban enacted into law in Connecticut, if nationally replicated, would not substantially drive down murder rates in Chicago or Hartford.
A recent 2016 study published in Criminal Justice Review, FactCheck notes, addressed “the connection between 19 different gun-control laws and violent crime in roughly 1,000 U.S. cities. Kleck [co-author of the study] found that ‘gun control laws generally show no evidence of effects on crime rates, possibly because gun levels do not have a net positive effect on violence rates.’ But there were a few exceptions. Requiring a license to possess a gun and bans on gun purchases by alcoholics appeared to reduce the homicide and robbery rate.” And, of course, the licensing of guns is as common as table salt. The gun violence figures recently used by Murphy as emotional props to acquire campaign funds include suicides, which account for nearly 60 percent of gun crimes.
On this latter point, Murphy defended himself from the Pinocchio assault by pointing out that suicide was also a violent crime. True enough, but it is a different kind of violent crime, entailing much different consequences, and the General Assembly in Connecticut doubtless would not have successfully passed laws banning the AR-15, a weapon not useful in suicides, had it been forced to argue that the ban would reduce the incidence of suicide alone. The shooter in Sandy Hook first murdered 27 innocent people, 20 of them children, and then turned a pistol on himself, committing suicide.
In a cooler movement, Murphy should ask himself whether the tears poured out in Connecticut and Las Vegas would have flowed so copiously if both shooters had committed suicide before they pulled the trigger on their many victims.
Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based columnist and a frequent contributor to New England Diary.
Your inner wax
''Primary Instincts'' (encaustic), by Stephanie Roberts-Camello, in the show ''SHIFTS: Approaching Encaustic From All Angles,'' at the Fuller Craft Museum, Brockton, Mass., through Nov. 26. Reception 2-5 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 28.