Whitcomb: Magic Mushrooms; Fending Off FEMA; Drop the Paywalls?
Sunday, April 21, 2024
“My father used to say,
‘Superior people never make long visits,
have to be shown Longfellow's grave
or the glass flowers at Harvard.
Self-reliant like the cat—
that takes its prey to privacy,
the mouse's limp tail hanging like a shoelace from its mouth—
they sometimes enjoy solitude,
and can be robbed of speech
by speech which has delighted them.
The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;
not in silence, but restraint.’
Nor was he insincere in saying, ‘Make my house your inn.’
Inns are not residences.’’
--“Silence,’’ by Marianne Moore (1887-1972), American poet
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“Some other spring
I'll try to love
Now I still cling
To faded blossoms….”
-- From the song “Some Other Spring,’’ with lyrics by Irene Kitchings and music by Arthur Herzog. It was a favorite of the singer Billie Holiday.
“A gossip is one who talks to you about others; a bore is one who talks to you about himself; and a brilliant conversationalist is one who talks to you about yourself.’’
-- Lisa Kirk (1925-1990), American actress and writer
The birds are singing their springtime songs; you might be able to hear a few away from the leaf blowers. But house cats and their feral colleagues are out to kill the feathered creatures. Please keep your felines inside.
Anything we can do to get off many manmade toxic chemicals the better, in small and large places. Researchers and business have been stepping up efforts to get off problematical chemicals by turning to natural solutions.
Boston’s WBUR reports that one quirky example is on Nantucket, which is experimenting with “MycoBuoys,” made from the root-like part of mushrooms (which, of course, are fungi), to replace Styrofoam buoys used in scallop, oyster, and mussel aquaculture to hold up spat collectors. The Styrofoam degrades, releasing microplastics that pose health risks to animal life in general. In this case, they may have been harming shellfish reproduction.
When shellfish reproduce, they spawn tiny larvae that move in the water until they find a structure to settle on. Once the larvae permanently attach to a surface, they are known as spat and, hopefully, grow to harvestable-sized shellfish.
The hope is that the buoys will last five to eight months. Town officials will see if their use can increase the number of scallops. If so, that could be an economic boon. Scallops sell for a pretty price.
Fungi can be used in a wide variety of ways to reduce the use of manmade chemicals. These include medicine, fuel, fertilizers, cosmetics, clothing and footwear. And reducing the production of manmade chemicals reduces the burning of fossil fuels.
Time to Get Serious
Rhode Island would seem a fine place for a thick public-transit system: Much of it is very densely populated, and there are numerous town centers to serve as passenger-collection sites, as opposed to the suburban and exurban sprawl in much of the country (though the Ocean State has some sprawl, too, especially on the western side of Narragansett Bay). But poor political priority-setting and public apathy have blocked what should have been done. The results can be seen in such things as the Washington Bridge fiasco, whose traffic effects were worsened by the dearth of public transportation. More RIPTA buses could have reduced the number of cars on Route 195 and adjacent roads when the westbound part of the bridge was closed.
Addressing transportation issues in the state is made far more complicated than it should be because it has far more (39!) municipalities than such a tiny state should have and has too little central planning.
With the exit of RIPTA director Scott Avedisian, brought down by a traffic case (!), I hope that there’s much reappraisal by Gov. Dan McKee and other political leaders about the role that expanded public transportation can play in improving the state’s environment and economy. And rather than picking a politician again (Avedisian is a former Warwick mayor), how about hiring a public transportation professional with a systems and/or engineering background?
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Boston will be looking very carefully at how goes the congestion-pricing program that is expected to start in New York City in June. The idea is to reduce vehicle traffic coming in and out of Manhattan’s central business district, to encourage mass-transit use and car-pooling, to use the congestion-toll revenue to improve subways and bus service over the next few years and to reduce air pollution.
If it works, and I think it will, based on other cities that have tried it, frequently gridlocked Boston will follow suit. God knows, the MBTA could use the revenue from such a program!
Congestion pricing has worked well in London, Stockholm, Malta, Rome, and Milan, among other places.
Here’s the New York City plan:
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Much of the whining about allegedly high U.S. gasoline prices (which are much lower than in other Western nations) comes from people driving huge, heavily financed gas-guzzling SUV’s to and fro houses out in suburbia and exurbia.
The Wet Look
A big hurricane season is predicted (but who knows?), in part because of a record-warm Atlantic in prime tropical-storm-spawning areas.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, which administers the federal flood-insurance program, has a rule that if a hurricane or other storm does damage to a house that’s equal to more than half its value, the owners must tear down the house and make its replacement higher than the teardown to comply with latest National Flood Insurance Program standards.
The trouble is that it is local officials who are mostly charged with trying to enforce this rule, and they too often succumb to pressure from locals not to stop rebuilding in flood zones. Whatever their anti-tax, anti-government agitations, especially in Florida, these locals are more than happy for taxpayers without water views to repeatedly have to subsidize shoreliners’ lifestyles as global warming continues to raise sea levels. As damages increase and property insurers (which cover wind but not water damage) bailout of flood-prone coasts, the economic impacts and political pressures from global warming will rise with the seas, with the Sunshine State at ground zero.
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Will Marathon Development's proposed mixed-use Copley Centre I project, just south of the Rhode Island Hospital complex, in Providence, become a model for other efforts to address the city’s housing shortage? It would include 178 “affordable housing’’ units, a two-story educational facility, offices and some other commercial stuff.
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The anti-vaxxers have siblings in the growing anti-fluoride-in-the public-water-supply program. How many use fluoride toothpaste and so think that fluoridated water is redundant in blocking tooth decay?
In any case, cutting back on fluoridation might cause a big increase in the incidence of tooth decay even as the shortage of dentists and dental hygienists worsens.
The new battle against fluoride in the water recalls the John Birch Society’s fight against it in the ‘50s and ‘60s, when it was called a Commie plot.
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What happens to writers and other creative types as companies come to see how artificial intelligence can create stuff that’s predictably saleable? Real, idiosyncratic human creativity, whose marketability can’t be reliably predicted, maybe shunted aside. The future may look grim for budding TV and movie scriptwriters, novelists and illustrators.
And, of course, AI is a festival of plagiarism.
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Perhaps that Israel is so tiny, let its very dense defense system, with the help of allies, bring down almost all of the missiles and drones that Iran’s dictatorship fired at it. Would it have worked as well if the country were more spread out?
Dancing Around the Sewer
Here’s what Putin plans for us this year:
Paywalls
Richard Stengel, a former managing editor of Time magazine, proposes in The Atlantic that professionally and ethically managed journalistic publications, most of which are behind paywalls, whose revenue helps pays for the professionals who write and edit for them, drop their paywalls, at least during this scary election year. Our frayed democracy is under threat, including from intensifying Russian interference in our election campaigns.
The Atlantic has a paywall.
He notes, “The problem is not just that professionally produced news is behind a wall; the problem is that paywalls increase the proportion of free and easily available stories that are actually filled with misinformation and disinformation.” But how many rigorously run pubs could afford to lose the revenue? How could advertising be enough to keep them going?
Hit this link for his full argument.
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"I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible: There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain."
---Former Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney
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“When clear prospects are opened before vanity, pride, avarice, or ambition, for their easy gratification, it is hard for the most considerate philosophers and the most conscientious moralists to resist the temptation. Individuals have conquered themselves. Nations and large bodies of men, never.”
-- John Adams (1735-1826), a U.S. Founding Father and the second president, in a letter to his wife, Abigail
The moral squalor and cowardice of so many leading Republicans, especially in the sewer that the U.S. House has become, gets more and more disheartening. Many U.S. House Republicans are far more interested in keeping in the good graces of their Kremlin agent leader than in doing anything that would help the country.
Consider their long sabotage of plans supported by Biden and remaining honorable Republicans to tighten the southern border and their blocking of
plans to help Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, not just because we favor, or used to, democracies but for our national security. It’s all because the GOP/QAnon’s sociopathic, Putin-suck-up witch doctor hates Ukraine. But perhaps there’s hope, as House Speaker Mike Johnson finally shows some spine in confronting the most fascist members of his astonishingly corrupt and anything but “conservative’’ party.
Some House Republicans are enthusiastically helping the Kremlin as it strives to undermine the West. Only time will tell how many of these people are the recipients of laundered Russian money, and how many are simply isolationists, recalling those before Pearl Harbor; some of those were Hitler supporters, just as some GOP folks now admire Putin and other tyrants. Many are traitors, at least in that they supported Trump’s insurrection.
Then we have the cynical New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, who had backed Nikki Haley in the primary there but now will back Trump. ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked him this:
“Just to sum up, you would support him for president even if he is convicted in classified documents. You would support him for president even though you believe he contributed to an insurrection. You would support him for president even though you believe he’s lying about the last election. You would support him for president even if he’s convicted in the Manhattan case. I just want to say, the answer to that is yes, correct?”
Sununu replied: “Yeah, me and 51 percent of America.” {51 percent figure is a lie, and the guv knows it.}
‘’For me, it’s not about him as much as it is having a Republican administration.’’
Sounds like this pol is angling for a job in the next Trump regime. Or maybe he’s angling for a lucrative payday from one of those billionaire Trump donors who meet at Mar-a-Lago to get promises that their taxes and regulations will he cut again in a time when the very rich have had the greatest economic and political power in America since the 1920’s, when intensifying income inequality helped lead to the Great Depression.
Sununu, whose father, the famously smug and arrogant John Sununu, also served as New Hampshire governor, in 1983-1989, likes to crow that the state’s lack of income and sales taxes makes it a business paradise. But the Granite State benefits above all from its proximity to rich, relatively high-tax, liberal Massachusetts, whose public services, including the nation’s best public schools; complex physical infrastructure, and higher-education sectors have helped create great wealth, much of which spills over to New Hampshire.
As I’ve suggested before, New Hampshire could accurately be called “The Parasite State.’’
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Trump can’t stop himself from disrupting his hush-money trial in New York, or, for that matter, any other attempts to hold him to legal account. That reminds me that federal Judge Julius Hoffman had Black Panther Bobby Seale bound and gagged for disrupting his trial, in 1969, on conspiracy charges related to the disturbances during the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
How delightful it would be to see the same discipline applied to Trump.
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The bravery and resilience of groups fighting for democracy against the brutal miliary junta in Burma (Myanmar) is inspiring. Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Laos and Thailand have been supporting the regime.
