Sunday, March 20, 2022
“Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.’’
–Mark Twain (1835-1910), American author
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Unfair, but certain people come to mind….
“over the tea-cups and into the square
the tongues has {sic} its desire;
still waters run deep, my dear,
there’s never smoke without fire.’’
From “At Last the Secret Is Out,’’ by W.H. Auden (1907-1973), British-American poet
‘’Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably.’’
— C.S. Lewis (1898-1965), British writer and scholar, best known for The Chronicles of Narnia
“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.”
— Margaret Atwood (born 1939), Canadian novelist and poet
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The U.S. Senate has approved putting the country on year-round Daylight Savings Time. Most people, especially in the north, will love the longer daylight late in the day, particularly, of course, in those light-deprived months of November, December and January. Standard Time has always been particularly problematical for New England because it’s so far east. That’s led many individuals to support having our region (except southwest Connecticut, which is part of the Greater New York area) join Canada’s Maritime Provinces in Atlantic Time.
While the latest sunset of the year in Boston with DST would be at 5:11 p.m. during the winter, the sun wouldn’t rise in Boston until after 8 a.m. from early December until late January. Many schoolchildren and others could find that difficult. So some adjustments to morning school and work times may be necessary if the DST bill becomes law.
One of the best things about later sunsets would be more people walking around, to exercise, shop, and visit with their neighbors. We could all use more of a sense of community. There are many more people up and about late in the afternoon than from, say, 6:30 to 7:30 a.m.
Other benefits might include spending less on electricity (but more on gasoline to go shopping?), fewer car crashes and less seasonal affective disorder (SAD). But it would require spending more on coffee to drink on those darker winter mornings before venturing out into the cold.
Plenty of sleep experts vigorously opposes year-round DST, saying year-round Standard Time would be healthier because of our Circadian rhythms: the physical, mental, and behavioral changes that follow a 24-hour cycle. These natural processes respond primarily to light and dark and affect most living things, including animals, plants and microbes.
Still, all in all, year-round DST is worth a trial of a few years.
Anyway, while we wait to see what the U.S. House does with the DST bill, let’s enjoy these softening days, even before sunrise. Compost cooking, grass greening. But I’m sick of robins. Where are the other birds? Do we have to wait for global warming to bring us blue and orange parrots to add some vivid avian color to the scene?
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For such an amusingly tiny place, Rhode Island has intense localisms. Consider Kevin Gallup’s remarks. He’s a former police officer and now director of the Emergency Management Agency in Charlestown, in the exurban south of the state.
Mr. Gallup ominously warned last week, in comments about PVD Food Truck Events coming to Charlestown, that “things morph’’ and town residents “might not appreciate” having people from Providence come to town for events.
“If we’re going to have people showing up from Providence and hanging out that we don’t know…along with our children…some people aren’t going to appreciate that and I can tell you that for a fact. So you’re going to need that police detail. Sorry, the world needs to be this way, but these things need to be thought out.”
There’s a long tradition of seeing cities as a source of menace, including in a “city-state’’ such as Rhode Island. Do Charlestown people feel safer with visitors from smaller-city New London, Conn., 34 miles from Charlestown, than with people from Providence, 48 miles away?
Remember those old maps that had the Latin phrase “hic sunt dracones” (“there be dragons”) for dangerous and/or unexplored regions? One wonders how familiar Charlestown people are with the capital of their state, and how many would say they’re all too familiar with it. People can be very provincial around here, and I’ll bet plenty of people from South County have never been to Providence.
Nonstop Eating and Driving
Wallet Hub has declared the Providence-Warwick area the 57th most obese metro area in the country and the Hartford-East Hartford-Middletown area the 58th, making them the fattest areas in New England. But nationally, the fattest regions are overwhelmingly in Trump country – the South and the Midwest. (Putin’s favorite orange blimp himself could stand to lose more than a few pounds.)
There are obviously links between obesity, poverty and lack of access to fresh food as opposed to fattening fast/junk food, which is everywhere. But an under-reported factor is sprawl development, which forces people to drive everywhere to do shopping and other errands. And driving (often in big gas guzzlers) becomes such an addiction that you see people driving around in circles to find a parking space within a block of a store rather than walking two or three blocks from their cars to shop, which would be a lot healthier and take less time.
Wallet Hub ran a useful overview of this obesity epidemic, which all of us, fat or thin, pay for in various ways:
“{O}ver 40 percent of U.S. adults are obese. Such a finding should come as no surprise, though, considering the huge availability of fast-food and increasingly cheaper grocery items that have negatively altered our diets. Unfortunately, the extra pounds have inflated the costs of obesity-related medical treatment to approximately $190.2 billion a year and annual productivity losses due to work absenteeism to around $4.3 billion.
Being obese is bad for a person’s health in general, but it’s especially dangerous during the COVID-19 pandemic, as it increases the risk of serious symptoms and may even triple the risk of hospitalization, according to the CDC {Center for Disease Control and Prevention.’’
Hit this link for the complete list:
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Speaking of COVID, it looks like the pandemic will resurge a bit in the next few weeks, as another Omicron variant spreads and immunity from vaccinations and prior infections fade. And Putin’s war on Ukraine and the vast flood of refugees it has unleashed is a recipe for international disease spread. Still, if you’ve had your shots, you’re very unlikely to get very sick if you’re reinfected.
That we’re going into spring should reduce the menace in New England because most of us will be spending more time outside. But in places like the South the return of hot weather will drive more people inside for air-conditioning. So I’d guess that the biggest COVID increase in the next few months will be down there.
Hang on to your face masks.
Bright College Days?
With colleges slated to tell anxious students next month if they got into highly selective schools (of which New England has the greatest density in America) most folks will continue to ignore that the U.S. News & World Report college rankings are highly dubious. They compare apples with oranges and are rife with unaudited data from colleges’ admissions officers anxious to goose the selectivity numbers. There’s even occasional out-and-out fraud.
They’re a cancer on the application process.
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I wonder how higher-education institutions will respond if the U.S. Supreme Court, as expected, next fall bans college affirmative-action programs that consider race – that is, for institutions that take federal money, which is almost all of them. How will colleges deal with what they see as their duty, or at least enlightened self-interest, to have a wide “diversity” (whose definition can be quite plastic) of backgrounds in their student bodies?
Using race as one element among others in admissions also involves seeking socio-economic diversity since past and present racial discrimination affects socio-economic status.
Politics Notebook
Much has been made of Republican successes in last November’s Virginia election, with such social issues as the nonexistent threat of “critical race theory’’ in public schools being well-weaponized. (CRT hasn’t been taught there and won’t be.) But the main reason for the election results was the low turnout of key Democratic groups, such as people 18-29, who are often too lazy to vote in off-year elections. Only 25 percent of this cohort bothered to vote in last year’s Virginia general election. Indeed, Democrats nationally are lazy about voting in all but presidential elections. Then they complain about the effects.
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Many states have become so one-party-dominated that their primary elections have become more important than their general elections. The winners of the primaries all too often tend to be candidates whose skills in stridently appealing to their party’s base far exceed their ability, or interest in, governing. You see the results in Congress.
Voting needs to be opened up in more states to get better candidates – people who can appeal to a broad range of the electorate and who seek to govern pragmatically (which includes the ability to compromise) for the general public good. That can mean such changes as ranked voting and open primaries. Public-spirited people in Rhode Island are now looking into pressing for such changes.
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I’m bored by Tom Brady, his unretirement and the celebrity-industrial complex in which he dwells. Given his age, he seems foolish to play again. He may get one concussion too many and spend the rest of his life drooling. But perhaps, like many people, he fears the inevitable sometimes fast, sometimes slow trip into obscurity that almost everybody but world-historical figures must take after they stop doing what made them famous.
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A reminder: Russia has always been an aggressive and expansionist state, not a defensive one. Look at a map of that gigantic country; read some history. Yes, it’s been invaded from the west, most notably in more modern times by Napoleon (who didn’t like Russia dominating eastern Europe) and Hitler (with whom Stalin divided up much of eastern Europe in the Soviet-Nazi pact of 1939) but the Russians have always tried to push west and subordinate any countries, most of them far less despotic than Russia, in the way.
And no country wants to be taken over by Russia, with its colorful tradition of brutal autocracy and massive corruption.
If and when Putin, the former KGB man and Communist who has made that easy move to fascism, withdraws his murder machine from Ukraine, the West and its allies must not drop any sanctions against his regime, himself and anyone else associated with this gangster government. And Ukraine, now more than ever culturally and emotionally part of the West, must be well-supplied with weaponry for years to come. As long as Putin is in power we must do everything we can weaken his regime, which menaces us all, in part because he supports other anti-Western despots.
The West and its allies meanwhile, should seize as much as possible of his oligarch allies’ ill-gotten gains abroad and use the money to help rebuild Ukraine, which the Russians have devastated.
Note how Putin’s forces, at his direction, continue to single out civilians, including children, to kill as part of the sort of terror tactics his regime has used for years, including against domestic opponents.
Putin has joined his allied tyrant Syria’s Bashar Assad in mass murders of civilians there, some with chemical weapons; in 2008 he attacked and stole part of Georgia, and in 2014 he attacked and sliced off Crimea and part of southeastern Ukraine. Sanctions against him were laughably weak. It wasn’t until the last month that the West fully awakened from its sleep of appeasement.
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Wars are paradises for purveyors of false equivalences. One that’s popped up in recent weeks is that America has “oligarchs” like Russia’s. No! America has billionaires (and some have far too much power over politicians) but unlike Russia’s billionaire oligarchs they’re independent of the government. And some, unlike parasitical Russian oligarchs, actually have brought new goods and services to the market. Russian oligarchs are part of the Putin kleptocracy; he takes care of them and they support him.
Some of this goes back to the ‘90s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when former Soviet functionaries grabbed large parts of what had been the Soviet economy and became what we now call oligarchs. One reason for the poor performance of the Russian army in its invasion of Ukraine, despite its extreme brutality, is that oligarchs have stolen so much from the Russian defense budget.
Of course, there is much suffering around the world caused by dictators, but we must focus on those who directly threaten the West.
Herewith are some interesting observations on false equivalences and related matters:
Forbes
Ricochet
Bloomberg
Koch Happy to Do Business With Stalin, Hitler, Putin
Koch Industries is a huge family-owned industrial (including lots of fossil-fuel-related stuff) conglomerate whose CEO is Charles Koch (a son of the founder and with a fortune estimated at $58 billion). The company and members of the Koch family are well known as big funders of far-right programs that demand lower taxes for the rich and fewer environmental and other regulations. Naturally, they are big players in the GOP.
While many big American companies have been pulling out of Russia, Koch has no plans to. But then, it was happy to do stuff for Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany.
Koch Industries’ operations in Russia include making industrial glass, electronic components, and products for the chemical and petrochemical and specialty chemical industries. All of those are strategic products useful to Putin’s war machine.
American consumers might consider Koch Industries’ priorities when shopping for these Koch products: Quilted Northern tissue, Brawny paper towels and Dixie cups.
Time on a Swing
Last week, while walking our dog, I saw a kid of about 6 or 7 on a swing suspended from a tree branch on that mild afternoon. I felt as he did for a moment – the simple exhilaration of being outside on a lovely day. Then I thought how much it reminded me of the ending of a famous E.B. White essay, “Once More to the Lake,’’ which you can look up.
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