Life on a wharf
Long Wharf in Boston, United States, 19th Century, jutting into Boston Harbor
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
I’ve spent a lot of time on wharves, and I especially think of them in August, when their smells of salt water, fish, creosote, diesel and gasoline reach their greatest intensity. Standing there at the edge of water, maybe looking at the eelgrass wave in the water a few feet away, I think of how summer is waning as a back-door cold front replaces the sultry southwest wind with a salty breeze from the east that’s cool enough to remind me of fishing for smelt as a kid in October off the “floats’’ (wooden floating wharves) in the harbor near our house, using a bamboo pole and multiple hooks. (Smelts, by the way, are best fried in butter.) Or I remember the east wind coming off Boston Harbor and cooling off my summer work mates and me as we smoked on the loading platforms along the promiscuously polluted South Boston waterfront and I mulled the threats and opportunities involved in returning to college in a couple of weeks.
On the Cape’s West Falmouth Harbor, there’s a very old and small granite-block wharf in front of what used to be my paternal grandparents’ house, since torn down and replaced by a tall McMansion but, as the builder emphasized to angry neighbors, on the “same footprint.’’ The little wharf provided me with a couple of lessons in the passage of time:
Low tide now exposes sand and mud flats going right up to the front of the wharf (or “dock’’ as we called it, even though docks are more precisely the area between wharves).
So why was it built? It turns out that a little stream emptying into the harbor had silted up the water abutting the wharf. In the 19th Century the water in that part of the harbor (once famous for its shellfish, before a disastrous oil spill, in 1969) was much deeper. And the rather mysterious structure was apparently built to provide access for people coming in small boats to a fresh water spring a few feet up the slope from the wharf.
Block JUMP Bikes for now
A JUMP Bike in Providence. The passenger here is a lot more benign than many of the riders.
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
A couple of weeks ago I implied here that though we’re in the Wild West period of such rentable personal-transportation options as dockless JUMP Bikes, we shouldn’t worry too much about them.
But I grossly underestimated the potential for mayhem with these bikes in some parts of Providence, as seen in recent episodes of teens, almost all boys, stealing these things for out-of-control rides that have included scaring, and even assaulting, some hapless pedestrians. These punks also ignore all traffic rules and in so doing threaten to cause serious car and truck crashes.
JUMP is owned by scandal-ridden Uber.
What to do? First off, what Mayor Jorge Elorza announced last week: These dockless bikes are being pulled from service, at least for a while. He said:
“As part of a commitment to provide residents and visitors with convenient and equitable intermodal transportation options, a joint public safety effort will collect bicycles and explore options to enhance security mechanisms for the system and to promote responsible ridership.”
Let’s look for long-term solutions to the problem. Perhaps this will involve only allowing bikes that must be docked -- i.e., station-based. Station-based systems can obviously be better monitored by police than can systems in which bikes (and scooters) can be picked up and left willy-nilly all over place, most irritatingly in the middle of sidewalks. This limitation, of course, will make them less accessible to many people, but so be it. Further, the police and courts must crack down hard on wild riders and thieves who abuse shareable bikes and scooters -- and publicize the punishment. And Uber (not unfamiliar with scandal) must be compelled to improve JUMP’s anti-theft technology ASAP. That applies to other companies offering similar services, too.
It’s too bad that the actions of a few would deprive many of the opportunity to use this handy, nonpolluting and fun transport, but public safety demands it.
Grace Kelly: Bluefish -- sustainable and delicious
Bluefish
Via ecoRI News (ecori.org)
According to a recent report released by the United Nations, our meat-forward eating habits are having a big impact on the environment — and not in a good way.
Farm animals produce 25 percent to 30 percent of greenhouse gases, particularly methane, which traps heat 25 times more effectively than carbon dioxide. One small step we can take to reduce climate emissions is to eat less meat, and perhaps fill that protein void by eating more sustainably caught local fish.=
As New Englanders with access to plenty of ocean, our seafood options are vast and varied. But not all options are created equal. Some fish, like the local cod, are in dangerous waters (pun intended) when it comes to population decline. But fear not, there’s plenty of sustainable options that are just as, and arguably more, tasty. We’re going to highlight these choices in a new monthly feature called Go Fish.
To do so, ecoRI News is partnering with Kate Masury of Eating with the Ecosystem, a local organization dedicated to promoting a “place-based approach to sustaining New England’s wild seafood,” and Stuart Meltzer of the Fearless Fish Market in Providence.
The first time I had bluefish was at a local restaurant where it was basted in a pool of nutty brown butter and served with an herb-onion salad and fresh-made tortillas. Its signature purplish-blue flesh had tempered to white during cooking, and each bite was silky and rich.
Bluefish is a sustainable delight that is readily available in the summer, when it migrates to the New England coast after spending the colder months in the South Atlantic Bight. It’s a hardy predator whose active lifestyle requires more oxygen than most fish, turning its flesh the purplish-blue color that gives the species its name. Its great seared in a pan until the skin gets crispy and golden, or as the recipe below suggests, soaked in a soy-sauce citrus marinade and grilled until charred and smok
According to Seafood Watch, bluefish caught in the North Atlantic is a “best choice.” This means “the stock is healthy, and management is effective. In addition, bycatch and habitat impacts are a low concern.” When buying, look for fish that has been caught by handline or hand-operated pole and line.
Grace Kelly is a journalist with ecoRI News (ecori.org).
“Trolling for blue fish’’ (lithograph by Currier & Ives, 1866)
And you, too
— Photos by Simeon Zahl of burial vaults at Hatfield House. Dr. Zahl is a theologian at Cambridge University.
Hatfield House is a country house in the town of Hatfield, in Hertfordshire, England. The present Jacobean house was built in 1611 by Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury and chief minister to King James I, and has been the home of the Cecil family ever since. The estate includes extensive grounds and surviving parts of an earlier grand house. The house, now the home of Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 7th Marquess of Salisbury, is open to the public.
Llewellyn King: A way to greater leisure with same number of work hours a week
The American Federation of Labor union label, circa 1900
Labor Day is almost here and with it another blessed, three-day weekend. Three days without work!
The best day, of course, is the middle one, when we can luxuriate in the time off without the knowledge that grips most of us on Sunday afternoons — that we must climb Monday’s escarpment.
The fact is that we Americans work too much. Not necessarily too hard, but too much. In the United States, workers’ vacations are mostly two precious weeks — and a third after long service. In Europe, they’re a month or, as in Germany, often up to six weeks — yet no one accuses the Germans of being idlers or not performing.
We won’t get more vacations, I think, until high-tech workers — those one might refer to as “the indispensables” — demand and get them. Some already have the choice of working in Europe and are looking at the “package” of their employment, not just the dollars in the paycheck. If they demand more, the idea will get around.
However, more vacation days won’t have the same benefit as those leisurely Sundays in a three-day weekend.
There is a way to greater leisure with the same number of work hours in a week. I have experienced it, and it does wonders in terms of employee happiness and creativity.
In the early 1960s, I was a writer for BBC Television News, and we worked a fabulous shift system: three days on and three days off. This system recognized that journalists could seldom finish what they had started in a procrustean eight hours.
The BBC 10-hour shift — three days on and three days off — accepted and accommodated the reality of the work rather than trying to squeeze the work into an arbitrary time frame, leaving it either unfinished or for someone else to try to finish — say a script for the late news broadcast or coverage of an ongoing parliamentary debate.
The social dimension of this work structure was even more interesting. Writers and editors became more productive in other ways: Some wrote novels, others worked on biographies or tried their hands at plays. They’d been given the gift of time.
Armed with this experience, when I worked at the Washington Post, where I was an assistant editor and also president of the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild, one of the largest chapters of the American Newspaper Guild, the trade union that represented journalists and some other workers, I was appalled at the mess the Post had with its overtime.
There was a complicated system of overtime and something called “overtime cutoff,” which applied to people who were paid more than the Guild-negotiated salary. It led to fights, conscientious reporters and editors working overtime without compensation, and major altercations over weekend schedules. No winners, just unhappy people. The management knew it was a mess and would’ve liked to change it.
When I suggested the BBC system to the Washington Post Company, management was enthusiastic. They asked if the union would bring it forward as a formal proposal in the contract negotiations, then just beginning for a new three-year contract.
We had to have our proposal vetted by union headquarters, the International. They said, “No, no, no. Heresy.” The union had always fought for a shorter workday since the so-called “model contract,” written by Heywood Broun, the famous reporter, columnist and founder of the American Newspaper Guild, in 1935. It was dropped like a libelous story.
Well, the three-days shift won’t work in many places, but in journalism, manufacturing and retail, it’s worth a try. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of workers would have the joy of that middle day of rest and, maybe, creativity.
When you open another cold one on Sept. 1, think about how nice it would be if that happened all year. Three days on and three days off. Glorious!
On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS.
Taking them in
Here’s a brand-new watercolor by William Hall. There’s show of his watercolors at the Jessie Edwards Studio, on Water Street, Block Island, R.I., through Sept. 4.
The back story of the painting here is that Howard Milikin, a great-grandfather of Mr. Hall, was a navigational pilot from Block Island. He would be ferried from Block Island to meet incoming clipper ships and then pilot them into New England ports. His license was unlimited.
Cute but they eat songbirds
“Challenge 120: People and Their Pets: To Those I’ve Loved Before,’’ by Natasha Stoppel, in her show “Other Worlds of Now and Then,’’ at Art Up Front Street, Exeter, N.H., Sept. 6-28. The gallery explains that she’s a traveling artist who quit her corporate job in 2014 to launch Artist Explores the World, a blog and YouTube channel centered around her art and travels.’’
Water Street in downtown Exeter
— Photo by Rglowacky1
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Not much in a name?
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
New England has too many small private colleges; some of them are not financially viable. So some have decided to change their name to “university’’ to make themselves sound more important and alluring. Accrediting organizations require a certain minimum number of graduate courses for such nomenclature
Lasell College, in Newton, Mass., is the latest New England college to decide to call itself a university; Assumption College, in Worcester, has done the same thing
Some of this is just the endless pursuit of status, though with so many little, and little known, institutions calling themselves “university’’ the alleged advantage must be getting a little thin.=
Two internationally known New England institutions – Boston College and Dartmouth College – are universities but for historical reasons – they started out and have remained devoted most strongly to undergraduate liberal arts education -- have refused to change their names. Admirable.
David Warsh: The future of the great U.S.-China trade decoupling
In the Port of Shanghai, the world’s biggest container port
James Kynge, Financial Times bureau chief in Bejing in 1998-2005, is among the China-watchers whom I have followed, especially since China Shakes the World: A Titan’s Rise and Troubled Future – and the Challenge for America appeared, in 2006. Today he operates a pair of proprietary research services for the FT.
So I was disheartened to see to see Kynge employ an ominous new term in an FT op-ed column on Friday, Aug. 23, “Righteous Anger Will Not Win a Trade War’’. President Trump thinks that the U.S. becomes stronger and China weaker as the trade war continues, Kynge wrote, but others see an opposite dynamic at work: “mounting losses for American corporations as the U.S. and Chinese economies decouple after nearly 40 years of engagement.”
Decoupling is so incipient as a term of art in international economics that Wikipedia offers no meaning more precise than “the ending, removal or reverse of coupling.” A decade ago, it implied nothing more ominous than buffering the business cycle (The Decoupling Debate). Former World Bank chief economist Paul Romer, no professional China-watcher but better connected than ever, since he shared a Nobel Prize in economics last year, returned from a trip there in June with something of a definition. The mood in China, at least in technology circles, was grim but determined, he told Bloomberg News.
“I think what they’ve decided is that the U.S .is not a reliable trading partner, and they can’t maintain their economy or their tech industry if it’s dependent on critical components from the United States. So I think they are on a trajectory now, that they’re not going to move off of, of becoming wholly self-sufficient in technology. Even if there’s a paper deal that covers over this trade war stuff, I think we’ve seen a permanent change in China’s approach…. There’s no question that they’re on a trajectory to become completely independent of the United States because they just can’t count on us anymore.’’
How long might it take to pretty fully disengage at the level of technological standards? More than five years, maybe ten, Romer guessed, citing Chinese estimates. For that length of time, Kynge reckons, U.S. high tech vendors would continue to suffer. American companies and their affiliates sell nine times more in China than their counterparts operating in the United States, according to one estimate he cited. Cisco and Qualcomm report being squeezed out of China markets, he says. HP, Dell, Microsoft, Amazon and Apples are considering pulling back.
The long-term competition for technological dominance worries Kynge more than the trade war. In many industries, he writes, China is thought to be already ahead. Among those he lists are high-speed rail, high-voltage transmission lines, renewables, new energy vehicles, digital payment systems, and 5G telecom technologies. And while there is no agreement about which nation possesses the more effective start-up culture, in university-based disciplines such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and biomedicine, in which the U.S. has been thought to have been well ahead, China is making rapid gains.
This decoupling of two nations that for 40 years gave grand demonstration of the benefits and, latterly, the costs, of trade is a bleak prospect. If there is a silver lining, it lies in the fact that rivalry often produces plenty of jobs along with the mortal risks that passionate competition entail. But if America is to do anything more than simply capitulate, it must find a leader and begin to move past the disastrous presidency of Donald Trump.
Friday’s shocking escalation, via Trump’s Tweets, brought that eventuality a little closer. The president is on the ropes. There is no sign of trade war fever beyond his base that might restore the confidence required for him to win a second term.
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New on the EP bookshelf: The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty, by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson (Random House, 2019).
The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay, by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman (Norton, 2019).
David Warsh, an economic historian, book author and veteran columnist, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this essay first appeared.
Chris Powell: The Epstein scandal: 'No one that couldn't be bought'
Jeffrey Epstein in a 2006 police mug shot
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Vile as financier Jeffrey Epstein seems to have been, many if not most of the girls he targeted were not quite the innocent victims being luridly portrayed by news organizations, not all if any of them really being "sex slaves."
To the contrary, while most of them were minors, under 18, they retained freedom of movement and repeatedly returned to Epstein, traveled with him, or went where he told them to go to be used by his friends. They knew what they were doing was prostitution, even if the law rightly holds that minors are not fully responsible for themselves.
Epstein's character is a settled matter, just as it is settled that money is power and power tends to corrupt. So it may be more illuminating to ask how so many teenage girls could escape the custody of their parents for so long to become the playthings of Epstein and his friends without inciting at least suspicion back home.
There seem to be two explanations. First is that some girls did not have much in the way of parents, so they were more vulnerable. Second is that there was a lot of money in it for them, for Epstein paid them well -- so well that many of his girls recruited others for him, and some even told the police that they loved him.
Having accepted such employment with Epstein, some of his girls now accuse him of ruining their lives and are levying claim to his estate. Others brought suit against him and then settled confidentially, choosing to take his money again without warning the world against him.
Epstein's most publicized accuser, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, now in her 30s, married, a mother, and living in Australia, has figured it out better than most news organizations. "Laughing the whole way through," Giuffre says, "Jeffrey thought it was absolutely brilliant how easily money seduced all walks of life -- nothing or no one that couldn't be bought."
Of course as the prototypical "sadder but wiser girl," Giuffre could apply her insight to herself most of all.
The corruptibility of human nature explains Epstein's success as a predator. Of course it does not excuse him. But it does invite reflection on the failure of society and the law to protect minors, and, really, the lack of interest in protecting them.
That children don't have parents is often the consequence of welfare and divorce policy.
Advertising and television sexualize children and bring the coarsest sex to the youngest audiences, especially those with negligent parents.
Even Epstein's friends and acquaintances who did not exploit his girls surely saw that something wrong was going on but did not report it. Long before he was elected president, one of those friends, Donald J. Trump, was quoted about Epstein's partiality to young women
Epstein was notorious a long time before he was prosecuted, and then his prosecution was so gentle that it has become a scandal in itself, suspected of having been meant to protect the most influential of his accomplices.
But lest people in Connecticut get too disdainful of Epstein and his circle, it should be remembered that had one of his underage playthings been impregnated, she could have been given another few hundred dollars in cash and been driven by limousine to any abortion clinic in the state, where nobody would have contacted her parents for approval or notified the police, state law concurring as much as Epstein in the concealment of statutory rape.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.
William Morgan: Magnificent machine is Yankee ingenuity writ large
While my wife, Carolyn, was recently buying some wood at Sweet Lumber Company, in the Olneyville section of Providence, I noticed this photograph of a saw that cut shingles.
Who knew what a magnificent piece of machinery there was to render wooden shingles from logs?! It is hard not to be impressed by this no-nonsense beast, capable of severing a hand or an arm in an instant. It was made in Orange, Mass., sometime after 1889, the year of its patent.
Orange is in Franklin County, not far from Greenfield and Millers Falls and Turners Falls, serious 19th-Century mill towns, producing sewing machines, cutlery and a range of tools. While we associate manufacturing with cities such as Manchester, Lowell and Fall River, machine shops and watermills were found throughout western New England.
Beyond the cities of Springfield, Holyoke and Chicopee, there were a lot of factories in small rural towns. If there were a swiftly flowing stream, waterpower would power a mill of some kind
The Chase Turbine Manufacturing Company was founded around 1850 in Concord, Vt., up in that state’s “Northeast Kingdom.’’
The company went bust during the Civil War, but soon thereafter reconstituted itself in the more economically advantageous location of Orange. They made equipment for water wheels and the magnificent turbine shingle saw until the Great Depression.
The inscription on it says it all: “Built by the Chase Turbine M'F'G'. Co. Orange, Mass.’’ This is no wimpy Chinese-made throwaway tool from Home Depot, but something built to last – Yankee ingenuity writ large. In many a Vermont hollow, singles are no doubt still being cleaved from trees by these glorious machines.
William Morgan is a Providence-based architectural historian, photographer and essayist. He is the author of Yankee Modern and The Cape Cod Cottage, among other books.
BU starting online MBA program; but do we need more MBA's?
The unvirtual part of the BU business school, whose official name is the Questrom School of Business
This comes from The New England Council (newenglandcouncil.com):
“Boston University (BU) has announced plans to launch an online Master of Business Administration (MBA) program. The new program will have a total tuition cost of $24,00 and is set to launch in fall of 2020.
“Boston University will partner with online education platform edX to offer the low-cost online MBA worldwide. EdX, created by Harvard University and MIT, currently has over 21 million registered users who have enrolled in more than 75 million online courses. While BU has worked with edX for the past six years to offer low cost undergraduate ‘massive open online courses’ (MOOC’s), this is their first time offering a graduate degree. The MBA will be designed from the ground up and will incorporate content from BU’s Questrom School of Business alumni and international business partners.
“BU Provost Jean Morrison noted that by adding an affordable, high-quality, large enrollment online MBA, the university is continuing its mission to provide various iterations of MBA programs that are compatible with the unique aspects of all business learners. BU currently has six different MBA programs, including Full-Time MBA, Professional Evening MBA, Executive MBA, Health Sector MBA, Social Impact MBA and the MBA+ MS in Digital Innovation. Applications for the online program have opened for the fall 2020 semester.’’
“With an online MBA we’re seizing the initiative to offer a major degree for which we believe there is global demand,” said BU President Robert A. Brown. “Higher education must evolve in a fast changing world. We aim to lead in this evolution.”
A river realm
“Spider web, Rail Trail between Northampton and Hadley, Mass.’’ {on the Connecticut River} (archival digital print), by Mary Lang , in her show “Here, nowhere else,’’ at Kingston Gallery, Boston, Sept. 4-29.
She says of her show:
“Each one of these photographs could be a doorway into a separate realm. They are single perceptions, clear and vivid, like waking from a dream, finding yourself Here, nowhere else. Like the turning of a kaleidoscope, for a moment time stops, everything falls into place and I am part of the invisible pattern that holds the world together. Though standing on the earth, it still feels groundless. For so many years I photographed water as a way of exploring groundlessness. It turns out that photographing earth is groundless as well.
“The world is inundated with photographs; 100 million and counting are uploaded to Instagram every day, visual records of a place or a time, a vacation or a hike. These photographs are those as well, but what makes this one, and not that one, rise above so many others, to hang on the wall in a frame, is because captured within the photograph is a sense of presence, of this moment, here, nowhere else, an absorption into vastness that some would call magic.’’
Looking north up the Connecticut River from the French King Bridge, at the Erving-Gill town line in western Massachusetts. Too many New Englanders don’t realize that the Connecticut is one of the world’s most beautiful rivers.
“If the river is as varied and beautiful as the Connecticut, you can merely look at it – in the long light of a sultry summer evening, under an angry winter sky, in the high color of autumn or the pastel shades of spring – and derive that sense of peace and uplift of the spirit that most men find in living water.’’
-- Roger Tory Peterson (1908-1996, artist and naturalist), in The Connecticut River, by Evan Hill (1972)
Todd McLeish: Rare Spring Salamanders like the hills
A Spring Salamander relaxing on some moss
Spring Salamanders are one of the giants of the salamander world, at least in the Northeast. They can grow to more than 8 inches long, and their diet often consists of other salamanders. But they are also quite rare in southern New England. They weren’t discovered in Rhode Island until the 1980s, and they still have only been found in a few locations in the northwest part of the state.
In Massachusetts, however, the tan or pinkish species with faint black spots was removed from the state’s list of rare species in 2006. Last month the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife (MassWildlife) launched a two-year survey to reassess the health of the state’s Spring Salamander populations amid concerns that the changing climate may be negatively impacting the cool streams where they live.
Jacob Kubel, a conservation scientist with MassWildlife’s Natural Heritage & Endangered Species Program, said Spring Salamanders have a long head with a square snout and external gills. He noted that the natural history of the species is somewhat unusual. After hatching in a stream, they live as larvae for three or four years before metamorphosing into adult salamanders.
“They can’t be in a stream that’s going to completely dry up in the summer, but they also do better in streams that don’t have fish that might eat them,” Kubel said. “That habitat isn’t extremely common, so the species isn’t extremely common.”
Spring Salamanders are primarily found in forested streams with seeps of cold groundwater in high-elevation, hilly terrain. They’ve been found at just four sites in Burrillville and Foster, R.I., but populations in Massachusetts have been located from the Berkshires to Worcester County. The species is listed as a state threatened species in Connecticut.
“The main objective of our survey is to do a quick assessment to make sure nothing has happened to our state population,” Kubel said. “If we can check off a great majority of historic sites and also find sites we didn’t know about previously, that tells us the status hasn’t taken a turn for the worse since delisting.
“The other component is that, as an agency, we need to be cognizant of climate change and its impacts on environmental resources. With Spring Salamanders being a cool-water, high-elevation species, it might be one of the first to show stress at the population level. They’re like the canary in the coal mine.”
Kubel and a team of volunteers are visiting locations where the salamander has been found in the past to document that the species hasn’t disappeared. Next year they will focus on finding new populations.
He said the results so far have been encouraging. But the work isn’t easy, and the success rate is pretty low.
“I was at a site last week where we didn’t have any historic records but I thought it was likely to be there, and I found quite a few — seven individuals — after turning over about 400 rocks,” he said. “But then I went to another stream nearby that I thought should have them, and I only found one after turning over 500 rocks.”
At the conclusion of the survey in 2020, Kubel will produce a report that makes recommendations about the conservation status of the Spring Salamander. The data will also be used as a baseline for comparative studies conducted in the future.
In addition to the survey, Kubel is also leading efforts to conduct genetic analyses of Blue Spotted and Jefferson salamanders, two rare species that look similar and are thought to hybridize, to clarify the geographic distribution of each.
No conservation activities have been undertaken in Rhode Island to study or monitor Spring Salamander populations, but recent land acquisitions have protected some of its habitat, according to Chris Raithel, a retired wildlife biologist with the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management.
“There are only a handful of known localities for it, but Rhode Island seems to be at the edge of its range,” he said.
“These guys have very specific habitat requirements, so it could be that the combination of high gradient perennial streams with a low abundance of fish in a heavily forested area isn’t available in Rhode Island,” Kubel said.
The Rhode Island Wildlife Action Plan lists Spring Salamanders as a species of greatest conservation need.
Rhode Island resident and author Todd McLeish runs a wildlife blog.
An identity complication
A statuette of Aphroditus in the anasyromenos pose. The ancient Greeks and Romans believed the pose had a magical power to ward off evil.
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.comAn Identification Issue
“But there are more than five sexes and only demotic Greek seems to distinguish among them.”
― Lawrence Durrell, in The Alexandria Quartet
Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo trendily wants her state to join others that will offer drivers’ licenses that don’t indicate the person’s sex. The change would let people put an “X’’ rather than a “M’’ or “F”
Of course, people are entitled to think of themselves as any sex they want and to have organs lopped off or created and to take hormones to change themselves into some sort of “gender’’ they weren’t at birth. But the fact is that, outside the very few cases of physical androgyny, people are physiologically either male or female. And for police and others in the justice system knowing the sex of individuals can be very useful, indeed sometimes essential. If these drivers undergo a sex-change operation, then fine, switch to one of the two sexes. But the “X’’ category will cause trouble.
The sub on the street
A captured Axis submarine is pulled down Tremont Street, in downtown Boston, in 1942 as part of a “Buy War Bonds’’ rally. President Trump would have loved this!
Thanks to our colleague David Jacobs of The Boston Guardian for forwarding this to us.
Nothing gold can stay
Aug. 23, Bristol (R.I.) Harbor: Late dusk in late summer
— Photo by Lydia Whitcomb
Around the world with the PCFR
Aug. 22, 2019
To members and friends of the Providence Committee on Foreign Relations (thepcfr.org). We hope that your summer is going well.
Below is the current list of our dinner speakers (at our venue, the Hope Club, in Providence) for our 2019-2020 season. (Suggestions welcome!) There will be refinements and outright changes in topics; we’re trying to remain somewhat flexible to respond to news and other events. (Just completed season speaker list is also below.)
Please email pcfremail@gmail.com with any questions. And check the Web site:
Thepcfr.org
For membership and other information
Our first scheduled speaker (there’s a remote chance there will be a September speaker; there are two speakers in October) comes
Wednesday, Oct, 2, with Jonathan Gage, who will talk about how coverage of such international economic stories as trade wars has changed over the years, in part because of new technology, and how that coverage itself changes events.
Mr. Gage has had a very distinguished career in publishing and international journalism. He has served as publisher and CEO of Institutional Investor magazine, as publisher of strategy+business magazine, as a director at Booz Allen Hamilton and Booz & Company, as enterprise editor for Bloomberg News and finance editor of the Paris-based International Herald Tribune (of sainted memory) and as a senior writer for the Boston Consulting Group.
He is a trustee, and former vice chairman, of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs.
He has written or edited for such publications as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Newsweek and Psychology Today magazine.
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On Wednesday, Oct. 23, comes Ambassador Patrick Duddy, who will talk about Venezuelan internal political and economic conditions and relations with the U.S., Cuba, Russia and other nations. Mr. Duddy, currently director of Duke University’s center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, served as American ambassador to Venezuela during some of the George W. Bush and Obama administrations. The late President Hugo Chavez expelled him but eight months later he resumed his ambassadorship. He finished that assignment in 2010.
Before his ambassadorships, Mr. Duddy served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State (DAS) for the Western Hemisphere, responsible for the Office of Economic Policy and Summit Coordination, which included the hemispheric energy portfolio, as well for the Offices of Brazil/ Southern Cone Affairs and of Caribbean Affairs. During his tenure as DAS, he played a lead role in coordinating U.S. support for the restoration of democracy in Haiti.
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On Wednesday, Nov. 6, comes Tweed Roosevelt, president of the Theodore Roosevelt Association and great-grandson of that president. He’ll talk about how TR’s foreign policy, which was developed as the U.S. became truly a world power, affected subsequent presidents’ foreign policies. Mr., Roosevelt is also chairman of Roosevelt China Investments, a Boston firm.
In 1992, Mr. Roosevelt rafted down the 1,000-mile Rio Roosevelt in Brazil—a river previously explored by his great-grandfather in 1914 in the Roosevelt-Rondon Scientific Expedition and then called the Rio da Duvida, the River of Doubt. The former president almost died on that legendary and dangerous trip.
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On Thursday, Dec. 5, we’ll welcome Dr. Elizabeth H. Prodromou, who directs the Initiative on Religion, Law, and Diplomacy, and is visiting associate professor of conflict resolution, at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. She titles her talk "God, Soft Power, and Geopolitics: Religion as a Tool for Conflict Prevention/Generation".
Dr. Prodromou is also a non-resident senior fellow and co-chair of the Working Group on Christians and Religious Pluralism, at the Center for Religious Freedom at the Hudson Institute, and is also non-resident fellow at The Hedayah International Center of Excellence for Countering Violent Extremism, based in Abu Dhabi.
She is former vice chair and commissioner on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and was a member of the U.S. Secretary of State’s Religion & Foreign Policy Working Group. Her research focuses on geopolitics and religion, with particular focus on the intersection of religion, democracy, and security in the Middle East and Southeastern Europe. Her current research project focus on Orthodox Christianity and geopolitics, as well as on religion and migration in Greece.
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On Wednesday, Jan. 8, comes Michael Fine, M.D., who will talk about his novel Abundance, set in West Africa, and the challenges of providing health care in the Developing World. He will speak on: “Plagues and Pestilence: What we learned (or didn't) from Ebola about Foreign Policy and International Collaboration in the face of epidemics and outbreaks’’
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On Wednesday, Feb. 5, we will welcome as speaker PCFR member Cornelia Dean, book author, science writer and former science editor of The New York and internationally known expert on coastal conditions. She’ll talk how rising seas threaten coastal cities around the world and what they can do about it.
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On Wednesday, March 18, comes Stephen Wellmeier, managing director of Poseidon Expeditions. He’ll talk about the future of adventure travel and especially about Antarctica, and its strange legal status.
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On Wednesday, April 29, comes Trita Parsi, a native of Iran and founder and current president of the National Iranian American Council and author of Treacherous Alliance and A Single Roll of the Dice. He regularly writes articles and appears on TV to comment on foreign policy. He, of course, has a lot to say about U.S- Iranian relations and a lot more.
Mr. Parsi is a co-founder of a new think tank, financed by an unlikely partnership of the right wing Koch Brothers and the left-of-center George Soros. It’s called the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and dedicated to helping craft a new U.S. foreign policy that would be far less interventionist and put an end to America’s “endless foreign wars.’’
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On Wednesday, May 6, we’ll welcome Serenella Sferza, a political scientist and co-director of the program on Italy at MIT’s Center for International Studies, who will talk about the rise of right-wing populism and other developments in her native land.
She has taught at several US and European universities, and published numerous articles on European politics. Serenella's an affiliate at the Harvard De Gunzburg Center for European Studies and holds the title of Cavaliere of the Ordine della Stella d'Italia conferred by decree of the President of the Republic for the preservation and promotion of national prestige abroad.
June: Keeping open for now but possibly something on China.
Speakers in the 2018-2019 season of the Providence Committee on Foreign Relations included:
Miguel Head, who spent the past decade as a senior adviser to the British Royal Family, on what it was like.
James Nealon, the former U.S. ambassador to Honduras and former assistant secretary of state, on the migrant crisis flowing onto our southern border.
Walter A. Berbrick, founding director of the Arctic Studies Group at the U.S. Naval War College, on “An Arctic Policy for the Ages: Strengthening American Interests at Home and Abroad
Phillip Martin, senior investigative reporter for WGBH News and a contributing reporter to Public Radio International’s The World, a co-production of WGBH, the BBC and PRI -- a program that he helped develop as a senior producer in 1995 – on the Indian caste system there and here.
Paulo Sotero, the director of the Wilson Center’s Brazil Institute on the future of that huge nation.
Historian Fred Zilian on the “Real Thucydides Trap,”—an alternate to Graham Allison’s—which threatens America’s leadership of the free world.
Dr. Teresa Chahine on international social entrepreneurship.
London-based Journalist and broadcaster Michael Goldfarb on Brexit.
Sarah C.M. Paine of the U.S. Naval War College on the “Geopolitics Underlying U.S. Foreign Policy.’’
Douglas Hsu, senior Taiwan diplomat, on tension and ties with Mainland, and Taiwan’s relations with the U.S.
Prof. James Green, a leading expert on Brazil, where he lived for eight years, and former president of the Brazilian Studies Association, on that nation’s new right-wing populist president.
Daphne Wysham: Bipartisan corruption for the fossil-fuel industry
Mining operations in the Athabasca tar (aka oil) sands.
Via OtherWords.org
Burning fossil fuels boils our planet — that much is generally well known.
But often these fuels do serious damage before they ever get to market. They spill out of pipelines, poison groundwater, or explode on trains. Even when they don’t, building new pipelines and export terminals helps companies sell more fuel — often of the dirtiest variety, like tar sands — which threatens our planet.
That’s why strong grassroots movements have cropped up against transporting tar sands oil via the Keystone XL Pipeline and the TransMountain Pipeline.
With those pipelines still running into resistance, investors in Canada’s Athabasca tar sands region are scrambling to get their oil to market by any means necessary — including shipping crude oil by truck across the Canadian border, then transloading it to trains in North Dakota to get it to West Coast ports.
And as a new report produced by the Center for Sustainable Economy reveals, they’re getting some help from friends in high places.
The report examines two unlikely allies in this effort — former Obama administration Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and billionaire Trump campaign donor Richard A. Kayne. Their intertwined financial interests are going to absurd lengths to get tar sands crude to export terminals in Oregon.
They’re financing two proposed Oregon crude-oil terminals — one in the Port of Columbia County, owned by Global Partners, and the other in Portland, owned by Zenith Energy Management. Both terminals are situated in a region that is overdue for a major quake. The Zenith terminal in particular is situated in an earthquake subduction zone, putting it at special risk.
Kayne is a primary financier of both the Zenith and Global Partners operations sites. He’s also a major Republican Party campaign donor and closely aligned with the Koch brothers’ financial and political networks.
Significantly, he is also among the inner circle of super-wealthy donors contributing to President Trump’s legal fees, which have run more than $8 million since taking office — the highest of any president.
The other financier, former Treasury Secretary Geithner, is widely credited with playing a major role in the Wall Street bailout following the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008.
Geithner is now director of Warburg Pincus investment company, which created Zenith Energy to facilitate the flow of crude oil by rail to Portland. Warburg Pincus is deeply invested in the Bakken and tar sands region and, together with Global Partners is a leading donor to Democratic candidates at all political levels.
Kayne and Warburg Pincus share directorships and investments in corporations that extract crude oil from the Bakken Formation of North Dakota and tar sands crude from Canada’s Athabasca tar sands region. These investments further overlap at transloading stations owned by Global Partners in North Dakota.
Both terminals and their backers provide proof that tackling climate change means tackling corruption at the highest levels of our democracy, regardless of party affiliation.
As the pipeline protesters have shown, it’s possible to resist these destructive projects even when big money — and powerful people in Washington — are behind them.
And as the 2020 campaign gets underway, there’s a huge opening for candidates — from presidential candidates down to local port commissioners — to take a real stand for the planet, and refuse to take campaign contributions from these industries threatening our future.
Daphne Wysham directs the Sustainable Energy & Economy Network and the Climate Justice Program at the Center for Sustainable Economy.
Start sneezing!
From “Fielding: Goldenrod and an Exploration of Connections,” an upcoming show at University of Massachusetts at Amherst Museum of Contemporary Art, with the show to be open Sept. 11, 18, and 25 and Oct. 2 and 9, all from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
The museum says:
“‘Fielding’ uses the plant Goldenrod (L. solidago) as a lens through which to engage the Natural History Collections and the UMass community. The project looks at both human uses and history of the plant, its local history and current presence in the area, and its significance in the non-human sphere and ecology.’’