Information, please
"The Breakfast Room" by Edmund C. Tarbell, ca. 1902
New England Diary is always looking for images, caption material and general commentary to promote current and upcoming shows at the region’s small and large art galleries. Send to:
rwhit6@yahoo.com
Art Deco masterpiece
Downtown Boston, in 1931, during The Great Depression. The stepped back Art Deco skycraper here was the headquarters of the now long-gone United Shoe Machinery Corp. The steel-frame skyscraper has 24 stories and a penthouse, and was built in 1929–1930 to a design by George W. Fuller and Parker, Thomas & Rice. It is Boston's finest Art Deco office building, including an elaborately decorated lobby. My father went to work in that building from 1946-1968.
For 20 years it was Boston’s tallest building. Incredibly it was almost demolished in 1981 but an outcry from preservationists saved it.
— Robert Whitcomb
Recent shot of the gold-gilded top skyscraper, in “TheHub’s’’ financial district.
David Warsh: We continue to live with 'cameralism'
F.A. Hayek (1899-1992), the famed European philosopher and economist, hated what MIT economist Paul Samuelson dubbed the “modern mixed economy.’’
SOMERVILLE, Mass.
From its beginnings, in 1947, the Mont Pelerin Society sensed a problem, which its members understood better than most. In the aftermath of World War II, amid the smoldering ruins of Europe, it was impossible not to be repelled by the two familiar examples of government planning, Hitler’s National Socialism and Lenin’s Bolshevik Revolution.
But the philosophers, historians, economists and journalists who formed the market advocacy group Mont Pelerin Society knew that the roots of government planning went much deeper than that.
In 1727, The King of Prussia established a chair of “Oeconomie, Policy, and Kammer-Sachen” at the University of Halle, at a time when, across the North Sea, Adam Smith was three years old. In his address on the occasion, the chancellor of the university noted that the concerns of the new discipline went far beyond what was to be found in Aristotle.
“What happens in the fields, meadows, ponds, woods, gardens or relate to planting; how to treat cattle in their stalls; how to increase manure; how to brew and sell corn; the task of a husbandman on every day of the year what reserves to lay by and how to stock a storeroom; how to properly organize kitchen and cellar; what to keep and what to distribute: not a word of this appears in Aristotle.”
“Kammer-Sachen” means something like legislative and judicial matters, the word Kammer meaning chamber, as in the private office of a judge. The idea of a science of governmental planning – oversight of what today its critics call “the administrative state” – was an Enlightenment project, shaped by the ideals that took hold in the years before the French Revolution. Conceptions of husbandry – of the systematic promotion of good order and happiness within the state – is older than classical economics.
You can follow the development of cameralism – meaning, loosely, government planning and oversight – in Strategies of Economic Order: German economic discourse 1750-1950 (Cambridge, 1995), by Keith Tribe, an independent economic historian and author of several well-received books. You may need the occasional help of a good German-English dictionary.
Cameralism is, roughly, what Adam Smith labeled mercantilism, or “the commercial system,” in contrast to his own market-based “system of natural liberty,” which he laid out in 1776 in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Smith defined mercantilism as an export-oriented and monetary strategy, managed by the state, in cooperation with well-ensconced business interests, in competition with other states.
In Friedrich List’s critique of The Wealth of Nations, published in English in 1846 as The National System of Political Economy, cameralism sounds more like a heavy-handed version of today’s macroeconomics – a true political economy, journalist List wrote, as opposed to Smith’s cosmopolitan economics.
In nine painfully erudite scholarly chapters, Tribe traces the course of the German persuasion from List through Max Weber, Ludwig von Mises and Otto Neurath to F. A. Hayek, organizer of the Mont Pelerin Society. He finishes with an analysis of the Nazis’ grand plans for Europe, noting its similarities to, and differences from, the European integration that eventuated after 1945.
Some of this background, but not much, is to be found in The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Great Depression (Harvard, 2012), by Angus Burgin, of Johns Hopkins University. (There is only so much an author can tell in one book.) A chapter on “moral capital” elucidates fears in the 1970s among neoconservatives – Irving Kristol, for example, a socialist in his youth – that libertarian capitalism was eroding “traditionalist” values. This was, in effect, living off the “accumulated moral capital” of social philosophies that it had supplanted, Kristol wrote, in declining an invitation to join the Mont Pelerin Society.
Already in 1935, while living in London, Hayek was sufficiently alarmed by the drift of things to collect several of his essays in Collective Economic Planning (Routledge, 1935). In “The Nature and History of the Problem,” he put his diagnosis most clearly.
“If we are to judge the potentialities aright, it is necessary to realize that the system under which we live choked up with attempts at partial planning and restrictionism is almost as far from any system of capitalism which could be rationally advocated as it is different from any consistent system of planning. It is important to realize in any important investigation of the possibilities of planning that it is a fallacy to suppose capitalism as it exists today is the alternative. We are certainly as far from capitalism in its pure form as we are from any system of central planning. The world of today is just intervention chaos.”
Not much changed in Hayek’s views between then and the time he wrote The Road to Serfdom, in 1944, still living in England. He had declared firm opposition to what, in 1948, would be described in the United States, in Paul Samuelson’s introductory textbook, Economics, as “the modern mixed economy.”
It doesn’t take more than a high-school diploma to recognize that much of America’s institutional mixture had been borrowed from German culture, some of it recently – from kindergarten to research universities and business schools, from government civil service to industrial safety, from rural electrification to road-building, from social insurance (retirement, medical, disability) to wage-bargaining and bank regulation.
Hayek may have longed for systemic purity, but it was Milton Friedman who put into action plans to purge its elements of cameralism, with two books of his own. Capitalism and Freedom, in 1962, espoused the economics of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign. Free to Choose, in 1980, set out what Friedman hoped would be Ronald Reagan’s platform for governing.
For example, in 1962, Friedman proposed to dismantle discretionary central banking, fixed exchange rates, public education, conscription, anti-discrimination policies, corporate social responsibilities, trade unions, professional licensing and compulsory social insurance, including the Social Security System.
Friedman had stupendous success as a cultural entrepreneur. Many of the measures he proposed have been adopted. Final returns are far from in on many of them – the all-volunteer military, for example. But one major strut may have already turned out to be disastrous, at least for one prominent company in the news.
In an influential essay in the New York Times Sunday magazine, in 1970. Friedman argued that “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” Business leaders who promoted desirable “social” ends – providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution “and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of reformers” – were “preaching pure and unadulterated socialism.”
A publicly owned corporation had only one ‘‘social’’ responsibility, Friedman concluded: “to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.” That meant increasing share prices, a goal easily measured and properly rewarded by compensating executives who achieve good results.
The doctrine of shareholder sovereignty is mentioned only in passing on page 474 of Jennifer Burns’ biography, Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 2023. But from Friedman’s argument to today’s problems at Boeing Co. seems to me a straight line of descent. At Airbus, in Europe, the legacy of cameralism flies on.
David Warsh, a veteran columnist and an economic historian, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this column originated.
Art for a rocky region
One of Natalie MacKnight's gouache paintings of a rock, in her joint show with Joyce McJilton Dwyer, “Rock, Paper, Lichen,’’ at 6 Bridges Gallery, Maynard, Mass., through Feb. 24.
— Image courtesy of 6 Bridges Gallery
The gallery says that MacKnight loves the "fusion of dynamic energy and quiet contemplation" in rocks.
Hit this link to read about the history of New England famous stone walls.
Jim Hightower: So wall off the Canadian border, too!?
A plaque attached to a bridge on the Maine /New Brunswick border crossing.
— Photo by Marty Aligata
The Haskell Free Library and Opera House straddles the border in Derby Line, Vt., and Stanstead, Quebec. The line on the floor shows the boundary line.
Looking at Campobello Island, in New Brunswick, Canada. Its only land access to the mainland is to Maine.
Park in Pittsburg, N.H., which is on the Canadian border. See New York Times story linked below.
— Photo by Jon Platek
Text from OtherWords.org
In the 1980s, many Texans were alarmed that hordes of immigrants were fleeing Rust Belt states and pouring across the Red River to take our jobs. So my friend and fellow Texan Steve Fromholz recommended a big beautiful wall across our northern border to keep them out.
Fromholz, a popular singer-songwriter and renowned political sprite, was ahead of his time in the political sport of wall building.
Instead of steel barriers and miles of nasty razor wire, Steve proposed preventing Yankee refugees from entering the Lone Star State by planting a 10-foot high, 10-foot thick wall of jalapeño peppers along the length of the Red River. Eat your way through and you’d be accepted as a naturalized Texan.
I thought of Steve’s impishness when I read that Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, and other Republicans were concocting a whole new xenophobic bugaboo to goose up their anti-immigrant demagoguery.
We can’t just fear the “invasion” coming across our Southern border, they cry! Indeed, Haley wailed: “It’s the northern border, too.” She added ominously that we must “do whatever it takes to keep people out.” DeSantis piled on, saying we should wall off America’s Canadian border.
Meanwhile, nearly all residents living along that 5,500-mile boundary fear the political wall-mongers more than the imaginary threat of foreigners surging across illegally. “People have always been coming through Canada,” says a clerk at a general store in far-north New Hampshire. Scoffing at the silly political hype, she says: “I don’t think the residents are really worried.”
But Chicken Little politicos won’t be shooed off by reality. After all, they still have the east, west and Gulf coasts to shut off — so expect them to propose razor wire for the entire U.S. shoreline. Their ridiculousness makes Fromholz’s satire seem rational!
OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer and public speaker.
Vertex touts what it says is an effective nonaddictive post-surgical painkiller (Copy)
Regions of the cerebral cortex associated with pain
Edited from a New England Council report:
“Boston-based Vertex Pharmaceuticals recently announced that its new experimental painkiller is as effective as an opioid when treating acute, post-surgical pain. Vertex claims that this new drug carries no risk of addiction, unlike with opioids.
“The painkiller, currently called VX-548, is set to be sent to the FDA for approval by mid-year. Though the drug has yet to outperform others when treating pain, that VX-548 is equally effective as some opioids without the risk of addiction could prove to be groundbreaking. Opioids have caused a decades-long endemic in the US, with almost 83,000 people in the U.S. dying from opioid overdoses in 2022 alone. Despite the highly addictive nature of these drugs, they are still commonly prescribed by doctors for post-surgical pain. If approved, VX-548 could mark a new age of pain treatment and a possible end to the opioid crisis.
“‘We are very pleased with the results from the VX-548 pivotal program, which demonstrate a compelling and consistent combination of efficacy and safety across multiple acute pain conditions and settings,’ Reshma Kewalramani, Vertex’s chief executive and president, said.’’
This book examines the history of the Sackler family, including the founding of Purdue Pharma, and the family's central role in the opioid epidemic. The book followed Keefe's 2017 article on the Sackler family in The New Yorker, titled “The Family That Built an Empire of Pain.’’
Interacting with the land
"Wedding Cake House, Iron Furnace Road, Pittsford, Vermont," by James Hope, in the show “Land Marks: Paintings of Human-Altered Landscapes,’’ at the Fleming Museum of Art, Burlington, Vt., through May 18.
The museum explains:
Focusing on portrayals of Vermont and elsewhere in New England, the show brings together 15 works, spanning roughly 1800 to the late 1900s. These paintings and a mirror, with a reverse painting on glass, infuse the Fleming’s Marble Court Balcony with color and with imagery that registers human interactions with the land.
Chris Powell: A Conn. fairy tale; hiding juvenile crime
A menstrual pad with wings
— Photo by Gsvadds
At Brookfield High School
MANCHESTER, Conn.
While few people were looking, and while most who were were too deceitful to explain or afraid to speak out, the Connecticut General Assembly passed, and Gov. Ned Lamont signed into law, a measure requiring public schools to distribute free feminine-hygiene products in at least one male restroom.
In anticipation of the law's date of implementation this coming Sept. 1, Brookfield's school administration installed such a vending device in a male bathroom at the town's high school. Boys being boys -- at least most of the time -- the other day some at the high school destroyed the device, thereby bringing the law more attention than it received while being enacted and causing Brookfield High Principal Marc Balanda to proclaim himself disgusted by the vandalism. Balanda called it "the work of immature boys, not men."
But whose work was the law itself? Responsibility rests with legislators and educators who want Connecticut to believe that there are no biological, anatomical, and psychological differences between male and female and that if people want to pretend about their natural gender, everyone else must pretend along with them.
The feminine-hygiene products dispenser law isn't the only manifestation of this pretense. The state Education Department advises schools to let students who consider themselves transgender use whichever restrooms they prefer. Some school systems direct their employees to keep a student's gender dysphoria secret from the student's parents if the student so desires. School athletic conferences require students claiming to be transgender to be allowed to participate in the sports of whichever gender they choose, though the policy remains under challenge in federal court by young women cheated out of championships by young men.
Everyone in Connecticut must pretend, on pain of denunciation or worse, as in Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale, "The Emperor's New Clothes."
The law's advocates dishonestly defend it as a matter of helping poor students -- as if free feminine-hygiene products can't easily be made available in female restrooms and school offices rather than in male restrooms.
Brookfield's state senator, Stephen Harding, wants the legislature to consider repealing the law. But he approaches the issue as if it is just another excessive state mandate on municipalities, not an excess of political correctness. Can the pretense here ever be confronted at the state Capitol?
Gender dysphoria is a burden to those who suffer from it. Schools should ensure that no one suffering from it is denied ordinary rights or harassed. But neither should gender dysphoria be used to deny the long-established rights of others, like gender privacy in restrooms, parental responsibility, and equal opportunity for girls and women in sports. The pretense here makes government ridiculous.
xxx
Local television news reporters are good at showing up at a crime scene late, when witnesses have departed, and instead interviewing people who know nothing about the crime except what the reporters have told them. Typically the bystanders obligingly deplore the crime they didn't see and then are put on the evening newscasts.
But such silly journalism the other week was actually useful. A group of young people went on a car-theft spree, including a carjacking at a gas station in West Haven, and led police on a chase through several towns before being stopped back in West Haven. Some of the perpetrators ran off but police captured two 14-year-olds, one of them armed with a loaded handgun.
Pressed by a TV reporter to comment later, a woman who was pumping gas at the station where the carjacking occurred and had seen nothing speculated that the incident demonstrated the need for more "programs" for young people.
Many people may feel the same way. But while Connecticut long has had many "programs" for troublesome youths, their car thefts lately are more numerous than ever.
What exactly are the "programs" for 14-year-olds with guns stealing cars? How successful are they? Do any involve confinement or is that now forbidden? And how will people ever find out while state government keeps juvenile court secret?
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Where boring is better
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
For a few years, states have been using quirky messaging on highway signs to grab drivers’ eyeballs. Consider: Massachusetts’s “Use Yah Blinkah” and a sign on Boston’s flood-prone Morrissey Boulevard, “Wicked High Tide.”
Very cute? Maybe. But what about those people from outside the region who might not understand local word uses and pronunciations, which in the Boston area are particularly bizarre (and to me often unpleasant). Sorry to be a bore, but highway signs, meant to promote safety and smooth traffic, don’t strike me as a good place for whimsy.
The Federal Highway Administration puts it well :
“Messages with obscure or secondary meanings, such as those with popular culture references, unconventional sign legend syntax, or that are intended to be humorous, should not be used as they might be misunderstood or understood only by a limited segment of road users and require greater time to process and understand. Similarly, slogan-type messages and the display of statistical information should not be used.”
Hit this link:
https://mutcd.fhwa.dot.gov/kno_11th_Edition.htm
‘Metaphor for life’
“Towards a Blue Planet” (color pencil on wood), by Massachusetts artist Stacey Cusher, in the group show “Everything Leaves a Mark,’’ at Kingston Gallery, Boston, April 3-28.
She says in her artist statement:
“Trees, forests and flowers are iconic and an endless source of inspiration. In drawing these, I locate different textures and emphasize the shapes of trees and differing values in graphite or blue color pencil to speak to their sturdiness and the capacity to withstand these times. They’re a metaphor for life. We have a constant relationship with them. As Sara Maitland, author of From The Forest, describes, “[r]ight from the beginning, the relationship between people and forest [and flora] was not primarily antagonistic and competitive, but symbiotic.”
“And from the slow process of creating drawings, floral paintings and animal portraits found in these gardens, forests and in unexpected places, a meditative presence occurs. There is a grandeur in nature and a spirit. Creating scenic worlds, even in still life paintings, segue into wonder, daydreaming, and contemplation. A child-like feeling occurs when anything seems possible: infinite immensity and infinite possibilities.’’
Judith Graham: Maybe we just don’t care about old people
“Old Woman Dozing,’’ by Nicolaes Maes (1656), at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels
From Kaiser Family Foundation Health News
The COVID pandemic would be a wake-up call for America, advocates for the elderly predicted: incontrovertible proof that the nation wasn’t doing enough to care for vulnerable older adults.
Navigating Aging focuses on medical issues and advice associated with aging and end-of-life care, helping America’s 45 million seniors and their families navigate the health care system.
To contact Judith Graham with a question or comment, click here.
The death toll was shocking, as were reports of chaos in nursing homes and seniors suffering from isolation, depression, untreated illness, and neglect. Around 900,000 older adults have died of COVID to date, accounting for 3 of every 4 Americans who have perished in the pandemic.
But decisive actions that advocates had hoped for haven’t materialized. Today, most people — and government officials — appear to accept COVID as a part of ordinary life. Many seniors at high risk aren’t getting antiviral therapies for COVID, and most older adults in nursing homes aren’t getting updated vaccines. Efforts to strengthen care quality in nursing homes and assisted living centers have stalled amid debate over costs and the availability of staff. And only a small percentage of people are masking or taking other precautions in public despite a new wave of covid, flu, and respiratory syncytial virus infections hospitalizing and killing seniors.
In the last week of 2023 and the first two weeks of 2024 alone, 4,810 people 65 and older lost their lives to covid — a group that would fill more than 10 large airliners — according to data provided by the CDC. But the alarm that would attend plane crashes is notably absent. (During the same period, the flu killed an additional 1,201 seniors, and RSV killed 126.)
“It boggles my mind that there isn’t more outrage,” said Alice Bonner, 66, senior adviser for aging at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. “I’m at the point where I want to say, ‘What the heck? Why aren’t people responding and doing more for older adults?’”
It’s a good question. Do we simply not care?
I put this big-picture question, which rarely gets asked amid debates over budgets and policies, to health care professionals, researchers, and policymakers who are older themselves and have spent many years working in the aging field. Here are some of their responses.\
The pandemic made things worse. Prejudice against older adults is nothing new, but “it feels more intense, more hostile” now than previously, said Karl Pillemer, 69, a professor of psychology and gerontology at Cornell University.
“I think the pandemic helped reinforce images of older people as sick, frail, and isolated — as people who aren’t like the rest of us,” he said. “And human nature being what it is, we tend to like people who are similar to us and be less well disposed to ‘the others.’”
“A lot of us felt isolated and threatened during the pandemic. It made us sit there and think, ‘What I really care about is protecting myself, my wife, my brother, my kids, and screw everybody else,’” said W. Andrew Achenbaum, 76, the author of nine books on aging and a professor emeritus at Texas Medical Center in Houston.
In an environment of “us against them,” where everybody wants to blame somebody, Achenbaum continued, “who’s expendable? Older people who aren’t seen as productive, who consume resources believed to be in short supply. It’s really hard to give old people their due when you’re terrified about your own existence.”
Although covid continues to circulate, disproportionately affecting older adults, “people now think the crisis is over, and we have a deep desire to return to normal,” said Edwin Walker, 67, who leads the Administration on Aging at the Department of Health and Human Services. He spoke as an individual, not a government representative.
The upshot is “we didn’t learn the lessons we should have,” and the ageism that surfaced during the pandemic hasn’t abated, he observed.
Ageism is pervasive. “Everyone loves their own parents. But as a society, we don’t value older adults or the people who care for them,” said Robert Kramer, 74, co-founder and strategic adviser at the National Investment Center for Seniors Housing & Care.
Kramer thinks that Boomers are reaping what they have sown. “We have chased youth and glorified youth. When you spend billions of dollars trying to stay young, look young, act young, you build in an automatic fear and prejudice of the opposite.”
Combine the fear of diminishment, decline, and death that can accompany growing older with the trauma and fear that arose during the pandemic, and “I think covid has pushed us back in whatever progress we were making in addressing the needs of our rapidly aging society. It has further stigmatized aging,” said John Rowe, 79, professor of health policy and aging at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.
“The message to older adults is: ‘Your time has passed, give up your seat at the table, stop consuming resources, fall in line,’” said Anne Montgomery, 65, a health-policy expert at the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare. She believes, however, that baby boomers can “rewrite and flip that script if we want to and if we work to change systems that embody the values of a deeply ageist society.”
Integration, not separation, is needed. The best way to overcome stigma is “to get to know the people you are stigmatizing,” said G. Allen Power, 70, a geriatrician and the chairman in aging and dementia innovation at the Schlegel-University of Waterloo Research Institute for Aging in Canada. “But we separate ourselves from older people so we don’t have to think about our own aging and our own mortality.”
The solution: “We have to find ways to better integrate older adults in the community as opposed to moving them to campuses where they are apart from the rest of us,” Power said. “We need to stop seeing older people only through the lens of what services they might need and think instead of all they have to offer society.”
That point is a core precept of the National Academy of Medicine’s 2022 report Global Roadmap for Healthy Longevity. Older people are a “natural resource” who “make substantial contributions to their families and communities,” the report’s authors write in introducing their findings.
Those contributions include financial support to families, caregiving assistance, volunteering, and ongoing participation in the workforce, among other things.
“When older people thrive, all people thrive,” the report concludes.
Future generations will get their turn. That’s a message that Kramer conveys in classes he teaches at the University of Southern California, Cornell, and other institutions. “You have far more at stake in changing the way we approach aging than I do,” he tells his students. “You are far more likely, statistically, to live past 100 than I am. If you don’t change society’s attitudes about aging, you will be condemned to lead the last third of your life in social, economic, and cultural irrelevance.”
As for himself and the baby boom generation, Kramer thinks it’s “too late” to effect the meaningful changes he hopes the future will bring.
“I suspect things for people in my generation could get a lot worse in the years ahead,” Pillemer said. “People are greatly underestimating what the cost of caring for the older population is going to be over the next 10 to 20 years, and I think that’s going to cause increased conflict.”
Judith Graham is a reporter for KFFHealth News.
‘Fun and Games’ in New London
“Girl in Crash Helmet’’ (polychromed wood and masonite), by the late Ivoryton, Conn.-based artist Leo Jensen (1926-2019), in the show “Fun and Games: Leo Jensen’s Pop Art,’’ at the Lyman Allyn Museum, New London, Conn., Feb. 10-April 14.
— Image courtesy of Mr. Jensen’s estate
The museum says:
“Recognized for his dynamic contributions to pop art, Connecticut artist Leo Jensen drew on his experiences growing up in the circus and the rodeo to bring the excitement and allure of that world into his art. With a fertile imagination and wide-ranging artistic skills and interests, the Ivoryton-based Jensen worked in various media—painting, drawing, carving, and welding—with equal enthusiasm.”
Best known for his large-scale bronze frog sculptures on the Thread City Crossing Bridge in Willimantic, Conn., Leo Jensen brought humor, nuance and insight into his work. This show presents a selection of Jensen’s artwork from his long and productive artistic career. It’s organized in conjunction with the Florence Griswold Museum, in Old Lyme, Conn., whose companion exhibition “Fun and Games? Leo Jensen’s Pop Art,” will be on view there from Feb. 20 through May 19.
One of Leo Jensen’s four copper frogs on the Thread City Crossing Bridge (aka Frog Bridge), in Willimantic.
The Ivoryton Playhouse, in Leo Jensen’s town.
Boston women’s shelter gets boost from foundation created by former Red Sox owners
Edited from a New England Council report
“The Pine Street Inn has used some of the $15 million it has received from the Yawkey Foundation to help expand and otherwise improve the women’s shelter, in Boston’s South End. The Yawkey family were long-time owners of the Boston Red Sox.
“The $15 million award represents the largest single donation in the Pine Street Inn’s 55-year history. After getting the donation, Pine Street is getting going on its plan to add 400 to 500 new units of permanent housing over the next five years, which will mark about a 40 percent expansion in its capacity. This increase will arrive at a crucial juncture, as Boston faces the dual challenges of an influx of migrants and escalating housing costs.
“‘Even this isn’t enough, but it’s a beginning,’ said Pine Street Inn President Lyndia Downie. Pine Street and Yawkey Foundation officials recently gathered at the women’s shelter to celebrate the late Jean Yawkey’s 115th birthday through the naming of the ‘Yawkey House.’ More than 1,300 women are supported each year through Pine Street’s outreach. It hopes to help more.’’
Don’t expect perfection
OIiver Ellsworth in 1785.
“Let us, my fellow citizens, take up this constitution with the same spirit of candour and liberality; consider it in all its parts; consider the important and advantages which may be derived from it, and the fatal consequences which will probably follow from rejecting it. If any objections are made against it, let us obtain full information on the subject, and then weigh these objections in the balance of cool impartial reason. Let us see, if they be not wholly groundless; But if upon the whole they appear to have some weight, let us consider well, whether they be so important, that we ought on account of them to reject the whole constitution. Perfection is not the lot of human institutions; that which has the most excellencies and the fewest faults, is the best that we can expect.’’
— Oliver Ellsworth (1745-1807), whose hometown was Windsor, Conn., was a Founding Father of the United States, lawyer, judge, politician and diplomat. He was a framer of the U.S. Constitution, senator from Connecticut, and the third chief justice of the United States. His remarks here came on Dec. 17, 1787, during the campaign to ratify the Constitution.
Oliver Ellsworth Homestead, in Windsor. It’s now a historical museum.
‘Chronological markers’
“Coded #000000 [Black]”, by Triton Mobley, in the show “Coloured Aesthetica,’’ at the Chazan Gallery at Wheeler, Providence, through March.
— Image courtesy of the Chazan Gallery
The gallery says:
Triton Mobley is a new media artist whose practice pulls together "critical making methodologies across performative installations, programmable fabrications, and speculative industrial design…. Mobley's work in the show is digital but pulls from the tangible and real to trace "chronological markers across the archived memories from America’s amalgamation of public, private, racial, economic, and religious spaces."
‘Hammers hoisted’
The factory of International Silver Company (1898–1983), later known as Insilco Corp., was formed in Meriden as a corporation banding together many existing silver companies in the immediate area and beyond. The making of silver products was once a major industry in New England. Consider that Taunton, Mass., dubbed itself “The Silver City.’’
“Till the thudding source, exposed,
Counfounded in wept guesswork:
Framed in windows of Main Street's
Silver factory, immense
”Hammers hoisted, wheels turning….’’
— From “Night Shift,’’ by Massachusetts-raised poet Sylvia Plath (1932-1963). To read the whole poem, please hit this link:
https://allpoetry.com/Night-Shift
GOP mulls ‘Slayveree’; See haunting bas relief in Boston
From the National Park Service:
The Robert Gould Shaw and Massachusetts 54th Regiment Memorial, installed in 1884, a haunting bronze bas relief on the Boston Common, and created by famed sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, commemorates the first Black regiment from the North in the Civil War. Although African Americans served in both the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, Northern racist sentiments kept African Americans from taking up arms for the United States in the early part of the Civil War. However, a clause in Abraham Lincoln's 1863 Emancipation Proclamation allowed for the raising of Black regiments. Gov. John Andrew soon created the Massachusetts 54th Volunteer Infantry. He chose Robert Gould Shaw, the son of wealthy abolitionists, to serve as its colonel. Notable abolitionists including Frederick Douglass and local leaders such as Lewis Hayden recruited men for the 54th Regiment. African Americans enlisted from every region of the north, and from as far away as Canada and the Caribbean.
Through their heroic, yet tragic, assault on Fort Wagner, S.C., on on July 18, 1863, in which Shaw and many of his men died, the 54th helped erode Northern public opposition to the use of Black soldiers and inspired the enlistment of more than 180,000 Black soldiers into the Union’s forces.
The front of Linden Place, the Bristol, R.I., mansion built in 1810 for infamous slave trader (and other “cargoes”), privateer and ship owner Gen. George DeWolf and designed by architect Russell Warren. The mansion now operates as a historic house museum.
— Photo by Bbucco/ Tiffany Axtmann Photography
‘Collide and co-exist’
Work by Jennifer Moses in her show “In Brightest Day in Blackest Night,’’ at the Museum of Art at the University of New Hampshire, Durham.
The museum says:
“Jennifer Moses explores opposing visual and conceptual themes which both collide and co-exist—the comic vs. the tragic, line vs. shape, and flatness vs. the illusion of space. Moses's work combines abstraction and representation, most recently shifting from personal reflection to political expression.’’
Chris Powell: Mutilation is mutilation; social-service industry complains about fiscal ‘guardrails’
Transsexual woman July Schultz displaying her palm with "XY" written on it at an demonstration.
MAN CHESTER, Conn.
What’s the difference between “female genital mutilation” and “gender-affirming care”?
“Female genital mutilation” is an ancient barbaric practice prevailing in some cultures in Africa and the Middle East. Some adherents mistakenly think that Islam requires it. It is committed against minor females and is euphemized as “purification.”
“Gender-affirming care” is the euphemism for sex-change therapy and is a modern barbaric practice associated with politically correct cultures in North America and Western Europe. It is committed against minors of both sexes and involves anatomy-altering drugs and surgery.
Female genital mutilation is prohibited by federal law and 41 states but not by Connecticut, so last week state legislators, 30 civic groups, and victims of the practice announced that they again will try to have it outlawed in the forthcoming session of the General Assembly. Legislators are rushing to endorse the proposal, though following the dubious practice of states that outlaw abortion, the advocates of outlawing female genital mutilation in Connecticut also want the law to criminalize taking a minor out of state for mutilation.
But meanwhile there is no effort in the legislature to prohibit “gender-affirming care” for minors, though Connecticut law presumes that minors lack the judgment to make such serious decisions, prohibiting them from purchasing alcohol, tobacco, and guns and from entering contracts and getting tattoos.
Medical research increasingly connects bad physical and psychological outcomes with “gender-affirming care,” and many who received it as minors come to regret it.
So in their consideration of female genital mutilation, legislators should ask why surgical and chemical mutilation and alteration shouldn’t be forbidden for all minors, delaying such practices to adulthood. What’s bad for the young goose is bad for the young gander as well, regardless of political correctness and however many other genders there are imagined to be.
DON'T WHINE, SPECIFY: Connecticut's social-services industry is complaining about the "fiscal guardrails” that state government has imposed on itself for the last few years at the behest of Gov. Ned Lamont and leaders of both parties in the General Assembly. The “guardrails” function as the limit on state spending that was promised as an apology for the state income tax in 1991 but was never delivered.
The industry has a point. Paid by state government, the industry provides many services that state government is obliged to provide and does so far less expensively than they would be provided by state government’s own employees, whose compensation is far higher than that of social-service organization employees.
But the industry's complaint is empty, for the industry never specifies any state spending that is less important than its own.
For many years state government has been primarily a pension-and-benefit society for its own employees. By law and union contract the compensation of state employees takes precedence over everything else in state government. Twenty percent of state government’s revenue now is used for government employee pensions, in part because for decades state government bought votes by overpromising while underfunding benefits. The social-services industry didn't object.
Even now much money could be transferred to social services if state government economized with its employees, as by freezing salaries instead of paying generous raises.
But the social-services industry doesn’t press for that either.
Indeed, practically every week brings an announcement from the governor about financial grants from the state to municipalities and other entities for discretionary purposes. Last week’s disbursements included $9 million for roads, sidewalks, and recreation trails in 10 small towns. No one would die if the money wasn’t spent that way. Without the state money the towns might proceed with some of the projects at their own expense.
But the social-services industry could make a plausible assertion that some of its underfunded work is a matter of life and death.
State government is never efficient. It is full of inessential, excessive and patronage spending. The social-services industry should try to earn more money by showing how it could be obtained without more taxes -- that is, by correcting state government’s mistaken priorities.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).