But they’re smart!
Octopus opening a container with a screw cap.
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
Now this will be a battle. A Spanish company wants to raise octopuses for food. Delicious and high protein. But research over the past few years has suggested that the animals are highly intelligent and have complex emotions. (Reminder: Pigs and cattle have emotions too, and pigs, anyway, are fairly intelligent. And would you eat your dog? Well, I suppose it depends….)
An inducement for raising the eight-legged and very flexible beasts is that these short-lived creatures grow very fast.
So there’s a campaign to block this aquaculture. So far, I’m on the octopuses’ side. Also, I wonder if there are other creatures in the ocean (besides marine mammals) that we’ll discover are smart.
In Greenwich, displaying a violent world
“Samurai Helmet” (Japan’s Edo Period — 1603-1868), in the show “Arms and Armor: Evolution and Innovation,’’ at the Bruce Museum, Greenwich, Conn., March 7-Aug. 11.
The museum says:
‘‘‘Arms and Armor’ brings together historical weaponry and natural history specimens to highlight parallels between combat in the human and natural worlds.’’
David Warsh: The outside helpers who helped make Keynes and Friedman iconic
John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946).
Keynes was a key participant at the Bretton Woods conference, which lay the foundation for much of the world’s financial system after the devastation of World War II.
The conference took place at the Mount Washington Hotel. Clouds here obscure the summits of the Presidential Range.
— Photo by Shankarnikhil88
SOMERVILLE, Mass.
John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman traveled different paths to become the dominant policy economists of their respective times. In The Academic Scribblers, in 1971, William Breit and Roger Ransom invoked the motto of the Texas Rangers to explain Friedman’s success: “Little man whip a big man every time if the little man is right and keeps a’comin’.”
But there was more to it than that.
Both Keynes and Friedman were slow starters and late bloomers. “It was The Economic Consequences of the Peace [in 1919] that established Keynes’s claim to attention”, as biographer Robert Skidelsky wrote at the beginning of the second volume of his trilogy. In murky circumstances, the prescient warning about the hard terms imposed on Germany after World War I failed to be recognized with a Nobel Prize for Peace, as Lars Jonung has shown. Not until 1936, with the appearance of The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, when he was 58, did Keynes acquire the sobriquet that Skidelsky confers on him in that second tome, “the economist as savior.”
Friedman was 50 when, in 1962, he published both Capitalism and Freedom and, with Anna Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States 1867-1960. He was nearly 40 when he turned to monetary theory. Within the profession he enjoyed growing success in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s. But vindication and celebrity waited until 1980, when he turned 69, as Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul Volcker battled inflation under a monetarist banner; when Friedman’s television series Free to Choose, with his economist wife, Rose. was broadcast on America’s public network; and when Ronald Reagan was elected president.
Both Keynes and Friedman freely offered advice to American presidents, which only enhanced the economists’ stature. Keynes, at arm’s length, disparaged Woodrow Wilson; encouraged Franklin Roosevelt, whom he admired, and, 15 years after his death, saw his policies adopted by John F. Kennedy. Friedman, after a 1964 unsuccessful campaign with Barry Goldwater, enjoyed considerable influence with Richard Nixon and Reagan.
So, how did the Keynesian Revolution roll out in America? There are many accounts of the process by economists, but only one by an economic historian of how America’s leading most trusted newspaper columnist first resisted, then was convinced, and facilitated the movement’s acceptance for the next 40 years. (Michael Bernstein’s A Perilous Progress: Economics and public purpose in twentieth century America (Princeton University Press, 2001) surveys the period from a somewhat different angle.)
Walter Lippmann was already America’s foremost public intellectual, a common enough species today, but then more or less one of a kind. He published A Preface to Politics a year after graduating from Harvard College, studied Thorstein Veblen and Wesley Clair Mitchell, made friends with Keynes when both attended the Versailles Peace Conference, in 1919, compared notes with U.S. presidents, Supreme Court justices, scientists, philosophers, central bankers, lawyers, corporate leaders and Wall Street financiers.
Lippmann began writing an influential newspaper column in the Depression year of 1931. For a taste of how different that world was from our own. I recommend a viewing of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. In Walter Lippmann: Public Economist (Harvard, 2014) the late Craufurd Goodwin, of Duke University, traces the twists and turns of Lippmann’s columns as he sorted through various explanations of the Great Depression – too much free trade, too little gold, too many monopolies, unbalanced budgets, before becoming convinced that more public public spending was the key to recovery.
After World War II, Lippmann grew close to MIT’s Paul Samuelson. He tracked the debates of emerging “neo-liberal” factions, including leaders F. A. Hayek and Friedman, but declined to join the Mont Pelerin Society. His influence as a columnist finally came to grief over his prolonged support for the War in Vietnam, and he died, at 85, in 1974.
The sources of Friedman’s support are more complicated. Within the profession he had many key allies– his Rutgers professors Arthur Burns, later chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, and Homer Jones, later research director of Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; his graduate school friends, George Stigler and Allen Wallis; his brother-in-law Aaron Director, later dean of the University of Chicago’s Law School; his co-author Anna Schwartz; and, of course, his wife, economist Rose Director Friedman, to name only his closest associates. These were among his fellow Texas Rangers.
It has been Friedman’s acolytes outside the profession who were quite different from those of Keynes. The story of the law and economic movement has been well told by Steven Teles in The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The battle for control of the law. On the financialization of markets, no one has yet topped Peter Bernstein’s Capital Ideas: The improbable origins of modern Wall Street. Friedman’s contribution to globalization is discussed in Three Days at Camp David: How a secret meeting in 1971 transformed the global economy, by Jeffrey Garten. The story of various business anti-regulation and anti-tax lobbying groups can be found in Free Enterprise: An American history, by Lawrence Glickman
It’s not that economics departments weren’t also special-interest groups, but they are special interests of a different sort, organized as competitors, which permits swift reversals within the profession itself. Whether that is the case with the legal, financial, corporate, and media industries remains to be seen. Maybe; maybe not.
David Warsh, a veteran columnist and an economic historian, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this column originated.
'Can't fill a house'
“Winter night,’’ by Bror Lindh (1877-1941), Swedish artist
“An Old Man’s Winter Night,’’ by Robert Frost (1974-1963)
ll out of doors looked darkly in at him
Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars,
That gathers on the pane in empty rooms.
What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze
Was the lamp tilted near them in his hand.
What kept him from remembering what it was
That brought him to that creaking room was age.
He stood with barrels round him—at a loss.
And having scared the cellar under him
In clomping there, he scared it once again
In clomping off—and scared the outer night,
Which has its sounds, familiar, like the roar
Of trees and crack of branches, common things,
But nothing so like beating on a box.
A light he was to no one but himself
Where now he sat, concerned with he knew what,
A quiet light, and then not even that.
He consigned to the moon,—such as she was,
So late-arising,—to the broken moon
As better than the sun in any case
For such a charge, his snow upon the roof,
His icicles along the wall to keep;
And slept. The log that shifted with a jolt
Once in the stove, disturbed him and he shifted,
And eased his heavy breathing, but still slept.
One aged man—one man—can’t fill a house,
A farm, a countryside, or if he can,
It's thus he does it of a winter night.
‘The very three a.m.’
“The Thaw” (1991), by Nikoklay Anokhin
‘‘The most serious charge which can be brought against New England is not Puritanism, but February.... Spring is too far away to comfort even by anticipation, and winter long ago lost the charm of novelty. This is the very three a.m. of the calendar.’’
— Joseph Wood Krutch (1893-1970), American essayist, critic and naturalist. In the 1940s, he lived in Redding, Conn.
Snowdrops piercing the snow.
The circle route
“ Intermezzi, Opus IV, Bl. 12: Amor, Tod und Jenseits (love, death and beyond) ‘‘ (1881), etching and aquatint on paper, in the show “50 Years and Forward: Works on Paper Acquisitions,’’ at the Clark Art Institute, Willliamstown, Mass., through March 10.
In gorgeous Williamstown.
Williamstown in the 1880’s.
If only we’d worn wetsuits
“The Wake” (1964), by Maine-and-Pennsylvania-based painter Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), in the show “Stories of the Sea,’’ at the Currier Museum of Art, in Manchester, N.H.
The museum says the show:
“{B}rings together a number of extraordinary loans with a wide array of artworks and objects from the museum’s permanent collection in order to explore various maritime themes.
“The selection spans the 16th Century to the present day, and includes dramatic seascapes painted in the Romantic tradition; images of steamers and transoceanic travels, referencing migration and tourism; representations of harbors and shipyards; and poetic tributes to the hardships endured by men working at sea.’’
Chris Powell: Hoping for a reality transfusion about medical debt
— Photo by SantyBoyMX
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont is acting as if he has a magic wand that can eliminate $650 million or more in medical debt owed by unfortunate state residents. He has been waving that wand for more than a year and waved it again the other week in his address to the new session of the state General Assembly. The magic is taking longer than expected.
The idea is for state government to pay $6.5 million to a charitable organization that purchases uncollectible medical debt from hospitals, whereupon the charity will offer the hospitals 1 cent per dollar of debt and the hospitals will agree to sell at that rate. Then the charity will inform debtors that they are off the hook.
But society won't be off the hook. For medical debt won't really be extinguished at all by this mechanism but merely transferred -- transferred to everyone else who uses hospitals. Indeed, uncollectible medical debt is already effectively transferred to the rest of hospital patients, private insurers and government insurers through the higher rates hospitals need to keep operating. Services have been provided without payment and their costs have to be recovered somehow.
While hospital rates must be negotiated with insurers and the government, as vital public institutions the hospitals can't be allowed to fail. State government is already deeply involved in negotiations to arrange Yale New Haven Health's purchase of three hospitals looted by the predatory investment company that acquired them several years ago -- Waterbury Hospital, Manchester Memorial Hospital and Rockville General Hospital. A direct or indirect subsidy to Yale from state government may be necessary.
As a practical matter most hospitals in Connecticut are already government agencies, with the government controlling most of what they do, either through statute, regulation, or insurance and reimbursement rates. Just this week the state Office of Health Strategy ordered Sharon Hospital not to close its money-losing maternity ward. A state government that claims the power to order a hospital to operate a maternity ward can claim the power to order forgiveness of medical debt and set debt forgiveness terms.
Key questions about the governor's debt forgiveness idea remain to be answered.
Will hospitals sell much of their debt so cheaply? They haven't said.
Will government-facilitated forgiveness of medical debt incentivize more people to stiff the hospitals serving them? That seems likely, since the proposed income limits for people qualifying for debt forgiveness are far above poverty thresholds.
Perhaps most important, since state government already has such power over hospitals, what's the need for a charitable organization to serve as intermediary in debt forgiveness?
The answer seems to be to provide political cover and obscure what will be going on -- the transfer of debt from individuals to the public and the concealment of more of the cost of government in the cost of living.
If state government arranged medical debt forgiveness and qualifications directly, by statute or regulation, the program would compete directly and clearly with all other demands on state government's finances. Every state budget might be forced to determine how much medical debt is to be forgiven each year.
Instead an intermediary would disperse the expense of debt forgiveness in thousands of transactions, distributed unequally among hospitals, which in turn would distribute the expense unequally in hundreds more transactions with insurers, government agencies, and hospital labor contracts. Political responsibility and blame would land mainly on hospitals.
Why does medical-debt relief need such subterfuge? For the problem is a terrible consequence of the country's medical insurance system, whose creakiness is exposed every day by "Go Fund Me" or similar campaigns on behalf of people with catastrophic injuries or diseases whose treatment costs far exceed any insurance coverage.
Though individuals or families may be blameless, just victims of bad luck, medical debt can follow them for lifetimes, ruining their credit.
Government is supposed to do for the people the crucial things they can't do for themselves. Covering medical care in catastrophic circumstances should be one of them. Let it be done directly, frankly, and without apology.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
John O. Harney: Remembering my brother; ‘safe for blueberrying’
Robert Harney
My oldest brother Robert, historian, social observer and role model, died nearly 35 years ago after an unsuccessful heart transplant. One doctor quipped that there was not a heart big enough to replace Bob’s.
Memories of my childhood feature Bob’s summer visits to the North Shore … Essex clams, tennis, various adventures on the coast. Also my visits to him in Toronto, where he led the Multicultural History Society of Ontario and introduced me to seemingly limitless exotic culinary experiences.
I still often have questions I wish I could ask Bob on issues ranging from family history to world tensions. I can imagine his presumably sharp and funny take on the explosion in amateur ancestry.
After being surprised at how little Bob’s important work intersected with the age of the Internet, I was recently cheered to see many references to Bob’s work.
But even with all his fascinating work in multiculturalism, it’s Bob’s humanity that sticks with me. Check out this poem of his …
Blueberries
It took the better half of the day
to reach the woods and piggery
up beyond the Lynn road
blueberrying with Capt.
He knew the route. the sun,
prickly shrubs and soggy spots.
He knew the granite outcroppings
beneath the berry bushes
the snakes nesting there—
garter, milk, and copperhead.
He overturned the stones with sticks
making startled humus steam
and baby snakes wriggle
like green tendrils at low tide
of shorewall seaweed.
Beyond the ledge was the piggery fence.
Sows and swill, the farmer’s share
of Salem’s scavenger economy.
The sun made us giddy, the brambles stung
we dreamed Capt.’s tales of bears and lynx,
and so a grunting sow, a piglet’s squeal,
a towhee rustling through the leaves
made the stooping berrypickers freeze.
My sister and I believed in bears
in Salem’s woods.
The old man’s stories made us surer,
gave circumstances and color to the dream.
The fear we knew to be untrue,
for what they didn’t convert,
the Puritans drove away or slew,
and that included beasts as well as men.
Then to show our own descent,
our links in time and space to them.
We threw the little snakes by handfuls
as morsels for the hungry sows
propitiating bears and
exorcizing woods.
Making the ledge
forever safe for blueberrying.
John O. Harney is a writer and retired executive editor of The New England Journal of Higher Education.
Penobscots' deal with 'Mother Earth'
Penobscot beaded moccasins.
Speech by Penobscot Nation Chief Saugama to the Maine legislature, in Augusta, Maine, on April 6, 2002:
To all who are present here today and to those who may listen on the radio or TV, I ask that your ears hear my words so that you will know what I have said. I ask for your minds to be open so that you will understand my intent. I ask that your hearts feel my commitment to bring honor to my family, my tribe and to our state, a place we all share as our home.
Woliwoni. Thank you.
It is an honor and a privilege as Saugama, the Chief of the Penobscot Nation, to be here on this historic day, addressing the joint session of the 120th Legislature.
Woliwoni. Thank you.
Today symbolizes what I truly believe to be a new era in Tribal/State relations. Relationships are based on communication. Today we have the opportunity for direct communication. Perhaps, today this can be the start of our greatest days before us.
My grandfather was a pack-basket maker, a river guide, and a hunter and worked on the Penobscot log drives. My grandmother, along with raising a large family, tended a garden, and braided sweet grass for the fancy-basket makers. In my youth, I was fortunate enough to have spent many hours with them, hearing the stories of the old days. From my grandparents, as well the other tribal elders, I learned my culture. Though these elders have joined our ancestors, their values, and their passion for preserving our traditions live on in the pride of my people.
I am thankful for my mother, a proud Penobscot woman. In her 60-plus years of living on the Penobscot River, she has witnessed many changes for our people. She faced the bitter winds of winter while walking across the ice, and paddled across the quick spring currents to go to and from school. She drove her first car across the infamous one-lane bridge. My mother worked as hard as many in the Old Town shoe factories and then became a dedicated Penobscot Nation's Tribal Clerk of 19 years. She has always supported my endeavors, even standing in the cold November rains at my High School football games. (Incidentally, she could never understand why 22 young men would fight over one funny shaped small ball.) She always strived to make a better life for her family and her people. Though she could not be here today due a slight heart attack, she will be watching on public TV. Please join me in honoring a proud Penobscot woman, Lorraine Dana. Neyan Penawepskewi. I am Penobscot.
Over the last two years, our people and our concerns for the environment, especially the rivers in the State of Maine have been in the news. We have a special relationship with the Penobscot River. We all live along the river. However, my people not only live on the river, we are actually a part of the river, living on Indian Island. The river is ingrained in our history, our culture, and our values.
It was once told to me by an elder that, before there was a river there were streams, from the upland into the valley. But one day, the water in the valley became a trickle, and it disappeared, and the people grew thirsty. A young hunter went to find out what had happened. He entered the forest and walked for days until he came to the place where the streams converged, and there he saw Kci Cetwalis, a gigantic frog. The frog grew bigger and bigger as it lapped up the little streams. The people sent for Gluskabe, our hero. Gluskabe followed the trail and when he came to the frog he called out, "There are others who are thirsty too. You must learn to share." "I won't stop," croaked Kci Cetwalis the frog, "Because I am the biggest and most powerful, I can do what I want."
Gluskabe pulled up a giant white pine, and lifting it high over his head he brought it down, striking the frog on the back. Kci Cetwalis the frog burst into a thousand pieces. The water shot up into the air and landed in the deep furrow in the ground the tree had made, and the water began to flow. And that is how the Penobscot River came to be.
For centuries our history and culture have been shaped by our direct daily interaction with this powerful moving force of nature. For this reason, my people have always viewed the regulation and protection of our natural resources as our obligation, our stewardship to Mother Earth. We still use the river as a source of life. Our traditions are tied into this powerful free-flowing source. Though Kevlar and Rogallex have all but replaced birch bark canoes, we still use the waterways of the Penobscot to journey north to our sacred monument, Katahdin. Katahdin is the center to our spirituality. We still gather plants from the river's sediments and use them in our medicines. We still take our children upriver to enjoy the traditions of our people. We pray for the return of the salmon so our subsistence rights can be realized.
Our stewardship and protection of the river comes naturally to me and my people. We have a deal; Mother Earth provides for us and we protect her. This traditional value goes beyond laws and regulations. This is a deal that transcends governments, profits and the perception of power. And this is a relationship our people will never break.
Our rivers, our waters are not just a resource, they are us. Our waters are sacred, not just to the Penobscot, not just to the Passamaquoddy, Maliseets, or Mic macs, but to all the people of Maine. Enforcement of the Clean Water Act is absolute and must be addressed. The daily lives and health of people who live along the Penobscot River from Millinocket to Searsport must be protected. We have the Governor's pledge to give the Tribes a substantial and useful role in the process of waste-water discharge permits affecting our reservation. On behalf of the Penobscot Nation I commend the Governor for that. I pledge to work on a government-to-government basis with Attorney General Steven Rowe to find a solution.
It is not enough to have high standards for the cleanliness of the water and the protection of all those who rely upon those waters, including the people of my tribe, the people of Maine, the fish and turtles that live within the river and eagles who find their sustenance within those fish. We are al1 connected and to protect this connection for now and forever. It is not enough to write high standards. They must be enforced. Our lives are at stake, and our environment is at stake. The reputation of the State of Maine is at stake, and as leaders we all have an obligation to protect our most precious resource.
Now I'd like to talk about sovereignty and the Settlement Act. These things are important to us, but need not be scary for you. The Penobscot Nation as a tribe and a government predates the State, and the United States. The State of Maine from 1820 on did recognize us as a tribe, but did not recognize our Federal Indian Rights. This changed in 1975 when Federal Judge Edward Gignoux ruled that the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy Nations have the same sovereign status under the Constitution and laws of the United States as tribes in other parts of the country.
In 1980 we settled our land claims after four long and often bitter years of negotiation. The settlement confirmed our sovereignty and our protection as tribes under Federal Law. The plan of the settlement was that tribes and the State would work out their destiny together. The Federal government gave its advance blessing to any agreements worked out between the tribes and the State.
We haven't done this enough. Too often we have been locked in the ancient struggle of the land claim. We need to find ways to work together as partners. We need to creatively use the tools available to us for the benefit of all. We need to ensure Maine tribes are never again deprived of benefits that other tribes enjoy. We can do this within the context of our unique relationship.
The very essence of tribal sovereignty is the ability to be self-governing for the protection of the health, safety and welfare of our people. We are a distinct people with a unique history. The Penobscots are an Indian people. For thousands of years, the bones of our ancestors have been laid to rest along the shores of the rivers and the ocean. We will continue to safeguard these rights to preserve our future. We are proud of our history and we are hopeful for our future. We, the Penobscot people, the Penobscot Nation are still here, and we will continue to be here for now, and forever. Neyan Penawepskewi. I am Penobscot.
Woliwani. I thank you.
Business boomed last year in Boston’s South End
Worcester Square, in the South End. The neighborhood continues to be gentrified.
—Photo by Henry Zbyszynski
Business was booming for the South End in 2023, as more than a dozen small businesses set up shop in the neighborhood. That trend looks like it will continue into 2024.
According to Randi Lathrop, who sits on the board of the South End Business Alliance, 16 businesses opened in the South End last year. They include five cafes and restaurants, two retail shops, two wine stores, and two personal trainers. A physical therapist, design company, skin care facility, and herbal medicine shop rounded out the list.
Four new businesses have opened their doors. They are Bluemoon Smoke Shop, Tepeyac Cocina Mexicana, ST33LE, a men’s clothing store, and Simmetria MedSpa, a spa focused on medical aesthetics.
Lathrop also added that nine more businesses already have plans to open in the next few months, including four restaurants, two retailers, a bookstore and a convenience store.
Some of these businesses are the first of their kind in Boston. Sky Candle Co., at 53 Dartmouth Street, that sells candles, all of which are vegan, non-toxic, and made on-site, along with diffusers and room sprays. Unique to Sky Candle is its candle bar, said Greg Dekermenjian, the shop’s owner. The candle bar has been the “highlight” of the store, he added.\
To read the whole article, please hit this link.
Editor’s note: Robert Whitcomb, New England Diary’s editor, is chairman of The Boston Guardian.
Too big for your nose
“Six Purple Heart and Cherry Napkin Rings” (woodenware), by Jim Gold, at Matt Brown Fine Art, in Lyme, N.H.
Lyme street scene circa 1913.
Cannon on the Lyme Common.
Hectic trip
“Generations” (acrylic and collage on unstretched canvas), by Boston-based artist Karmimadeebora McMillan, at Montserrat Gallery, Beverly, Mass., through March 6.
The gallery explains that the image is in the show “Karmimadeebora McMillan: Wandering stars…for whom it is reserved…the blackness…the darkness…forever,’’ a "kaleidoscopic journey through time that draws inspiration from sci-fi, speculative fiction, and Afrofuturism. McMillan's strong visual style of bold geometry and figures pulls from all aspects of Black history to examine the power of memory and how Black histories are held and carried."
“View of the Beach at Beverly, Massachusetts,’’ 1860, by John Frederick Kensett
Chuck Collins: I love your music, Taylor, but please ditch your remaining private jet
Taylor Swift’s Dassault7x jet. She sold her other private jet.
Taylor Swift last year.
BOSTON
Via OtherWords.org
I spent a decade, like many parents, chauffeuring pre-teen and teenage girls around to a Taylor Swift soundtrack. I learned every Swift song as it was released and sang along to the chorus in the car. I even went to one of her first stadium concerts with my young Swifties.
Congrats, Taylor, for your talent and decades of consistently great songwriting. You deserve all the accolades and rewards. Here’s my one request: Give up your private jet.
Those young fans of yours that I used to shuttle around are now campaigning against climate change. They understand this is the critical decade to shift our trajectory away from fossil fuels and towards clean energy.
And they need you, once again, to sing a new song.
I know you’re dealing with a lot of crazy conspiracy theories in right-wing media. And you even succeeded in getting Fox News to admit that private-jet travel contributes to climate change, which is no small feat!
They’ve said a lot of nonsense about you, but that part is true. Private jets emit 10 to 20 times more pollutants per passenger than commercial jets. You know it’s wrong — that’s why you cover your face with an umbrella when you’re disembarking.
Maybe it’s even why you decided to sell one of your jets. Why not the other?
We all have that experience of wishing we could be two places at once. I’ve been on a work trip and wished I could zip home for my daughter’s soccer game. But your private flight from your tour in Tokyo to the Super Bowl burned more carbon than six entire average U.S. households will all year.
Like so many challenges in our country, private jet pollution is increasing alongside inequality. According to a report I co-authored for the Institute for Policy Studies, “High Flyers 2023, ‘‘ the number of private jets has grown 133 percent over the last two decades. And just 1 percent of flyers now contribute half of all carbon emissions from aviation.
Should we set off a carbon bomb so that the ultra-rich can fly to their vacation destinations? More and more Americans are answering no. In Massachusetts, a grassroots coalition called Stop Private Jet Expansion at Hanscom and Everywhere is calling on the governor to reject an airport expansion that would serve private jets. It could inspire similar fights nationally. (Hanscom Field is in Bedford, Mass.)
Banning or restricting private jet travel would be one of the easiest paths to reducing emissions if it weren’t a luxury consumed by the most wealthy and powerful people on the planet. But climate advocates are still working to find a way. In Congress, Sen. Ed Markey and Rep. Nydia Velazquez have proposed hiking the tax on private jet fuel to make sure private jet users pay the real financial and ecological costs of their luxury travel.
There’s good news, Taylor: A generation of music stars toured without jets, taking the proverbial tour bus. And it sparked a lot of great songs about this amazing land.
Taylor, if you want to be green, stay on the ground. Your fans will love you and the future generations will thank you.
I believe there’s a song there.
Chuck Collins, based in Boston, directs the Program on Inequality and co-edits the Inequality.org website at the Institute for Policy Studies. .
But he’d die inside
The earliest known photograph of a snowman, c. 1853, by Mary Dillwyn
“Seeing the snowman standing all alone
In dusk and cold is more than he can bear.’’
— From “Boy at the window, by Richard Wilbur (1921-2017), New England-based poet
Here’s the whole poem:
https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/boy-at-the-window/
Llewellyn King: Making movies with the dead as AI hammers the truth AND improves (at least physical) health
Depiction of a homunculus from Wolfgang von Goethe's (1749-1832) Faust in a 19th Century engraving.
Popularized in 16th-Century alchemy and 19th Century fiction, it has historically referred to the creation of a miniature fully formed human.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
Advanced countries can expect a huge boost in productivity from artificial intelligence. In my view, it will set the stage for a new period of prosperity in the developed world — especially in the United States.
Medicine will take off as never before. Life expectancy will rise by a third.
The obverse may be that jobs will be severely affected by AI, especially in the service industries, ushering in a time of huge labor adjustment.
The danger is that we will take it as the next step in automation. It won’t. Automation increased productivity. But, creating new goods dictates new labor needs.
So far, it appears that with AI, more goods will be made by fewer people, telephones answered by ghosts and orders taken by unseen digits.
Another serious downside will be the effect on truth, knowledge and information; on what we know and what we think we know.
In the early years of the wide availability of artificial intelligence, truth will be struggling against a sea of disinformation, propaganda and lies — lies buttressed with believable fake evidence.
As Stuart Russell, a professor of computer science at the University of California at Berkeley, told me when I interviewed him on the television program White House Chronicle, the danger is with “language in, language out.”
That succinctly sums up the threat to our well-being and stability posed by the ability to use AI to create information chaos.
At present, two ugly wars are raging and, as is the way with wars, both sides are claiming huge excesses from the other. No doubt there is truth to both claims.
But what happens when you add the ability of AI to produce fake evidence, say, huge piles of bodies that never existed? Or of children under torture?
AI, I am assured, can produce a believable image of Winston Churchill secretly meeting with Hitler, laughing together.
Establishing veracity is the central purpose of criminal justice. But with AI, a concocted video of a suspect committing a crime can be created or a home movie of a suspect far away on a beach when, in fact, the perpetrator was elsewhere, choking a victim to death.
Divorce is going to be a big arena for AI dishonesty. It is quite easy to make a film of a spouse in an adulterous situation when that never happened.
Intellectual property is about to find itself under the wheels of the AI bus. How do you trace its filching? Where do you seek redress?
Is there any safe place for creative people? How about a highly readable novel with Stephen King’s characters and a new plot? Where would King find justice? How would the reader know he or she was reading a counterfeit work?
Within a few months or years or right now, a new movie could be made featuring Marilyn Monroe and, say, George Clooney.
Taylor Swift is the hottest ticket of the time, maybe all time, but AI crooks could use her innumerable public images and voice to issue a new video or album in which she took no part and doesn’t know exists.
Here is the question: If you think it is an AI-created work, should you enjoy it? I am fond of Judy Garland singing “The Man That Got Away.” What if I find on the Internet what purports to be Taylor Swift singing it? I know it is a forgery by AI, but I love that rendering. Should I enjoy it, and if I do, will I be party to a crime? Will I be an enabler of criminal conduct?
AI will facilitate plagiarism on an industrial scale, pervasive and uncontrollable. You might, in a few short years, be enjoying a new movie starring Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart. The AI technology is there to make such a movie and it might be as enjoyable as Casablanca. But it will be faked, deeply faked.
Already, truth in politics is fragile, if not broken. A plethora of commentators spews out half-truths and lies that distort the political debate and take in the gullible or just those who want to believe.
If you want to believe something, AI will oblige, whether it is about a candidate or a divinity. You can already dial up Jesus and speak to an AI-generated voice purporting to be him.
Overall, AI will be of incalculable benefit to humans. While it will stimulate dreaming as never before, it will also trigger nightmares.
On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
Commercialized love in New England
Sweethearts were made by the New England Confectionery Company, or Necco, before being purchased by the Spangler Candy Company in 2018.
Read The New England Historical Society’s look at the history of Valentine’s Day in New England.
Obsessed with Chinese culture
“Slow First Kisses” (watercolor collage), by Greater Boston painter Nancy DuVergne Smith, in her show “Moon Gates and Other Chinese Signs,’’ at Galatea Fine Art, Boston, March 1-31.
She says:
"I fell in love with Chinese culture as a teenager. Perhaps because my father began to resemble a small Chinese man as he aged and, indeed, there was a Chinese community where he grew up in the Mississippi delta. Maybe because it was the most exotic culture I could imagine. Slowly I have made some of it mine. My wedding included Chinese music and rituals. My husband and I traveled to China twice: once to adopt our daughter, a second time to introduce her birth country to her. We celebrate Chinese New Year and the Autumn Moon Festival. I meet regularly with my Jiejies (older sisters) who are Chinese, Korean and American. In the past two years, I have added an addiction to Chinese dramas (C-dramas), TV serials depicting human ambitions, romances, celebrations and struggles in ancient and modern times. I’ve even picked up a little of the language and calligraphy. I love the architecture, gardens, art, poetry, food, and admire individuals’ ambitions, resilience and sense of humor. Paintings in this “Moon Gate” series share glimpses of my China passion.
Birds' spring songs may be coming earlier
Chickadees’ songs cheer up New Englanders in their shortening winters. The species shown here, the Black-Capped Chickadee, is the state bird of Massachusetts.
Song sparrow
‘On any given, relatively warm winter day, the melodies of song sparrows and chickadees float down from the trees.
“Hearing birdsong in early winter is both a natural and unnatural phenomenon, according to ornithologists. As days get longer and warmer, the birds’ internal clocks urge them to sing.
“That’s why you may hear birds that live here year-round, like the chickadee, or that winter here but breed father north, like the American robin, sing during nice weather, according to Salve Regina University professor Jameson Chase. ‘So, not unusual and certainly not on warm days.’
“But with spring-like weather coming earlier and earlier due to climate change, some of the songs of the season may be coming a little earlier, too.’’
Please hit this link to read the whole article, by Colleen Cronin
Speech by Vermont senator about Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunt: ‘With the scalp of a pink Army dentist’
Vermont Sen. Ralph Flanders (1880-1970). He was a rock-ribbed, old-fashioned New England Republican.
March 9, 1954
Mr. President, this brief talk is in the nature of advice to the junior Senator from Wisconsin. I had hoped that he would be present. I do not feel constrained to put off the talk in his absence. I find that he is to be in New York today. Not knowing when he can be present, I proceed.
Mr. President, the junior Senator from Wisconsin interests us all – there can be no doubt about that – but also he puzzles some of us. To what party does he belong? Is he a hidden satellite of the Democratic Party, to which he is furnishing so much material for quiet mirth? It does not seem that his Republican label can be stuck on very tightly, when, by intention or through ignorance, he is doing his best to shatter the party whose label he wears. He no longer claims or wants any support from the Communist fringe. What is his party affiliation?
One must conclude that he is a one-man party, and that its name is “McCarthyism,” a title which he proudly accepted.
The junior Senator from Vermont finds much to praise and much to deplore in McCarthyism, as he sees it displayed on the national stage. That which is praiseworthy is the vigorous and effective housecleaning which it undertakes.
In January of last year the Republican family moved into quarters which had been occupied by another family for twenty long years. The outgoing family did not clean up before it left. The premises were dirty indeed.
Into these dirty premises the junior Senator from Wisconsin charged with all the energy and enthusiasm of a natural-born housekeeper. He found dirt under the rug. He found dirt behind the chiffonier. He found dirt in all the corners. He found cobwebs and spiders in the cellarway. All this dirt he found and displayed, and the clean-up he personally superintended.
Of course it was not done quietly. In the long years of my life I have come to the conclusion that natural-born housewives seldom work quietly – particularly when cleaning premises left by someone else. There is much clatter and hullabaloo. The neighbors across the backyard fence are apprised of each newly discovered deposit of grime. Much of this in his long life has the junior Senator from Vermont seen and heard, but he has never seen or heard anything to match the dust and racket of this particular job of housecleaning. Perhaps these extremes are necessary if a one-man party is to be kept in the headlines and in the limelight.
Now the question before the nation is this: Is the necessary housecleaning the great task before the United States, or do we face far more dangerous problems, from the serious consideration of which we are being diverted by the dust and racket? It is the deep conviction of the junior Senator from Vermont that we are being diverted, and to an extent dangerous to our future as a nation. He feels called upon to say to the junior Senator from Wisconsin: “Right about face.” Having looked inward for so long, let him now look out outward.
When he and we look outward, what do we see? We see defeat in Korea, and the Iron Curtain moved down the truce line by force of arms, in defiance of the principles and purposes of the United Nations. We find the same aggression pursued in Indochina, with our country assigned to play the part of a supporter of colonialism, and persuaded to enter into negotiations which are foredoomed to parallel, to a greater or less extent, the foreordained conclusions of the Korean truce.
In Europe we see Italy ready to fall into communist hands. We find France irresolute, palsied in thought and action, where her Communists well organized and sure of their ground. Saddest of all, we see Great Britain nibbling at the drugged bait of trade profits, which benumbed her judgments when Japan moved into Manchuria and Mussolini moved into Ethiopia. Then followed, in logical sequence, the fall of the Rhineland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, and the Second World War.
Let us look to the south. In Latin America there are sturdy strong-points of freedom. But there are likewise, alas, spreading infections of communism. Whole countries are being taken over. Other countries, not yet captured, are undergoing relentless infiltration.
There is little need to spotlight the other trouble spots in Asia and Africa. If this massive advance is not stemmed, our future place in the world is clearly foreordained. The Iron Curtain, now protecting Communist countries, will be drawn about the United States and Canada, the last remnants of the free world. This will not need to be accomplished by defeating us militarily. It will result from the capture of the rest of the world by infiltration and subversion. We will be left with no place to trade and no place to go except as we are permitted to trade and to go by the Communist masters of the world.
Of course the attack may come from the air – sudden, catastrophic. This is possible, though unlikely, for why should the Soviet Government subject the Russian cities to destruction when it is doing so well by infiltration and subversion? In either case, the dangerous attack is from without, not from within. Look out, Senator, and see what is creeping upon us.
In very truth, the world seems to be mobilizing for the great battle of Armageddon. Now is a crisis in the agelong warfare between God and the Devil for the souls of men.
In this battle of the agelong war, what is the part played by the junior Senator from Wisconsin? He dons his war paint. He goes into his war dance. He emits his war whoops. He goes forth to battle and proudly returns with the scalp of a pink Army dentist. We may assume that this presents the depth and seriousness of Communist penetration in this country at this time.
If he cannot view the larger scene and the real danger, let him return to his housecleaning. Let him sweep out all the dirt that is under the rugs, back of the furniture and in the remotest corners. After he has done all this, let him take a pocket handkerchief and rub over the tops of the doors and window frames. He may find a little dust there too. But let him not so work as to conceal mortal danger in which our country finds itself from the external enemies of mankind.
Let me appeal to him in the words of a great hymn, written by St. Andrew of Crete about the year of our Lord 700:
Christian, dost thou see them
On the holy ground,
How the hosts of darkness
Compass thee around?
Christian, up and smite them,
Counting gain but loss;
Smite them, Christ is with thee,
Soldier of the cross.