Retreating looks wiser than rebuilding on the coast
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
There’s intensifying debate in many coastal and other areas that are increasingly flood- and erosion-prone in our warming climate on whether we should repeatedly repair or replace flood-damaged structures; have taxpayers pay some or all of the cost to move them to higher ground, and what to put in their place. I think the obvious answer in many places is to retreat and create flood-mitigating parks with (new?) marshes and thick vegetation and other water-absorbing materials that can reduce damage to the higher-elevation properties nearby. Of course, in such densely built urban areas as Newport’s Point neighborhood and Boston’s Seaport District that’s tricky.
I thought about this the other day when reading about the debate in Newport over whether to abandon the idea of rebuilding storm-damaged facilities at Easton’s Beach and stage a retreat. It seems clear to me that given projections of continued global warming and associated sea-level rise, that spending money to rebuild the Easton’s Beach amenities would soon be seen as a waste of money. Replenishing the sand that storms have washed away is expensive enough, though needed to keep the beach as a major attraction for locals and tourists alike.
Forecasts for the 2024 hurricane season are starting to come out. It looks, er, exciting.
Measuring CO2 in the Ocean
Edited from Wikipedia caption: “This diagram of the fast carbon cycle shows the movement of carbon among land, atmosphere and oceans. Yellow numbers are natural fluxes, and red are human contributions in gigatons of carbon per year. White numbers indicate stored carbon.’’
Thank you, Paul Salem, for giving the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) $25 million for ocean research in general and, in particular, to study the oceans’ capacity for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, into which we’ve been putting vast quantities of climate-warming CO2 by burning fossil fuels, clear-cutting forests, degrading wetlands and engaging in industrial agricultural practices (especially large-scale livestock production). The heating of our climate is accelerating, and more than 70 percent of the world’s surface is ocean.
Note that this excess carbon dioxide is also acidifying the water, harming sea life.
Mr. Salem, a billionaire, was a partner in Providence Equity Partners, and in 2022, he became chairman of WHOI’s board.
WHOI president Peter de Menocal said: “There is a tidal wave of ‘blue carbon’ solutions to climate change on the horizon, some proven, but most completely novel and in need of testing to investigate their safety and effectiveness. The ocean can help us avert a climate crisis, but we need to also ensure the long-term health of marine ecosystems and the communities that rely on ocean resources. This far-sighted gift {by Mr. Salem} will help us stay ahead of what is already a billion-dollar industry and inject some much-needed reality into the carbon market.”
xxx
I have always had a soft spot for Woods Hole, because this windswept village, basically a kind of college town within Falmouth, is so beautiful and dramatic; because of WHOI and other marine-related institutions based there, and their smart and interesting people, and because an important part of my father’s family lived in and around it. Some moved there in the 17th Century when, as Quakers, they fled Puritan persecution in and around Boston, and others came down from the Boston area as summer people when trains were extended to Cape Cod in the 1870’s. There were more than enough eccentrics among them; some had weird whirligigs on their roofs and some were recluses.
View of downtown Woods Hole, including Marine Biological Laboratory and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution buildings.
Chris Powell: What about respecting ‘diversity’ of views on abortion?
“The Genius of Connecticut,’’ by sculptor Randolph Rogers, a plaster version of the bronze statue (destroyed) originally mounted on top of the dome of the Connecticut Capitol, is exhibited on the main floor.
Soviet poster c. 1925, warning against midwives performing abortions. Title translation: "Miscarriages induced by either grandma or self-taught midwives not only maim the woman, they also often lead to death."
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Where is it written that the crazier Alabama, Texas, or Idaho get, the crazier Connecticut must get too?
But that seems to be the premise of the leftist faction of the Democratic majority in the General Assembly when it comes to abortion.
Alabama lately became famous for the Bible-thumping decision of its Supreme Court that, as a matter of law, frozen human embryos must be considered children. Freed by the U.S. Supreme Court's reversal two years ago of its 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, Alabama and other right-wing states have virtually outlawed abortion, many of them with the support of a majority of their residents.
But Connecticut law on abortion is unaffected. Connecticut maintains the policy articulated by Roe: that abortion is legal prior to the viability of the fetus and that state government may restrict abortion afterward. As a practical matter, Connecticut also allows the abortion of viable fetuses if a pregnant woman and her doctor claim the law's mental-health exception for late-term abortions. No one challenges such claims.
That's still not enough for the many abortion fanatics among Connecticut's Democratic state legislators. They reportedly are about to propose an amendment to the state Constitution establishing a right to abortion at all stages of gestation. They already have proposed legislation to force medical providers to provide abortion services even if doing so violates their consciences or religious beliefs. Such a law would force the most sincere providers among them to leave the state if they would continue their careers.
The nominal rationale for the constitutional amendment is that someday public opinion in Connecticut may turn in favor of banning abortion. Nobody really believes that but such an assertion builds the political hysteria desired by the all-abortion, all-the-time movement.
The nominal rationale for the legislation forcing medical providers to violate their consciences or religious beliefs is that some rural areas of the state are an hour or so distant from abortion clinics -- as if some rural areas of the state aren't also distant from supermarkets, dentists, restaurants, bars, police stations, and all sorts of conveniences, and as if people don't account for this when choosing where to live.
The real rationale for the legislation is to stamp out contrary consciences and religious beliefs. Ironically, the people doing this stamping out tend to be the same ones who prattle about the benefits of "diversity." That is, it's great if people look different as long as everyone thinks and votes the same way.
If you believe that there is something worth respecting in a viable fetus -- an unborn child capable of living outside the mother's womb -- get lost. There can be no “diversity” for you.
xxx
STOP HIDING CRIME: Figuring out what to do about former criminal offenders is a challenge.
State law already holds that part of the solution is to conceal many convictions. Now the General Assembly is considering whether to prohibit landlords from considering convictions more than three years old when evaluating potential tenants.
Criminal convictions follow people around and can burden them for a long time. But then why shouldn't they? Why shouldn't former offenders have to do more to prove themselves than people who have never caused trouble? Why should prospective landlords, employers, and romantic partners be obstructed in protecting themselves? Why should landlords and employers be obstructed in protecting their tenants and employees?
While the labor shortage may be reducing the reluctance of employers to hire former offenders, the housing shortage is worsening their plight. But the employment and housing problems faced by former offenders actually arise from something bigger than their criminal records: their lack of education and job skills, which often correlates with crime.
Concealing criminal records helps former offenders only by increasing risk to everyone else. So the only fair solution is to improve education and facilitate housing construction. Since that's not likely to happen in Connecticut, state government should operate more halfway houses for former offenders as they rebuild their lives.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years(CPowell@cox.net).
Short-term housing
“Tiny House,’’ by Freeport, Maine-based Deanna Jacome, at the Southern Vermont Arts Center, Manchester, Vt., March 30-July. It’s in the center’s “Spring 2024 Solo Exhibition,’’ part of a longstanding tradition there. Multiple artists working in a variety of media, genres and styles are selected to show their work in rooms and spaces throughout the center’s Yester House.
We were always armed
Four historically significant baseball bats showcased in the National Baseball Hall of Fame's traveling exhibit "Baseball As America". From left to right: bat used by Babe Ruth to hit his 60th home run during the 1927 season; bat used by Roger Maris to hit his 61st home run during the 1961 season; bat used by Mark McGwire to hit his 70th home run during the 1998 season, and the bat used by Sammy Sosa for his 66th home run during the same season.
“I’m from Boston, and in Boston, you are born with a baseball bat in your hand. And actually, most of the bats in Massachusetts are used off the field instead of on the field, and we all had baseball bats in our cars in high school.’’
— Eli Roth (born 1972) Roth, an American film director, screenwriter, producer and actor. He’s particularly associated with horror movies. He grew up in the affluent Boston suburb of Newton, so it’s unlikely he and his pals often had baseball bats in their cars.
Our brief time?
“Noise Aquarium” (installation view from the “Our Time on Earth” exhibition), by Victoria Vesna, at the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass., through June 9.
© Danann Breathnach Photography
Beware the ‘tyrannous word of command’
Fife and drum group in the American Civil War
“The voice of protest, of warning, of appeal is never more needed than when the clamor of fife and drum, echoed by the press and too often by the pulpit, is bidding all men fall in and keep step and obey in silence the tyrannous word of command. Then, more than ever, it is the duty of the good citizen not to be silent.”
— Charles Eliot Norton (1827-1908), New England-based author, social critic and Harvard professor of art.
Not to be seen
David McCullough (1933-2022)
“Climb the mountain not to plant your flag, but to embrace the challenge, enjoy the air and behold the view. Climb it so you can see the world, not so the world can see you.”
xxx
“And read… read all the time… read as a matter of principle, as a matter of self-respect. Read as a nourishing staple of life.”
xxx
“There’s the New Millennium technology craze . . . holy moly, is there ever . . . the breathless infatuation with hi-def, 3D, 5G, glued to the hand, glued to the ear, twenty-first-century cyber gee-whizzery. They’re coming at us so fast—the gizmos, the doodads, the gimcracks, the wonderments—so ubiquitously, so overwhelmingly, we’ve not yet found how best to wrangle each new miracle into genuine usefulness.”
— David McCullough, immensely popular American historian. Over the years, he had residences in Boston’s Back neighborhood, Martha’s Vineyard, Camden, Maine, and Hingham, Mass., where he died.
The Old Ship Church, in Hingham. Built in 1681, it’s the only surviving 17th Century New England Puritan church.
Dangerous garden
…"there is a rumble as the garden folds, rolls, shreds, devours…itself’’ (digital print on archival watercolor paper with hand-cut and torn elements, construction paper, plastic, feathers mounted on artist designed wallpaper), by Ebony G. Patterson, in the show “In the Garden,’’ at The Current Gallery, Stowe, Vt., through April 11.
— Image courtesy of the artist, Monique Meloche Gallery and Hales Gallery.
The Trapp Family Lodge, in Stowe. The Sound of Music made the singing family famous. The Vermont landscape reminded them of their native Austria, which they left to get away from the Nazis.
—Photo by Royalbroil
David Warsh: Why did Paul Samuelson end his momentous debate with Milton Friedman?
SOMERVILLE, Mass.
It was a transformative national debate, on the level of Hamilton and Jefferson, or Lincoln and Douglas: Paul Samuelson (1915-2009) of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Milton Friedman (1912-2006) of the University of Chicago, wrote dueling columns for Newsweek magazine from 1966 until May 1984. Then their arrangement ended abruptly, With no public explanation, Samuelson quit.
Why?
Friedman had become well known as a critic of government spending on basic research. In Free to Choose, the 1980 book accompanying their highly successful television series, he and his economist wife, Rose, had argued that the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and tax subsidies to higher education are undesirable and should be abolished.
Since Friedman was also an adviser to future President-elect Ronald Reagan, reporter Nicholas Wade, of Science magazine, called him up to ask what should be put in their place?
“Nothing,” Friedman replied. “The Treasury, the citizenry and the advancement of science would all be better off without the NSF and other research agencies.”
In his interview, Friedman enumerated to Wade the problems he felt that government caused. They boiled down to mediocrity, waste, abuse and a chilling effect on the academic community’s willingness to speak frankly and criticize programs. Harvard philosopher Willard Quine had made much the same argument in an essay in Daedalus in 1974.
Wade asked Friedman on whom should the burden of proof be placed?
“On those who wish to extract money from below-income taxpayer, or on those who argue the other way. I challenge you to find a single study justifying the amount of money now being spent on government support for research science.”
Abolition of government funding had been no proposal to advance in 1980, Friedman admitted, when Reagan was no more proven a candidate than had been Barry Goldwater, whom Friedman had also advised, in 1964. But it was now 1981, and Reagan was at the newly elected president, riding a wave of excitement. When Friedman repeated his arguments in Newsweek in May, Paul Samuelson never wrote for the magazine again.
Some background: Samuelson had attended Harvard University on one of the first Social Science Research Council fellowship, leaving for MIT in 1940. In the late stage of World War II, the 29-year-old Samuelson had served, with John Edsall, the biochemist, and Robert Morison, head of biology for Rockefeller Foundation, on a subcommittee established to study post-war science policy for Vannevar Bush, World War II science czar.
When Bush’s report, Science, The Endless Frontier, was issued, in 1945, it contained the recommendations that the trio had favored: Pentagon funding for military technology; the National Institute of Health, for medicine; and National Science Foundation, for basic and applied science (including social sciences). Not until 1958, after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik , its first satellite, the year before, was the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was established.
Five years had been required to establish the NSF, owing to opposition in Congress, from populist senators who wanted funding to be distributed, equally among the states, county by county, pork-barrel fashion, rather than by a system of peer review. At the other end of end of the argument was Polaroid’s Edwin Land, who felt that government should favor entrepreneurial inventors, such as today Silicon Valley s titans (and, in those days, himself).
Fifteen years later, I asked Samuelson whether there had been any connection between one event and the other. Had he suffered enough of his rival? Not at all, Samuelson replied. He had been about quitting after a copy editor had changed a headline on a prior column in a way that displeased him.
Somehow, I didn’t believe him. I raised an eyebrow, and we continued the interview.
I thought of that when I took down from the shelf Better Living through Economics (Harvard, 2011 ), a book edited by John Siegfried, that I hadn’t found a way to write about when it was published. The title was a play on a famous Dupont Co. advertising campaign, “Better living through chemistry.” Multiple chickens and multiple pots graced the book’s jacket, a reference to Herbert Hoover’s 1928 campaign promise, “a chicken in every pot.’’ Siegfried, a Vanderbilt University professor, had been for many years the widely respected secretary-treasurer of the American Economic Association.
The book contained a dozen case studies by leading economists who had been involved in policy reforms, followed by expert commentary on each. Siegfried noted in an introduction that only one of the studies, the all-volunteer armed force, had been pursued by academic economists without external funding. Eventually Richard Nixon appointed a presidential commission to study transition from conscription to a market-based military; many economists were involved in its work. The plan they came up with was implemented in 1973.
In an overview of the essay, Charles Plott, of Caltech, noted that the contributions of economics had been accomplished “with only a tiny fraction of the level of research support given to other sciences.” Yet basic and applied research in economics, he asserted, had profound effects on American life.
The 12 essays included in Better Living through Economics described emissions trading; improved price indices; the effects of trade liberalization on growth in developing nations; welfare-to-work reform; a revolution in monetary economics; adoption of electro-magnetic spectrum auctions; air-transport deregulation; the application of deferred acceptance algorithms in school choice and medical education; new anti-trust measures; all-volunteer military forces, and policies to encourage retirement savings.
Regardless of whether you consider the effects of all these measures to have been net beneficial, you may agree that each was worth a try. Some clearly worked to provide better living. Perhaps others didn’t succeed as well. After two or three American wars, for example, the returns on an all-volunteer-military force vs. conscription are not in.
One other test of government-sponsored basic research is worth thinking about, however – a natural experiment in which virtually all Americans took part. This experiment was conducted without any of the protocols that Milton Friedman demanded as proof of the value of at least some, if not all, government spending on basic research. Certainly it can be argued about, long after the fact. But scale alone makes it important.
More on that experiment next week.
xxx
The reason that Samuelson gave for his decision to quit his long-standing column stemmed from the magazine’s decision to spike without telling him the column he had turned in, about John Kenneth Galbraith’s memoirs. Newsweek had reviewed the book “rather thoroughly” three weeks before, the editor explained.
Is it possible that Samuelson seized on the magazine’s slight as a fig leaf to conceal his irritation at Friedman’s proposal? The week before, the Chicagoan had called on the Reagan administration to sharply cut back on National Science Foundation’s grants to economists? Perhaps. In matters requiring diplomacy, the MIT professor was an artful dodger. But Samuelson turned 65 that year. He’d been dueling with Friedman in Newsweek since 1966.
Whatever the case, it was an abrupt way to end a momentous public debate.
David Warsh, a veteran columnist and an economic historian, a proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this column originated.
Beautiful fantasies and landscapes
Mural by Justin Favela in his show “Do You See What I See?’’, at the New Britain (Conn.) Museum of America Art through Dec. 1
From the museum’s description:
“Brilliant colors, tissue paper, cardboard, and untold stories converge in ‘Do You See What I See?’, featuring works by Las Vegas-based artist Justin Favela (born 1986). Nestled throughout the galleries, this exhibition is an exploration of the artist's quest to see himself and the vibrant Latinx community represented within the museum's esteemed collection.
“‘CONERICOT,’ Favela’s piñata-inspired mural, above, draws inspiration from depictions of Latin America from the permanent collection. His immersive installation alludes to the beauty of those landscapes, as well as the fantasies that often color Americans' perceptions of these underrepresented cultures.
“‘Do You See What I See?’ extends its presence throughout the museum with several reinterpretations of 19th- and 20th-century paintings and works on paper. These dispersed works serve as thoughtful interventions within the existing collection, bringing past and present into conversation and addressing Latinx presence—or absence—in the story of American art.”
Downtown New Britain in 1930, as the once manufacturing powerhouse slipped into the Great Depression. Few of the industrial buildings above are still there.
Downtown New Britain a few years ago.
— Photo by Kenneth C. Zirkel
Indie bookstores in Boston doing well
(New England Diary’s editor, Robert Whitcomb, is chairman of The Boston Guardian)
Boston’s independent bookstore scene is at its healthiest in decades, and it could continue communities, while three existing stores have expanded their operations, according to The Boston Globe. Boston’s downtown neighborhoods have seen the lion’s share of this growth, growing in 2024.
Since 2020, at least eight claiming four of the openings and bookstores have set up shop one of the expansions.
Paired with bookstores’ slim margins, Boston’s expensive commercial real estate has largely prevented bookstores from opening downtown over the past few decades, said Beth Ineson, executive director of the New England Independent Booksellers Association, a trade association. But that changed after a dip in real estate prices following the pandemic.
“My association has seen an unprecedented amount of growth across the entire region during that time because there was more commercial real estate easily available,” she said. Even after its recent renaissance, downtown’s bookstore scene could still have some room to grow. Ineson said that because of Boston’s highly educated population, the city still has fewer bookstores than one would expect for a city of its size.
“Our demographics in Boston proper really should support far more independent bookstores than have previously been downtown,” she said. “Given the population here, there’s certainly always room for more stores, and I’m delighted that we see stores opening in different neighborhoods in the city.”
Of Boston’s downtown neighborhoods, the Seaport has seen some of the most impressive growth in its bookstore scene. Though it didn’t have a bookstore before the pandemic, the fast-growing and once- industrial neighborhood now has two just blocks apart.
Help keep ‘White House Chronicle’ on the air!
From Llewellyn King:
Dear Friends,
My long-running news and public affairs program, White House Chronicle, which airs weekly on PBS and public, educational and government cable access channels across the country, is looking for sponsors.
We have had some wonderful support over the years, including the Stevens Institute of Technology, the American Petroleum Institute, Exelon Corporation, Anterix, the Edison Electric Institute, the Salt River Project, and the Large Public Power Council.
Due to recent realignments and retirements, we are now seeking new support.
Sponsoring the program can be a great branding tool. In Washington, for example, it airs on WETA, Channel 26, leading the Sunday morning talk shows. The audio airs four times on SiriusXM Radio’s popular POTUS (Politics of the United States), Channel 124.
White House Chronicle has worldwide carriage on Voice of America Television and Radio in English.
The program is the mother ship of my operations. It makes all my other work possible. Its mission is to examine the intersection of science, technology and society. How we live today, and how we will live tomorrow.
It is my belief that this intersection often has a greater impact than does politics alone.
My and co-host Adam Clayton Powell III's guests have been some of the leading lights of technological and scientific progress. Recently they have included Ernest Moniz, former secretary of energy; Vint Cerf, vice president and chief internet evangelist at Google; Stuart Russell, professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley; and John Savage, professor emeritus of computer science at Brown University.
The program has been ahead on the issues of the transformative impact of artificial intelligence, the use of hobbyist drones in warfare, and the crisis in electricity supply.
If you would like to get the benefit of a variable branding message on all our broadcast platforms, please get in touch with me at llewellynking1@gmail.com.
Cheers,
Llewellyn
Executive Producer and Host
White House Chronicle on PBS;
Columnist, InsideSources Syndicate;
Contributor, Forbes and Energy Central;
Commentator, SiriusXM Radio
When it’s ‘puddle-wonderful’
in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman
whistles far and wee
and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it's
spring
when the world is puddle-wonderful
the queer
old balloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing
from hop-scotch and jump-rope and
it's
spring
and
the
goat-footed
balloonMan whistles
far
and
wee
“In Just Spring,’’ by E.E. Cummings (1894-1962), a poet who grew up in Cambridge, Mass., and as an adult continued to spend a lof of time in New England, particularly at his vacation home in Madison. N.H. At his death, he was considered the second most widely read poet in the United States, after Robert Frost.
While they can
“Dancing at the A-House” (1990) (acrylic on canvas), by Ronni Farrell (1947-2019), at Larkin Gallery, Harwich Port, Mass.
Mitre’s BlueTechLab
— Mitre photo
Edited from a New England Council report
BOSTON
“The nonprofit Mitre Corp. recently announced that a team from Chelmsford, Mass.-based product-development company Triton Systems Inc. has become the first commercial enterprise to use Mitre’s new BlueTech Lab for testing. The lab is at Mitre’s Bedford, Mass., campus and was built to support the company’s expanding marine-technology work. (Mitre is headquartered in Bedford and McLean, Va.) The lab incudes a 620,000-gallon test tank (above) that can be used to study communication and acoustic sensing on uncrewed undersea and surface vehicles.
“Triton Systems used the lab’s test tank to analyze the behavior of a small vehicle they are developing for a Department of Defense client. Angelica Cardona, a Triton engineer, had told Mitre that her company was eager to use the lab because of its ample workspace and controlled atmosphere.
“‘Being here saves us so much time and money. Without this resource, we’d be dealing with the logistical burden of getting out to sea and testing in mucky waters,’ said Cardona.’’
‘A farewell gesture’
Audubon Center Bent of the River trail in Southbury, Conn.
— Photo by Karl Thomas Moore
“March brings many things, but not hurricanes. But yesterday it brought a storm and a temperature drop, a farewell gesture from winter. The pipes froze again in the back part of the house. And as I viewed the solidly frozen bath mat in my shower, I felt I could do without any record-breaking statistics.’’
— Gladys Taber (1899-1980), in The Stillmeadow Road (1959), about life in her Southbury, Conn., farmhouse
Chris Powell: Ban investors from taking over and looting charitable hospitals
“The Cunning Thief,’’ by Paul-Charles Chocarne-Moreau, depicting a thief about to steal a baked good.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont and state legislative leaders have not yet completed their health-care proposals for the new session of the General Assembly but they should include legislation forbidding the sale of nonprofit hospitals to profit-making entities.
Many nonprofit hospitals in Connecticut have been acquired in recent years by large nonprofit chains, such as Hartford HealthCare and Yale New Haven Health, and so may not be vulnerable to acquisition by profit-making entities. But many other nonprofit hospitals in the state may be -- the ones owned by smaller chains of nonprofits and the few nonprofit hospitals that remain independent.
Good luck to anyone who can start a private hospital and make money from it. But state government must protect the nonprofit hospitals insofar as they have been built over many years by community charity and voluntarism and their capital properly belongs to the community. An investment company's 2016 acquisition of three Connecticut nonprofit hospitals -- Waterbury, Manchester Memorial, and Rockville General, in Vernon -- has resulted in the liquidation of that community capital for private profit.
The investment company sold the real estate of the three hospitals, paid the money to its investors, and then leased the property back so hospitals could continue operating but with the added expense of rent. This was essentially what in high finance is called a leveraged buyout. More simply it is looting.
Now the three hospitals are insolvent, operating under financial duress, and being offered for sale but there appears to be only one potential buyer, Yale New Haven Health, and it wants a subsidy from state government to make the deal. It's starting to seem as if the hospitals may fail before a deal is made.
The same situation has unfolded recently in Massachusetts, where an investment company bought the six nonprofit hospitals of Caritas Christi Health Care and eventually liquidated their real estate for profit for investors. Now those hospitals are insolvent and in severe trouble as well.
In a statement last month the entire Massachusetts congressional delegation wrote that the investment company "stripped out and sold the property from underneath these hospitals, creating hundreds of millions of dollars in profits for private equity executives while leaving the facilities with long-term liabilities that are magnifying -- if not creating -- the current crisis."
The acquisition of nonprofit hospitals by private investors is a racket. Connecticut should outlaw it. If nonprofit hospitals can't survive financially, their assets should default to state government, which should reorganize them in the public interest, not the private interest, so the charity that built them endures.
Can armed civilian patrols reduce the violent crime in Hartford's Garden Street neighborhood, where two people were shot to death Feb. 10? A city pastor, Dexter Burke of The Light Church of God, thinks so and is organizing the patrols as well as a block watch and trash-collection efforts.
Hartford police will welcome the extra eyes and ears if not necessarily the extra pistols to be carried, though the people in the patrols will be licensed.
Burke is tired of the prayer vigils led by another city clergyman that always pop up following shootings in the city. While television news often publicizes them, the vigils do no more than display the righteousness and ineffectiveness of their participants.
Burke's accusation that Hartford's police are "unwilling or unable" to protect the neighborhood is less justified, since Hartford is full of poverty and crime, not just around Garden Street. Of course Connecticut's other cities are full of poverty and crime too, and nobody ever does anything about that either -- or at least nothing effective.
Citizen patrols and block watches may help but may not reduce crime as much as push it into other areas. Still, that might not be so bad, for with more crime in middle-class suburbs, maybe state government could be prompted to examine why nothing it does to reduce poverty and crime has much effect.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Plastic pieces edge out cigarette butts as beach waste in Rhode Island
Pieces of plastic on beach.
Text from ecoRI News
“For the first time in the history of Rhode Island’s participation in the International Coastal Cleanup program, cigarette butts were not the item most collected by volunteer participants. Instead, small plastic and foam pieces — those pulverized bits that accumulate in wrack lines — took the lead, according to Save The Bay’s recently released 2023 International Coastal Cleanup Report.
“‘When this project started over 35 years ago, the focus was on recording the most common types of identifiable trash so that we could get a picture of what was littering our shores and where it was coming from,’ Save The Bay volunteer and internship manager July Lewis said. ‘In terms of the number of items picked up, cigarette butts were always at the top of the list.”’
“Last year, however, 2,830 local volunteers collected 23,468 plastic and foam pieces — and 21,165 cigarette butts.’’
To read the whole article, please hit this link.
— Save The Bay graphic