Those crazy crystals

An early classification of snowflakes by Israel Perkins Warren (1814-1892), Congregational minister as well as an editor, author and amateur scientist who lived in Connecticut and then in Maine.

Winters can be an inconvenient bore while also providing some days of glittering beauty and austere clarity and the clearest nights of the year to see the stars. In any case, winters are getting shorter, and along with that, there’s less snow as we continue to cook the world by burning gas, oil and coal.

To people like me who have generally found shoveling snow tedious  (and now, with age and heart disease, dangerous) and  icy streets and sidewalks narrowed by piles of snow frustrating to navigate, the  accelerating shrinkage of snow might seem pleasant (though I’m a former skier). But snow and cold are part of a healthy environment in the North Temperate Zone.

Consider that snow helps store  reliable fresh-water supplies for drinking and crops.  Its blanket protects the plants below it, and cold winters are part of the annual cycle essential for growing many fruits, among other edibles.

There’s an old adage  that “snow is the poor man’s fertilizer,’’  based on  the fact that as snow melts, it slowly releases nitrogen into the ground, while protecting the underlying plants from a killing freeze. Much of the nitrogen in rainfall washes away.

And besides facilitating winter sports, a major industry in such places as northern New England, winter and snow make us enjoy spring all the more. (Snow-making strikes me as an environmentally dubious activity – using lots of energy, causing some erosion and sometimes screwing up local water systems. But, hey, it is exhilarating to bounce down a mountain, even if the land on each side of the “snow”-covered trail is brown.)

Of course, heating bills can be onerous, but so can electricity bills for air conditioning as summery temperatures tend to start earlier and end later.

Meanwhile, of course, even as global warming continues, there will still be cold snaps; one will be coming this week. There’s weather and then there’s climate. Remember when the sci-fi-sounding “polar vortex” deep freeze in the Northeast (apparently caused by warming around the North Pole!) very briefly drove our temperatures below zero last winter? Things quickly warmed up again to above “normal’’, whatever that is these days, but not before killing some plants that had been lured into acting (do plants “act”?) as if spring had arrived. One of  our favorite  flowering shrubs died in this way, though the others seemed unaffected.

All Wet

This 18th Century house in Newport’s frequently flooded Point section was the headquarters of French Vicomte de Noailles 1780-1781, during the Revolutionary War.

Will localities and states have to start taking many thousands of properties along shorelines of rivers and the ocean  by eminent domain as these places repeatedly flood? Just in Rhode Island, you see the same places flooding again and again and again with taxpayers having to absorb some of the cost of repair. People like to live along the water, but this can’t go on.

Things will get particularly interesting if the powers-that-be try  to permanently evacuate such upscale places as Newport’s Point neighborhood, with its gorgeous 18th Century houses. But I suppose that wouldn’t happen for a few decades….Right? Get out those stilts!

Chris Powell: Turn off the weather hysteria on TV news

— Photo by snowKing1

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Local television newscasts in Connecticut are usually trivial. But when winter comes and there is any chance of a few inches of snow, TV newscasts are liberated from all pretension to meaning, and they crown their triviality with redundancy.

As they did the other week, for several days ahead of a potential storm they strive to scare their audience about the dangers ahead. On the eve of the storm they devote most of each half hour to "informing" their viewers that the state Transportation Department and municipal public-works departments are preparing to plow, salt and sand the roads, as if this isn't what they always do and have done for decades. Reporters are often reduced to doing live dispatches from sand and salt barns. 

The obvious is repeated half hour after half hour, as if all meaningful activity in Connecticut has come to a halt and as if the state has never seen snow before.

During the storm itself the TV newscasts delight in broadcasting from their four-wheel-drive vehicles to inform their viewers that it's snowing, as if their viewers lack earlier technology -- windows.

Deepening the suggestion of doom, some TV stations give names to the winter storms they glory in, as the National Weather Service gives names to hurricanes. Since a hurricane must have winds of at least 74 miles per hour, it can do enough damage to prove memorable in some places and thus to merit a name. But to earn a name from a TV newscast, the only threat a winter storm needs to pose is to the relevance of the newscast itself, and indeed most such storms will not be memorable at all.

Meanwhile the newscasts will warn people with heart conditions against shoveling too much snow, and warn all viewers against putting their hands in a snowblower while it's running. Such is the estimation of the intelligence of the local TV news audience.

This charade of local TV newscasts is called "keeping you safe." But when the charade is operating, Connecticut has even less journalistic protection from wrongdoers and malfeasance. Indeed, that seems to be the point of the weather hysteria of local TV news -- to fill time with the trivial and redundant because it is so much less expensive than reporting about anything that matters, which usually requires investigation.

This principle of killing time is observed by local TV newscasts even when there is no weather to frighten people with. For the typical newscast is full of reports that consume 90 seconds to convey just 10 seconds of information.     

Of course newspapers, competitors to television, are full of triviality and redundancy too. But at least readers can turn the page and dispose of the product at their own pace. Viewers of live TV newscasts can't fast-forward past what they don't need to watch.

Presumably the triviality and redundancy of local TV newscasts continue because market research tells TV stations that triviality and redundancy are what their audience wants -- especially since most local TV news is broadcast in the morning when people are rising, dressing, making breakfast, getting ready for work, and seeing children off to school, and in the evening when people are reconnecting with family, making dinner, reviewing mail, and getting kids to do their homework.

The breakfast and dinner hours are not suited to profundity from TV, so during those hours local TV news usually provides what is only incidental information, less compelling than the immediate information of home life.

Even so, at least national television occasionally has done serious journalism.

So could local TV newscasts not find 10 minutes every other weekday for news that means something, news relevant to society's or government's performance, news that wouldn't be forgotten as fast as last week's Storm Jack the Ripper or yesterday's murders, robberies, fires, and car crashes?

Those things really aren't all Connecticut needs to know.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).

'Diversionary' weather

An early classification of snowflakes by Israel Perkins Warren (1814-92), an American Congregational minister as well as an editor and author. He lived in Connecticut and then Maine.

“A kind of counter-

blossoming, diversionary,

doomed, and like

the needle with its drop

of blood a little

too transparently in

love with doom, takes

issue with the season….’’

— From “Spring Snow,’’ by Linda Gregerson

Chris Powell: At least we plow well; sick vets and discretionary wars

MANCHESTER, Conn. Government in Connecticut does one thing well: snowplowing. While 2 inches of snow can send Washington, D.C., into comic panic and paralysis, Connecticut plays through even a foot or more of snow and can push it out of the way and be back in business in 24 hours.

Still, even in normal winters the snow is a drag here, and now, with heavy snow seeming to come nearly every week, it is more than a drag. It may be reducing economic output by 10 or 20 percent. Many people feel as if they are going to work mainly so they can earn money to pay someone to plow their driveway so they can go to work again.

Of course Connecticut long has managed despite having three terrible months each year. But that is because the state offered advantages offsetting that disadvantage.

On the whole for the last 25 years, since its enactment of an income tax, Connecticut has been losing population relative to the rest of the country, and the other day the Census Bureau reported that the state's population is back in absolute numerical decline as well.

Reflecting recently on state government's continuing budget deficits despite a record tax increase, budget director Ben Barnes said Connecticut has entered "a period of permanent fiscal crisis." His candor could be appreciated but Barnes also was confessing failure -- confessing that state government's policies have not been making Connecticut more prosperous but rather have been impoverishing it.

The excessive snow will make many state residents reconsider their premises for living here. To encourage them to stay put, state government better start reconsidering some of its premises as well.

* * *

Connecticut U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal is making much of his sponsorship of legislation aimed at reducing suicides among returned military veterans. The legislation is mainly a matter of requiring the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to increase mental-health services and hire more psychiatrists, and since the legislation passed the House and the Senate unanimously, its enactment may not have required as much political courage as the press releases about it imply.

Of course war always has been traumatic, and many returning soldiers always have suffered from a self-destructive depression even when they bore no debilitating physical wounds. Today there is a fancy name for it: post-traumatic stress disorder.

But at least with the country's biggest wars -- the Civil War, World War I and World War II -- veterans had the consolation that their work absolutely had to be done, whether it was preserving the nation and ending slavery or defeating totalitarian aggression that threatened the whole world, as well as the consolation that their fellow citizens profoundly appreciated their sacrifice.

It has been much different with the country's discretionary wars of recent decades, from Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan, where U.S. soldiers fought for dubious premises, where the national interest was not at risk enough to seem to require drafting the whole population into the war effort, and where the service of the soldiers was not really appreciated when they got home, because by then the wars they fought -- intervening in other countries' civil wars or trying to civilize barbarian cultures -- were not considered to have been worthwhile, the civil wars having burned themselves out on their own and the barbarians having not been civilized.

Yes, there are so many suicides of recently returned veterans, estimated at an appalling 22 every day, that the Veterans Affairs Department should have the resources to help more. But what the Armed Forces deserve most is not to be squandered on stupid and unnecessary wars -- like the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan that Senator Blumenthal has supported despite their failure to reach their objectives and despite the impossibility that they ever  could reach their objectives, at least not without the all-consuming effort  that elected officials like the senator did not dare to demand from their constituents.

Chris Powell is managing edit0r of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Selfish people in fat cars

As a libertarian about many things, I used to oppose laws against using cell phones while driving even in states  -- Rhode Island is the worst I have seen -- noteworthy for having very  incompetent, lazy and inconsiderate drivers. No more. The relentless snows have  dramatized just how bad many drivers in the Ocean State are. The people in SUV's are the worst -- perhaps because the owners tend to be affluent and spoiled. They barrel down streets many of which are  now less than a lane wide, at 20 miles an hour over the speed limit, with walls of snow and ice squeezing from both sides while yakking about their trivial lives on their phones.

I'll be pleased when the price of gasoline goes to $5 a gallon and even some of these slobs might get rid of their fat cars. They'll still be  self-absorbed, spoiled people but less able to make life miserable for others on the road, be they other drivers or hapless pedestrians looking for a sidewalk behind six-foot-high walls of dirty snow.

-- Robert Whitcomb