When the cold rains killed the spring
— Photo by W.carter
“You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person died for no reason.”
― Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), in A Moveable Feast, his memoir of his days as a young man in Paris.
“A Rainy Day in Boston” (1885), by Childe Hassam (1859-1935).
Essence of mountain
“Cannon (Mountain) Abstract’’ (oil on canvas), by Kim Drucker Stockwell, at the Gallery at WREN, Bethlehem, N.H., in her joint show with Kristine Lingle, “Vistas and Visions,’’ through April 25.
The gallery says:
“This exhibition of northern landscapes will evoke calm, peace and contemplation.’’
Chris Powell: Political correctness flusters response to assault in school; cannibal and gambling updates
Downtown Waterbury, called “The Brass City” in its industrial heyday.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Three principles of Connecticut's political correctness have collided sensationally in Waterbury, where two middle-school students recently assaulted two other students. The victims, twin 13-year-old sisters new to the school, are of Arab descent and wore Muslim hijabs that were ripped off, so the alleged perpetrators, ages 12 and 11, are suspected of religious or ethnic prejudice. That would make the assault a “hate crime," and a political fuss is being made about it.
Children are often cruel and stupid and pick on others simply for being different. So it's just as plausible that the assault was motivated by ordinary cruelty and stupidity rather than any serious animus toward religion or ethnicity. Waterbury police are investigating and maybe they'll find out, though the public may not be told, because of those colliding principles of political correctness.
Those principles are:
1) Perpetrators of “hate crimes" should be more severely punished than perpetrators of ordinary crime because ordinary enforcement of criminal law doesn't demonstrate political correctness.
2) Short of murder, children misbehaving in school shouldn't be charged criminally or even punished at all, just referred to social workers.
3) Crime by juveniles should be handled secretly so there can never be any accountability for them or the government.
The collapse of discipline in public education argues for serious and visible punishment of students who commit assault -- something more ominous than the Waterbury middle-school principal's squishy statement about “respect, inclusivity and kindness," something requiring suspension from school and reparations to the victims.
But in the end little can be done with 11- and 12-year-olds except to watch them grow up. School authorities should be held to account but the ‘‘hate crime" crowd should can its bluster.
CANNIBAL WATCH: Questions posed by Republican state senators to the state Psychiatric Security Review Board about Tyree Smith, the murderer-cannibal whom the board recently paroled have turned out to be good ones.
In response the other week, the board's executive director, Vanessa Cardella, confirmed that despite the heavy supervision the parolee is receiving at the group home where he has been placed -- six state employees or contractors are keeping an eye on him -- he still will have plenty of time to be out and about on his own.
Cardella didn't know how much the supervisors will be paid for working on the parolee's case, but it seems likely to be many thousands of dollars a year.
Most people may not understand the necessity for the murderer-cannibal's parole and its expense. Indeed, they may be shocked and appalled. But they shouldn't blame the board, for it is only following the law, which calls for the perpetrator's release if the board thinks he'll be fine if he adheres to the conditions of his parole, which include medication.
Of course there can be no guarantee. Serious risk to the public will continue, which is why a better outcome would have been to keep the man residing in a comfortable room at the state's high-security mental hospital. This probably would be less expensive as well.
But that better outcome requires changing the law about acquittals by reason of insanity. The law simply shouldn't allow release of murderers before their old age. Republican legislators, a small minority in the General Assembly, should submit such legislation even though the Democratic majority will reject it. For at least then some Democrats may be asked to explain why people should feel good about the outcome of the murderer-cannibal's case.
THE PERFECT TAX: A recent study by the state Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services found that people addicted to gambling constitute less than 2 percent of Connecticut's population but produce more than half the state's sports betting revenue and a fifth of its revenue from all forms of gambling.
While the department sees this as a problem with a huge human cost, elected officials see it as a political solution -- the perfect tax. A tiny and disparaged minority finances a disproportionate share of state government and that human cost is not on state government's books.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
A northern visitor helps make me a fine day
A common loon in breeding plumage.
A couple of weeks ago I was sauntering along a twisting path of beach sand, through waist-high salt marsh cordgrass, on Gaspee Point, in Warwick, R.I., and passed a now vacant skeleton of an osprey platform on top of a telephone pole. Ospreys had not yet arrived here on upper Narragansett Bay, although there have been two recent osprey sightings 25 miles south, at Newport and Jamestown.
In the distance, I could see Providence’s skyline and wind turbines. Then I heard a “brrup. brrup’’ from a flock of Brandt geese swimming in sunlit shallows. Their voices would end in a higher octave and become a chorus of gabble and grunting. I wondered what they could be communicating to each other.
There were high clouds to the southwest in the otherwise cloudless blue sky. A small propeller-driven plane sounded in the distance. The wind and gently curling waves together made a whooshing noise.
A single Brandt floated near the shore, preening, while two other Brandt pushed their dark beaks into the sand and gravel bottom. They ingested tiny rounded beach stones to help digest their favorite meal, eelgrass, which they rolled into bite-size-balls before swallowing.
I saw a flash of white about 200 yards out from the beach, and quickly reached for my monocular, hoping to get a clearer view. I caught sight of him before he disappeared below the surface. I thought: “It is a solitary common loon…wow…wintering here on the bay…so lucky to see it.” I wondered where his summer home in the North Woods might be. I assumed that it was a male, but I couldn’t be certain.
In the winter, the male loons lose their elegant, “tuxedo-like” plumage, becoming a monotonous black/white. Their breeding plumage, from March to October, is a checkerboard, including a dazzling, vertical-bars, black/white “scarf.” Loons’ summer homes are pristine and remote ponds and lakes in New England’s North Woods and in Canada.*
In the winter, loons are lone visitors spread out on Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island Sound and Long Island Sound.
In the summer they make unforgettable, ethereal calls that echo off mountains, and across lakes and ponds, in the North Country. But in winter, they are silent. They are amazing swimmers with large, black web feet that let them to dive very deep, and swim long distances underwater chasing fish, their prey. Loons can be traced back to archaeopteryx in Mesozoic times. They are large birds, nearly three feet long, but clumsy flyers.
I rested my creaky, tired legs on a silver-gray, driftwood seat (about 10 feet long) with cement blocks substituting as legs. It was fairly comfortable as I scribbled in my notebook.
Then I shouted out to a friend who almost daily strolls along the shore using his bright red walking poles. He’s about 50 yards away from me, so I’m shouting, “Hey, Harry, it’s me…John…!” Harry’s retired now, and on most days walks in a five-mile loop from his house along Gaspee Point. I had last talked with him when he was raking the last autumn leaves in his yard.
Always nice to chat a bit with Harry. That, and seeing a wintering loon on our precious bay, made for a fine day.
***
*Ancient people called, among other things, Maritime Archaic People, Circumpolar People, and Lost Red Paint People, saw loons as connected to the spirit world, including the afterlife. Their territory included Demark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Latvia, the Faroe Islands, Greenland, Labrador, Newfoundland and Maine. They lived off the sea as fishermen and hunters of seals, and were skilled boat builders, navigators and tool makers. Loons fascinated such famed writers of the past as Henry David Thoreau, E.B. White, Edwin Way Teale, his wife, Nellie Teal, and the still very much alive John McPhee.
John Long is a Warwick-based writer.
At least there’s spring
“Emerging’’ (Cyanotype collage enhanced with hand-painted tape and acrylics), by Ann-Marie Gillett, in the show “Celebrate Spring,’’ at Spring Bull Gallery, Newport, R.I., through April 27.
Llewellyn King: Trump Regime heavily Uses fear as its most potent Weapon
WARWICK, R.I.
Something new has entered American consciousness: fear of the state.
Not since the Red Scares (the first one followed the Russian Revolution and World War I, and the second followed World War II and the outbreak of the Cold War) has the state taken such an active role in political intervention.
The state under Donald Trump has an especial interest in political speech and action, singling out lawyers and law firms, universities and student activists, and journalists and their employers. It is certain that the undocumented live in fear night and day.
Fear of the state has entered the political process.
Presidents before Trump had their enemies. Nixon was famous for his “list” of mostly journalists. But his political paranoia was always there and it finally brought him down with the Watergate scandal,
Even John Kennedy, who had a soft spot for the Fourth Estate, took umbrage at the New York Herald Tribune and had that newspaper banned for a while from the White House.
Lyndon Johnson played games with and manipulated Congress to reward his allies and punish his enemies. With reporters it was an endless reward-and-punishment game, mostly achieved with information given or withheld.
The Trump administration is relentless in its desire to root out what it sees as state enemies, or those who simply disagree with it. They include the judicial system and all its components: judges, law firms and advocates for those whom it has disapproved of. If an individual lawyer so much as defends an opponent of the administration, that individual will be “investigated” which, in this climate, is a euphemism for persecuted.
If you are investigated, you face the full force of the state and its agencies. If you can find a lawyer of stature to defend you, you will be buried in debt, probably out of work and ruined without the “investigation” turning up any impropriety.
One mighty law firm, Paul, Weiss, faced with losing huge government contracts, bowed to Trump. It was a bad day for judicial independence.
The courts and individual judges are under attack, threatened with impeachment, even as the state seeks to evade their rulings.
Others are under threat and practice law cautiously when contentious matters arise. The price is known: Offend and be punished by loss of government work, by fear of investigation and by public humiliation by derision and accusation.
The boot of the state is poised above the neck of the universities.
If they allow free speech that doesn’t accord with the administration’s definition of that constitutional right, the boot will descend, as it did on Columbia.
Shamefully, to try to salvage $400 million in research funds, Columbia University caved. Speech on that campus is now circumscribed. Worse, the state is likely emboldened by its success.
Linda McMahon, the education secretary, has promised that with or without a Department of Education the administration will go after the universities and what they allow and what they teach, if it is antisemitic, as defined by the state, or if they are practicing diversity, equality and inclusion, a Trump irritant.
One notes that another university, Georgetown, is standing up to the pressure. Bravo!
At the White House, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has decided to usurp the White House Correspondents’ Association and determine herself who will cover the president in the reporters’ pool -- critical reporting in the Oval Office and on Air Force One.
Traveling with the president is important. That is how a reporter gets to know the chief executive up close and personal. A pool report from a MAGA blogger doesn’t cut it.
Trump has threatened to sue media outlets. If they are small and poor, as most of the new ones are, they can’t withstand the cost of defending themselves.
ABC, which is owned by Disney, caved to Trump even though its employees longed for the case to be settled in court. But corporate interests dictated accommodation with the state.
Accommodate they have and they will. Watch what happens with Trump’s $20 billion lawsuit against CBS’s 60Minutes. The truth is obvious, the result may be a tip of the hat to Trump.
Nowhere is fear more redolent, the state more pernicious and ruthless than in the deportation of immigrants without due process, without charges and without evidence. ICE says you are guilty and you go. Men wearing masks double you over, handcuff you behind your back and take you away, maybe to a prison in El Salvador.
Fear has arrived in America and can be felt in the marbled halls of the giant law firms, in newsrooms and executive offices, all the way to the crying children who see a parent dragged off by men in black, wearing balaclavas, presumably for the purpose of extra intimidation.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS, as well as an international energy-sector consultant and speaker/ His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island.
‘What else can they become?’
Work by Cynthia Atwood (polish, fabric, paint, interior fan, extension cord), in her joint show with Mark Lorah, “Visceral Resonance,’’ at AVA Gallery and Art Center, Lebanon, N.H., through May 1o.
She says she is “attracted to materials and takes pleasure in handling and pushing them and wonders what else they can become? I enjoy being struck by a concept and then playing with it, wondering how the concept can become an object and visa versa.’’
Beloved Peak
Bascom Lodge (in honor of John Bascom) and Saddle Ball Mountain looking southwest from the War Memorial Tower on Mt. Greylock, which, at 3,489 feet, is the highest mountain in Massachusetts.
“Greylock, our daily pleasure, our constant symbol, our ever renewed inspiration, for all who have fellowship with Nature.’’
— John Bascom (1827-1911), a professor of rhetoric at Williams College, in Williamstown,Mass., in 1855-1874 and president of the University of Wisconsin in 1874-1887. He died in Williamstown, close to Greylock, in his beloved Berkshires.
Chuck Collins: Dismantling the IRS only helps Billionaire tax Dodgers
Houses (mostly for the summer) of the very rich in Watch Hill, R.I.
— Photo by JJBers
U.S. Treasury Department estimates of unpaid taxes indicate that over half of all unpaid taxes are attributable to the top 5 percent of earners.
Via OtherWords.org
Starting this tax season, Trump and Musk’s IRS cuts will cost middle class taxpayers a lot more than they save.
BOSTON
The Trump administration and Elon Musk’s DOGE have begun dismantling the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), beginning with 6,700 layoffs. Their stated plan is to cut half of the agency’s workforce.
Their biggest cuts appear to be in the Large Business and International division, which audits wealthy individuals and companies with more than $10 million in assets. These are essentially the workers who make sure billionaires and corporations pay their taxes.
Musk and Trump claim to be sage businessmen, but it would be hard to find a business owner in America that would dismantle their accounts receivable department when their wealthiest clients still owe them money.
So make no mistake: These cuts will cost taxpayers a lot more than they save.
Gutting the IRS will hurt the middle class by reducing the taxes that billionaires and corporations pay for our public services. It passes the bill to working class taxpayers to cover veteran’s services, infrastructure, national parks, and defense.
When it comes to taxes, the wealthy aren’t like you or me. Most wage earners have our state and federal taxes withheld from our monthly paychecks. Ninety percent of taxpayers use the simple standard deduction filing and hope we get a refund.
But billionaires and multimillionaires are different. Their income comes mostly from investments and assets — which they can hide. They hire experts from the “wealth defense industry” — an armada of tax lawyers, accountants, and wealth managers — to minimize their taxes and maximize inheritances for their fortunate children.
They deploy anonymous shell companies, complex trusts and bank accounts in tax havens like Bermuda, Cayman Islands, and South Dakota to aid their clients in minimizing taxes — tools not available to ordinary taxpayers. According to the Tax Justice Network, over $21 trillion is now hidden in tax havens like these.
A 2021 expose by ProPublica found that more than half of the 100 wealthiest U.S. billionaires use a complex trust system to avoid estate taxes, which at the current level only kicks in for people with wealth over $13.99 million.
This aggressive tax-dodging by the superrich has resulted in an enormous “tax gap” between what they owe and what’s collected. For the last few years, this gap is estimated at $700 billion a year — almost the size of the Pentagon budget.
Working- and middle-class taxpayers will pick up the slack, or see their services cut. Most likely some of this gap will be added to the $36 trillion national debt, requiring us to pay on an installment plan.
In previous decades, the IRS had the expertise to keep up with the schemes that billionaires and transnational corporations use to dodge their taxes. But over the last two decades, their capacity to catch wealthy crooks and grifters has been decimated by cuts.
Things started to turn around again in 2021, when Congress voted to invest in enforcement. And already, the investment was starting to pay off. A year ago, the IRS announced they’d recovered $482 million from millionaires who hadn’t paid their debts.
Trump and Musk are now reversing these modest gains.
As the agency that people love to hate, the IRS was an easy target for Trump’s anti-government attacks. But the real beneficiaries of a weak IRS are billionaires and large global corporations. With an understaffed IRS, their tax shell games can operate without scrutiny — something seven previous IRS commissioners from both parties recently spoke out against.
We may not agree about everything in the federal budget, but most people agree the wealthy should pay their fair share of whatever expenses we share. And it’s hard to catch the criminals if you remove all the cops on the beat.
The billionaires will be popping their champagne bottles. Even with the higher tariffs on European bubbly, they can afford the best.
Chuck Collins, of Boston, directs the Program on Inequality and the Common Good and co-edits Inequality.org at the Institute for Policy Studies. He’s the author of The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions.
Peel me a grape and Update my Estate plan
“Abundantia” (ink jet print), by Boston-based photographer Tara Sellios, in her show “Ask Now the Beasts,’’ at the Fitchburg (Mass.) Art Museum.
The museum says:
“Sellios is a Boston-based artist whose monumental photographs highlight the beauty of the grotesque. Sellios creates still-life vignettes from organic materials including animal bones, insect specimens and dried flowers which she photographs using a large format 8 X 10 inch camera. Printed at a large scale, Sellios’s photographs capture the vivid details of her materials.’’
Fitchburg in its manufacturing heyday.
Still Dress in layers
“The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day.
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You're one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
a cloud come over the sunlit arch,
And wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you're two months back in the middle of March.”
―From “Two Tramps in Mud Time,’’ by Robert Frost (1874-1963)
It stares back
“CELES-TIAL” (acrylic on canvas) by Renato Viganego, in his show at Atlantic Works Gallery, Boston, April 4-26.
Nathan Meyers: Longtime privatization of government functions is undermining democratic accountability
By British caricaturist James Gillray (1756-1815)
Nathan Meyers is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Nathan Meyers does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
AMHERST, Mass.
Since returning to office, President Donald Trump has aggressively moved to shrink the federal government. His administration has frozen federal grants, issued executive orders aligned with the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, and, most prominently, created what he calls the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
DOGE has been billed as a cost-cutting initiative, although the actual amount of money being saved remains unclear. To lead DOGE, Trump appointed Elon Musk, a megadonor whose companies hold federal contracts worth billions. Musk has already moved forward with major cuts, including sweeping workforce reductions, the curtailment of government operations and purges of entire agencies. Thousands of federal workers have lost their jobs.
While certainly dramatic, these actions reflect a longer trend of privatizing government. Indeed, my sociological research shows that the government has steadily withdrawn from economic production for decades, outsourcing many responsibilities to the private sector.
3 indicators of privatization
At first glance, total government spending appears stable over time. In 2024, federal, state and local expenditures made up 35 percent of the U.S. economy, the same as in 1982. However, my analysis of Bureau of Economic Analysis data offers a new perspective, recasting privatization as a macroeconomic phenomenon.
I find that U.S. economic activity has become increasingly more privatized over the past 50 years. This shift happened in three key ways.
First, government involvement in economic production has declined. Historically, public institutions have played a major role in sectors such as electric power, water delivery, waste management, space equipment, naval shipbuilding, construction, and infrastructure investments. In 1970, government spending on production accounted for 23 percent of the economy. By 2024, that figure had fallen to 17 percent, leaving the private sector to fill the gaps. This means a growing share of overall government spending has been used to fund the private-sector economy.
Second, government’s overall ability to produce goods and services – what economists call “productive capacity” – has fallen relative to the private sector, both in terms of labor and capital.
Since 1970, public employment has lagged behind private-sector job growth, and government-owned capital assets have trailed those of the private sector. Although public-sector capital investments briefly rebounded in the 2000s, employment did not, signaling a shift toward outsourcing rather than direct hiring. This has significant implications for wages, working conditions and unionization.
Third, and relatedly, government increasingly contracts work to private companies, opting to buy goods and services instead of making them. In 1977, private contractors accounted for one-third of government production costs. By 2023, that had risen to over half. Government contracting – now 7 percent of the total economy – reached US$1.98 trillion in 2023. Key beneficiaries in 2023 included professional services at $317 billion, petroleum and coal industries at $194 billion and construction at $130 billion. Other examples include private charter schools, private prisons, hospitals and defense contractors.
The meaning of privatization
Privatization can be understood as two interconnected processes: the retreat of government from economic production, and the rise of contracting. The government remains a major economic actor in the U.S., although now as more of a procurer of goods and services than a provider or employer.
The government’s shift away from production largely stems from mainstreamed austerity politics – a “starve the beast” approach to government – and backlash against the New Deal’s expansion of federal economic involvement. In 1971, the controversial “Powell Memo,” written by future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, mobilized business leaders around the goal of expanding private-sector power over public policy. This fueled the rise of conservative think tanks, including the Heritage Foundation, the eventual architect of the Project 2025 privatization agenda.
While government production shrank, government contracting expanded on promises of cost savings and efficiency. These contracting decisions are usually made by local administrators managing budgets under fiscal stress and interest group pressure, including from businesses and public sector unions.
Yet research shows that contracting frequently fails to reduce costs, while risking monopolies, weakening accountability and public input, and sometimes locking governments into rigid contracts. In many cases, ineffective outsourcing forces a return to public employment.
The consequences of privatization
Trump’s latest moves can be viewed as a massive acceleration of a decades-long trend, rather than a break from the past. The 50-year shift away from robust public sector employment has already privatized a lot of U.S. employment. Trump and Musk’s plan to cut the federal workforce follows the same blueprint.
This could have major consequences.
First, drastic job cuts likely mean more privatization and fewer government workers. Trump’s federal workforce cuts echo President Ronald Reagan’s 1981 mass firing of more than 11,000 air-traffic controllers, a source of prolonged financial struggles and family instability for many fired workers. Trump’s firings and layoffs are already reaching far beyond Reagan’s.
In addition, since federal spending directly contributes to gross domestic product, cuts of this magnitude risk slowing the economy. The Trump administration has even floated the idea of changing GDP calculations, potentially masking any reality of economic decline.
Rapid privatization is also likely to trigger significant economic disruptions, especially in industries that depend on federal support. For example, USAID cuts have already sent shock waves through the private-sector agricultural economy.
Finally, the privatization trend risks eroding democratic accountability and worsening racial and gender inequalities. That’s because, as my prior research finds, public-sector unions uniquely shape American society by equalizing wages while increasing transparency and civic participation. Given that the public sector is highly unionized and disproportionately provides employment opportunities for women and Black workers, privatization risks undoing these gains.
As Trump’s administration aggressively restructures federal agencies, these changes will likely proceed without public input, further entrenching private-sector dominance. This stands to undermine government functioning and democratic accountability. While often framed as inevitable, the American public should know that privatization remains a policy choice – one that can be reversed.
Finding their way through low visibility
“The Fog Warning” (1885), by Winslow Homer (1836-1910).
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
The beauty and increasingly complicated society of the Maine Coast sure have long lured novelists. The latest of note is Caleb Mason’s Thickafog (a lobsterman expression), a mystery set on an island based on Vinalhaven, which these days is mostly known for summer people and what remains the Pine Tree State’s most famous fishery — lobsters (though warming seas are tending to move more and more of them toward Canada). Oyster, seaweed and other aquaculture will play a bigger and bigger role.
Fog, of course, is often on, or lurking just off, The Pine Tree State’s storied coast, making scenic views more unpredictable than in most beautiful places.
And there’s the psychological and emotional fog that comes and goes in this tale centered on the deadly fall off a cliff of Bobby, a charming (maybe too charming?) elderly man. Jon, his alcoholic, intense, often bitter, but still usually functioning, son, becomes a suspect in the death. He’s a carpenter on the island, where work on new and old summer places provides a lot of local income. Then there’s Ingrid, an increasingly demented but still elegant lady nicknamed “The Island Queen,’’ who becomes the romantic focus of Bobby, causing conflict in her family.
As in any good novel, events change leading characters in the book in strong or subtle ways.
Unlike many novels set on the Maine Coast that tend to be mostly about affluent, or at least formerly affluent, summer people with fancy educations, Thickafog’s characters include a range of year-round locals with individual family troubles and joys.
Challenges include drug addiction, crime, teenage angst, isolation-spawned anxiety/depression, poverty, material shortages, medical emergencies, rigorous weather, and you’d think, a touch of claustrophobia, especially in the winter.
And yet the islanders, year-round or just summer folks, and of all financial classes and other backgrounds, have a way of coming together when needed: The novel displays the island’s rough-hewn sense of community and the ironical humor that helps support it. And all this happens amidst the island’s vividly described seasonal changes, from temperate if sometimes low-visibility summers to cold stormy winters.
Vinalhaven, as was nearby Stonington, was famous for its beautiful granite. This 1904 postcard shows columns being prepared for New York City’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine.
Very user friendly
Logan Airport, (“International’’ was added later) in East Boston, Mass., in 1930. It opened in 1923 and was named for Gen. Edward Lawrence Logan (1875-1939), a soldier and Massachusetts politician.
Last snow or first of the season?
Raymond Ruseckas, “Path to the West” (pastel on paper), by Raymond Ruseckas, Vermont Artisan Designs, Brattleboro.
Frank Carini: Dangerous Animal and Plant diversity loss in New England
New England Cottontail Rabbit, a species that is imperiled.
Excerpted and edited from an ecoRI News article by Frank Carini. Photo above isn’t from the article.
“Habitat loss is the greatest threat to southern New England’s biodiversity, from small to large species.
“The animals and insects that make southern New England interesting and special are being squeezed out of existence by the very species that needs them to survive.’’
“Humans aren’t giving the natural world the space it needs and deserves. We’re crowding out non-human life, which, in turn, makes nature less productive and us less healthy. The natural world is too often viewed only through the lens of what it can give us or how it can entertain us.
“Animals and plants are going extinct faster than any period in human history — a million species threatened with extinction, and extinctions now occurring some 1,000 times more frequently than before humans. The planet’s sixth mass extinction is being driven by human activity though the burning of fossil fuels and our unsustainable use of land and water.’’
“The loss of biodiversity, along with climate change, are ‘widely recognized as the foremost environmental challenges of our time,’ according to a 2019 study authored by three southern New England researchers.
“They wrote that ‘proforestation provides the most effective solution to dual global crises — climate change and biodiversity loss.”’
‘With Every Eviction notice’
Downtown Chelsea, Mass., Historic District
— Photo by James L. Woodward
“The refugee’s run
across the desert borderlands
carved wings of fright
into his forehead,
growing more crooked
with every eviction notice
in this waterfront city of the north.’’
— From “Mi Vida: Wings of Fright: Chelsea, Massachusetts, 1987,’’ by Martin Espada (born 1967), American/Puerto Rican poet and teacher at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Llewellyn King: By killing what Stalin and Mao couldn’t, we’re Saying we don’t care about the rest of the world
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
It was a quiet voice in the night in Southern Rhodesia, a radio broadcast. But it let in the world: a world beyond the horizons of my family, and even the demanding British public school-inspired academy I attended.
The broadcast was the BBC Transcription Service. I had to keep the radio on low because it was carried after midnight by the local radio network, which itself was based on the BBC model.
There was only one channel and no television in Southern Rhodesia in the 1950s, so the BBC Transcription Service was very important, especially to me in my teens.
To this day, I recall a scientific program on the frontal lobes of the brain and a dramatization of John Galsworthy’s novel The Man of Property.
I didn’t need to listen to those broadcasts to get information left out by an oppressive government’s censorship. There was none then; it was long before Ian Smith’s premiership. I didn’t have to be afraid of the police at the door because I was listening to the radio.
Behind the Iron Curtain, or in any other oppressed places, say Salazar’s Portugal, listening to the unbridled BBC and its spiritual sister, the Voice of America, required courage as you risked arrest.
But listen they did. First to the BBC in Nazi Germany and its occupied countries, and to VOA, later during World War II and in the countries under Soviet influence or control, and in Mao’s China.
Now this great voice, the Voice of America (so appropriately named in reality and metaphor) has been silenced after 83 years by the Trump administration for no discernible reason. What Stalin and Mao couldn’t silence — with jamming, long prison sentences and ubiquitous policing — President Trump has done with a pen stroke.
What VOA and its services — including Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Radio Marti and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks — did was to offer high-quality journalism and entertainment uncontaminated by propaganda.
Paradoxically, VOA was free of government messaging because it was financed by the government. An act of law guaranteed that, and its highly professional staff of 900, broadcasting in more than 40 languages, were on guard against propaganda.
Yes, the government paid for it to be free. Consequently, it was practicing a pure broadcasting that might have reached the apex of achievable objectivity.
Commercial broadcasting is not free in that way and is often biased for commercial reasons. Think Fox and MSNBC or the pinnacle from which CNN has fallen.
The BBC, like VOA, is government-funded with a special tax called the “licensing fee.” But because the bulk of its output is domestic, it is constantly berated by politicians, frequently in the House of Commons.
The BBC World Service is financed separately through the UK Foreign Office, but is wholly owned and operated by the BBC, thus keeping the government at arm’s length; another paradox in which pure journalism is taxpayer financed.
I have personal knowledge of both the BBC and VOA. I worked for the BBC television news in London and did occasional radio broadcasts for its overseas service in the early 1960s.
At VOA in Washington, I was sometimes interviewed by Branko Mikasinovich for the Serbian and Russian services. I found the experience as professional and questions as objective as any I have experienced from any news outlet anywhere. (It was also fun.)
For two decades, my weekly news and public affairs television program, White House Chronicle, was carried by VOA globally in English — and at one time was translated into Chinese. It was dropped during the first Trump administration, but VOA started distributing it again in the Biden years. Mostly it deals with the nexus of science and society, such as AI’s anticipated impact on jobs.
I have simply given the program to VOA as a public service and no money has ever changed hands.
Apart from the hard news, VOA gave the world a window into democratic America: our struggles and triumphs, our values, our of freedom, our luxury of choice, and those aspects of American life that make us the nation we are — at best aspiring to be Ronald Reagan’s “shining city upon a hill.”
The Trump administration hasn’t only denied 70 percent of the world that lives under authoritarian rule the opportunity to hear the truth, but they have also robbed America of the second of its two great soft power tools; the first was USAID, the helping agency.
We aren’t only telling the world that we don’t care about it, but we are also retreating from it into inconsequence.
On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS.
‘Unseen elements’
“A Solid Buzzing,” by Bunny Harvey, in her show “Worlds Within Worlds,’’ at Burlington (Vt.) City Arts. The show features the landscape paintings of the Tunbridge, Vt.-based artist.
She says:
“Lately my work has focused mainly on the hidden, or unseen elements of landscape: the west wind bringing new weather, the buzzing and hissing of insects, bird song and chatter, shifting pockets of cool and warm light, the scent of distant mown hay or manure or salt air, the feel of grass or mud or stone on my feet.’’
Hayward and Noble Mill and Mill Bridge, in Tunbridge.