Whitcomb: Reading Election Entrails; Newport War; College-Rankings Revolt

Sunday, September 18, 2022

 

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Robert Whitcomb, columnist

 

“My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.’’

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— From “After Apple-Picking,’’ by Robert Frost (1874-1963)

 

 

‘’He’s my friend that speaks well of me behind my back.’’

— Thomas Fuller (1608-1661), English clergyman and historian

 

 

“We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.’’

— Ray Bradbury (1920-2012), American writer, especially known for his science fiction

 

 

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Being pelted with falling acorns on last Thursday’s chilly, breezy, October-like morning was quite a stirring reminder of the changing season.

 

 

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I don’t like early voting.

 

 

Obviously, some shut-ins and others with mobility issues must vote early by mail, but most people can easily wait until Election Day. The later we wait, the better informed we’ll be. Lots of useful information about candidates and their proposed policies comes out in the last couple of weeks before an election. Of course, it’s always a guess, hopefully, an informed one, about how elected candidates will perform in office. Or anyone in any job.

 

How will they respond to unpredictable events? No one really knows how they’ll do in the fog of crises. As the late British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan famously responded when someone asked him what he most feared in office: “Events, my dear boy, events.’’

 

I also like the civic ceremony of voting in person. It shows respect for the democratic institutions that many died to create and maintain and builds community cohesion as we see our neighbors performing their duty as citizens.

 

It often seems that we’re making voting too easy, and in so doing, saying it’s not worth much. Indeed, voting has declined in many places even as we’ve made it easier and easier.  And rain is a pretty pathetic excuse for not voting.

 

I’ve said all this before, but it’s worth repeating.

 

 

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Brett Smiley, Mayor-elect PHOTO: GoLocal’s Richard McCaffrey

Now that Brett Smiley is effectively Providence’s mayor-elect, I hope he swiftly puts the kibosh on proposals to institute rent control (which he has rightly opposed) to address Providence’s slice of the national housing-affordability crisis. Rent control, and price control in general, worsens the lack-of-supply situation, which eventually leads to much higher prices. To moderate housing prices, we need zoning,  tax and other policies that increase supply.  We need to encourage building. Much of this must be done at the state level.

 

I remember Richard Nixon’s irresponsible price-control program aimed at getting him re-elected.

 

 

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Salve Regina’s proposed big expansion PHOTO: File

Look for fireworks at the Newport Zoning Board’s meetings next Wednesday, Sept. 21, and Thursday, Sept. 22,  both at 6 p.m., over Salve Regina University’s controversial plan (hated by some) to build two dorms to house a total of 400 more students, with parking lots to go with them. The battle, over land between Bellevue, Shepard, Victoria, Ruggles and Lawrence Avenues,  has been going on for years.

 

You can’t blame some of the neighbors for being very unhappy at the idea of a big institutional expansion in the midst of a celebrated Gilded Age neighborhood.

 

The meetings will be held in Newport City Hall in a second-floor room. This being Newport, perhaps there will be a couple of celebrities there.

 

Few land-use and building disputes are as animated as those in The City by the Sea.

 

 

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Helena Foulkes TV Ad

I suspect that Helena Foulkes deeply regrets not putting more resources into her Rhode Island Democratic primary campaign for governor much earlier, a campaign that she narrowly lost to Gov. Dan McKee. If the race had lasted a week longer, she probably would have won, especially as she increasingly found her rhetorical footing. If all the voting had happened on Election Day, she would have been the victor.

 

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I suppose that we’ll be inundated in the Rhode Island general election campaign with ads featuring Republican Amy Kalus’s three criminally cute boys and Dan McKee’s criminally cute mother. Are many people weary of politicians dragging in their families for the optics? “See we’re normal, just like you!” they seem to be trying to say. But no one willing to undergo the slings and arrows of varsity politics is “normal’’.

Still, I assume that most voters like these visuals, though they have little to do with the realities of governing.

 

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Ashley Kalus, GOP Candidate for Governor PHOTO: GoLocal’s Richard McCaffrey

McKee has been a Rhode Islander for his whole life,  and he’s held various public offices here, so we know a lot about him, but we have much to learn about the background and policies of the very bright and well-educated Kalus,  who until recently was a resident of  Illinois (where she worked for then-Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner) and then Florida  (she’s a  Gov. Ron DeSantis admirer). She moved to the Ocean State in 2021, though she and her husband had previous ties to Rhode Island, and Kalus spent much of her earlier years in Massachusetts.

 

Of course, she says, “I’ll be the education governor,’’ as do pretty much all gubernatorial candidates.

 

 

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PHOTO: File

U.S. News and Fraud Report

Too many Americans are obsessed with status, which has made them vulnerable to such cons as the U.S. News & World Report’s college rankings, which are based on methodologies and dubious data that compare apples with oranges. U.S. News, once a failing news magazine, has made millions from its publications selling rankings that feed off people who are unable or unwilling to do their own investigations.

 

We in New England are perhaps more aware of the prestige chase because the region is so well known for its old and famous private colleges and universities, including four of the eight Ivy League schools.

 

Just how dubious the rankings are was emphasized again last week, when U.S. News demoted Columbia University to No. 18 from No. 2 in its latest annual list of “Best Colleges’’ after allegations that that great New York institution had manipulated its numbers to goose its rankings.

 

Well, of course, probably all the ranked institutions fudge their numbers to impress students and their parents.  Comparing these schools, all of which are unique in innumerable ways, with the bogus precision of rankings leads to much misunderstanding.

 

U.S. News applies crude and easily manipulated measurements that many colleges use to market their exclusivity and prestige while claiming that they don’t.

 

It would be great if many more colleges refused to cooperate with U.S. News in these rankings, as has, for example, the prestigious Reed College, in Oregon. (Back in the ‘70s we called it “Weed’’.) But they probably won’t.

 

I confess that, like most people, I enjoy reading some rankings (“Best Places to Retire,’’  etc.), but I don’t take them seriously. The point here is that the U.S. News college rankings have done considerable damage to American higher education by all too often steering students to institutions that are wrong for them and encouraging colleges to allocate resources not to improve the overall quality of their education but rather to pump up applicant numbers and look more exclusive.  As a result, U.S. News is one of the villains in the spiraling cost of higher education.

 

Take a look at Jeff Selingo’s book “Who Gets In and Why: A Year Inside College Admissions.”

 

“The broader lesson everyone should keep in mind is that U.S. News has shown its operations are so shoddy that {both  Columbia’s No. 2 and No. 18 rankings} are meaningless,” Columbia math Prof. Michael Thaddeus told The New York Times last week. “If any institution can decline from No. 2 to No. 18 in a single year, it just discredits the whole ranking operation.” It was his data analysis that apparently led to Columbia’s ranking being lowered so dramatically.

 

Meanwhile, Providence-based Johnson & Wales University, which U.S. News had unranked in a data scandal, now touts its new rankings. The circus goes on amidst the fearsome fall application process.

 

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As some conservationists recommend,  should we stop buying lobsters to help save our endangered fellow mammals the North Atlantic Right Whales, which  can get entangled in trap lines and drown? That’s a tough one in Maine, with its very valuable lobster fishery (which, however, is heading northeast as the Gulf of Maine warms).

 

 

Big Grid Backup

A fine idea!

 

A battery complex has been built to provide backup power for Provincetown, with Truro and part of Wellfleet soon to follow, on the often stormy Outer Cape.

 

The $49 million facility is designed to be integrated with the area’s microgrid. Whenever power fails in a section of the local grid, backup electricity will be released from the battery complex. As battery storage keeps improving, we’ll be seeing more and more of these operations.

 

This project was developed as an alternative to running a second main power line from the regional grid to the Outer Cape, which could have caused serious environmental damage, especially in the Cape Cod National Seashore.

 

Hit this link for more information:

https://commonwealthmagazine.org/energy/provincetown-hooked-up-to-large-electricity-battery/

https://www.capecod.com/newscenter/eversource-new-battery-significantly-cuts-down-provincetown-outage-times/

 

 

Dr. Graham’s Prescription

The very creepy, and I suspect,  tormented South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham is devoid of principle and possessor of an impressive political plasticity. (He denounced Trump early in 2016  but  has since become one of his most devoted sycophants.)

Now Little Lindsey has reversed himself again. While he said a couple of months ago, in the wake of the reversal of Roe v. Wade, that the abortion issue should be in the hands of the individual states, he now backs a national ban on abortion after 15 weeks.

There’s a constitutionally reasonable,  or at least traditional, argument to be made that the states, not the Feds, should determine such things as allowing gay marriages and abortion, since they would seem to come under domestic law, traditionally the responsibility of the states. That used to be the basic position of the Republican Party – local control and all that. Federalism!

But with the immense power of far-right Evangelicals in the party, which has been moving at a brisk clip toward fascism, key figures in the GOPQ are taking a more unitary and nationalized view of America’s politics and government. They do this as they await the return to power of their Fuhrer, Trump, or of another would-be strongman, such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, to impose the positions of their GOPQ base across America.

Meanwhile, the anti-satanists are back!

Hit this link:

 

 

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The Civil War redux: Red State governors in the South, who preside over places with crummy social services, are shipping foreign migrants to Blue States, which have much better services. The latest destination: Martha’s Vineyard!  Weaponizing desperate people. (Still, I admit to a little sick pleasure at the spectacle of The Vineyard’s population of rich liberals being unsettled by their new  (and presumably temporary?) neighbors.)

 

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Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip visiting Germany in 2015

Royal Overkill?

Some brave people have complained about the relentless coverage that has followed the death of Queen Elizabeth II, especially since other things on the world stage seem much more important, such as a possible turning point in the war in Ukraine.

 

But most people seem to love the optics of British ceremony/pageantry — nobody does such shows better! They provide a colorful escape from our mundane lives. And the long, image-rich Royals spectacular is relatively easy for the news media to cover — a lot easier than, say, a war, earthquake or hurricane. And, yes, a factor in the current mania is the general affection for the Queen because of her graciousness and dignity, which is more than you can say about some members of her family. And that she was not supposed to openly take political positions tended to shield her from controversy and unpopularity. She reigned, not ruled.

 

Where will the Royals Show go next?

 

Tomorrow we’ll see the most spectacular funeral in London since Winston Churchill’s, in 1965. It will be a brief distraction from Britain’s Putin-pushed inflation rate of about 10 percent.

 

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Since  2014, Vladimir Putin has arranged for hundreds of millions of dollars to be spent, and relentless disinformation campaigns concocted, all aimed at installing people and parties around the world who would be nice to the blood-soaked dictator. This includes help for the GOPQ, in 2016 and 2020.

See:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/joewalsh/2022/09/13/russia-has-secretly-spent-300-million-to-influence-foreign-elections-us-says/?sh=3f0365d54784

 

 

They’re sick of it

Of course, most Americans don’t like the nation’s health-care “system’’. It’s fiercely fragmented, complicated, expensive,  and it vastly favors treatment of the affluent over those below. It’s probably the worst health-care “system’’ in the Developed World, but don’t expect much change given the lobbying power and campaign contributions of private health insurers, hospital chains and pharmaceutical companies. Still, the scaled-back Build Back Better law will finally let Medicare negotiate some drug prices with pharmaceutical companies will help, though it won’t start until 2026.

 

The Veterans Administration has long been allowed to bargain on prices with drug companies.

 

A major impediment to fixing the worst aspects of our “system’’ is that most Americans know little about health care in other nations and have no plans to learn about it in order to seek better models with which to replace our mess. This willful ignorance has been exceedingly profitable for the aforementioned economic interest groups.

 

 

The Grim Reaper vs. Research

I’ve been researching, in a desultory way, some family and industrial history in New England — mostly on Cape Cod (boats, salt, etc.) around Greater Boston (shoes, machines, bricks, etc.) — and in Minnesota, mostly in and around Duluth (iron ore, grain, wood, Great Lakes ships, etc.) with the idea of braiding them together in a quasi-novelistic way. But as I’m sure many readers know,  key in-person human sources tend to die on you at an accelerating rate.

 

Somehow reading yellowed newspaper clippings while wearing gloves doesn’t quite do the trick.

 

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In a trip that combined a look at the past and the future, last week I visited, with a cousin, an old graveyard (lots of dead Quakers) in Falmouth, Mass., where I’m the new owner of a tiny piece of real estate into which my “cremains’’ are supposed to be deposited. I asked my four siblings if they’d like to join me there, but they more wisely than me held off decisions, pending, I think, projection of burial-cost inflation. “Oh, maybe just drop my ashes in the sea,’’ one said.

You can’t be too careful. It still rankles me that my father is buried in the wrong cemetery and with a typo in his middle name on the gravestone. Not that he would have cared much.

 

Wanna-be Medicis

Here’s a book that’s an unusual combination of the history of a social-climbing family, of a business,  of art and museums, and of a certain denounced lust: The Mount Vernon Street Warrens: A Boston Story, 1860-1910, by Martin Green. It tells of how an old Yankee family living in genteel poverty became Boston Brahmins, as well as major art patrons, with the money from a big Maine paper mill, even as fissures widened in a clan with more than its fair share of eccentrics.

Robert Whitcomb is a veteran editor and writer. Among his jobs, he has served as the finance editor of the International Herald Tribune, in Paris; as a vice president and the editorial-page editor of The Providence Journal; as an editor and writer in New York for The Wall Street Journal,  and as a writer for the Boston Herald Traveler (RIP). He has written newspaper and magazine essays and news stories for many years on a very wide range of topics for numerous publications, has edited several books and movie scripts and is the co-author of among other things, Cape Wind.


 

 

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