Sunday, September 03, 2023

Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

As imperceptibly as grief
  The summer lapsed away, —
  Too imperceptible, at last,
  To seem like perfidy.
  A quietness distilled,
  As twilight long begun,
  Or Nature, spending with herself
  Sequestered afternoon.
  The dusk drew earlier in,
  The morning foreign shone, —
  A courteous, yet harrowing grace,
  As guest who would be gone.

  And thus, without a wing,
  Or service of a keel,
  Our summer made her light escape
  Into the beautiful.

— Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

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“A memorandum is written not to inform the reader but to protect the writer.’’

— Dean Acheson (1893-1971), lawyer and diplomat. He was secretary of state in the second Truman administration.

“Rhode Island was settled {by} and is made up of people who found it unbearable to live anywhere else in New England.’’

— Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924), U.S. president in 1913-1921, in a Jan. 29, 1911 speech in New York City

(Or maybe other New Englanders found Rhode Islanders unbearable.)_

Forget the Pumpkin Spice Latte. We have the best three weeks of the summer ahead of us – if we stay away from school and the obligations of adulthood, which intensify in September.

Block that Impulse

The “scandal,” or whatever you want to call it that forced Don Carlson to quit the race for the Democratic nomination in Rhode Island’s First Congressional District, is a reminder of how the tempting immediacy of Internet communication can snare people.

The case is somewhat murky, but revolves around texts in 2019 between Mr. Carlson, now 62, and a male graduating senior at Williams College, where Mr. Carlson, who is gay, was teaching. He allegedly sent a text to the student in which he suggested establishing a personal relationship of the sort seen on a Web site where people pay to set up dates. And in a later text, Mr. Carlson allegedly broached the idea of helping out the student with $5,000.

In any event, a classmate of the student alerted Williams officials, who, we’d guess, know more about what had happened than has been disclosed to the public. The college told Mr. Carlson that he’d no longer be allowed to teach at that elite college.

Williams spokesman Jim Reische said: “We’re relieved to hear that Don Carlson has no interest in trying to teach here again,” WPRI reported.

One wonders if Don Carlson would have been so foolish to converse with the student in an intimate way in the days before email and texting when virtually all communication was in person or by phone or snail-mail letter or fax. Maybe, but using these media are less likely than texting or emailing to encourage blurting out inappropriate remarks.

Most of us have learned the dangers of sending out stuff in anger or some other high emotion, perhaps by accident, such as sending nasty remarks to many people when there’s only one intended recipient. That can add to the landfill of bitter regrets that even the most careful people sit atop.

There’s something about writing a letter on paper that slows us down and encourages reconsideration. In my own case, I’ve learned when writing a heated letter to set it aside for a day before posting; I’ve even gone as far as the post office before turning around before dropping it in the box and taken the letter home for another rewrite.

Ah, letters on paper, using blue or black ink! Stuff to put into scrapbooks for you and your descendants and maybe even for historians. And whatever you do, write thank-you and condolence notes on paper! Recipients will appreciate them far more than emails. And fire people in person!

It has long been the practice of famous and not-so-famous people or their estates to leave for free, or sell, their letters and other personal papers to college or other libraries so that biographers, historians, and other scholars can study the documents and perhaps use them in their books. Email and texting are probably sharply reducing the flow of new archival documents. Too bad.

And most of those cell phone photos will evaporate, unlike the ones we used to stick in photo albums.

How Much to Pay Them?

As the sea level rises and coastal storms seem to be becoming more severe, more and more states and localities are realizing that in many stretches of low-lying coast, the only long-term solution is to remove houses and other structures, in what has been called “managed retreat.’’ The tricky thing is how to pay for it, especially since shoreline houses tend to be expensive.

Get ready for buyouts, relocating roads and changing zoning ordinances and districts.  This could be particularly exciting in towns, such as Warren and Barrington, R.I., where so much of the land is barely above sea level.

A lot of shoreline homeowners, who include a disproportionate number of politically powerful rich people, will be, er, inconvenienced. And towns and cities will worry about the loss of property-tax revenue.

Localities, led by new state policies, should start planning where, or if, buildings and public infrastructure can be relocated, and meanwhile, promote marshland expansion, which will help mitigate flooding in stores.

This should be done with all deliberate speed. Global warming is speeding up.
 

Hit this link:

Recharge as You Drive

This from MIT researchers:

“Two of humanity’s most ubiquitous historical materials, cement and carbon black (which resembles very fine charcoal), may form the basis for a novel, low-cost energy storage system….The technology could facilitate the use of renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, and tidal power by allowing energy networks to remain stable despite fluctuations in renewable energy supply.

“The two materials, the researchers found, can be combined with water to make a supercapacitor — an alternative to batteries — that could provide storage of electrical energy. …MIT researchers … say that their supercapacitor could eventually be incorporated into the concrete foundation of a house, where it could store a full day’s worth of energy while adding little (or no) to the cost of the foundation and still providing the needed structural strength. The researchers also envision a concrete roadway that could provide contactless recharging for electric cars as they travel over that road.’’

Hit this link:

Wouldn’t it be nice if some southern New England cities and towns, especially in suburbia, gradually set aside some lanes for electric golf carts as an alternative to cars for very local travel. Golf-cart networks have been spreading in some suburban and exurban areas, mostly of course, in regions south of here. (They’re famously the chief mode of transport in the vast master-planned, age-restricted Florida development called The Villages, a capital of the Trump cult.)  The carts are fun, convenient and a  modest way to improve a community’s air quality and take bites out of global warming. Admittedly, the carts would mostly be used in the April-to-November period, but, hey, winters are getting shorter….

Some would find them a pleasant alternative to bikes, especially in the rain.

Not Quite That Simple

PALO ALTO: A History of California, Capitalism and the World, by Malcolm Harris, is a highly entertaining quasi-Marxist screed that takes us to today’s chieftains of Greater Silicon Valley (such as the creepy Trumpster Peter Thiel and the self-infatuated Venture Capital QAnon around him). We go there via the theft of Native American and Mexican land; the arrival and exit of gold miners; the machinations of rapacious and monopolistic railroads; ingenious and self-confident political corruption; the early days of Stanford University (flavored with murder and eugenics), with its spectacular Palo Alto campus and in some ways the region’s psychic center, and the beginnings of what led to “high tech’’.

It’s diverting and often funny – I rather like his jovial tone as he describes assorted outrages, real and debatable – but the theme is so glued to old-fashioned socialist theology that it often just sounds silly. He calls capitalism, in its California incarnation and elsewhere, “a system of domination and production.’’ Well, yes, to some extent. But he also makes such over-the-top assertions as “the human-capital production system was hostile to everyone except certain white men, as eugenicists designed it’’. History is a tad more complicated.

(This reminds me of the old joke that “under capitalism man oppresses man. But under socialism, it’s the other way around.’’ We’re a pretty oppressive species.)

Capitalism, to paraphrase Churchill on democracy, is the worst economic system, except for all others that have been tried. Fueled by the profit motive, it’s a fount of invention and innovation, and thus wealth, very unevenly distributed, but eventually raising the standard of living for most people. Capitalism has the great merit of responding to a changing world with more creativity than can government central planning.

But capitalism must be regulated to, among other things, protect public health and safety, penalize fraud, break up price-fixing monopolies and protect workers’ rights. Some would call a regulated capitalism a “mixed economy.’’ Whatever.

To Mr. Harris, in capitalism you have only two main groups – heartless plutocrats and their victims – rather than the very, very complicated society and economy that go with the system.

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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