Whitcomb: Global-Warming Planning; Native-American Street Signs; Israel at War - GoLocalProv

GoLocalProv | Whitcomb: Global-Warming Planning; Native-American Street Signs; Israel at War

Whitcomb: Global-Warming Planning; Native-American Street Signs; Israel at War

Sunday, October 15, 2023

Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

“The game has grown old.

An overcast day.
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A sweet, sad day.

They’re leaving the stands.’’

From “Fall Overcast,’’ by E.B. White (1899-1985), essayist, children’s book author and minor poet.

See: From “Poems and Sketches, 1981,’’ published by HarperCollins

“The epidemic of world lawlessness is spreading….War is a contagion.’’

President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945), on Oct. 5, 1937

“The Devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.’’

William Shakespeare (1564-1616), in The Merchant of Venice

How beautiful, and painful to the eyes, is the slant of the sun on October’s late afternoons.

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Now I know why we’ve had so few birds at our feeder lately: So many plants have gone to seed that birds have plenty to eat all over the place. And, of course, some birds have already headed south.

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Discussions come up from time to time about whether to create another Rhode Island state reservoir in the Big River Management Area, to supplement the Scituate Reservoir. To be useful they must consider scientifically and actuarily based projections of the effects of global warming as well as of population growth.

Given that New England is expected to become wetter over the next few decades, will the Ocean State really need another big reservoir? Maybe. A Big River Reservoir would apparently be mostly for the fast-developing southern part of Rhode Island, and development pressures around here will probably increase as Americans move north from the Sun Belt, where climate change will be more onerous than in the Northeast. Further, the heavy draw on groundwater in South Country threatens to increase salt-water intrusion into coastal towns’ wells.

(There's little talk at the moment of adding reservoirs to supplement the Quabbin Reservoir, which supplies large parts of central and eastern Massachusetts.)

In any event, making projections of global warming effects is becoming a big industry, with many consulting firms making a good living on it, and new public programs, such as the American Climate Corps, are being created to deal with it. By the way, I noticed in The Boston Guardian the other day that that city will be updating its evacuation routes for storms and other emergencies.

The challenge has been heightened by the development of the city’s Seaport District, which is virtually at sea level, as is downtown Providence. Will the Seaport District become the Venice of the Northeast?

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Iftikhar Ahmad, President and CEO PHOTO: GoLocal

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Cambridge, Mass., will soon be putting up street signs in the language of the Massachusetts tribe, the Native Americans who were living in what is now Greater Boston when the English arrived. The latter brought European diseases for which tribe members had no immunity, and they wrested, often violently, control of the region from the Natives, thus wiping out most of the tribe in the 17th Century.

Not only will the sign project be expensive – including in paying experts to get the words right -- it may well inspire other, and much larger, ethnic/language groups to demand installation of street signs in their languages. Cambridge includes residents comprising a vast number of backgrounds.

In any event, expect many mystified drivers in coming months as identity politics marches on.

PHOTO: Flickr Public Domain

Who knows what the situation in the Mideast will look like by the time you read this? The fog of war indeed.

First, it’s always good to bear in mind how tiny and densely populated Israel is, and so how little space it has in which to defend itself. On a world map, it’s just a barely perceptible sliver, and if you’ve toured it from north to south, as I have, you’re even more aware of its vulnerability. It’s bordered by mostly corrupt, brutal regimes (Jordan a partial exception) and is the only democracy in the Mideast. Arab regimes often promote hatred of the Jewish State to divert their suppressed subjects from the regimes’ failures to address their economic and political aspirations.

Arabs in Israel generally live better than Arabs in Arab nations. Israel’s society, historically infused with liberal democracy and respect for human rights, is far more humane than any Arab nation, and Israel is far more prosperous. But suspicion, lies and hatred often trump those attractions.

Israel’s most frequent direct attackers are Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, and Hezbollah, the most dominant force in Lebanon. Both deny that Israel even has the right to exist. Hamas, which is Sunni Muslim, and Hezbollah, which is Shia Muslim, are both supported by Iran’s theocratic tyranny.

It’s a pretty good guess that Hamas may have timed its surprise and very bloody invasion in part to sabotage the proposal for Saudi Arabia to soon establish diplomatic relations with Israel – something that the Iranian regime vehemently opposes.

Why was Hamas initially so successful in its invasion, which included massacres of many civilians, including children, along with rape and other torture. A major reason, apparently, is that Israel’s human-based intelligence (spies, etc.) has eroded, and intelligence from technological monitoring wasn’t enough to pick up the slack as Hamas planned its barbarism. And Israel wasn’t ready for the low-tech aspects of the ground assault itself.

Then there are the Israeli political divisions spawned by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s attacks on the country’s judicial independence, which have undermined military morale and readiness; many soldiers have opposed the egomaniacal Netanyahu’s drive for more power in what had been a freewheeling democracy. And his support for ever more Jewish settlements on the West Bank, sometimes accompanied by violence by settlers, has further outraged Palestinians, with Hamas pouring gasoline on the fires.

Netanyahu, who, like his (former?) pal Trump, is financially corrupt, has allied himself closely with extreme-right ultra-Orthodox Jews, most of whom avoid military service in the always besieged nation. No wonder that many Israelis consider them parasites.

In short, Netanyahu has torn apart his nation politically, making it more vulnerable to attack by Hamas and other enemies.

Israelis may rally around Netanyahu for a while (he’s a strong speaker), but then will turn against him because of the huge intelligence failures under his watch that enabled the Hamas attack, as did his government’s cynical and corrosive far-right policies. The U.S., too, must analyze its own failure to see what Hamas was up to.

Hamas has received lots of military and other aid from Iran, a key Russian ally. Bear in mind that the Kremlin loves anything that makes life more difficult for the West and its allies and almost always backs dictatorships over democracies. After all, the success of the latter gives Russian citizens ideas….

Did Iran help plan the Hamas assault, as seems likely? If so, it will have to pay a heavy price.

Meanwhile, the Kremlin has used Hamas’s attack to push the idea that the West’s support of Ukraine in its struggle to free itself from Putin’s bloody invasion has diverted us from addressing Mideast issues. That isn’t true, and this is a not a zero-sum situation. We must respond to multiple crises all the time to protect American interests, one of which is protecting a close ally in the Mideast. As painful as the obligations of leadership can be for us, the world would be an even nastier place without it. Isolationism is always a temptation, but does an increasingly multipolar world look inviting?

As historian and journalist Anne Applebaum wrote this week in The Atlantic:

“The Russian invasion of Ukraine and Hamas’s surprise attack on Israeli civilians are both blatant rejections of that rules-based world order, and they herald something new. Both aggressors have deployed a sophisticated, militarized, modern form of terrorism, and they do not feel apologetic or embarrassed about this at all.’’

“{L}ike the equally outdated Pax Americana that accompanied the rules-based world order—the expectation that the U.S. plays some role in the resolution of every {major} conflict—we might miss the Geneva Conventions {which cover the rules of war} when they are gone. Open brutality has again become celebrated in international conflicts, and a long time may pass before anything else replaces it.’’

Oh yes, the Hamas outrage also reminds us that the more the world can get off the oil that subsidizes the Mideast regimes that support Hamas and Hezbollah the better.

Often Satisfying, Despite the Aggravations

I’ve been on the board of a bunch of nonprofits over the years, including a couple of libraries, a disease-fighting organization and a couple of media-and education-related charities. They were mostly underfunded, and their ability to survive problematic. They sometimes recall the silent-film series “The Perils of Pauline.’’ And as often seems the case in many organizations, a small percentage of board members do most of the work, which mostly involves oversight of salaried management and doing direct fundraising, which is usually no fun.

So it can be frustrating. Still, I’ve found that people serving on nonprofit boards are among the best and most interesting people I’ve ever met.

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