"No weekends for the gods now. Wars
flicker, earth licks its open sores,
fresh breakage, fresh promotions, chance
assassinations, no advance.
Only man thinning out his kind
sounds through the Sabbath noon, the blind
swipe of the pruner and his knife
busy about the tree of life ....''
-- From "Waking Early Sunday Morning,'' by Robert Lowell (1917-1977), American poet
"It was one of those early November mornings that are as beautiful as any in spring. There was gold everywhere, drifts of it on the elm tree, flakes of gold under our feet, gold dust on the hedges, liquid gold in the refracted falling light."
-- Elizabeth Goudge (1900-1984, English writer, in The Dean's Watch
"Is it a fact -- or have I dreamed it -- that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time?''
-- Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864), American novelist and short-story writer
"No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or dispossessed or outlawed or exiled, or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him, nor will we send against him except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.''
I'm waiting for an overnight hard freeze, which we haven't had yet, that will compel the many remaining leaves on our trees to drop the next morning in one fell swoop.
As we enter the brown and gray stretch called November, it's heartening to see people with patches of arable dirt planting bulbs and spreading lime in anticipation of spring, whatever the grimness in the news.
Meanwhile, a report from Connecticut Public Radio tells us that most of the acorns we see on the ground are from red oaks, not from white oaks. That's not good for ecological diversity. It seems that the latter have been hard hit in recent years by the invasive spongy moth (I love these names) and stretches of severe drought. So if you see white-oak acorns on the ground, pick them up and plant them deep enough to reduce the chances that squirrels or deer will eat them.
Red oak acorns have more tannic acid than white-oak ones, so they last longer on the ground because animals are less likely to eat them.
Say this for spare November: It may be the quietest month.
That cooler weather is pushing more folks indoors, and thus close to each other, makes us think about how the maniacal Robert Kennedy's anti-vaccine campaign is behind the increase in communicable diseases, such as measles, especially in the "low-information'' Red States. People have already died because of Kennedy's campaign.
The current regime talks a lot about "freedom.'' The anti-vax movement makes us feel less free to move around and mingle.
The stock market, fueled by artificial-intelligence hype, has continued to jump (at least until this writing), mostly benefiting the top 10 percent of Americans. Meanwhile, layoffs are very rapidly spreading, not only because of AI replacing people at an ever-faster rate, but also because of such other challenges as the federal shutdown and chaotic Trump tariff policies. These challenges are making companies anxious that they can't maintain their profit margins and keep their workforces the same size.
How long can this stock-market/employment divergence continue as low- and middle-class consumers struggle more and more to pay their bills?
Maintenance is so boring, and who wants to pay for it?
Read GoLocal's article about the condition of the support columns under the Memorial Boulevard bridge in downtown Providence. They show significant decay, exposed rebar and cracking. How dangerous is this? We wouldn't want anyone to undergo a very chilly swimming lesson.
U.S. capitalism, for all its frequent harshness, has great dynamism and creativity that has created prosperity more often than not. Trying to micromanage companies reduces that dynamism.
Too much red tape! Massachusetts's employers are now required to disclose the annual or hourly pay range in job postings, with the idea of closing "unfair" pay gaps that hurt women and racial minorities. But this is the sort of micromanagement of the private sector that drives up costs and tends to discourage job creation over the not very long term.
Employers need great freedom to determine compensation in ways that best serve their enterprises' interests.
As often with new regulations, there will be unintended consequences. As employment lawyer Laura Studen told WGBH:
"One unintended consequence can be that employers will simply shrink the ranges on salaries for comparable work so that there will be fewer raises, fewer increases. They may want to make sure that the people who are making outside the range are brought within the range, which may have a consequence to people having reduced compensation as a result."
Then there's Massachusetts Sen. Paul Feeney's bill that says, "Grocery stores shall not have more than eight self-service checkout stations operating at any one time per location," and the measure would require grocery stores with self-service checkouts to have at least one human-staffed checkout station for every two self-checkouts.
I much prefer dealing with humans at checkouts, but if a grocery store/chain (a low-profit-margin high-volume sector) business wants to completely automate its operations, then that's its business. Meanwhile, stores that retain humans as checkout clerks should use that as an attraction.
This smells like voter intimidation: The Trump regime will send "monitors" from the Justice Department to watch for "irregularities'' in five Cailfornia counties and one in New Jersey for the elections on Tuesday. These elections are state elections.
Both states are, of course, dominated by Democrats.
Federal monitors have long been sent to watch elections to protect civil rights, especially in the former Slave States, but the harsh and fascistic tone of the current and corrupt Justice Department, which the Orange Oligarch sees as his personal legal strike force to torture his political opponents, makes news about the monitors on Tuesday a tad unsettling.
So California and New Jersey must assign state monitors to watch the federal monitors.
All this comes as Red State Republicans, with the help of their allies in the White House and the Supreme Court, have successfully fought to suppress the vote in areas with large percentages of nonwhite people and engage in gerrymandering far more extreme than the Democrats'. You can bet that there won't be much federal monitoring of possible voting "irregularities'' in Red States.
At the same time, election officials' asking would-be voters for an official ID before they can cast ballots - driver's license, etc. - to stop fraud and protect the credibility of the election process - is very reasonable. After all, you need an ID to get on a plane.
I recently watched House of Cards, the political thriller series set in a Washington, D.C., of bottomless corruption. Many of the evil deeds presented in this brilliantly written series, which originally ran from 2013-2018, would have once seemed fantastical, but no more....
This approach may initially sound like a return to "snake-pit" times before the deinstitutionalization movement of the late '60s and early '70s that led to many seriously ill people roaming the streets. But plans in some states to place homeless people, many of them mentally ill and drug-addicted, in residential "campuses'' where they can be protected and treated, away from harm's way on the streets, deserve trials. Yes, this would involve involuntary residence and treatment for many.
Of course, a lot will depend on the quality of individual states' social-service structures. Blue States generally have far better structures than Red ones because they're willing to pay for them, though there are such partial exceptions as Utah (love those self-disciplined and civic-minded Mormons!).
Trump likes at least a version of this approach, among other reasons, because the sight of bedraggled homeless people on the street offends his aesthetic sensibility and is bad for businesses. I doubt that compassion has much to do with it.
But, especially with big Medicaid and other federal cutbacks coming, it's uncertain how the work of these proposed facilities can be paid for. And then there are always the legal issues raised by involuntary placement and treatment, though they have frequently been used for mentally ill individuals under guardianship.
Still, I hope that states give these "campuses" a try.
You've probably noticed the ads on TV for meds to treat mental illness, especially depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia. I hope that viewers recognize that the side effects of psychotropic drugs can be strong. For instance, lithium, which is used to treat bipolar disorder, can cause very noticeable changes in the face and elsewhere in the body.
I vividly recall someone I knew who was taken off lithium and put on Depakote, another med for bipolar people (we used to call them manic-depressives), but apparently with fewer side effects. When I encountered her for the first time after this change I didn't initially recognize her, so different was the cast of her face. But when I looked at her more closely, her face reminded me of the much younger woman I had known many decades before she was put on lithium. It was eerie.
As I have written before, I'm not crazy (so to speak) about pharmaceutical ads on television aimed at getting people to pressure their physicians to prescribe very expensive, patent-protected pills.
I'm sure that U.S. taxpayers are proud that Trump has used billions of their dollars to help give the party of his, er, eccentric and chainsaw-wielding acolyte Argentine President Javier Milei a victory in last Sunday's legislative elections!
"In terms of high-end product influx into the U.S., Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our {the Trump Organization's} assets.''
Bryce McFerran has withdrawn his nomination to be first vice president and vice chairman of the U.S. Export Bank after it was publicized that he has long and very deep ties with the Kremlin - no surprise since some other members of the Trump circle, besides their leader, have long had connections with the murderous regime that rules Russia.
McFerran is a national security risk, but minimally compared to the Orange Oligarch himself.