White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

The Truth is on the Walls

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VILNIUS, Lithuania – In May 2016, local artist Mindaugas Bonanu painted U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump locking lips with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the wall of Keule Ruke, a barbecue restaurant near the city’s Central Station. Painted next to the passionate pair was the phrase “Make everything great again,” a riff on Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.”

Bonanu’s mural took inspiration from one on the east side of the Berlin Wall which depicts East German leader Erich Honecker kissing his Soviet counterpart Leonid Brezhnev. That mural, painted by Russian artist Dmitri Vrubel in 1990, is titled “My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love.”

Dominykas Ceckauskas, the barbecue restaurant’s owner, said the mural was “predicting that if Russia and the USA would ever make out, it would happen in the Baltic states … with tongues or with tanks,” NBC News reported.

Photo credit: Linda Gasparello

Three months later, vandals whited out the mural, which had become an international sensation.

“The purpose of the attack was to remind us, the people of the free world, that there are still active advocates of authoritarianism in our society,” Ceckauskas said on the restaurant’s Facebook page.

He promised to reinstall the mural, which he called “a world famous symbol of liberty and defiance.”

Delivering on his promise, there is a new mural which depicts Trump and Putin sharing a joint: fellow authoritarians having a puff.

In the restaurant’s garden, there are two murals on the back wall. The first is inspired by “American Gothic,” American artist Grant Wood’s 1930 painting of a farmer and his daughter standing in front of a house with a gothic window. The farmer is holding a pitchfork. But in the mural, their heads are penises and the farmer, holding a trowel, is building a brick wall topped with barbed wire.

Next to that mural, the wall is painted black. At the top of this mural, these words are painted in stark white letters: “Dirty Mexican Wall.”

Eating Crepes with Gusto

I ate my first crepe in Paris, on a solo trip at age 12. I spent a week there in a youth hostel, under the wing of the Didac Agency, which placed teenaged American girls as au pairs in French families. The agency thought I was too young to be an au pair, even though I was already babysitting in Hingham, Mass., where I grew up. So they placed me with a gregarious family in the southwestern Landes province — the Albert Barrieus — as a companion for their children.

Photo credit: Linda Gasparello

With a limited budget and an unlimited curiosity about French food, a crepe was an easy choice for lunch on the day I checked out the Gare d’Austerlitz, from which I would take a train south to Dax, where I would meet my French family.

At the station’s buffet, I ordered a simple crepe au fromage. The crepe I ate at that buffet (one of Paris’s major train station buffets which the French railway authorities promoted as “gastronomical buffets” in 1960s) is the one by which I have judged all crepes for 50 years.

That delectable experience made me a train station buffet buff. My husband Llewellyn King is one, too. We have eaten very well in train station restaurants in Lyon, Brussels, London and Vilnius.

Vilnius’ Central Station was a short walk across a park from the Panorama Hotel, where we stayed during our recent trip to attend the annual congress of the Association of European Journalists. After taking a look at the old trains in a fenced-in museum park near the platform, we decided to eat at the station’s Gusto blynine. It is basically a Lithuanian IHOP. Lithuanian crepes (lietiniai su varske), American-style pancakes and Lithuanian grated potato pancakes (bulviniai blynai) were listed on seven pages of its 34-page menu.

We ordered spinach-and-curd cheese crepes, made with “traditional” wheat rather than buckwheat (grikiu) batter. They were made near our table in an open kitchen and served folded in a neat square, which kept the batter spongy and the filling oozy.

Photo credit: Linda Gasparello

Although we ate at a few other restaurants in the city, all superb, we returned twice to Gusto blynine. We ate more spinach-and-curd cheese crepes, crusty potato pancakes with fried bacon and hot soup, beetroot with fried ham and tomato with hot paprika.

One evening, we recommended the restaurant to some English and Irish colleagues, who were staying at the Panorama and wanted to dine nearby.

The next day, I asked David Lennon, a former Financial Times correspondent, where they went for dinner. “We found a nice Lithuanian restaurant, which had a lot of little rooms,” he said. “Somehow, I ended up eating a potato sausage. Whoever thought up such a thing?”

And to think that he could have eaten crepes with gusto, as we did at the railway station find.

The Sex Scandal of the Last Century: Profumo and Keeler

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The key player in one of the greatest sex scandals, Christine Keeler, died on Dec. 4.

When it comes to sex scandals, nothing which has been revealed lately, has anything on Britain’s Profumo Scandal of the early 1960s. The cast was incredible: two nubile and very sexy young women, Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies; a society osteopath, Dr. Stephen Ward, who organized sex parties for men at the top; including the minister of war, John Profumo; a KGB officer at the Soviet Embassy, Yevgeny Ivanov; and Lord Astor, a leading aristocrat.

The set: Cliveden, Lord Astor’s country estate.

The unraveling: Christine’s two earlier lovers got into a fight and shots were fired outside of Ward’s home. Britain’s libel laws were very strict, and the extent of the sex scandal did not break in the newspapers until the rumors were published in the United States. The security services had already warned Profumo that he was sharing Christine with a Soviet spy, and he ended his affair with her.

The unforgivable factor: Profumo lied to the House of Commons and weeks later had to resign. He left the scene for social work in the East End of London, which he did for the rest of his life.

I met Christine and Mandy at the offices of The Sunday Mirror in 1963. My opinion: Christine was one of the most beautiful and intriguing women I have ever laid eyes on. She had a mystical quality, a Mona Lisa.

Mandy was less attractive, but bubbly and exuded fun. She was a good time-girl, who liked parties and sex by her own admission.

Christine averred these were her interests, too. But she was more: a beautiful, tragic child. She was just 19 and hoped to be model.

When it all came tumbling down, Ward was convicted of living off immoral earnings and committed suicide. Mandy married three times, lived in Israel and the United States, and was involved in the London theater. Christine began a huge and tragic slide that two marriages and two children failed to arrest. When she died, she was living in public housing; fat and raddled, all traces of her daunting beauty gone.

Lord Astor left England for the United States while the scandal cooled.

I always wished that Christine would have thrown her head of dark hair back and said, “I did it and I loved it.” Mandy more of less did.

Scandals don’t have happy endings, laced as they are with hypocrisy and betrayal. Everyone betrayed everyone in the Profumo Scandal. Christine was the most betrayed.

The Unexpected Consequence of Bitcoin Energy Hogging

The bitcoin fever — along with all of the other cryptocurrencies that blockchain technology has made possible — has one interesting consequence: a huge new demand for electricity.

Bitcoin miners, the operators who seek to create new entries and to verify the chain and both to make money and to protect from fraud, use staggering amounts of computing and staggering amounts of energy, including to cool the supercomputers.

But the electric bonanza won’t benefit all the electric utilities: The server farms follow the lowest cost for power. Therefore, electric companies with very cheap power, as those in the Northwest with hydropower, are the winners. But all the winners aren’t domestic: Some are likely to be overseas, and Iceland is a strong candidate to host the next rash of server farms.

Environmentalists are calling this a disaster. If cryptocurrency growth continues at its present wild speed, more electricity is likely to be generated with coal, especially outside of the United States.

It is the great growth area for electricity. While natural gas is becoming dominant in the United States, poor countries which want to jump on the high-tech bandwagon, like Poland, could be burning vast quantities of coal.

See it as the real-life consequences of something that only exists in cyberspace, a ghost materializing. The winner maybe Iceland with mega hydro available.

The Things They Say

“Work is much more fun than fun.” — Noel Coward (1899-1973), English playwright, actor and composer.

How You Kiss Under the Mistletoe and Other Changes in 2017

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Some years are indelibly etched into history, like 1941, with the bombing of Pearl Harbor; 1964, with the Civil Rights Act; and 1968, with the anti-war demonstrations.

Such a year may be 2017, not only because of Donald Trump’s presidency but also because of revolutionary changes in the way we live and work that aren’t directly produced or ratified by politics.

Here are some of the takeaways:

  • The uprising of women against men in power who have harassed them, assaulted them and sometimes raped them. Nothing quite like this has happened since women got the vote. The victims have already wrought massive changes in cinema, journalism and Congress: Great men have fallen, and fallen hard. Can the titans of Wall Street and the ogres of the C-Suite be far behind?
  • This Christmas, more people will buy online than ever before. Delivery systems will be stretched, from the U.S. Postal Service to FedEx, which is why Amazon and others are looking at new ways of getting stuff to you. There will be bottlenecks: Goods don’t come by wire, yet. The old way is not geared for the new.
  • The sedan car — the basic automobile that has been with us since an engine was bolted in a carriage — is in retreat. Incredibly, the great top-end manufacturers, from Porsche to Rolls Royce and even Lamborghini, are offering SUVs. They win for rugged feel, headroom and, with all-wheel drive, they’ll plow through snow and mud. In the West, luxury pickups are claiming more drivers every year for the same reasons.
  • No longer are electric vehicles going to be for the gung-ho few environmentalists. Even as the big automakers are gearing up for more SUV production, they’re tooling up for electrification on a grand scale, although the pace of that is uncertain. Stung by the success of Tesla, the all-electric play, General Motors is hoping to get out in front: It is building on its all-electric Volt. Volvo is going all-electric and others want to hedge the SUV bet. The impediments: the speed of battery development and new user-friendly charging.
  • The money we have known may not be the money we are going to know going forward. In currency circles, there is revolution going on about a technology called “blockchain.” Its advocates, like Perianne Boring, founder and president of the Chamber of Digital Commerce, believe it will usher in a new kind of currency that is safe and transparent. A few are making fortunes out of bitcoin, which has risen 1,000 percent in value this year so far. A fistful of new currencies are offered — and even bankrupt Venezuela is trying to change its luck with cryptocurrency. For those in the know, blockchain is the new gold. Will it glitter?
  • The proposed merger between CVS, a drugstore chain, and Aetna, an insurance giant, may be one of the few mergers that might really benefit the consumer as well as the stockholders and managers. It will lower drug prices because both the drug retailer and the paymaster will be at the same counter. Expect this new kind of health provider to drive hospital charges toward standardization.

This holiday season, consider the changes in the way you live now. Watch out for whom and how you kiss under the mistletoe, and for how internet purchases get to you. If a new car is in store for you in 2018, a difficult choice may be to venture electric, go SUV or stay with a sleek sedan. And will you pay for it with the old currency or the new-fangled cryptocurrency?

Happy holidays!

 

Photo: “The Moment”, credit: Stephen Willis. This photo is used under Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0) license.

When Zimbabwe Was Camelot, More or Less

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The new president of Zimbabwe, Emmerson Mnangagwa, has one thing going for him. Maybe it is the only thing going for him.

He may just remember how it was when Zimbabwe was a functioning country; when it was the jewel of Africa, as well as being the breadbasket in its neighborhood; when it was peaceful and kind; and when the future beckoned as it did nowhere else in Africa. When it was the Camelot of Africa.

At 75, he is old enough to remember that era. If he keeps that memory in mind, he may be able to start his tortured and failed country back on the path toward normalcy. At present there is no currency, 90 percent unemployment and up to a third of Zimbabwe’s adults are living in neighboring countries, political and economic refugees. Hunger is as constant as the rising and setting of the sun on the beautiful savanna.

He will have to unlearn the lessons he learned so well as the right hand of the fallen dictator Robert Mugabe.

I can write this because I have that memory of a country of peace and plenty. I was there.

It was my country. It was where I was born and went to school. I remember its hopefulness, and I remember its wrongheadedness as a British colony that thought it would survive in perpetuity.

I was there and I remember the good and the less so.

I remember as a youngster, maybe 11 years old, writing “passes” so that an African servant or friend could be free to roam in white areas at night.

But I also remember during that time when Zimbabwe, then Southern Rhodesia, was linked to its neighbors in the Central African Federation, how the prime minister drove his own car and picked up hitchhikers. No security. No worries. No color barrier.

I learned about this firsthand. One day, as I stood outside my home, hitching a ride to school (sometimes I walked the three miles), a large black car (a British Humber Super Snipe, made by the Rootes Group) pulled up and the driver said, “Jump in.” It was Sir Roy Welensky, the prime minister. No security, no police. I was 14 years old, and it was the first of many rides with him.

But as Harold Macmillan, the British prime minister, said in 1960, the winds of change were blowing and it was clear that Southern Rhodesia had to change. The steps toward change came in the late 1950s, but they were small. Racial barriers were relaxed in law, if not in practice, but an indigenous African political movement was nascent. I knew its founders; gradual change was the goal in keeping with the peaceful tenor of the country.

But Robert Mugabe and an extreme element had decamped for training in China, North Korea and Egypt. The struggle had been internationalized. The African leaders, especially the young Mugabe, were indoctrinated with communism. Dictatorship was the creed, command economies the way to go.

Mugabe came to power after a civil war that was bloody and damaging, orchestrated by Ian Smith, the last white prime minister, who played to his base of frightened whites and their supporters in Britain and the United States. Change would have come but without Smith, it might have come without a war.

Mugabe’s rule began in 1980, after a London-brokered peace conference. While he said nice things about all the people living in what is now called Zimbabwe, he had another agenda.

In 1983 Mugabe, a Shona, sent his dreaded Fifth Brigade (a private army trained by North Koreans) into the south of the country, known as Matabeleland. It was the home of his political opposition and a rival tribe, the Ndebele. The whole ghastly apparatus of genocide was employed: murder, torture, rape and starvation.

Somewhere between 20,000 and 25,000 people died.

Mugabe had shown his iron fist. At his side: Mnangagwa. Can he now forget the murder, the corruption, the repression and the devastation and remember the time when things were otherwise?

Mnangagwa is old enough to remember, but he also is a man schooled in dictatorship, with blood as well as memory in his toolbox.

 

Photo: Emmerson D. Mnangagwa, Minister of Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs of Zimbabwe during High Level Segment of the 25th Session of the Human Rights Council. 5 March 2014. UN Photo / Jean-Marc Ferré. Used under the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).

Llewellyn King’s Notebook: The New Publishing Giants; Failing Upwards; Gastronomic Capital of U.S.?

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When A.J. Liebling said that freedom of the press meant freedom for those who owned the presses, he spoke in a time when there were nearly 2,000 daily newspapers in the United States. Today there are fewer, and they depend on more than presses to stay in business. They depend on the indulgence of Google, Facebook and Twitter.

Freedom of the press now depends on those few companies that own the logarithms on which all publishers depend to get a wider range of readers, even while making no money off them.

The newsboys and newsgirls of yesterday delivered the papers. That is all. The news deliverers of today control the whole publishing world. They can determine success or failure and, as we are seeing, have the power to censor.

William Horsley, a retired BBC correspondent who is involved with media studies at the University of Sheffield and is vice president of the Association of European Journalists, says the newsboys are now the publishers.

In the billions of words that have been spouted about freedom of the press here and around the globe, Horsley has identified a new and terrible reality about the freedom of the press and along with it, the freedom of ideas.

Quite simply, we now live in an era in which an algorithm buried somewhere in the secret depths of Google can do more to change what we know, think and say than any dictator has been able to achieve.

While the creators of Google, Facebook and Twitter probably did not dream of such power, such control, such hegemony, it has come to them.

The mind reels with possibilities, each more disturbing than the previous, of what would happen if any of the Internet giants fell into the hands of malicious owners or a dictator. Think of the damage if Steve Bannon, who presides over Breitbart, or some like ideologue, were at the helm of Google, Facebook or Twitter.

George Orwell, at his most pessimistic, could not have imagined the existential evil that could await us, courtesy of technology, plus a sociopath.

Dumb Luck, Sir. Dumb Luck.

A professor at Brown University congratulates me on my life choices. He implies that my peripatetic journey through the world, clutching a press card, has been because of sound choices. To which I have to respond, “My life has been one of dumb luck and failure.”

Luck, I say, because it is what determines your being at the right place at the right time. Failure, I say, because it is possible to fail upwards: I have, often.

Had my career been on an even keel, I would have finished high school, maybe gone to university and then gotten stuck in one of the early jobs, making it my “career.” As it is, I dropped out of high school, went into journalism and failed a lot.

If I had kept any of those jobs I failed at, I might have had a duller life: a jobbing writer in Africa, a news writer at ITN in London, the creator of America’s first women’s liberation magazine (which failed to liberate any women, but liberated all my money) in New York, an assistant editor at The Washington Post, and a trade journal reporter at McGraw-Hill.

So, Mr. Professor, I recommend that you prepare students for the success of failing upwards. Sometimes that goes for relationships and marriages. Do not bivouac too early on life’s open road.

The Gastronomic Capital of the U.S.: Is it Rhode Island?

In France, it is pretty well agreed, the area around Lyon is the gastronomic capital.

In the United States, New Orleans is mentioned. Well I have eaten many a meal in New Orleans, especially during a time when I was making a lot of speeches at conventions in New Orleans. But I have to say that good food rolls in Rhode Island. So much so that smart visitors come to Li’l Rhody on gastronomic tours, including friends of mine, who, like myself, have eaten the world over.

Now there are a few quibbles, to be sure. One big one is that there are woefully few French restaurants in the state, and the Italian influence in the restaurants is pervasive. Also I think there could be more top-of-the line and regional Chinese restaurants, although a Uighur restaurant has just opened in Providence. Other Asian cuisines — Korean, Indian, Thai and Japanese — are well represented.

Still, the eating in the Ocean State leaves New Orleans with a way to go in my book.

 

Photo: Esther Vargas, “Twitter periodismo“. Used under the Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.

Russia’s Lies Are Aimed at Undermining European Democracies

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VILNIUS, Lithuania — Fake news in Europe does not mean what it means in the White House. It means Russia and it means a clear-and- present danger.

That was the message loud and clear at the annual congress of the Association of European Journalists (AEJ) in the country’s capital last week. The rubric of “fake news” covers a parcel of Russian subversion, from phony news to staged events with surrogate players and stunts, such as sending in Russians posing as skinheads to imply the presence of fascists when none are there.

To Europe – especially to those countries near or bordering Russia — the threat is most keenly felt. At the AEJ congress, speaker after speaker spoke of it not in abstract terms, but as part of a continuing struggle.

Russia is waging its war with Europe, using new tools, like social media, but with old KGB tactics, according to Marius Laurinavicius, senior expert at the Vilnius Institute of Policy Analysis. “We are at war with Russia. It’s a different war: There are no tanks or fighters. It’s their perception, not mine,” he said.

The three Baltic nations — Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia — are under relentless attack by Russian disinformation and dirty tricks.

Whereas much of the world is indifferent to Russia’s seizing of Crimea, the insurgency in eastern Ukraine, and Russian troops in Georgia, to the Baltics, those acts are a scenario for their re-occupation.

When the Baltics were part of the Soviet Union, they suffered in ways not fully comprehended elsewhere. In Vilnius, for example, the former KGB headquarters is a museum of horror, open to the public. Here are the torture chambers and the execution cell. Those who were not killed in this building, right in the center of town, were shipped to Siberia — an incredible 300,000 Lithuanians out of a population of just under 3 million.

President Vladimir Putin has said Russia is entitled to come to the aid of any Russian-speaking minority which is being maltreated: his rationale for invading Crimea. All three Baltic states have Russian-speaking minority populations listening to and watching Russian radio and television broadcasting ceaselessly fake news to stir them up and denigrate their host countries.

At the AEJ congress there were tales of Russian subversion across Europe, from the French and German elections to the attempted Catalonian secession in Spain. Russia has a huge apparatus for fomenting trouble in the democracies, according to Brian Whitmore of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Thousands of people working on fake news in dozens of languages, factories of lies.

Why does Russia do it? One reason is that Russia is deeply unhappy at having NATO on its borders, fanning an old Russian paranoia about the countries to its west. Another, according to Whitmore, is that “Russia is doing to the West what it believes the West is doing to it: It believes the West is trying to undermine it.”

At the AEJ congress a year ago, in Kilkenny, Ireland, the buzz was all about then-presidential candidate Donald Trump and his likely impact in Europe. This year in Vilnius, less so. The big issue is Russia and how the media can deal with the Russian propaganda onslaught, sorting out the real from the fake. It is a daily challenge for Europe’s journalists: Is it a scoop or a state-sponsored lie?

Delegates heard from Laurinavicius that the Putin administration in Moscow is a kind of c-suite of corruption, built around the old KGB (where Putin was No. 2 in East Germany), mixed with the Russian Mafia and collaborating oligarchs. Taken together a potency of evil, seeking to make mischief and possibly to conquer weak and unprepared democracies by lies and fakery.

 

Photo: A newspaper kiosk on Savanoriu Avenue in Vilnius Credit: Umnik. Creative Commons License.

A Movie David Goes Against a Goliath of a Disease

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The movie is called “Unrest.” The unrest of the title is one of the many symptoms of Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, also known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, often expressed as ME/CFS. It is at one level a touching love story and at another, where its real purpose lies, a cry to be heard.
This mysterious, debilitating disease affects maybe 1 million Americans and has no cure, is hard to diagnose, and there is no therapy other than attempts to alleviate the worst symptoms. It is a disease of the immune system. To get it to have normal life confiscated and replaced with bare existence, pain, confusion and fatigue, which is not ameliorated by sleep, hence the unrest.
Dr. W. Ian Lipkin, who directs The Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University, and who has been described as the nation’s leading virus hunter, says that ME/CFS may be like cancer: one disease in many forms.
“Unrest” is not the first ME/CFS documentary but, to me, it is the most compelling. Actually, it is a compelling movie in its own right and someone with no interest or knowledge of the disease would find it engrossing — and damn good entertainment.
The movie, which has been entered for an Oscar in the documentary category, and premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, is the work of Jennifer Brea and a team of very able professional moviemakers. But Brea is the star, the producer and the director. She also is a severely impacted victim of ME/CFS, and the suffering you see on the screen is not a reenactment.
The key to the movie is home footage shot by Brea and her husband, Omar Wasow, as she fell ill. It opens with Brea in extremis crawling across a floor, flattened and in pain. It has a fine admixture of the horrors of the disease and the joy and love of her restricted life with Omar.
The film scores many firsts, one of which, to the best of my knowledge, is it has been certified for continuing education credits for doctors. For a movie that is entertaining as well as instructive, this is an achievement. At an upcoming showing in Atlanta, the audience will be made up entirely of medical professionals getting continuing education credits.
This is major because the disease is not part of normal medical education syllabuses, greatly exacerbating the diagnosis problem. The film makes a strong point about the inclination of medical establishments to treat this very awful physical disease, with its endless suffering, as a psychological one. One of the most harrowing scenes in “Unrest” concerns the arrest in Denmark of a wrongly-diagnosed patient, Karina Hansen, who was forcibly removed by the police and confined in a clinic without recourse for three years. Her parents were denied access for the first year. This is an extreme example of the cruelty when somatic diseases are diagnosed as psychosomatic.
For seven years, I have covered ME/CFS and its devastation: the broken marriages, teenagers who cannot go to school, and patients who must lie in dark silent rooms, wondering why they must live. In the course of my reporting, I have received thousands of emails from around the world, describing the loneliness and the daily hell of living with ME/CFS. Most patients I find go through periods of extreme incapacity and then a life where every effort has its price: One woman in New York knows that dinner with friends will bear a price of three or more days of exhaustion and bed confinement.
I have interviewed young women who clearly will never see a wedding day, men who may never know the enchantment of love, and parents who suffer the special agony of having to take care of children who cannot help in any profound sense.
Because of the ignorance of ME/CFS in the medical profession, the minuscule funding for research from the government, through the National Institutes of Health and the big foundations, I salute the arrival of a movie that may shake up a complacent world.
Some years ago I started, along with my friend and ME/CFS suffer, Deborah Waroff, the YouTube channel ME/CFSAlert. Our motto was comfort the patients, educate the doctors and shame the government.
“Unrest” does the job on a grand scale.

A New Rolls-Royce, Just in Time for the Holidays

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Rolls-Royce Motor Cars has a new Phantom on the market. It’s just the eighth model with that marque to be produced since Henry Royce himself designed the car way back in 1925. It has been the top of the Rolls line ever since. The big, beautiful one: a land yacht of a car.

Once a “Roller” was somehow able to signal prudence as well as wealth. After World War II, when Britain was getting back on its feet, the big cars (usually black in color) pulled up at Claridge’s, The Connaught, The Dorchester, The Savoy, or one of the other great London hotels, and declaimed Britain’s returning health, quietly suggesting “Britain is back.”

In Hollywood, they signaled status. When they pulled into the Beverly Hills or the Beverly Wilshire hotels, the message was not subdued. It shouted, “I am someone in this town!” There were cheaters, of course: Those who rented a Rolls for a premiere or some other must-be-seen-at event.

Things went somewhat off the rails when the newly minted plutocrats of the Middle East took to treating the great cars as though they were no more than Volkswagen Beetles, sometimes just abandoning them in the desert as a new toy came along.

Even in the days when a Rolls was intended to convey solidity as well as wealth, there were exceptions, like Nubar Gulbenkian, the heir to the original Middle East oil fortune. He broke from tradition and owned ostentatious yellow Rolls. In the Swinging Sixties, there were more colored Rolls — even a movie, “The Yellow Rolls Royce,” written by Terence Rattigan, starring Ingrid Berman and Rex Harrison.

To get the full Rolls effect, you want to be chauffeured and lounge in the back: It’s as big a tiny house in the Phantom.

Alexander Korda, the Hungarian-born British film producer and director, used to sit in the front next to his chauffeur. Upper-class London eyebrows were raised — but then he was in show business.

But the bucks-to-burn oil crowd of the ’70s didn’t really help the prestige quotient of the car. They became a sign of flamboyance and a target for social activists. Gauche vulgarians took over: oil sheiks and rock stars.

Owning a Rolls has its own challenges. People who own them and don’t have a driver to stay with the car when out and about — whether in Hollywood, New York or London — find the Roller is a liability. Do you entrust this mobile bank vault to a parking lot? People steal the famous hood ornament, Spirit of Ecstasy, as a challenge.

Well, if you still want to get into the 2018 Phantom VIII, you can get the ready-to-drive-away model, complete with 12 cylinders of thirsty power and, allegedly, the quietest ride ever in a car for about $435,000. That’s with sumptuous carpets, wonderful leather and wood to get you tree-hugging all over again. Also, it’s pretty fast for a car that weighs nearly 6,000 pounds. It’s regulated to 150 mph. But if you take the regulator off, you can get 186 mph out of it.

Yet there’s something sad, about this latest luxury-and-engineering extravaganza: It seems designed for another time.

BMW, which now owns Rolls-Royce Motor Cars, is about to launch a Rolls-Royce SUV and it may eclipse its sedans. It should claim the market for the fun-in-the-desert crowd as well as those from LA, who like to tool around the canyons east of Malibu.

Worse, the writing is on the wall for internal combustion engines in China (a big, new Rolls market), Britain, Germany and France, which have threatened to ban them by mid-century.

Budget note: You can get into a lesser Rolls, like the entry-level Silver Ghost, for half the price of the Phantom VIII. But if you want to signal that you have Trumpish wealth, a Rolls-Royce coupe Sweptail was custom-built for $13 million.

Just the car to go with the $92 million condo in New York.

I drive a Kia Soul. It cost $15,000 new and it does what the Rollers do: It goes from place to place, just like the Phantom VIII.

Notebook: Theater as It Should Be; Fish and Chips Disappearing in U.K., Plentiful in NE; The Myth of the Frozen North

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Little Arctic, R.I. and Its Amazing Theater

Arctic Impresarios: David Vieira (left) and Jim Belanger. Photo Credit: Linda Gasparello

Theater should be readily accessible, affordable and good. For me, the ideal theater experience has always been to pop off to the theater at the last moment and get an affordable seat.

There was a time when you could do that in London and New York. But theater-going has become an expensive chore, both in the West End and on Broadway: Buy exorbitant tickets far in advance, drive, park and get a bill for the evening which can run to over $500 for two.

Not so where I live — just down the street from the amazing Arctic Playhouse, which is to theater what food trucks are to restaurants: accessible, affordable and good.

The Arctic Playhouse is by any measure an anomaly. It just shouldn’t be. Arctic is a distressed hamlet in West Warwick, R.I. Once, it was prosperous shopping area near working textile mills. Now it has fallen on hard times, having lost its retailing base to shopping centers. Washington Street, its main street, has boarded-up shops and a pervasive sense of decay.

But Arctic has live theater at the Arctic Playhouse: a very modest but nonetheless effective theater space where, for under $15, you can see what is often a damn good show. The theater, by the way, will be moving to a larger space on the same street.

I write this in the warm glow of having just seen such a show with my wife: “I Love … What’s His Name?” As its subtitle says, it’s a cabaret about confusion in love in the 21st century.

We were dubious, but we really like the spirit and intimacy of our neighborhood theater and its energetic impresarios, Jim Belanger and David Vieira.

So we ate a light supper and drove a few minutes to be enchanted by a clever review, well-executed by a topnotch cast, including co-creators Rachel Hanauer and Jeff Blanchette, Angela Jajko, Jessica Gates and supported with industrial-lifting, as it were, from pianist Bob Logan.

The cabaret featured a series of ballads and patter songs — some by musical greats, like Tim Rice and Stephen Sondheim — about dating. Very modern, too: Cell phones play a big part in a show that is funny, tuneful and rip-roaring good entertainment.

I’ve always said you don’t need a palace to put on a good show, just good players. It’s about the play and the players, as Shakespeare said in “Hamlet,” not the venue. Arctic proves that, production after production. Local fun in a clubby atmosphere with free cookies, decaf coffee and popcorn, and a full, cash bar.

Give my regards to Broadway, but you won’t be seeing me in many a day.

If You Want Great Fish and Chips, Try New England

Rightly, you think the national dish of Britain is fish and chips. Well, maybe not anymore.

It is increasingly hard to find fish and chips in Britain and Ireland. Not impossible, but harder than it was when there was a fish-and-chip shop, known as a chippie, almost on every corner.

The other shocking thing is that the fish and chips in the chippies, when you find them, are likely to be squeezed in with other fast food —hamburgers, sausages and even lasagna.

What you are more likely to find in every town or village is an Indian or Pakistani restaurant. In fact, I’ve read it argued that the national dish of England is no longer fish and chips, but curry and rice.

But I’m delighted to report that some of the best fish and chips to have crossed my plate in a long time are to be found in New England, particularly in Rhode Island. Almost every restaurant and bar has very good fish and chips. Excellent, in fact, but missing that standard of the British Isles version: mushy peas. You don’t have to have them with your battered cod in the U.K., but you’d be missing the full experience if you don’t.

Mushy peas are, as they sound, peas cooked to produce a mush. Sounds disgusting, eh? Well, they’re delicious.

Why, I wonder, with so much excellent haddock around, is there no smoked haddock to be had? Finnan haddie is just not on sale among the wonders of the sea in every supermarket. The Brits like to eat it at breakfast, and the French serve it as a main course. My wife, Linda Gasparello, who grew up in Hingham, Mass., says finnan haddie and cod cakes were regular offerings on South Shore menus.

Very good too. Ladies and gentlemen, start your smokers.

The Myth of the Frozen North

We moved to Rhode Island from the Washington, D.C. area five years ago and we still shuttle back and forth with some regularity. It is hard to be a journalist and not be drawn into the Washington maelstrom.

We sing the praises of Rhode Island as loudly as operatic stars. We go on about its great food, wonderful beaches, fabulous architecture and nice people.

But people in Washington, and elsewhere in the country, believe that we live in igloos, kept warm at night by a five-dog team of huskies. They believe the cold dominates our lives and that we drive Humvees to get through the snow.

It’s not an argument we have been able to win. But the fact is the climate in most of New England is much better than the climate down in the nation’s capital where the summers are insufferably hot and humid and the winters can be as cold as they are in Providence. There is less snow there, but everything ceases up when it does snow —usually a big one every year.

The pathological fear of cold keeps people away and living in worse climates. Pass the grog.

When the Light Fails — Modern Society’s Weakest Link

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Modern life has a woven-in thread of vulnerability that is peculiar to our times: electricity. It is the cardiovascular and nervous system of life across the world, more so in the Internet Age than even 30 years ago.

If the nation were to lose electricity, it would cause an instant and lethal paralysis that would go beyond inconvenience of the kind parts of New England have just experienced — and that left me charging my cell phone in my car.

Nonetheless, limited and scattered blackouts of the kind I have been caught in are a reminder of what alarmists (alarmists are unsettling, but not always wrong) have been warning. If there is no electricity, there is no light, no water, no sewage treatment, no gas and diesel, no heating and cooling — even gas and oil systems rely on electric pumps and fans. If such a blackout were sustained, slow death through starvation, or fast death through disease and armed gangs ravaging the cities and towns for food, would be the result.

A curtain-raiser is Puerto Rico. Just look to its agony: The mitigation is that there is help from the rest of the United States — imperfect and maybe inadequate, but still help.

In a national blackout, Canada and Mexico might be as affected, and the catastrophe would be complete.

Such a blackout — very unlikely but not inconceivable — is posited to come from a hostile power using a nuclear weapon targeting the special vulnerability that comes with electricity and computerization. The hostile power would not target cities, as in the past, but instead would detonate a nuclear bomb high in the atmosphere, creating an electromagnetic pulse (EMP), which would do the damage. It would cause destructive electric surges, fry electronics and render most things that support daily life in 2017 inoperable.

The phenomenon has been known since the earliest days of nuclear weapons development, during the World War II Manhattan Project. Atmospheric tests by both the United States and the Soviet Union in 1962 gave the world hard evidence. The new urgency comes because some believe North Korea would try such an assault as soon as it perfects its long-range intercontinental missile.

One of the people who takes the EMP threat seriously is nuclear proponent and public policy advocate Richard McPherson of Idaho. He has written to President Trump proposing that Puerto Rico become a test bed for an EMP-hardened electrical grid.

Engineers believe they know how to do this, but the cost would be prohibitive, according to experts I have interviewed at the Electric Power Research Institute and the Edison Electric Institute, respectively the research arm of the electric industry and its trade association.

Robin Manning, EPRI vice president of transmission and distribution infrastructure, says they are studying the EMPs and a progress report is expected in a few weeks.

To believe the North Korean theory, you have to accept that North Korea is run entirely by cartoonish characters like its president, Kim Jong-un, and that they wish to be destroyed in global retaliation, from Europe and even China.

A quieter and very knowledgeable voice comes from Siegfried Hecker, a former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. He has visited North Korea’s nuclear sites seven times and has seen some of their most secret installations, including their centrifuges. He has even been allowed to handle a container of plutonium, the raw material of thermonuclear devices.

In a speech at Brown University on Oct. 31, Hecker said that North Korean technology and science is very impressive, and the scientists and engineers running the nuclear program are not mad fanatics but very dedicated to their task. He does not see the small country as an existential threat to the United States, but it is a problem: a problem that must be tackled civilly, through conversation.

“We know nothing about this country and who controls their nuclear arsenal. We need to talk to them, and their denuclearization will come later,” Hecker said.

Meanwhile the long-term security of the electric system remains a national necessity, whether the threat is monster storms, cyberattack or EMPs.

Scott Aaronson, EEI executive director of security and business continuity, says a “holistic” approach for security, embracing all hypothetical disasters, not obsessing on one, is necessary.

The situation in Puerto Rico is not hypothetical. It is an American tragedy of enormous proportions here and now. It is also a frightening window into what can go wrong in this, the Electric Century.