The Blogfather

Westfield gets developed, we get open space

An Editorial in The Providence Journal this morning has the right slant on Otis;

"No one can accuse the Base Closure and Realignment Commission of being a rubber stamp for the Pentagon. In New England, at least, the BRAC rejected some of the Defense Department's proposed base closings, and so saved a major military presence in this part of the country.

Dollars and cents aside, this is probably a good thing. The Pentagon's proposed closings would have so concentrated defense work in "red states" -- states that had voted for George W. Bush -- that the Northeast's commitment to the national military mission might have been sorely undermined, and disruptive political bitterness aroused. This might not have been intentional, but the effect could have been divisive.

The largest New England facilities saved by the BRAC were the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, in Maine, and the Naval Submarine Base New London, in Connecticut -- each with thousands of jobs. Then, on its last day of deliberations, the BRAC unexpectedly reversed the Defense Department's proposed expansion of Hanscom Air Force Base, outside Boston, and voted to close Otis Air National Guard Base, on Cape Cod, with plans to send its fighter jets to Barnes Air National Guard Base, in Greater Springfield.

The last move left political leaders astonished. Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy called himself and others "baffled." "[I]t defies logic, it defies intuition, it defies understanding."

Militarily speaking, that may be so. Certainly, the closing of Otis must defy understanding by the more than 500 workers whose jobs will be moved to the Springfield area.

But from the commonwealth's strictly selfish view, the move might serve the long-term best interests of both Greater Springfield and Cape Cod. For whereas the Springfield area lags behind eastern Massachusetts in economic development, overdeveloped Cape Cod's greatest lack is open land.

Otis will apparently continue to serve the Coast Guard, which is part of the new Department of Homeland Security. But if the major Otis operations close, there is, with proper planning, a tremendous opportunity to set aside the huge tract formerly known as the Shawme State Forest for thoughtful environmental, residential and business uses.

Our political leaders need to recover from their bafflement and get to work planning for Otis's long-term future."

And Jack Coleman said it here first 

The above is one more example of this great newspaper's habit of getting ahead of the curve every time. It should be recalled, however, that cctoday's Jack Coleman had it right over a month before the rest of the world. See his April 15 story "Otis on notice" here.
 

A disaster awaits the next storm

NStar wires along Cape Cod's  roads are not ready for winter

As you drive around the cape, start looking up at the wires along which ever road you are on. Do they disappear into the trees? If so, you're looking at a disaster come the next winter storm, to say nothing of a hurricane.

A hurricane would be ten times worse

Perhaps you've never noticed the power lines and telephone wire along your street before. If so, let me assure you that they didn't look anything like the photo above which is along State Highway 28 between Chatham and Orleans.

Since before the NStar strike last Spring I have not seen a single NStar truck or any other company performing this vital, yearly task of removing the tree limbs which are dangerously close to power lines.

The minute the next winter storm hits with winds over 40 or 50 mph, those tree limbs will dance about until they start snapping wires. The fact that NStar has neglected this routine task is not simply an major inconvenience for consumers who will be left in the dark, it's enormously MORE costly to repair the damage AFTER the wires go down than to trim the trees before.

NStar's shareholder should be angry as hell

I called NStar's 800 number four times  a week ago, leaving four messages on voice mails which said the person was returning that day, August 2, 2005. I called again two days later to leave more messages, and finally, four days after I began I got a call from a Mike Durand who assured me I was wrong (despite the evidence of my eyes and camera), and promising that their arborist would contact me right away.

He didn't. Four days later I received the email below including a PR release attached. I won't bore you with the PR release, but here's the email. Judge for yourself.

Mike Durand
NSTAR Media Relations

NSTAR's tree maintenance program continued during the union strike. Our commitment during that time was to continue providing service to our customers regardless of the circumstances.

Our award-winning program benefits every town on Cape Cod. This year's towns include: Barnstable, Bourne, Brewster, Chatham, Chilmark, Dennis, Eastham, Edgartown, Falmouth, Harwich, Orleans, Provincetown and Truro.

This year alone, we are working on over 400 miles on Cape Cod. This commitment, along with addressing specific customer concerns, requires an average of 10 tree crews working daily on the Cape.

We encourage a discussion about our program and our proactive community outreach with local tree wardens and the National Arbor Day Foundation. Most recently, we've worked with tree wardens in Barnstable, Chatham, Falmouth and Orleans.

Attached is a press release we issued earlier this year about our receipt of the Tree Line USA award from the National Arbor Day Foundation. We've received this prestigious award in honor of our tree maintenance initiatives for five years in a row.

Bad News for Old Media

Below is a paragraph from a stunning five page feature article in Sunday's NY Times Book Review section by Judge Richard A. Posner. It's relevance to Cape Cod is increased by the loss of all Filene's advertising in local newspapers just this past Friday;. Here's Posner -

The latest, and perhaps gravest, challenge to the journalistic establishment is the blog. Journalists accuse bloggers of having lowered standards. But their real concern is less high-minded - it is the threat that bloggers, who are mostly amateurs, pose to professional journalists and their principal employers, the conventional news media. A serious newspaper, like The Times, is a large, hierarchical commercial enterprise that interposes layers of review, revision and correction between the reporter and the published report and that to finance its large staff depends on advertising revenues and hence on the good will of advertisers and (because advertising revenues depend to a great extent on circulation) readers. These dependences constrain a newspaper in a variety of ways. But in addition, with its reputation heavily invested in accuracy, so that every serious error is a potential scandal, a newspaper not only has to delay publication of many stories to permit adequate checking but also has to institute rules for avoiding error - like requiring more than a single source for a story or limiting its reporters' reliance on anonymous sources - that cost it many scoops.

It is more than worth the minute it takes to register at the Times site to read the rest of this article by a prominent Federal Judge,  and to convince you, here's another paragraph;

What really sticks in the craw of conventional journalists is that although individual blogs have no warrant of accuracy, the blogosphere as a whole has a better error-correction machinery than the conventional media do. The rapidity with which vast masses of information are pooled and sifted leaves the conventional media in the dust. Not only are there millions of blogs, and thousands of bloggers who specialize, but, what is more, readers post comments that augment the blogs, and the information in those comments, as in the blogs themselves, zips around blogland at the speed of electronic transmission. 

Richard A. Posner is a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School and, along with the economist Gary Becker, the author of The Becker-Posner Blog.

He has written many books including Preventing Surprise Attacks: Intelligence Reform in the Wake of 9/11 (2005), as well as books on the Clinton impeachment and Bush v. Gore. 

Read the complete article here.