Skyline Happenings

According to the Seattle times: The Seattle Public Library’s online catalog, e-books, Wi-Fi and public computers have all been taken offline Tuesday, as the agency investigates what it described as a ransomware event.

Thanks to Mary M. – here’s the update

• www.spl.org is back online. You can now once again access our Event Calendar, as well as some digital services, such as online versions of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post.
• Hoopla is accessible. Please note: If you borrow a Hoopla item that isn’t displaying properly, please try 1) logging out of your account and then log in again, or 2) try deleting and redownloading the Hoopla app.

The Library continues working to securely restore more technology services, such as e-books, computers, Wi-Fi, printing and more. We will update this space as progress is made.

May 28: Announcement to Patrons

Dear patrons,

In the early morning hours of Saturday, May 25 — just one day before we were prepared to take our systems offline to conduct planned maintenance on a server over Memorial Day weekend — the Library became aware of a ransomware event affecting our technology systems.

This disruption began impacting access to staff and public computers, our online catalog and loaning system, e-books and e-audiobooks, in-building Wi-Fi, and our website at www.spl.org.

The Library quickly engaged third-party forensic specialists, contacted law enforcement, and took our systems fully offline to interrupt and better assess the nature and impacts of the event. With our external partners, we continue to investigate the source of this disruption and are working as quickly and diligently as we can to confirm the extent of the impacts and restore full functionality to our systems. Privacy and security of patron and employee information are top priorities.

Until we can ensure the security of these systems, they will remain offline. We do not yet have an estimated time of resolution but will update you here as we are able to bring systems back online.

We are an organization that prides itself on providing you answers, and we are sorry that the information we can share is limited. At this time, securing and restoring our systems is where we are focused. We will update you in this space as we make progress on that work.

We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and understanding as we navigate this difficult situation.

We are still open and lending print books and other physical materials!

Despite these challenges, we intend to keep opening our doors as scheduled to welcome you in. You are invited to enjoy our spaces; check out our physical books, CDs and DVDs (using paper forms); and get your reference and referral questions answered to the best of our ability.

Our hard-working staff, whose jobs have become more challenging without technology access, are ready and able to assist you to check out materials and use our spaces and amenities. Although you cannot currently place holds, you are welcome to pick up holds already on the shelves. (One tip: When you visit, please bring your physical library card or library card number.)

You can find our current open hours schedule on this page.

Please hold on to your materials a little while longer

Because we cannot currently check physical materials back into our catalog, we encourage you to hold onto them a bit longer. The Library does not charge daily late fines for overdue materials. Once we get back online, we will update due dates for materials.

We apologize in advance that wait times will be impacted as we work to manage a backlog of returned and newly delivered items.

Students from Columbia’s School of Professional Studies attend their graduation ceremony on May 10, 2024, in New York City. The college’s main commencement ceremony was canceled amid pro-Palestinian protests on campus. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago via Getty Images)

The commencement speech you need to hear.

By Robert Parham in The Free Press (thanks to Ed M.). Before joining the McIntire faculty, Professor Parham was head of the cybersecurity academy at the Israeli intelligence corps, and a cybersecurity product manager at Microsoft. He also helped found MUV Interactive, an Israeli Internet-of-Things startup, and is a consultant to several other startups.

If you are graduating from college this year, I suspect you’re not too familiar with George Carlin. So before you become inflamed about the (intentionally) harsh title, let me tell you I plagiarized it from Carlin, who was one of the best American comedians of the last 100 years. His show You Are All Diseased is available on YouTube, and it is so good that I was willing to start by alienating you a bit just to plug it here. You’re welcome. It is especially recommended if you’re in any kind of altered state of mind.

Speaking of states of mind: I’m worried about yours.

Rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide among people your age in the U.S. are skyrocketing. I myself lost a student to suicide a few years ago—an experience I wish on no one. I’m here to tell you that I think it’s partly our (your professors’) fault. We, along with others, have been feeding you a distorted view of the world and your place in it, and I think this has caused a considerable part of the existential angst you all feel.

But I’m not just aiming to point fingers.

I want to lay a vision of the present and future, which I genuinely believe and yet know many of you don’t share. After all, exposing you to unfashionable ideas is a core part of a healthy education. My deeper hope in doing so is to start a conversation on changing this sad state of affairs and to get you on your way to a happy and healthy life. Isn’t that what commencements are all about?

Whenever I speak with my students—I teach at the University of Virginia—they seem deeply pessimistic about the state of the world. We all know the reasons. Climate change is going to kill us all; late-stage capitalism is running amok; inequality is at an all-time high; racism and bigotry are rampant; gender-nonconforming and queer people are under unprecedented attack; economic anxiety has never been worse; AI is coming for our jobs; and on and on and on.

I then pose a simple thought experiment to them: If you were given a time machine that could take you back to any period in the last 12,000 years—since the dawn of civilization—when would you rather live? (continued)

You see, I believe we currently live in the golden age of humanity. Things have never been better for human beings. Yet it seems we have never felt worse about our prospects. 

If you’re a woman, go back more than about 100 years and you become property (of your father and, later, your husband), with no voting rights and little protection under the law. If you’re a person with above-average melanin levels, like me, the same (and worse) happens to you. Gender-nonconforming minorities would find the past just as terrible. 

Based on every objective measure of well-being—safety, health, wealth—if you are a college student in America today you are better off and wealthier than the king of England was 300 years ago. You have better access to education, entertainment, leisure, and healthcare. You have cleaner water and more abundant food. You have a significantly safer and longer life. And you have access to all of the world’s knowledge, including this piece, in the palm of your hand.

And it’s not just you. Throughout recorded history, the vast majority of humans lived in what we would today define as abject, dehumanizing poverty. Income and wealth inequality were measurably worse than they are today by orders of magnitude. Women died during childbirth at staggering rates. Most humans didn’t survive childhood. And various forms of subjugation and slavery were the norm in nearly all societies. On these and a variety of other objective metrics, humanity has made breathtaking progress in the past 300 years. 

Which then raises the question: Why? Why is it that “everything is amazing and nobody is happy”?

Let’s go back to comparing you with the king of England. If you’re anything like my students—I’ve tried that line on them, too—you felt that something was off with that statement. How can it be that you’re better off than the king of England? You certainly don’t feel better off, do you?

We economists call this phenomenon “relative wealth concerns” or “keeping up with the Joneses.” These are just fancy terms to describe a simple psychological fact: we are constantly busy comparing ourselves to our peer group and feel bad when we fall short in that comparison. 

Peer group is an essential term in the previous sentence. No one cares that they’re enormously better off than their grandparents; they just care that they’re worse off than Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk. You don’t feel wealthy, despite the fact the median human lives on the equivalent of $5,000 per year. Yes, you read that right. Imagine if you lived in the U.S. but spent only $5K a year at current U.S. prices, and you’ve imagined the life of the median human today. Your “peer group” isn’t humanity; it’s social media influencers and billionaires, and you are deeply unsatisfied when comparing your lives to theirs.

You live in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, yet you feel economic anxiety. The late Charlie Munger summarized it succinctly: “The world is not driven by greed. It’s driven by envy.” And in this era of instantaneous communication networks and social media, envy has been put into hyperdrive. 

But envy has also been transformed and rebranded. Once a deadly sin, it became a virtue. We call it “fairness” (or sometimes “equity”) now and concentrate our attention on all the ways the world is “unfair.” Mostly the ways that lead to others in our peer group having more than us.

The world is unfair. Deeply so. It’s just that you’re the lucky ones. You won the birth lottery. 

In a truly fair world, any dollar you make or spend above $5,000 a year would instead be given to someone else. Maybe a poor Kenyan, or Bangladeshi, or Indian. But that’s not the kind of fairness and equity anyone talking about “fairness” and “equity” around you seeks. 

You’ve been lied to. You’ve been told by the media, social networks, and not least your professors, that this fantastic world we live in is evil. Not only that, you’ve been told it’s your fault. You’re too racist, too greedy, too white, too privileged, not sufficiently attuned to the plight of the marginalized. It is not enough to be non-racist, they say; you must be anti-racist. Anything less than that, and you’re complicit in evil. Some of you are better by default due to some accidents of birth; some of you are worse. Small wonder you feel suffocated, anxious, and depressed. Any human, weighed down with this responsibility and guilt, would be just as down. The cognitive dissonance of being told colonialism is evil, American slavery is uniquely evil, that wealth and the markets that enable it are evil, while going to school at a top-tier U.S. institution built on “Monacan land” using slave labor would incapacitate anyone.

The people pushing these ideas may have meant well. I like to give people the benefit of the doubt. But we’ve seen more than enough to know that the outcomes of this worldview are terrible. And yet many of your professors keep reinforcing these harmful lies.

I know that from seven years of teaching juniors at UVA about markets. My first class of the semester is titled “What Is Money?” A deceptively simple question, but simple questions are the most interesting. We discuss the emergence of “barley-backed” money in ancient Sumer; the idea that money is memory of past services rendered; the inherent positive-sum aspect of exchange in free markets, in which by definition both sides to a transaction become better off as a result (why would they both agree to it otherwise?); and the mind-bending idea that when they look around them in the classroom, everything they see, except naked humans, was made by a corporation. To a first approximation, corporations produce all the things and humans consume all the things. And we’re always very rude to them. That seems mighty ungrateful of us.

We also discuss wealth, or the accumulation of money. As a refugee, my family’s “balance sheet” zeroed out in my early life. The money I have today was willingly given to me in exchange for my services, which luckily appear to be in fairly high demand. I taught my students, and they gave me proof commemorating my service to them. I then, of my free will, asked Tesla for the services of a car and passed on some of that proof-of-service to them, to commemorate their service to me. So did many others, with their own hard-earned proof-of-service. We’re better off, Tesla is better off, its employees and suppliers are better off, and so are their employees and suppliers. When my students ask, “Why do Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have so much money?” I answer, “Because we gave it to them, willingly.” They created highly coveted services and managed to secure a teensy fraction of the value they created for other humans.

Without fail, at the end of the class a few students tell me that the content of the course was diametrically opposed to what they had been taught so far. Prior, they had class discussions about the exploitative nature of the market system and its inherent unfairness; the evil and greed of corporations; and the fight of exploited workers against oppressive capitalists. 

I point out to them that these paradigms imply a zero-sum world in which wealth can only be created by taking it from others, whereas they live in the positive-sum world of markets, in which wealth is created by exchange. Markets have deposited a magic wand in their hands, which allows them to freeze moments in time, observe what is currently happening in foreign lands, and conjure loved ones for a face-to-face conversation out of thin air. Kings would have given half their kingdom for such a wand, but now anyone can have it for the low, low price of $69.99 per month. Or about five hours of student work. This is how we got wealthy.

They were told that the wealth of men like Musk and Bezos, and, incidentally, theirs, is ill-gotten (despite the fact it was willingly given to them by other humans). That it was somehow taken from its rightful owners, the oppressed, whoever they may at that moment be. And that this oppressor-oppressed mindset applies more widely, to other realms of human interaction. Because of accidents of birth, pigmentation, and privilege, they are oppressing others. Hence they, the oppressors, must yield the floor to the oppressed, as they have already caused “enough harm.” 

My students arrive at my class steeped in zero-sum ideas, in which one person’s gain must be another person’s loss, and the only way to get a thing is by “oppressing” it from someone else. Then, they are shocked to hear heretical ideas about a world in which wealth is created, not stolen, and human interactions can be win-win and make all of us immensely well-off. The dissonance is severe, and they’re unsure how to deal with all the shame and guilt accumulated by years of accused “oppression.”

I hence want to close by telling you, the class of 2024: it’s not your fault. You are not evil. Being white / black / privileged / downtrodden / well-educated / illiterate / wealthy / poor / healthy / sickly / cisgendered / non-conforming does not make you bad (or good, for that matter). The sins of your forefathers are not your own. You did nothing wrong by being born. Yes, aiming to improve the state of human affairs is noble, but choosing instead to study, play games, and make out with the cute person you have your eye on does not make you bad. It makes you a normal, healthy human being. And no one seems to bother to tell you that. So there, I said it. You are not subject to the “original sin.” Go forth and have a happy and healthy life. There is still (much) room for progress, but things are currently better than they’ve ever been, and improving fast. 

Or as Carlin put it, in his direct way: “Life gets really simple once you cut out all the bullshit they teach you in school.”

Oh, and one last thing: you might wonder why am I saying such heretical things in public. It’s because I committed to it as part of my Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB) goals for the year. 

All professors at UVA have a yearly review, covering goals in the all-important fields of teaching and research excellence as well as the recently added “DEIB goals.” The specific DEIB question on my annual review was “Outline your priorities and plans for the coming year, including your specific goals to help foster Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging within the School and within your classroom.”

Here’s what I had to say about that:

1. Why is this category still here?
2. I’m one of the most diverse faculty members here (a refugee, veteran, immigrant, person-with-above-average-melanin, and the proud owner of the only mezuzah at McIntire), and I aspire to include all of my students and give them a feeling they belong. Yet, possibly the thing most diverse about me is my opinion in the next point:
3. Diversity is great, inclusion is amazing, we should all feel like we belong here, but the only interpretation of Equity I’ve had rigorously defined is stock equity in a company. The main meaning of the word I could find seems to be adjacent to equality of outcomes, which I hold to be anti-liberal and deeply misguided.
4. My DEIB goal for 2024 is to help abolish the DEIB establishment at UVA.

I think I’ve done really well on my DEIB goal for the year with this piece. They’ll probably give me a raise after that, don’t you think? At the very least, no one will accuse me of telling you only what you want to hear. And maybe a few of you will actually heed my advice. If that’s the case, it was all worth it.

Robert Parham is an assistant professor at the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce; follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @kn_owled_ge. Watch Jerry Seinfeld give his Duke commencement speech here.

Thanks to Pam P.

QUEENS, NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)—In what has become a Memorial Day tradition for him, on Monday Donald J. Trump laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Podiatrist.  

Trump made his annual pilgrimage to pay homage to the heroic doctors who issued bogus diagnoses to ensure that their privileged patients never answered the call of duty.

In an emotional tribute, Trump thanked the fallen foot specialists who bravely risked their medical licenses so that others facing military service could be free.

Choking back tears, he said, “They gave everything so people like me could give nothing.”

by Robert Reich in Substack

Friends,

Not since Theodore Roosevelt ran against William Howard Taft in 1912 have voters been able to weigh the records of two men who have done the job of president.

The mystery is why Americans have more positive views of Donald J. Trump’s policies than they do of Joe Biden’s.

You and I both know that polls this far before an election are almost worthless. Even on the eve of an election, they’re mostly baloney. (Polling generated by HuffPost on Election Day 2016 concluded that Hillary Clinton had a 98 percent chance of beating Trump.)

Nonetheless, I confess that last week’s polls — The New York Times/Siena poll of seven swing states showing Joe Biden losing to Trump due to the economy, the FT/Michigan Ross survey finding voters trust Trump more on the economy than Biden (43 percent to 35 percent), Gallup’s showing that Americans’ confidence in Biden to do the right thing for the economy is among the lowest Gallup has measured for any president since 2001, and a Politico–Morning Consult poll finding Trump and Biden statistically tied on who did more to boost infrastructure — gave me pause.

When this many polls show the same thing, the thing they show deserves attention.

So let me attend to it.

First, I’ll give you the facts. Then I’ll try to explain why the facts aren’t getting through to voters. Finally, what I believe Biden and his allies must do.

1. The facts.

Under Trump the economy lost 2.9 million jobs. Under Biden, it has gained 15 million, so far.

Under Trump, the unemployment rate rose by 1.6 percentage points to 6.3 percent. Under Biden, unemployment has remained under 4 percent for the longest stretch in over 50 years. Working-age women are being employed at a record rate, and wages are rising for American workers.

In 2016, candidate Trump campaigned against the trade deficit with China. He called it “theft” and even used the term “rape” to describe it. In 2016, the U.S. goods trade deficit with the China was near $350 billion. In the first three years of the Trump administration (before COVID-19), it worsened, averaging almost $379 billion per year.

Under Biden, America’s trade deficit with China has improved dramatically — falling by $103 billion, or 27 percent, to $279 billion. It’s the lowest bilateral deficit in goods since 2010.

Under Biden, the stock market has soared. On Friday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 40,000 for the first time in history, exceeding the market’s annualized return under Trump.

Under Trump, the national debt rose from about $19.9 trillion to about $27.8 trillion, an increase of about 39 percent, and more than in any other four-year presidential term. It happened mainly because of Trump’s enormous tax cuts for wealthy Americans and big corporations. (continued)

Tomorrow is Memorial Day, the day Americans have honored since 1868, when we mourn those military personnel who have died in the service of the country—that is, for the rest of us. 

For me, one of those people is Beau Bryant.

When we were growing up, we hung out at one particular house where a friend’s mom provided unlimited peanut butter and fluff sandwiches, Uno games, iced tea and lemonade, sympathetic ears, and stories. She talked about Beau, her older brother, in the same way we talked about all our people, and her stories made him part of our world even though he had been killed in World War II 19 years before we were born.

Beau’s real name was Floyston, and he had always stepped in as a father to his three younger sisters when their own father fell short.

When World War II came, Beau was working as a plumber and was helping his mother make ends meet, but in September 1942 he enlisted in the Army Air Corps. He became a staff sergeant in the 322nd Bomber Squadron, 91st Bomb Group, nicknamed “Wray’s Ragged Irregulars” after their commander Colonel Stanley T. Wray. By the time Beau joined, the squadron was training with new B-17s at Dow Army Airfield near Bangor, Maine, and before deploying to England he hitchhiked three hours home so he could see his family once more.

It would be the last time. The 91st Bomb Group was a pioneer bomb group, figuring out tactics for air cover. By May 1943 it was experienced enough to lead the Eighth Air Force as it sought to establish air superiority over Europe. But the 91st did not have adequate fighter support until 1944. It had the greatest casualty rate of any of the heavy bomber squadrons.

Beau was one of the casualties. On August 12, 1943, just a week before his sister turned 18, while he was on a mission, enemy flak cut his oxygen line and he died before the plane could make it back to base. He was buried in Cambridge, England, at the Cambridge American Cemetery and Memorial, the military cemetery for Americans killed in action during WWII. He was twenty years old.

I grew up with Beau’s nephews and nieces, and we made decades of havoc and memories. But Beau’s children weren’t there, and neither he nor they are part of the memories.

Thinking about our untimely dead is hard enough, but I am haunted by the holes those deaths rip forever in the social fabric: the discoveries not made, the problems not solved, the marriages not celebrated, the babies not born.

I know of this man only what his sister told me: that he was a decent fellow who did what he could to support his mother and his sisters. Before he entered the service, he once spent a week’s paycheck on a dress for my friend’s mother so she could go to a dance.

And he gave up not only his life but also his future to protect American democracy against the spread of fascism.

I first wrote about Beau when his sister passed, for it felt to me like another kind of death that, with his sisters now all gone, along with almost all of their friends, soon there would be no one left who even remembered his name.

But something amazing happened after I wrote about him. People started visiting Beau’s grave in England, leaving flowers, and sending me pictures of the cross that bears his name.

So he, and perhaps all he stood for, will not be forgotten after all.

May you have a meaningful Memorial Day.

Spring Fling at Skyline

Ed Note: For my personal take, click here.

by Sunita Puri in the New Yorker

Shortly after his sixty-seventh birthday, Ernesto Chavez retired from his job at a Los Angeles food warehouse. Sara, his wife of forty-five years, told me that he meticulously took his medications for high blood pressure and cholesterol, hoping to enjoy his time with his grandchildren. But one morning in January, 2021, Ernesto burned with fever, his chest heaving as though he were once again lifting heavy boxes. At the hospital, he tested positive for covid-19. His oxygen levels plummeted, and he was quickly intubated. Ten days later, his lungs were failing, his face was bloated from litres of intravenous fluid, and his hands and feet had begun to cool. As his chances of survival waned, I arranged to speak with his family about a subject inseparable from death itself: cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR.

For decades, physicians have debated whether CPR should be offered to people who suffer from the final blows of incurable illness, be it heart failure, advanced cancer, or dementia. Although CPR has become synonymous with medical heroism, nearly eighty-five per cent of those who receive it in a hospital die, their last moments marked by pain and chaos. The pandemic only deepened the risks: every chest compression spewed contagious particles into the air, and intubation, which often follows compressions, exposed doctors to virus-laden saliva. Hospitals in Michigan and Georgia reported that no covid patient survived the procedure. An old question acquired new urgency: Why was CPR a default treatment, even for people as sick as Ernesto?

As a palliative-care physician, I help people with serious, often terminal, illness consider a path forward. During the pandemic, this involved weekly Zoom meetings with each family whose loved one was in the I.C.U. with covid. We discussed how the virus could damage the lungs irreversibly, how we gauged a patient’s condition, and what we would do if, despite being on life support, that patient died. (continued)

The billionaire Rob Hale gave the 1,200 graduates of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth a gift, and asked them to give, too.

By Jenna Russell in the NYT

Until the final minutes of their commencement ceremony last Thursday, the 1,200 graduates of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth thought they knew what they would remember most about it: the supremely bad weather during the outdoor ceremony, where they sat drenched and shivering in a torrential rainstorm.

Then, as they prepared to collect their diplomas, their commencement speaker, Rob Hale, a billionaire philanthropist from Boston, returned to the dripping podium. He brought along two cash-stuffed duffel bags, he announced, and would hand every graduate $1,000 as they crossed the stage — $500 to keep for themselves, and $500 to give to any good cause.

“My friends and I were looking at each other like, no way,” Ali McKelvey, one of the students, said. “We were like, this has to be a joke.”

It wasn’t. Mr. Hale, the co-founder and chief executive of Granite Telecommunications, ranks as one of the country’s wealthiest people and most generous benefactors. He and his wife, Karen, gave away $1 million every week in 2022, to both well-known and unheard-of causes.

Still, as he told the graduates at UMass Dartmouth, he has never forgotten the experience of losing everything, when the first company he built went bankrupt in the dot-com crash more than 20 years ago.

Since that disaster, he said in an interview this week, he and his wife have found deep joy and satisfaction in giving their money away. In granting college students a chance to experience the same feeling, he said he hoped to light a spark that they will carry with them — even if he had no guarantee that they will honor his request. (He said he believes the vast majority do.)

“If they get to feel that joy themselves, then maybe it becomes something they want to do again, and make part of their own lives,” Mr. Hale, 57, said. “In America and the world, these are times of turmoil, and the more we help each other, the better off we’ll be.”

In the week since a businessman they had never met handed them two damp envelopes onstage — one labeled “GIFT” and the other “GIVE” — the new graduates have packed up dorm rooms, fine-tuned résumés and snapped last campus selfies. They have also pondered where to send what for most will be the largest charitable gift they have ever had the chance to give.

Tony da Costa, a graphic design major who graduated with high honors, considered giving his $500 to a charitable organization but decided instead to hand it over to an acquaintance of his mother, someone he has never met, who is suffering from an illness and struggling to pay bills.

“I felt like giving it to a specific person would feel better,” said Mr. da Costa, 22, who grew up in the town of Dartmouth, on the southern coast of Massachusetts not far from Cape Cod.

Kamryn Kobel, an English major, gave her $500 to the Y.W.C.A. in Worcester, Mass., where she learned to swim as a child, to support its programs for young women and survivors of violence.

Her donation felt like something to be proud of, she said — once it sank in that the envelopes she tucked under her rain poncho contained exactly what Mr. Hale had promised.

“At first, it was like, is there really going to be cash in there?” she said. “And then it was like, oh my God, it’s for real.”

Smaller and less well known than the university’s flagship campus in Amherst, UMass Dartmouth enrolls about 5,500 undergraduates, more than half of them first-generation college students. Eighty percent come from Massachusetts; 80 percent receive financial aid.

It is the fourth Massachusetts college campus in the last four years where Mr. Hale has thrilled graduates with his signature split gift. Each time, he has selected a public school with high concentrations of first-generation and lower-income students who have “worked their tails off to get there,” he said.

Last spring, he distributed the graduation gifts at the Boston campus of UMass, where 66 percent of incoming students identify as people of color.

Last spring at Deerfield Academy, a private high school in western Massachusetts with a more affluent enrollment, he put the focus solely on philanthropy, depositing funds in a school-directed trust so that each graduate could give away $1,000. Mr. Hale, who grew up in nearby Northampton, graduated from Deerfield in 1984 and went on to Connecticut College.

In an interview on Wednesday, he briefly grew emotional describing how one of the UMass Dartmouth graduates had given her $500 to a local group that provides holiday gifts for children in need — a program that had helped her family when she was a child.

“Seeing things like that is very cool,” he said.

Ms. McKelvey, 21, donated her $500 to a women’s shelter in her hometown of Ashland, Mass., west of Boston, inspired by classes she had taken for her interdisciplinary major, health and society, where she learned about the struggles of disadvantaged women.

“I remember sitting in some of those classes and thinking, ‘Someone needs to do something about that,’” she said. “And now I have the opportunity to do something.”

By Richard Buck – Special to The Seattle Times

The latest financial report on Social Security portrays a dire future of supposedly inevitable benefit cuts of 21%, starting in 2033, as the system continues to pay out more each year than it takes in.

This impending “crisis” has been well-known in government circles for at least 40 years. And so has a simple and fair solution: Stop giving workers with sky-high earnings a (nearly) free ride.

Right now, most workers are taxed 6.2% of their wages, but only on the first $168,600 they earn. After that, their Social Security obligation is done. That means the maximum annual contribution is $10,458.

Internal Revenue Service figures suggest that 10% of U.S. workers earn more than $170,000 a year. Those workers contribute less of their pay than the rest of us, yet they’ll most likely receive above-average benefits.  

A simple two-part solution could extend the life of Social Security as we know it for many decades. 

First, eliminate the $168,600 cap on wages subject to the tax. This is fair to everyone. 

Second, apply the 6.2% payroll tax to the total compensation of highly paid
C-suite executives. Despite their massive earnings and in some cases ridiculously high pensions, they will happily collect Social Security benefits, which currently max out at about $58,000 a year. This is money that they certainly will not need.

Think of Boeing’s CEO, Dave Calhoun. His total compensation last year was reportedly $32.8 million (a figure Boeing contests). Boeing most likely deducted $10,453 in Social Security payroll tax from his base salary of $1.4 million — and contributed its own share, for a total of $20,906.

Had he paid the same share of his total compensation as the average employee, it would have cost him $86,800 — an expense he certainly could have afforded.

Undoubtedly, Boeing and many other companies would easily find ways to circumvent such a change in the law. They could cap a CEO’s “salary” at $100,000, for example, and pay the rest in some form of compensation not subject to the Social Security tax. 

But an easy-to-understand second change would save employers all that trouble: Apply the payroll tax to executives’ total annual compensation as reported to the Securities and Exchange Commission — figures that every year are eagerly reported by the press.    

In Calhoun’s case, 6.2% of that $32.8 million would amount to a little more than $2 million. Certainly, he would feel that. But as a percentage of his compensation, the sting would be no worse than that felt by Boeing’s approximately 170,000 employees. 

Boeing would find a way to compensate him for this, and that compensation would be subject to Social Security tax as well. A win-win situation.

These two simple proposals would not fix the underlying problem with Social Security, which was designed when most people died before they could collect much, if any, of its benefits. And they might be politically impossible. 

But they would go a long way toward postponing any benefit cuts, and I believe they would give the overwhelming majority of workers a sense that they were being treated more fairly. 

Richard Buck was a Seattle Times business reporter from 1977 to 1997. Now retired, he lives in West Seattle.

From Buzznet – thanks to Bob P.

Over two million tourists visit Alaska every year, and many go hiking. But some of these hikes are dangerous. A deaf college student went on a hike alone and fell 700 feet down a mountain. What she found was that there was something else down there, too. Here is the unexpected story of how she was rescued.

A College Student’s Vacation Went Wrong

Amelia Milling was a college student at the Rochester Institute of Technology. That year she decided to spend some of her summer break on vacation in Alaska.

Although Milling is deaf, she is more than capable of handling a solo journey. The student flew from her native state of Tennessee to Anchorage, one of Alaska’s largest cities.

A Treacherous Three-Day Hike

While on vacation, Milling decided to hike the Crow Pass Trail. The trail, which is 30 miles south of Anchorage, is a three-day hike.

Crow Pass cuts through the scenic Chugach State Park. In June, the weather climbs over 50°F and the skies clear. It was the perfect time for that hike.

She Was Well Prepared For This Difficult Hike

Milling packed everything she needed for the hike: food, water, clothes, a tent, a sleeping bag, and other hiking gear. She even bought trekking poles, which act as a separate set of limbs that help people keep their balance.

Although Crow Pass is gorgeous, it is also challenging. The terrain can be rough, and the weather can change unpredictably.

A Lovely Day Of Hiking Quickly Went South (continued)

Thanks to Mike C.

Rep. Byron Donalds’s medical education consists of a bachelor’s degree in finance and marketing from Florida State University. But the Florida Republican played a doctor on TV over the weekend, telling Fox News host Maria Bartiromo that, after examining President Biden, he suspects the president is receiving a secret medication that makes him appear to be sharp-witted and totally on the ball.

“The American people need to understand if they’re giving him some injection so that he can actually look like he’s coherent,” Donalds said.

Dr. Donalds seemed not to have considered the obvious possibility that Biden looks like he’s cogent and clear because he is cogent and clear. Still, the good doctor’s diagnosis raises some key questions that must be considered:

There is a shot that cures incoherence in one dose? How can I get some? Why has nobody thought to give it to Kevin McCarthy all these years? And why, for that matter, doesn’t Dr. Donalds, who seems to think he should be Donald Trump’s running mate, inject his prospective boss with the stuff? Just last week, Trump’s attempt at saying “carried out by radical Democrats” came out as “carried owby rgbgb tdai.” (continued)

Thanks to Diana T. – from the The Dementia Action Collaborative

“We are excited to invite you to a webinar that will make an impact: Partnering for Progress: Washington State’s Action Plan for Dementia. This webinar, offered on two separate days, provides insights into Washington state’s comprehensive plan to address dementia, ongoing actions and how you can contribute to this vital cause.

The webinar is designed for diverse audiences, including:

• People interested in understanding more about dementia initiatives in Washington state.
• Aging and Long-Term Care Providers seeking to enhance their support for individuals with dementia.
• Health Care Providers eager to stay abreast of training options and resources available for themselves or to share with people in their practice. 
• Public Health staff who want to promote brain health and the well-being of those impacted by dementia.

Key topics that we will cover include:

• Overview of Washington State’s Action Plan for Dementia.
• Current actions and initiatives are underway to support individuals with dementia and their families.
• Opportunities for collaboration and involvement to enhance dementia care and support systems.

We believe that participating in this webinar will deepen your understanding of dementia-related efforts in our state and empower you to make meaningful contributions toward improving the lives of those affected by dementia.

No pre-registration required. Please mark your calendars and join a webinar on one of the dates below. Your active participation is crucial in creating a more dementia-friendly and supportive community.

📅 Webinar Date – Mark your calendar, save the link below and use it to join us

• 10 – 11:30 a.m. June 4, 2024 –  Join Zoom Meeting Thank you for being committed to this vital cause. We look forward to you joining us for these engaging and informative sessions.”

Thanks to Pam P.

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean —
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down —
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Comments by SALT: The most famous lines of this poem are the last two: they’re taped to mirrors and pinned to cork boards and framed in embroidery and on and on — and sure enough, they’re lines worth remembering. But the heart of the poem is a couple of lines earlier: “Tell me, what else should I have done?” What else, that is, besides “falling down in the grass, being idle and blessed, strolling through the fields all day.” At its heart, this poem is a little revolution, a provocative question mark beside the conventional answers to the query, What makes for a day well lived? How should I spend this “summer day”? This summer day, I mean — the one we’re in right now. The one we’ll live in tomorrow.

Oliver’s potentially life-changing proposition is that we very well may need to rethink what a “productive day” looks like. It may look a lot less like a day tied to screens and email and housework and errands and getting things done, and a lot more like the simple, astonishing affair of getting to know a grasshopper. This grasshopper, I mean. And if we remember that not everyone today has the opportunity to take a day in the fields to be “idle and blessed,” then this poem may redouble our efforts to build a world in which everyone — everyone! — has the occasional time and space to stroll through the fields, “wild and precious,” holding out a little sugar in our hand.

From crosscut.com

The King County Council greenlit a proposal that will boost the minimum wage in unincorporated King County to $20.29 an hour, one of the highest in the country.

Councilmembers Girmay Zahilay, Rod Dembowski, Teresa Mosqueda and Jorge L. Barón co-sponsored the measure, which aims to lift wages in unincorporated areas to match those of nearby cities. For example, the current minimum wage is $16.28 an hour in Skyway, a county neighborhood next to the city of Tukwila, which has a minimum wage of $20.29. Seattle’s minimum wage is $19.97 per hour and the state’s is $16.28. 

This ordinance impacts only unincorporated areas of King County, and would not include cities like Redmond or Bellevue that abide by the state’s minimum wage, or cities like Renton, where voters recently set a city minimum wage of $20.29, which starts in July.

The proposal, which would also need a signature from King County Executive Dow Constantine, would take effect on Jan. 1, 2025, and could be subject to increase based on inflation at that time. 

There would be exceptions for small businesses with lower revenues and fewer employees. Businesses with 15 or fewer employees and an annual gross revenue of less than $2 million would be allowed to pay employees $17.29 an hour, $3 less than the proposed legislation. This difference would decrease annually by 50 cents until there is no difference in 2030. 

Businesses with 15 or fewer workers but have an annual gross revenue of $2 million or greater, and businesses with more than 15 but fewer than 500 employees, would have an hourly minimum wage of $18.29. This difference would decrease annually by $1 until there is no difference in 2026. 

Alex Wong/Getty Images

ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA (The Borowitz Report)—The wife of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito took “full responsibility” for the piles of men’s clothing that suddenly appeared on the couple’s front lawn Monday morning.

Neighbors awoke to an unusual spectacle outside the Alito residence, where an extensive wardrobe of men’s slacks, shirts and judicial robes had been dumped in a haphazard manner.

A frantic Justice Alito emerged from his home to collect the items and lower a pair of boxer shorts that had been flapping in the wind atop the flagpole. In a terse statement, Mrs. Alito said she was “sick and tired of wives being thrown under the bus,” adding, “If the Republicans go down to defeat in November, Sammy Boy will probably blame me for overturning Roe v. Wade.”

Thanks to Bob P. (Hope this doesn’t catch on to, but it might liven up a Mariner’s game)

By Amy Woodyatt and Jacob Lev, CNN

A furry pitch invader paused Major League Soccer play on Wednesday as a rogue raccoon ran onto the field during a match between the Philadelphia Union and New York City FC.

The athletic critter ran the length of the pitch at Subaru Park in Chester, Pennsylvania, deftly evading capture while sprinting stadium staff tried to apprehend it using a trash can.

“We need to find him a ball because he’s moving very well in the center of midfield,” a commentator quipped during the kerfuffle, adding that it was “entertainment of its own kind.”

Raquinho the raccoon was eventually captured and later released. Eric Hartline/USA TODAY Sports/Reuters

The match was paused for five minutes as crews tried and eventually succeeded in capturing the animal, dubbed “Raquinho the Raccoon” by MLS.

The Union sent out an update saying that the raccoon was “put in good hands” and was safely released.

“Unofficially, Raquinho the Raccoon spent 161 seconds on the field tonight, which was the most by a raccoon in @MLS history,” the league communications said in a post on X.

NYCFC went on to take the game 2-1 after a second-minute goal by Alonso Martínez and a Hannes Wolf free-kick in injury time in the first half.

Thanks to Bob P. — Agence France-Presse in Paris

‘Bakery scent’ added via microcapsules to postage stamp celebrating ‘jewel of French culture’

The French Post Office has released a scratch-and-sniff postage stamp to celebrate the baguette, once described by President Emmanuel Macron as “250 grams of magic and perfection”.

The stamp, which costs €1.96, depicts a baguette decorated with a red, white and blue ribbon. It has a print run of 594,000 copies.

According to the Parisian shop Le Carre d’encre, which sells it, the stamp has a “bakery scent”. The ink used on the stamps contains microcapsules which provide the fragrance.

It was released for sale on Friday, after a launch on Thursday, the day of Saint-Honoré, the patron saint of bakers and pastry chefs.

“The baguette, the bread of our daily lives, the symbol of our gastronomy, the jewel of our culture”, La Poste says on its website.

“This scent is encapsulated. We buy it from another manufacturer,” Damien Lavaud, printer at Philaposte, told France Bleu.

“And the difficulty for us is to apply this ink without breaking the capsules, so that the smell can then be released by the customer rubbing on the stamp.”

The French baguette was given Unesco heritage status in 2022

Thanks to Ann M. – from the Daily Art Magazine Newsletter

If you’ve witnessed someone fainting in front of great masterpieces, it could have been Stendhal Syndrome—an art lover’s sickness.

Stendhal Syndrome, also known as hyperkulturemia or Florence syndrome, is a psychosomatic disorder characterized by rapid heartbeat, dizziness, fainting, confusion, and even hallucinations when an individual is exposed to a collection of artworks perceived as exceptionally beautiful, often encountered in settings like art galleries or museums.

While not officially recognized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Stendhal Syndrome profoundly affects individuals. Some sufferers experience symptoms severe enough to necessitate hospitalization and even antidepressant medication. Florence’s Santa Maria Nuova Hospital often attends to tourists who feel dizzy or disoriented after admiring renowned works like Michelangelo’s David or the masterpieces of the Uffizi Gallery.

The syndrome gained its name in 1979 from Italian psychiatrist Graziella Magherini, who documented over 100 similar cases among visitors in Florence. It pays homage to the 19th-century French author Stendhal, who recounted his own encounter with the phenomenon during his 1817 journey to Florence in his book Naples and Florence: A Journey from Milan to Reggio.

Stendhal visited the Basilica of Santa Croce, where Niccolò Machiavelli, Michelangelo, and Galileo Galilei were buried. He also saw Giotto’s frescoes for the first time and was overwhelmed with emotion. He wrote:

I was in a sort of ecstasy, from the idea of being in Florence, close to the great men whose tombs I had seen. Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty… I reached the point where one encounters celestial sensations… Everything spoke so vividly to my soul. Ah, if I could only forget. I had palpitations of the heart, what in Berlin they call ‘nerves.’ Life was drained from me. I walked with the fear of falling.

Ecstasy, sublime beauty, celestial sensations… Have you ever experienced the Stendhal Syndrome?

Thanks to Mel B.

The Skyline Chorale will be performing songs from “South Pacific” on Wednesday evening, May 22 at 7:30 PM in the Performance Hall.  We are encouraging people to invite family members who might enjoy the show.  It is about an hour long and should be fun.

Thanks to Mary M. – for complete info click on this site: https://waterfrontparkseattle.org/the-park/

On the Waterfront news + happenings from Friends Alliums bloom at sunset by Pioneer Square Habitat Beach. Photo by Land Morphology. It’s hard to say if the sun is here to stay (after all, it is only May.)  What we do know is we’ll take this over the gray any day.  So come on down to this bay, enjoy that salty Puget spray,  catch a sunset before it goes away,  in this here world class park reclaimed from a former highway.  🌥⛅️🌤☀️ Construction Update:   Waterfront Park is transforming our downtown shoreline, with 20 acres of brand new public space filled with thousands of new plants and trees, incredible feats of civil engineering and landscape design, and beautiful public art – but there is even more than meets the eye!   Waterfront Park also contains some innovative environmental improvements, many of which are not visible from the surface. Marine habitat enhancements support our marine neighbors including nearshore fish migration corridor and Green Stormwater Infrastructure (GSI) that filters and cleans stormwater before it reaches the Puget Sound.    Check out this SDOT Blog post by our city partners at Waterfront Seattle to learn more about habitat improvements, and how continuing work on landscaping and pedestrian improvements are helping to keep Elliott Bay healthy. A photo of the seawall face which includes grooves and nooks to promote algae growth, shallow water and rock beds on the bay floor for fish to hide and forage at lower risk of predation, and a light-penetrating surface in the sidewalk above to provide light for marine plant growth and guidance for young salmon during their migration. Courtesy of the City of Seattle. The Free Waterfront Park Shuttle Returns!   What’s blue and orange, runs on a continuous loop in the downtown corridor, accessible and free for all, and back later this month? You guessed it, the Free Waterfront Park Shuttle is coming back to offer rides from Seattle Center, Belltown, Pioneer Square, the International District, and the waterfront. We’re excited to be managing the shuttle this year in partnership with the Seattle Historic Waterfront Association. Service will start on May 24 and span through September, so don’t miss out on free rides to all your favorite Seattle destinations! Last year, the Free Waterfront Park Shuttle offered over 14,000 free and accessible rides to visitors to the waterfront.   Pier Party 2024 July 26th, 5:30pm-9pm @ Pier 62   Tickets are now available for Pier Party, Friends of Waterfront Seattle’s 2nd annual fundraiser, featuring a night of inspiring art and performances, James Beard award winning food and drinks, and a look into the bright future of Seattle’s Waterfront Park! Get your tickets today and join us on July 26th for an unforgettable night! Events in the community:   Africatown’s Summer of Soul 2024 All summer long   Our friends and partners at Africatown Community Land Trust are celebrating Black excellence, resilience, and joy, all summer long! Kickoff the summer celebrations with Honoring our Black Wall Streets on May 27 with over 100 Black-owned businesses, live music, guest speakers, and more! Learn more!   Madaraka Festival  June 17th & 18th   Madaraka Festival is returning to Seattle for a Juneteenth celebration! If you attended any of One Vibe Media’s events at Pier 62 over the last couple of years you know they’re an incredible time, featuring internationally acclaimed East African musicians. Get your tickets. EBC will connect the parks along the Elliott Bay Waterfront with a new pedestrian and bicycle greenway trail and restore and revitalize Myrtle Edwards and Centennial parks.  Elliott Bay Connections    Our partners at DSA, the City of Seattle, and the Port of Seattle have launched a new website for the upcoming Elliott Bay Connections project that will connect, restore, and revitalize public parks along the Elliott Bay waterfront. Learn all about this exciting new project just north of Waterfront Park, and sign up for a live online presentation and Q&A on May 16th at 6pm!  Learn about EBC Follow us on Instagram See the latest and greatest Friends happenings and Waterfront Park news. We want to hear from you!   Take our survey to share your thoughts on our programming, public safety, and experience at Waterfront Park, and enter to win a $100 Visa gift card! View in browser Copyright (C) 2024 Friends of Waterfront Seattle.  All rights reserved.  You have received this email because you subscribed or are affiliated with Friends of Waterfront Seattle. Our mailing address is: 1201 Alaskan Wy #200, Seattle, WA 98101 Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe

Touching essay in the New England Journal of Medicine.

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Thanks to Ann M. who notes, “Tom Lehrer is now age 96—this performance brings back happy memories!”