CLOSE
Opinion

by -
0 1328

Last Friday, exactly 53 years ago to the day, a book was published that started by asking the question, “Is this all?” The book, written by Smith College graduate Betty Friedan, is called “The Feminine Mystique” and it is generally considered to have launched a revolution that changed society in America and around the world.

Friedan based the book on a survey she did of her classmates at their 15th reunion in 1957, at which she asked her telling question. At that time women were assumed to be content with their lives if they had a husband, a home and children. The answers she received proved otherwise. For this sample of women, that was resoundingly not enough, and from those answers and her own experience she began to advocate that women be educated not to get a husband but to be an individual. To women today, this thesis seems obvious, but at the time of her book, Friedan’s message was greeted with astonishment. She was overturning the role of women in society that had existed for pretty much all of recorded history.

The same week Friedan’s book came out, my husband and I were married in a beautiful wedding that my parents made for us in New York. That night, we flew to Chicago where my husband was finishing school. I immediately got a job to support us until he graduated and we returned to New York. Were Friedan’s words ringing in my ears? Hardly, for I had recently graduated from a college whose president had repeatedly delivered that same message. These were Barnard College President Millicent McIntosh’s words:

“Don’t make your goal in life simply to find a husband. You cannot know what lies ahead for you. You may not find that special person, you may get divorced or be widowed. Prepare yourself for the future by getting a good education.”

How true! I was able to support us in those early years because of my education and was able to carry on and care for my family after my husband died at an early age because of my solid identity. All widows eventually do this. It certainly helped to be prepared.

When the youngest of my three children started first grade in 1976, I launched my own business. It was the hometown newspaper you are now reading 40 years later. Within five years after I stepped back into the workplace, women had indeed “left their kitchens,” as Republican presidential candidate John Kasich controversially said this week, to get jobs outside the home. Some started businesses of their own. Some of those women, wives and mothers, helped me immeasurably to grow my business. Women were hungry for a creative role and an individual existence outside the home in addition to their meaningful work maintaining the family.

When more women began to work and the idea of wives earning salaries became more acceptable, the two-paycheck families became the norm. This in turn brought forth all sorts of new issues: latchkey children, gender equality in the workplace, redefinition of roles within marriage, glass ceilings, higher divorce rates, balancing work and family for women and men, the child care industry. All are familiar themes to us now.

In a way, my life and those of my contemporaries span the dramatic changes Friedan’s book and McIntosh spoke of, for we are living examples of those truths.

by -
0 1204

Recent headlines, displayed prominently on news sites around the world, were alarming, such as: “150,000 Adélie penguins killed by iceberg.” The stories suggested our flightless black-and-white friends were cut off by a Rhode Island-sized iceberg from their food supply. It was too late to save the “Happy Feet” characters. But the reality was anything but black and white.

“These headlines, while eye-popping, are not necessarily true,” said Heather Lynch, an assistant professor in the Stony Brook University Department of Ecology and Evolution. The stories came from a recent study, published in Antarctic Science. Lynch did not participate in the study, but is involved in monitoring penguin populations from satellites. “This idea that [these] penguins have perished doesn’t reflect the biology in hand,” she said. It will take “many years” before scientists are able to sort out the effect of this iceberg on penguin survivorship.

That’s because penguins can take a year or two off from breeding during unfavorable environmental conditions, which means that penguins displaced from breeding by an iceberg aren’t likely dead.

The scientists in the original study were linking the change in the breeding penguin population at Cape Denison — the site of a research station for famous Australian geologist and explorer Douglas Mawson about a century earlier — with the number of nesting pairs recorded after the arrival of iceberg B09B in 2010.

“There was some concern that there were dead chicks or frozen eggs at the site,” Lynch said. “We need to be cautious about interpreting that as evidence of some kind of catastrophic mortality event. There’s extremely high chick mortality rate under normal circumstances. That is the cycle of life.”

Reports about penguins losing habitat, breeding grounds or access to food typically lead to the kind of questions that were central to the “Happy Feet” story: What role do humans have in the process and what action, if any, is necessary to save the birds?

Kerry-Jayne Wilson, the lead author on the study and the chairperson of the West Coast Penguin Trust in New Zealand, offered some perspective.

“We did not suggest adult penguins had died,” she said in response to an email request for comment. “Some media outlet started” this rumor.

She said she believes most of the missing penguins are probably “out at sea, having assessed conditions as unsuitable for breeding.”

The authors sent out a clarifying press release in response to the stories: “It is unlikely many, if any, adult penguins have died as a result of this stranding event. This iceberg stranding event only affects Adélie penguins in the Commonwealth Bay area; the millions of Adélie penguins breeding around the rest of Antarctica are not affected.”

So, where did the story go wrong? For starters, a press release announcing the study used the headline: “Giant iceberg decimates Adélie penguin colonies.” The statement suggests that breeding has declined in the area, without indicating that 150,000 of Mr. Popper’s pals perished.

I turned to a representative at SBU’s Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science, which teaches scientists to make their research accessible to the public, to see if there are any lessons from this communication misfire.

Elizabeth Bass, director emerita of the center, suggested scientists needed to know their audience when sharing their research. “Be crystal clear about your findings,” she advised. In all the courses the center teaches, the message is to stress characterizing the work in a way that’s “not going to be misunderstood.”

Lynch is concerned that these type of stories, taken out of context, make it more difficult to share well-grounded science from future studies with policymakers.

“At some point, people stop listening and that’s what concerns me,” she said. “Real science whispers, it doesn’t shout.”

by -
0 1078

Laws governing sex offenders have turned a corner over the last year.

County and town governments recently lost the authority to regulate where registered sex offenders are allowed to live. That power now rests solely with New York State, which only limits offenders on parole or probation.

While we appreciate the good intention behind one state senator’s bill to let local governments enact their own residency restrictions, it is not ideal.

Part of the reason the local municipalities’ authority was overturned in the New York State Court of Appeals last year is that there were too many layers of restrictions.

In just our area alone, both Suffolk County and the Town of Brookhaven had their own separate restrictions on where registered sex offenders could reside in their jurisdictions.

There should be laws that prevent sex offenders from living within certain distances from schools or their victims, but allowing each county, town or village to decide on their own creates a mishmash of rules that are nearly impossible to follow. When this is the process, there are counties and towns next door to one another, or even overlapping, with different rules. That makes it more difficult for sex offenders to comply, and it would benefit us all if offenders are more able to actually comply with the laws we have enacted. In addition, clean-cut laws that are easy to identify, and thus follow, would also likely bring peace of mind to their victims, who deserve to feel safe.

The onus should be on the state to design more comprehensive restrictions on where registered sex offenders can live. That system should include required distances from victims’ homes and places of employment, as well as schools, playgrounds and other places where children gather. And the regulations should vary slightly based upon a community’s density, so as not to treat urban, suburban and rural areas as if they are the same.

Although more state regulation is not always an appealing idea, this is one of those cases when we need the state to intervene, in order to make enforcement more uniform. And it is an important issue, because it has an immediate impact on our children and on the sex crime victims we have a moral responsibility to protect.

by -
0 234

This past Monday was Presidents Day, and we might have been thinking of our great presidents, if we were thinking of them at all in the midst of a vacation day, as being larger than life. However, in a recent biography of George Washington, Ron Chernow tells us that for all the 8,000 acres of splendid estate and many slaves to work the property, Washington when he retired from the presidency in 1797, was hard up for cash. Financial pressure was “unrelenting.”

I don’t know about you, but to me that makes him a more human founding father, one almost every business person and resident can identify with. So what did the father of our country do? He looked around his farmland for a new profit source, one that would supply cash rather quickly, and came up with the idea of making whiskey.

It was not, The New York Times tells us in a recent article, his idea alone. His new plantation manager, James Anderson, was a Scotsman and distiller. Mount Vernon had plenty of rye and together with what Washington called “Indian corn” and a still, they were able to make ample supplies of whiskey.

Now this is not how we usually think of our first president, the guy who chopped down the cherry tree and the president who sent militiamen to quash the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania when local distillers revolted against a federally imposed whiskey tax. Washington was aware of his image problem but, entrepreneur that he needed to be, he became something of a whiskey baron. In the first full year of operation, almost 11,000 gallons were produced and the whiskey earned a profit equivalent to some $142,000 in today’s dollars.  A distillery was built that was one of the largest of the time. Washington blamed his new success on Anderson, unwilling to take personal credit. The distillery was rebuilt after tours of Mount Vernon began and can be viewed by the many visitors to the estate each year. The old recipe is still used when samples are handed out.

Washington did enjoy alcohol, favoring “sweet wines, rum punch and whiskey,” but his reputation for alcohol in moderation was established by his stern action toward his troops when they became drunk and his reluctance to pass out drinks when he ran the first time for election to the Virginia House of Burgesses. His opponent did and duly won. A quick study, Washington did so the next time he ran, and this time he was successful.

Unfortunately for Washington, he was not able to realize a growing success from his whiskey efforts. In 1799, the second full year of production, he died at the age of 67. He willed the distillery to a granddaughter of his wife Martha, but a fire destroyed the operation in 1814.

Only relatively recently has this chapter in Washington’s life become widely known, and it adds a colorful dimension to the man and his myth.

by -
0 388

About 61 years after he died, Albert Einstein is still right. The legendary theoretical physicist predicted a century ago that a space time continuum would contain gravitational waves.

This past September, a team of more than 1,000 scientists heard a sound from a billion light-years away that was generated by two black holes colliding. The scientists were working at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, known as LIGO. The announcement of the results, made on Feb. 11, was greeted with considerable excitement by physicists, mathematicians and scientists, with one of them saying that astronomers have long had eyes but this breakthrough gives them ears, too.

I asked Marilena LoVerde and Patrick Meade, Stony Brook University assistant professors at the C.N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics, for their take on the big announcement.

DD: How does the significance of any potential finding of gravitational waves compare to that for the Higgs boson particle? Some people have suggested that it’s on the scale, if not larger, than the Higgs boson particle.

PM: I would certainly say it’s a very big discovery. However, unlike the Higgs, gravitational waves were on a much stronger footing that they should exist. The Higgs told us something new about how the universe worked, and it didn’t have to be true — there were many other options. However, gravitational waves are exciting because it’s a validation of the theory we already use, general relativity, and it may provide a new way to search for physics we haven’t discovered yet.

ML: This is absolutely on the scale of the Higgs boson. Similar to the Higgs boson, gravitational waves were predicted and expected to exist — and in fact indirectly measured through the spin down of the Hulse-Taylor binary pulsar — but the direct detection of gravitational waves is an absolute triumph of experimental physics and opens an exciting new era of gravitational wave astronomy.

DD: What has the email traffic about this announcement been during the last week? Have you received emails from scientists, colleagues, collaborators and friends who all want to know what this would mean and what you make of it?

ML: Rumors have been going around for months, but the frequency of people emailing/discussing such rumors and adding pieces of evidence suggesting they were true, and the details of the rumors have all increased significantly in the past few weeks.

PM: Since this isn’t directly my field I wasn’t as involved as with some other rumors, but rumors through Twitter, blogs and conversations with colleagues at other places who heard things were all happening over about the last month.

DD: Is there a chance that whatever was detected was an artifact?

ML: The signal looks very compelling. Of course I haven’t had much time to study the details of the statistical methods used to extract the signal and I’m looking forward to doing that.

PM: I’d say it’s extremely unlikely to be an artifact or statistical anomaly, because the same signal was seen in two separate detectors — one in Washington [state] and one in Louisiana.

DD: Will the existence and detection of gravitational waves open up the sky to enable us to “see” much more than we can now in terms of matter and the universe? Will they help us see and understand dark matter and dark energy?

PM: Gravitational waves definitely open up a whole new way to see the universe. However they won’t directly give us any information on dark matter or dark energy in the foreseeable future. To make gravitational waves that are observable with our technology you need very violent gravitational events, like these two black holes merging that LIGO saw. However, by developing new detectors with better sensitivity we may be able to look back and see other violent events in the history of the universe.

by -
0 273

The Suffolk County Police Department needs more oversight, but a committee entirely composed of Suffolk County legislators is not going to cut it.

Rob Trotta, the Republican representative for the 13th Legislative District, called upon his experience in law enforcement when he proposed such a committee to investigate and oversee county police operations. There have been concerns after issues such as former police chief James Burke’s resignation last year amid charges of civil rights violations. Trotta is a former Suffolk County detective who once worked on the FBI’s Long Island task force. His idea would put six members of the Legislature on this committee to review police practices, as well as those in the district attorney’s office and the county sheriff’s office, and investigate allegations of favoritism and other issues.

While we support his notion of assembling an oversight committee to keep the county police department honest, we also prefer bringing in people from different backgrounds. There should be legislators involved on the committee, but we would limit it to only two members — one from the Legislature’s majority party and one from its minority. From there, we would add a local expert on ethics, one representative each from the police department, sheriff’s office and DA’s office, and perhaps a financial member such as Comptroller John M. Kennedy Jr. Bringing together these different brains and skill sets would bring more ideas to the table and help in problem-solving — diversity in opinions and backgrounds could enhance the conversation.

Having this sort of diverse membership would also help prevent abuse, as the committee Trotta has proposed will have the authority to subpoena and to administer oaths and affirmations. Not that we think our legislators are necessarily untrustworthy, but putting that level of power into the hands of any one lone group is asking for trouble. We already have enough of that with people who have abused their authority — that’s why we’re in this position in the first place.

by -
0 1059

Chinese New Year this week made me think of the Chinese people I had visited this past September, which in turn made me think of the vegetation growing out of their heads, which then made me smile. We don’t usually think of the Chinese as being frivolous, but there they were, sporting plastic clips on their hair in the shape of vegetables, fruits and flowers.

First I thought it was my imagination. Then I guessed it was some sort of fancy head covering. Finally I just stared. People — young people, older people — were walking past us matter-of-factly with flowers and weeds growing up out of their heads. Most had one or two; some had half a dozen. That was our first morning on the street outside our hotel in Shanghai. The fad moved with us as we traveled around the country.

No one seemed to know how or where it started, although there was some speculation that it began in the southwestern city of Chengdu, known for its laid-back lifestyle. And in a country in which the people are not particularly known for their individualism, they certainly did stand out on the streets. The plastic vegetation included clover, sunflowers, chrysanthemums, lavender, mushrooms, chilies, cherries, gourds and pine trees, according to an article about the fad that appeared in The New York Times at that time.

The trend was ratcheted up when a popular Taiwanese singer, Jay Chou, and his wife were seen wearing bean sprouts in photographs on the Internet. They were “meng meng da.” meaning cute. Bean sprouts are still the most popular item, according to street vendors, who with their native entrepreneurial instincts, leapt into business on street corners and in gift shops. The rapidly growing fad speaks to the power of the Internet in China to spread trends as well as ideas.

“Some people think it’s cute, some think it’s just plain infantile,” one sales assistant was quoted by The Times as she was carefully arranging three flowers and a cherry stem on her friend’s head.

The flower clips cost 500 renminbi each, or about 75 cents, unless one is a skillful bargainer in which case one can get perhaps three or four for the same money.

Maybe the colorful plastic head gardens offer some respite from the unceasing gray pollution that covers the cities and towns in China. The greens could be seen as a wistful attempt at harmony with nature. For us, they were ready-made conversation pieces. We indicated our admiration to the wearers, and they smiled in appreciation. Quickly the ice was then broken and conversation, often in pantomime, proceeded from there.

Taobao, which is a popular Chinese retail website, lists thousands of sellers of increasingly elaborate floral displays for one’s hair, although at this time of year, such ornamentation is probably taking second place to hats. And maybe not, since it was 64 degrees in Shanghai yesterday, warm enough for a garden to grow.

by -
0 1214

Clinton, Bush, “Star Wars,” McDonald’s, Target. It sounds like the setup for a joke, except that the joke seems to be on us.

Somehow, a nation that prides itself on rugged individualism has wound up with a case of “the more of the same, please.” It’s like we’ve all been chewing the same gum for a long time. As soon as we’re not sure what to do with it in our mouths, we pop in another piece, which tastes OK for a while but then runs out of flavor.

Hey, look, I get it. The unfamiliar could be worse and confusing. We have, politically and culturally, become a country that is comfortable with the devils we know.

Drive through almost any town on the East Coast and you might feel as if you are taking a short trip, over and over, through a movie set with the same props, signs and stores on every corner. What happened to mom and pop stores? Is there such a thing as local flavor anymore? Do we even want to try local flavor, lest we don’t like it or, worse, our digestion doesn’t appreciate an unfamiliar combination of foods? We are a society of specific tastes, avoiding gluten, peanuts, dairy, animal protein and a host of others.

What that’s created is a collection of picky eaters and picky consumers who want things their way from specific restaurants and stores. That has become a recipe for the same stores to open in towns throughout the country.

We have become a society in which franchises reduce the amount of thinking we have to do, trimming the highs and lows of unique experiences.

We don’t have to think about any of our consumer choices, because we can go to the same stores with the same layout everywhere. In fact, many of these stores have saved money on staff, allowing us to self-checkout, so we don’t even have to converse with people about their lives and towns anymore. We can continue to interact with our friends and family on the phone, removing ourselves from our current setting. When we’re done shopping, we don’t have to worry about the type of hotel we sleep in at night because we can stay in the same place everywhere. “Yes, as my profile demonstrates, I like room 518.”

Here we are, 24 years after Bill Clinton took office and Hillary is hoping to move back into the White House as Clinton II. Of course, she’s not Bill and she has her own ideas for the country. But it feels as if we’ve been here before, as if we are in another “Star Wars” between the Clintons and the vast right-wing conspiracy she decried all those years ago.

Speaking of “Star Wars,” it’s a relief that the current film isn’t as bad as the forgettable three prequels. And yet the plot devices and decisions seem to have come from the recycling bin, albeit with a humble woman from a desert planet who has developed the ability to use the force.

Maybe we’ve had enough of the same. Maybe the country has decided to take Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump more seriously because we don’t want to be on automatic pilot anymore. Then again, Sanders sounds like the George Steinbrenner character from “Seinfeld” and Trump sounds like, well, himself from TV.

Where will we be a year from now? Well, we will probably have another “Star Wars” film; we will have a new president, or maybe a different iteration of something familiar; and we will be somewhere in America, surrounded by familiar stores and choices.

Then again, maybe, just maybe, we will make our own decisions and find our own way, without big box retailers and familiar characters and story lines passing in a blur past the windows of our minds.

by -
0 1079

The Suffolk County Police Department announced it will be cracking down on the movement of drugs through our neighborhoods. Given the consistent rise in opioid addiction and overdoses across the county, as well as drug-related crime, we say an initiative like this is long overdue.

Over the past several weeks, investigators have executed nine search warrants and seized about $300,000 in cash; 2,672 grams of cocaine, 464 grams of heroin and 80 grams of oxycodone; seven guns; and drug paraphernalia. While we applaud the police department for its efforts, more could have been accomplished if cops used their resources to crack down on these problem areas much sooner.

Police said their new initiative to target houses of known drug activity is, in part, fueled by resident complaints. Maybe they couldn’t hear as well as we could, but residents have always been complaining and reporting about this issue — not just recently.

The Special Operations Team detectives who are now being utilized in each precinct to work with residents to obtain information on who is dealing what and where — and to execute search warrants on these locations and make arrests — will cost money. That money is well worth it. While the police department has used a limited budget as an excuse for why actions like these sometimes can’t be taken, if Suffolk County wants to bust up drug activity, police resources should be made a bigger priority. One would be hard-pressed to find a resident who disagrees.

For now though, we are pleased to see the police department being responsive to community concerns about known problem drug locations.

by -
0 1146

This week is bracketed on both ends by a “Super Bowl,” the real one coming up in Santa Clara, Calif., between the Denver Broncos and the Carolina Panthers and the one we just witnessed in Iowa. The NFL game is a lot easier to understand, what with there being only two opponents and a final victory.

The Iowa contest, despite tons of publicity and seemingly endless buildup, is only the first polling in what remains a nine-month marathon to elect the next president of the United States. In fact, the politicking and the campaigning have been going on for the better part of a year already. Never mind the arguments over whether baseball or football is the national pastime. Based on airtime, print and social media, the answer to the question of which is the most popular spectator sport is clearly politics. It’s the only game that goes on for two years.

Politics also has its own way of scoring that defies logic. The results for the three main GOP contenders were Ted Cruz, 28 percent; Donald Trump, 24 percent; and third-placed Marco Rubio, 23 percent. Now if four points won a football game, we would call it a close game. So Cruz is the acknowledged winner at only a quarter of the total, and Trump is only a little behind. Yet everyone talks of Trump’s poor showing — except him. And Rubio is somehow congratulated for coming in even a whisker behind Trump. This is a game where absolute numbers don’t seem to count; it’s a contest of expectations. Better the pols should set themselves up the way they do on the stock market: Put out poor expectations of future earnings and when your results rise above that lowly level, the value of the stock goes up.

But we always knew the guys on Wall Street were smarter than the presidential aspirants. That’s why the politicians hate the market makers so much.

Anyway, back to the Iowa caucus. Besides being the first in the country, how important is it in history? The answer is tepid at best. In contested caucuses, where there was no sitting president running for re-election, Iowa Dems chose the eventual presidential nominee five out of eight times, according to the Des Moines Register. And twice that winner has gone on to become president: Barack Obama and, before him, Jimmy Carter — with a miniscule number of voters who showed up at the polls. In 1992, by the way, Bill Clinton finished fourth with only 3 percent of the caucus vote, and we all know what happened after that.

Iowa Republicans in contested elections chose the eventual nominee three out of six times. Twice that winner went on to the presidency: Gerald Ford and George W. Bush. In 1980, father George H. W. Bush beat Ronald Reagan in the Iowa caucus but Reagan went on to represent the GOP and then won the national election. In 1988 Bob Dole beat George H. W. Bush in Iowa but Bush went on to triumph, no thanks to Iowa. Maybe they would be better off if candidates hoped to lose Iowa.

As to the Dems, Hillary Clinton beat out Bernie Sanders in a contest so close that different groups were flipping a coin to decide which candidate their representatives would support. Yes Clinton won, like a runner who wins a race by a fraction of a second, but her enthusiasm was nothing compared to that of Sanders, who considered his results fabulous. It’s the expectations thing again.

Better to leave this discussion of politics and talk about something noncontroversial that happened this week. In fact it probably is the biggest story of the week: the weather. Maybe we have El Niño to thank, but any time I can walk the dog in February wearing light clothes — on me, not him — I consider myself wonderfully lucky. I’m not going to go on about this because I don’t want to run the risk of hexing us, but I’ll take a winter where the temperature bounces around in the 40s and even flirts with 60s on a few days, and the blizzard comes on Saturday and Sunday. I’ll consider us in the Northeast the real winners this week.

Prev1...152153154...169Next Page 153 of 169
TBR News Media is your local news and entertainment website.
We provide you with the latest breaking news and information for your community.
Contact us: [email protected]

Most Viewed

©