What’s surprising is how cheap it is.

In our ridiculously short-lived news cycle, this story made the rounds in Rhode Island for a day or two:

Newly sworn-in Rhode Island District Court Judge Michael McCaffrey continues to operate a political campaign committee with a political fund with a balance of approximately $230,000, according to state campaign finance records.

The balance of that account is $229,927.95, according to McCaffrey’s most recent filing.

The Rhode Island Code of Judicial Conduct specifically prohibits judges or judicial nominees from engaging in political activities.

The linked GoLocalProv article quotes a section of the Rhode Island Code of Judicial Conduct indicating that this sort of thing is forbidden, but there’s apparently some loophole, because donations are common.  When Judge McConnel was in the news as an anti-Trump activist from the bench, I traced the massive donations to politicians from him and his family.

The loophole might be the phrase “except as permitted by law,” or it might be this:  “These Rules do not prohibit judicial nominees from seeking support or endorsement on their own behalf.”

Whatever the case, of the $105,495 McCaffery handed out to Rhode Island politicians in the five years leading up to his appointment as a judge, most beneficiaries received less than $1,000, and only the Democratic State Committee received more than $1,000 per year.

So, it’s no surprise that our politicians are for sale (at least those in the Democrat Party), but their souls are awfully inexpensive.

At bottom, the problem socialism runs into again and again is that the designers of heavy-handed policy can never have all the information needed to be so heavy handed.  A recent commentary by “Environmental scientist and land use planner” Scott Millar exposes one instance of that problem:

The failure to adequately plan a long-term, safe, steady supply of drinking water for new housing can have catastrophic impacts. Watersheds for public surface water and groundwater drinking water supplies are not appropriate for high-density development. Once drinking water is contaminated or overdrawn, it can’t easily be restored and must be protected for both current and future generations.

For these reasons, I strongly support legislation to amend the Rhode Island Low and Moderate Income (LMI) Housing Act (45-53-4). This legislation would eliminate the existing state mandated housing densities in lands that are used for drinking water supplies. Moreover, the current law only requires developers to cite that public water or sewer systems are available. The legislation adds language that the capacity of public water or sewer be documented to support the proposed increase in residential density before a development proposal can be approved.

These problems become easier to see at the local level and among those who are directly involved in individual decisions.  Even as somebody who is comfortable with change and reluctant to tell people when they can and can’t develop their property, I’ve worried that the multiple housing developments in the works within a mile or two of my house could create problems for water infrastructure.  The water pressure is already terrible.  I know this because I live here.  Such are the reasons for local zoning authority.

But progressive legislators in the state — some from urban areas where density has already been accommodated and some from rural areas where wells are common — have decided it’s simply time to force dense housing from border to border as a blunt tool for “affordability,” and they’re too arrogant to ask themselves what they don’t know they don’t know.

Vincent Marzullo makes good points in a recent Providence Journal commentary, but his lens is off in an important way:

Civil society’s first responsibility is to rebuild the habit of human connection. Division thrives in abstraction. It is easy to demonize “the other side” when the other side is a caricature on a screen. Community organizations can counter this by intentionally creating spaces where people with different views work on shared, tangible goals: mentoring children, ending homelessness, supporting veterans, better care for our older adults, or responding to disasters. Cooperation around practical needs does not require ideological agreement, but it does build trust, which is the foundation of a healthy democracy.

You can tell by the way all of Marzullo’s examples are in the narrower range of “civil society” that covers charity that he has a particular vision in mind.  He’s seeing these as non-governmental organizations that pursue public goods.  But civil society shouldn’t be construed so narrowly; it’s important to include activities that people pursue for other motives, including self-interest.

Given his vision, Marzullo lists five things “civil society must” do to help unite and heal our country:

• Provide space to cooperate toward practical needs.
• Model respectful disagreement.
• Counter economic and social isolation.
• Promulgate accurate information.
• Reclaim moral leadership.

He errs in charging such groups with these tasks.  The appropriate way to understand the mechanism is that civil society does these things naturally, simply as a function of bringing people together to based on common interests that are different from their political leanings.

Tasking civil organizations with socio-political goals and emphasizing a narrow range of their activities will limit their reach to those who are nearly of like mind in the ways most relevant to politics.  Rather, what we need is a society that encourages engagement in a broad range of activities — politics and charity, yes, but also business, sports, religion, hobbies, and more — so that people interact and find commonalities that have nothing to do with politics or the other areas of their lives.

Middletown’s town hall was recently filled with people lining up to beg for mercy from the town’s new automatic speeding ticket scheme:

“It’s a combination of us not having a camera before and the fact that it’s a new system in town, people are not used to it,” Police Chief Jason Ryan said. “They anticipated about 10% of those who haven’t paid to possibly be showing up in court today, so that puts us at somewhere between 150 to 200 people expected to show up today, based on what Blue Line has seen in other communities in the past.”

We can do the math: that’s 1,500 to 2,000 tickets that hadn’t yet paid, so there were many who simply paid it.  And the town’s victims had multiple tickets each:

“I had a pile of tickets for going between 30 and 35 miles an hour down a road I’ve traveled on for 48 years,” Shannon Laiho said.

Why is 30–35 miles per hour too fast?  Because there happens to be a school in that location.  Nevermind that it’s a high school well set back from the road on a large, exclusive campus.  To local government that means “excuse to take money from people.”

The unseen effects may be the worst, though.  Getting burned by these tickets is an unmeasurable disincentive to travel to or around an area, so the entire area will be losing so the town government can gain.

I’m cynical about politics, but it still bothers me to see groups trying to get away with the rank spin and dishonesty of the SEIU, to which Ian Donnis points (without my cynicism) here:

SEIU 1199 NE, the biggest health care union in the region, is seeding with $50,000 a new organizing effort, Affordable RI, to train and support candidates at all levels who embrace a laser-like focus on affordability. Some might call this preaching to the choir in a state where Democrats maintain a super-majority in the General Assembly. At the same time, a lot of Rhode Islanders struggle with the cost of child care – and there’s not much relief in sight.

Look at the group’s agenda.  This isn’t about making things more affordable.  It’s about taking money from some people and giving it to others.  You can be for that or against it, but it’s not what most people think when they hear the term, “affordable.”  It’s dishonest.  It’s lying.

Among the most depressing aspects of the turn our country has taken is that people for whom we naturally want to have tremendous respect and trust — teachers, nurses, social workers, and others — are, through their labor unions, central to the systemic dishonesty corroding our communities.

This, another day when the bored and bought-off take to the streets for their quasi-religious “No Kings” revival, seemed like an appropriate time to highlight this investigation into whether the state of Rhode Island is violating human rights by forcing insurers to include abortion coverage in every plan:

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on Thursday announced an investigation into 13 states that require health insurance plans to cover abortion care.

In a news release, the agency said the investigation is based on allegations that the states are coercing health care entities to provide coverage of abortion “contrary to conscience” and in violation of a federal law known as the Weldon Amendment.

“OCR launches these investigations to address certain states’ alleged disregard of, or confusion about, compliance with the Weldon Amendment,” said Paula Stannard, director of the HHS Office for Civil Rights in a statement. “Under the Weldon Amendment, health care entities, such as health insurance issuers and health plans, are protected from state discrimination for not paying for, or providing coverage of, abortion contrary to conscience. Period.”

In the right contexts, progressives will try to obfuscate their views, but they do indeed believe that everybody should have to pay for other people’s abortions.  They’d make them free to the women, if they could, and force us all to contribute to the fund.

These are not people who believe in “no kings.”  They just want to be sure the king is forcing their radical beliefs onto everybody else.

This is exactly the sort of story our local media buries, but ought to promote, because it’s informative in a way they don’t want to admit:

“On Wednesday morning, the City was informed of a report that federal officials were on site at Webster Elementary School attempting to enter the building. The school temporarily went into secure status and Providence Police responded to assess and verify the unidentified individuals.

Mayor Smiley joined Providence Public School Department leadership at the scene to support the safety of the students and staff and to ensure all appropriate policies were being upheld. Following the response, PPD was informed that the activity was the State Police.”

Students’ learning was disrupted because the ideology of adults from the classroom up to the [expletive] mayor makes them children unable to respond maturely.  Those putative authorities began to fantasize about plaudits for standing up to phantom tyranny in a way entirely safe to themselves.  Their decisions were performative and self-aggrandizing.

This isn’t just an incident; it’s a lesson.  This is how the people who run Providence, its schools, and the state structure their thinking and their daily lives.  It’s a symptom of the psychological illness that has been dragging our state down for decades, and it’s well past time to begin electing the cure, for the good of our children and our communities.

I know from long experience that it’s easy to read way too much into survey results like this, but there’s definitely much to be explored:

I’d love to see a deeper dive on when people received those diagnoses and how their politics and church behavior has changed.  It would tell us something significant, for example, if many or most of the 8% of conservative weekly church goers who have received a diagnosis of a mental health condition were conservative and/or church goers at the time.

But where my mind really wants to go, looking at the various columns, is the relevant influence of each factor.  Notice that attending church has almost no effect on conservatives until they go weekly.  We might speculate that conservatism, itself, embeds much of what makes church attendance helpful entirely as a frame of mind.  We shouldn’t forget, especially, that the chart does not track belief in God or sense of spirituality, only church attendance and politics.

Meanwhile, moderates gain some advantage by some church attendance, bringing them in line with conservatives, but they don’t gain additional benefit (in terms of mental health) no matter how often they attend.  It is as if (as a group), they won’t fully commit to the psychologically healthiest principles.

Then there are the liberals.  Putting aside the peculiarity of those in the “monthly” group, there’s a direct correspondence between frequency of church attendance and mental health.

Of course, we could think of other explanations.  It may be, for instance, that conservative church goers are simply less likely to ask doctors for diagnoses, no matter how unhealthy their psychologies happen to be.  Given other health, charity, and relationship findings, I find that unlikely to be the explanation, but it’s plausible.

In short, one can read the results as an indication that church-going conservatism is the healthiest perspective by which to live.  That perspective has characteristics that can be defined along political and religious axes, and you can derive benefits along either axis but do better when accepting the entire worldview.

The premise of what I’ve called the “government plantation,” or “company state,” is that — just as large companies once sought to import inexpensive labor for their workforces in “company towns” — governments are looking to attract immigrants to keep their populations up.  There’s a key difference, though.  Companies need labor.  Governments don’t produce anything; what they need is revenue.

One option toward that end is to let the private sector grow and keep government unobtrusive so people benefit when they use their own resources and ingenuity to do profitable things.  The problem, here, for those who prioritize government, is that people using their own resources and doing profitable things are independent and understand the value they bring to the table.

The other option is to find people in need of assistance and services for which the government can charge other people.  Those other people can be local taxpayers or, even better, they can be taxpayers at higher levels of government who have no direct say in the government plantation’s decisions.

So, when you see news like this, don’t react as if you’re observing interacting currents in a tide:

From July 1, 2024, to July 1, 2025, Rhode Island had a net domestic migration of -1,551, with 1,551 more people moving out of the state than moving in, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Meanwhile, the state had a net international migration of 5,923, as 5,923 more people moved into Rhode Island from abroad than left.

To whom are the state’s politicians catering?  Do you hear them worrying that Rhode Islanders are leaving their home?  No.  For decades, they’ve been celebrating changing demographics and promoting a sanctuary state.

There’s a reason.  Rhode Islanders may elect them, but that doesn’t mean those who live here are the priority.

This is interesting, although of course several layers of disclaimers belong on comments by industry insiders as reported via social media:

Karp says AI will heavily disrupt college educated, highly trained professionals, the core Democratic voter base in cities and suburbs.​

He argues their economic power will shrink as AI eats white‑collar work.

He also says vocational, working class jobs in the physical world will gain relative power because AI cannot easily replace them.​

Those workers are often male, non‑degreed, and more likely to vote Republican.

Karp calls anyone who thinks this disruption will somehow be politically manageable “in an insane asylum”.​

The Democrat base has spent decades belittling and attempting to demoralize the white, male working class, and now it looks like the balance of economic power will shift in their favor.  Certainly, that may be temporary, until robotics displaces them and power shifts again, this time to helping services, where human-to-human contact is the point.

These shifts are interesting to ponder, and they’ll be very important to watch.  Simply as a matter of incentive and political theory, the narrow class of AI platform owners will surely want to absorb as much of the excess value and released political power as they can.  Politicians who pitch government as the great protector of classes of people and redistributor of wealth will have incentive to go after both the tech giants and the working men, both of whom they’ve vilified.  This is apt to spark backlash on both fronts.

The future nightmare one can imagine in these circumstances doesn’t have to happen, but it’s going to require a good number of Americans’ rejecting what has become the mainstream way of understanding economics, government, and society.

What worries me about post-Obama developments in America’s civic culture is that people may no longer spot the incongruity in this:

On Monday, a letter signed by 11 local “pro-democracy and human rights organizations” sent to Crowne Plaza management took issue with the hotel’s decision to book the event.

“The Crowne Plaza is a respected Rhode Island institution with a long history of hosting sports teams, family gatherings, and community-centered events,” the letter read. “Many Rhode Islanders — including your own employees — will be shocked and dismayed that the hotel is choosing to host a rally featuring individuals whose rhetoric and actions undermine democratic values and threaten the safety and dignity of vulnerable communities.”

These activists were trying to shut-down a rally and silence its speakers.  If anything “undermines democratic values,” that does.  But if Americans don’t see this problem instantly, then we may be at the point that there’s simply no ability to communicate across ideological lines.

Of course, what’s obviously happening is that progressive Democrats have defined their own narrow views and their own power as “democracy,” and free speech that opposes them is not a right at all.

Coverage of the dramatic drop in registrants for insurance through HealthSource RI misrepresent, at least partially, the significance, although it may not be deliberate.  Here’s Nancy Lavin in Rhode Island Current:

About 10,000 people covered through HealthSource RI dropped coverage during the 2026 open enrollment period, representing 20% of the 48,000 enrolled before open enrollment began in November, according to data from HealthSource RI published Monday. A copy of the final open enrollment report was shared with Rhode Island Current in advance.

The stark decline in insurance coverage, with implications not only for former plan participants but the entire state health care system, is concerning for state officials, but not surprising. In fact, HealthSource RI initially projected an even bigger drop of 13,000 people tied largely to expiring federal tax credits.

A decision not to purchase insurance through HealthSource is not the same as “a decline in insurance coverage.”  My family used HealthSource for dental coverage, and the second year, a visit to the dentist wasn’t covered because HealthSource was so slow to pass along our paperwork to the actual insurance.  Thus, we learned that (unlike when I’d looked into it in the past), insurers offer these plans independently, without the unnecessary middle step of the government.  Our plan is now cheaper and has better coverage.

Without a government mandate forbidding competition, HealthSource is nothing but a delivery vehicle for welfare.  With expiration of a temporary boost in welfare lingering from COVID, people have no reason to use the redundant website.

This episode is an excellent lesson in the framing of many stories related to government.  The government creates a program competing with private companies, and the rhetoric equates the government with the service, in general.  Journalists forever after present a reduction in government involvement as a loss of the service.

It’s not.  Indeed, HealthSource should be dismantled as the first step to withdrawing government from healthcare much more broadly.

Democrat Governor Dan McKee once differentiated himself as an education innovator.  Now that he’s a puppet of Rhode Island’s labor unions, he might as well be a literal marionette, so I wouldn’t be optimistic that he’d do the obvious thing and allow Rhode Island families access to this federal benefit:

Parents in Rhode Island who send their kids to private school can claim a federal school choice tax credit on next year’s income tax returns — as long as state officials go along with it.

States must soon decide whether to participate in the first major federal program funding private schools. Last July, Congress included a tax-credit scholarship in last year’s budget reconciliation package.

Taxpayers in states that opt in receive a dollar-for-dollar federal tax credit on up to $1,700 for donations to nonprofit Scholarship Granting Organizations, or SGOs, which in turn provide scholarships for private school tuition and other expenses. The credit takes effect on 2026 tax-year returns filed in early 2027.

Frankly, if I were only going from Rhode Island’s in-state media, I’d probably have no idea this opportunity existed.  That is because journalism in the Ocean State is also a heavily marionetted occupation for the same special interests.

In my social media stream earlier today I saw somebody comment that the greatest trick of the last century was convincing Western liberals that humanity had evolved into a new era.  We’d figured out objective truth, and now all cultures on the planet accepted the same basic premises.  Invasions were a fading relic in a few remaining regions that had evolved insufficiently.  Certainly, nobody would invade the West!  All we want to do is get along and trade with others, helping them to advance, themselves.  During the Clinton Era, people seriously used the term, “The End of History.”

The comment reminded me of another post I read recently, by Michael McNair:

China looked at the lessons of 20th century great power conflict and drew the conclusion that military power alone doesn’t determine outcomes, upstream industrial capacity does.

The Allies won because of overwhelming industrial might. Japan and Germany lost because they lacked critical industrial inputs. Starved of oil, they were forced into gambles that cost them the war…Japan attacking Pearl Harbor to seize the oil in the Dutch East Indies, Germany marching to the Caucasus to take the Baku oil fields. Input scarcity doesn’t just weaken you. It steers your decisions. It pulls decisions away from the optimal plan and toward the necessary plan.

China learned this lesson and decided to be the one holding the chokepoints. By embedding itself so deeply into the upstream supply chains that feed American military production, a conflict would trigger Western industrial paralysis and neuter its ability to fight a long war.

McNair goes on to apply this insight to current events with the Trump administration.  My narrow purpose in this space, however, is to point out that history has not ended.  China, for instance, certainly studied the lessons of the last half millennium (the period of the Great Powers), which are freely available to anybody with a library card, Amazon account, or audiobook subscription.  Very probably the leaders of radical Islamic regimes did, too.

Westerners need to return to school, themselves, and stop electing people who sell us out in service of their greed and ignorance.

I see a lot of dollar amounts mentioned in Nancy Lavin’s article on Rhode Island Current about the abrupt departure of the CEO of the inchoate “quasi-public” that’s supposed to do something to advance the life sciences industry in Rhode Island.

Mark Turco was only one year into a three-year contract paying him $400,000 per year.  Federal taxpayers apparently provided $45 million in pandemic relief that expires at the end of the year.  McKee wants Rhode Island taxpayers to accept another $115 million in debt to add to the funding.

What isn’t clear is what Rhode Islanders are getting for all this money.  We certainly didn’t get economic relief during the pandemic from money that isn’t spent, yet.  It sounds like we got some bylaws for the new “hub.”  What else?

A November article in the Providence Journal suggests a good chunk of the money the hub has given out has gone to out-of-state and out-of-country businesses.  An “impact report” on the organization’s website appears to take credit for all life science spending in the state, which arguably points to the lack of necessity for a hub.

As we’re seeing with another government “.com” — HealthSourceRI — Rhode Island government should stop dabbling in business and wasting our state’s money and attention.  In that case, various news organizations have reported a steep drop in plans purchased through the healthcare exchange as if that means people have stopped receiving healthcare.  I dropped a dental plan through HealthSource a year ago not because my family didn’t expect to continue receiving dental care, but because we could get it directly from an insurer for less money.  Buying directly also allows us to avoid problems like we experienced a year before, when one of our claims was rejected because HealthSource had taken so long to transfer paperwork to the insurer.

In short, these “quasi-public” agencies are turning out to be unnecessary layers to justify government involvement, and they only get in the way.  Enough, already.

Supporting this legislation (in the Rhode Island Senate and House) is simply wrong, and any legislators who do should be considered disqualified from public office:

A law enforcement agency, as defined by § 42-164-2, shall not employ any individual who was hired as a sworn officer of the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency on or after January 20, 2025.

Shameful, shameful.  Entirely apart from one’s position on immigration enforcement, this policy is wrong on pure principle.  Besides the fact that it offers no due process or individual consideration — indicating a belief in political factions in line with totalitarian dictators — it’s treasonous.  On the other hand, the policy is perfectly in line with the reality that Democrats will destroy your life whenever they can, if they disagree with your politics.

Here are the named sponsors of the bills, some of them surprising (especially in the Senate).  We should flush them out of our political system.

House:

• Karen Alzate, District 60, Pawtucket and Central Falls
• Jennifer Stewart, District 59, Pawtucket
• José Batista, District 12, Providence
• Teresa Tanzi, District 34, South Kingstown and Narragansett
• Kathleen Fogarty, District 35, South Kingstown
• Rebecca Kislak, District 4, Providence
• Edith Ajello, District 1, Providence

Senate:

• Meghan Kallman, District 15, Pawtucket and Providence
• Tiara Mack, District 6, Providence
• Jonathan Acosta, District 16, Central Falls and Pawtucket
• Ana Quezada, District 2, Providence
• Dawn Euer, District 13, Newport and Jamestown
• Walter Felag, District 10, Warren, Bristol, and Tiverton
• Louis DiPalma, District 12, Middletown, Little Compton, Newport, and Tiverton
• Victoria Gu, District 38, Charlestown, Westerly, and South Kingstown
• Pamela Lauria, District 32, Barrington, Bristol, and East Providence
• Alana DiMario, District 36, Narragansett, North Kingstown, and New Shoreham

It’s easy to be distracted by the fact that she is a he who in every picture wears an emblem of radical Islam that will obviously turn on and crush radical Leftism the moment their alliance seizes power:

Perhaps more important than the identity politics, however, are the economic ones.  A statewide rent freeze would destroy housing availability.  A $30 minimum wage would destroy employment.  Applying a similar approach to heathcare would destroy the medical system.

This isn’t merely a difference of opinion.  One cannot understand basic economics and review the record of related policies and think they will do otherwise than destroy.  That means the DSA is made up of people who want to destroy our state and country and/or don’t care to understand the policies they would impose by force.

Anybody who’s been reading this site for any length of time will know why I got a good laugh from this result from a Harvard public opinion poll:

Maybe it wasn’t always so, but being involved in political issues is teacher unions’ reason for being.  They’re radical activist groups that use member services as a means of raising money and gaining influence.  Saying unions shouldn’t be involved in politics is like saying television news networks should stop generating content and focus on advertising.

We’re supposed to live in a representative democracy, right?  Why, then, is legislation with such a clear majority of support proving so hard to pass when the federal government is fully dominated by the party whose members support the legislation at a 91% margin?

Even the opposition party is evenly split on the issue, which is why, one suspects, the news media isn’t taking its common “politicians aren’t listening to the people” stance.  The politicians in Washington know that mainstream journalists will do what they can to keep people from knowing how many other Americans agree with them.

This is indicative of the process that brought us Donald Trump as President.  Republicans kept voting for policy platforms that never materialized.  It was like pushing a button over and over and getting no result, so we pushed harder (Tea Party) and harder (Trump).

One can predict the importance with which such polling results are treated by whether they make progressive Democrats or conservative Republicans feel dominant or isolated, because making progressive Democrats feel dominant and conservative Republicans feel isolated is one of the central objectives of media spin.

My perspective on January 6, 2021, is a bit different from the mainstream norm because of the freedom and nature of my job at the time.

Within days of the event, I watched hours of raw video, and the “complicated” reality Chip J. described in this article was absolutely evident.  You don’t have to be a trained police officer to wonder why in the world police would shoot tear gas canisters deep into a crowd — over the heads of the people in the thickest part whom authorities presumably wanted to disperse.  It didn’t take deep investigation to come across videos of police opening entrances and waving protesters into the building.

You could trace individuals as they moved through the building… like the guy who appeared from behind Capitol police and proceeded to instigate a riotous lunge forward when just moments before the protesters at the front of a crowd had negotiated a peaceful walk through an area of the capitol.  Then the same person smashed the window through which Ashley Babbit climbed only to be shot.

Almost immediately, you could find other videos, too, if you looked.  In one I remember, activists were changing surreptitiously out of their Trump gear in the bushes.  The person filming that one could tell something strange was going on.  (I haven’t explored this, but I’ve heard one of them was the same radical whom a terrorist threw a bomb over in NYC.)

Because of this early inoculation with reality, I never took the reporting quite seriously.  I may have underestimated how well the Democrats’ reframing worked.

To be sure, readers of Chip J.’s article should keep in mind he’s a family friend and neighbor of one of the convicted-and-pardoned participants, Todd Henderson.  Chip watched those same hours of videos to help his friend and also to convince himself that it really was true that the FBI and news media were distorting reality in order to persecute him and others.

He reached the same conclusion I did, and it’s one about which Americans have a civic obligation to be curious.

Nicole Solas highlights one out of Westerly:

At this point, kids, young adults, and maybe not-so-young adults think dark and cynical is just the way art is supposed to be.  It can be otherwise.  We once had a canon with a wide variety of content — from child-appropriate to mature, from beloved to relatively obscure — that students could perform without requiring age restrictions for the audience or amplifying psychological dysfunction.

We’ve been deconstructing our culture for so long multiple generations may not even know what it means to be constructive.  That’s suicidal at the cultural level.