Quick Read
Justin Roias — the Providence City Councilor for the ward covering the North End — doesn’t like self-storage facilities. That’s fine, but his response and reasoning raise crucial points of organization and problem solving: I came across Roias’s tweet via Rachel Miller, who is participating in “the effort to update our zoning laws to prohibit…
Observing that a significant majority of Americans now believe the COVID lab-leak theory despite the idea’s having recently been banned on “Big Tech platforms,” Glenn Greenwald recalls a 2021 Pew Research finding that over a mere three-year span the percentage of Democrats who support big-tech censorship had grown from 60% to 76%, and (worse, in…
If you pay attention to non-leftwing media and/or haven’t blocked or muted anybody who isn’t progressive on social media, you’re likely to have heard that Anheuser-Busch has taken a huge financial hit after a young marketing executive aligned the company fully with radical gender ideologues by partnering with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, a man whose…
Whether it’s peculiar or not (given his governance style) the most-conspicuous thing about the Learn 365 RI initiative — for which Democrat Governor Dan McKee has sought (and received) a PR boost — is how undefined it is. There’s some effort to get municipalities to commit to something, although what that may be isn’t clear. …
To solve problems without causing unexpected damage, you have to have some reasonable explanation for the circumstances. This recent anti-gun tweet from Democrat Congressman Seth Magaziner illustrates how politicians are moving farther and farther away from problem-solving: If you’re accustomed to analyzing data visualizations, it might take you a moment to understand Magaziner’s point. The…
To what extent, do you think, is our current predicament caused by a feedback loop of blindness? Perhaps the people investigating society’s questions are actually incapable of considering some possibilities for ideological reasons. They therefore craft policies and advance cultural changes whose outcomes they cannot measure because of the blind spot with which they began.…
Talk about housing has been all the rage in Rhode Island over the past year. Unfortunately (and tellingly), it doesn’t seem to be a policy area in which activists, politicians, and journalists believe data ought to be front and center. Sure, we get numbers about the effects of the problem — housing costs $X; Y…
Now that it is no-longer-proposed, we are free to look at Fane Tower renderings in detail, beyond the gut reaction that it is odd and would be misplaced in Providence. Structurally, the building would have been akin to a tree trunk that began to split near the ground. The strength comes from the middle, providing…
We’re probably all feeling the increasing (let’s say) incoherence of things over the past decade or more, but I’ve found it clarifying. Distinctions and beliefs have reached cartoonish levels, which teaches lessons that may continue to apply in subtler degree when (if) life moves back toward sanity. One may long have suspected that progressives (once,…
Americans really need to be able to step back a bit from the immediate issue addressed in legislation and think about how it relates to our understanding of society’s proper structure. A Rhode Island bill going after self-checkout lanes in retail stores is an excellent case study. Kathy Gregg writes in the Providence Journal: An army…