Quick Read

Apartment buildings

The evicted mother’s story reveals much more that our society needs work on.

By Justin Katz | October 21, 2021 |

One difficulty with assessing sympathetic stories associated with public policy debates (and the reason advocates actively seek and promote them) is that they short circuit rational discussion about tradeoffs.  The position of seeming to lack sympathy is so uncomfortable that the public debate leaves important details unraised and, typically, the villain is assigned to be…

A hoodie on a beaten school bus

Let’s have P-Tech-type innovation instead of critical race theory.

By Justin Katz | October 21, 2021 |

Providence schools don’t necessarily have to sign up with Pathways in Technology Early College High School (P-TECH), but doesn’t this seem like the level of innovation and drive that we ought to have seen after the dreadful John Hopkins report more than two years ago? Founded in 2011 by IBM and the Bloomberg administration in…

A blurry streetscape

Shouldn’t “epidemiologist” Bostom be better with numbers?

By Justin Katz | October 21, 2021 |

As a Rhode Island conservative, nothing would please me more than letting Andrew Bostom go off and do his thing.  Unfortunately, people with whom I generally agree and think of as allies keep citing him as a credentialed epidemiologist (which he’s not) and even utilizing him as an expert witness in court. Look, I agree…

What do you call it when the administration secretly transforms the country?

By Justin Katz | October 20, 2021 |

Nick Miroff (of the Washington Post, of all publications) reports that arrests along our southern border are occurring at record rates. Meanwhile, the New York Post has photos of illegal immigrants being flown into New York in the middle of the night, for distribution in nearby communities.  This recalls news items coming in from around the country,…

Image of COVID as planet Earth

UPDATED: Tiverton is last for vaccination but near-best for COVID hospitalizations?

By Justin Katz | October 20, 2021 |

Living in the town, of course it caught my eye that Dan McGowan of the Boston Globe outed Tiverton as the only town in Rhode Island with a vaccination rate below 50%: Tiverton is now the only city or town in Rhode Island with a COVID-19 vaccination rate below 50 percent, according to data from the…

An empty restaurant

You can’t think too hard with the progressive sales pitch.

By Justin Katz | October 20, 2021 |

It’s hard to know how much to debate an essay like Greg Brailsford’s on his site Uprise RI. The entire thing is stale propaganda.  It’s a sales pitch.  He’s selling you something.  You can see it in every sentence.  It jumps out even in a side note about how he caught COVID despite being fully vaccinated,…

Raimondo with Jack Reed and Jim Langevin

The news media continues to embarrass itself and sell us out for Raimondo.

By Justin Katz | October 19, 2021 |

What an embarrassing puff piece from the Associated Press and run by WPRI.  You know that old line about discomfiting the comfortable?  How about skepticism about the powerful?  Yeah, not so much.  Instead, one can only wonder whether Raimondo’s people slipped the writer, Josh Boak, cash or promises or he’s just a cheap date who…

The Carmagnole (Dance Around the Guillotine) by Kathe Kollwitz

URI is helping a powerful celebrity destroy the life of one of its students.

By Justin Katz | October 19, 2021 |

It’s never an easy call to side with people on principled grounds when you vehemently disagree with something mind-blowingly stupid and offensive they’ve done or said, especially in an environment prone to witch hunts and cancellations.  But that’s the sort of thing principled people have to do in a free society. So, I have no…

Scene from Field of Dreams

A pornographic young-adult graphic novel in North Kingstown High School is another slip down the spiral.

By Justin Katz | October 19, 2021 |

Nicole Solas of South Kingstown has widened her efforts to return sanity to Rhode Island schools to North Kingstown, where she has filed a police report highlighting a very graphic graphic novel that North Kingstown High School provides to its students, most of them minors.  Following her reports can be challenging, if you have children…

Machine Elements by Fernand Leger

The McKee-Matos 2030 plan is doomed for disaster (if it isn’t just political fluff).

By Justin Katz | October 18, 2021 |

Given it all to do again, I’d probably have studied systems engineering in college.  I love plans and planning.  But I loathe self-described “plans” like Rhode Island 2030, still in draft form from the so-called McKee-Matos Administration. The duo claims that they “launched RI 2030 to craft a vision both for the state’s economic recover as…