Ripple
Today the most prominent themes among the flotsam on RI Twitter are hagiographic tweets about labor unions and reports about failing infrastructure in the Providence area with respect to water management. Folks, thank the unions for the flooding, because the expense they’ve imposed on infrastructure in Rhode Island is largely to blame. Ignoring this reality…
… if you see people citing the strange flash flooding in the Providence area and Rt. 95 as evidence of “climate change,” ask them whether the blame mightn’t more reasonably land on government officials’ poor management of the infrastructure under their authority.
As local media sources have started to track instances of monkeypox in our area, I’ve wondered how many Rhode Islanders know that it is mostly (although not entirely) a venereal disease spreading mostly among gay men. Except, as Rod Dreher points out, that’s not a fact to which we’re permitted to react: Scott Gottlieb, former…
Something about this story feels profoundly discouraging to me: Forty Rhode Island business owners traveled to Washington D.C. last week as part of the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses Summit to meet with hundreds of officials to discuss how to boost access to capital, child care and government contracting. Katie Schibler Conn, owner of KSA…
Rhode Island provides an excellent case study in how corruption works. Elections aren’t stolen at the ballot box (except as a last resort). Rather, corruption rigs the game at every opportunity — buying and coercing votes so that they don’t have to be stolen or manufactured. The only way to stop this is to get…
More data on COVID immunity over the long-term is not actually that surprising to people who looked at the data honestly a year or more ago: “Effectiveness of primary infection against severe, critical, or fatal COVID-19 reinfection was 97.3 percent … irrespective of the variant of primary infection or reinfection, and with no evidence for…
My pace of writing for these essays is much slower than my usual. In part, the reason is that my 2022 has simply been busier than I expected, and I haven’t been able to manage my Dust in the Light allotment of time every week. In bigger part, however, the reason is that, as clear as…
… on Astral Weeks by Van Morrison has to be one of the greatest tracks ever recorded
I listened to so much Billy Joel as a tween and teen that one could almost say he was something of a father figure for me (hey, don’t judge). One of his songs just came up on my shuffle, inspiring me to check in BillyJoel.com, which I haven’t visited in years. With a few exceptions,…
What did they change? Well, there was a rule that said mommies had to be allowed to kill their babies before they were born everywhere in the country, and the court said states could decide whether or not to keep that rule. Why would mommies want to kill their babies?