Justin Katz
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. …
As we’re rightly reminded frequently in the face of such incidents, we would err if we overgeneralized from incidents like this one: A homeless woman “was wiping blood off of her hands with a paper towel” after she allegedly killed a homeless shelter coordinator with an ax, police said. Zaaina Asra Zakirrah Mahvish-Jammeh, a 38-year-old…
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…
Conflicts like this can be nothing more than bureaucratic squabbles. They can also be evidence of a move toward a Communist China–esque absorption of religious organizations. And they can also be mere bureaucratic squabbles that prepare the ground for government absorption of religious organizations. The Archdiocese for the Military Services (AMS) slammed Walter Reed National…
John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss the mysterious ways in which Rhode Island government runs poorly.
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.…
John DePetro and Justin Katz walk through the latest comedies in Rhode Island politics and discuss the characters who have been stealing the spotlight.
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…
John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss the factors behind Rhode Island’s inability to raise sufficient funds for major projects.
It’s interesting to watch these partisan ideologues bash the newspaper that contributed so much to their careers. One wonders whether they’ve ever considered whether their work-product and the journalistic culture they’ve perpetuated has contributed to the paper’s plight: