Justin Katz
I understand that part of historian Doug Burgess’s argument is that piracy was once a somewhat respectable occupation among American colonies, but I can’t help but take this as an indication of the historical nature of conservative reformers’ current task: Newport became a Colonial capital for pirating. “The Colony [of Rhode Island] now began to…
This has a sadly familiar feel for conservatives, who’ve again and again been vexed by a president mislabeled as one of us: Last week’s deal was supposed to hold both the managers’ and unions’ feet to the fire. In handing out the taxpayer money, the White House insisted the auto union cut worker pay roughly…
Mark Shea has an oft-recited line that fits this turn of events well: Using homemade lab equipment and the wealth of scientific knowledge available online, these hobbyists are trying to create new life-forms through genetic engineering — a field long dominated by Ph.D.s toiling in university and corporate laboratories. In her San Francisco dining room…
Two sentences from Edward Mazze’s commentary, yesterday, ought to be repeated daily for the benefit of every Rhode Islander until we force some real change in the right direction: In New England, Connecticut reported unemployment at 6.6 percent, Maine 6.3 percent, Massachusetts 5.9 percent, New Hampshire 4.3 percent and Vermont 5.7 percent. … There is…
It certainly behooves humanity to follow the trends and assess the contributors to changes in the global environment, but increasingly, there seems to be an environmentalist version of hypochondria at play: In one of the report’s most worrisome findings, the agency estimates that in light of recent ice sheet melting, global sea level rise could…
James Lewis worries that the incoming administration will sign the United States on with what he characterizes as a sort of eco-Inquisition, in the continued politicization of science: The world’s Green politicians are gathering in Poznan, Poland, to split the loot through a new Kyoto II Treaty. They blame the failure of the last Kyoto…
Being from an AP report, the headline is rapidly submerged in lest-you-think-this-is-good-news “context,” but it’s worth noting, nonetheless: Iraq’s Christians, a small minority in the overwhelmingly Muslim country, quietly celebrated Christmas on Thursday with a present from the government, which declared it an official holiday for the first time. … In his homily on Thursday,…
My teens and early twenties were, in a word, turbulent — mired in self-destructive behavior and emotional flights. Typical. Oh so typical was my pushing the world away in order to create an explanation for my feeling of isolation. In my impatient mind, the world had promised me much and delivered little. The fruits of…
I’ve been meaning to update the Census component of my analysis of RI’s taxpayer exodus (as I did with the related IRS data), but time has been too short. In the meantime, mull over this conspicuous paragraph from a Providence Journal article on the Census data: Census Bureau spokesman Robert Bernstein said that between July…
The rhetorical dance of the East Providence teachers’ union is so flowing, it’s easy to miss the essential argument: “The School Committee’s solution to their self-inflicted fiscal problem is to blame it on the teachers’ contract and to shift the entire burden of paying off that deficit to the teachers,” union representative Jeannette Woolley countered…
