Justin Katz

A Word from a Neighbor

By Justin Katz | June 21, 2007 |

I can’t imagine what I would do — or, more to the point, demand — if my little square of land turned out to be contaminated. My family would probably be moving into somebody’s basement while we tried to figure out how to either save the property or extricate ourselves from ownership of it. Folks…

Stacking the Bidding Deck Against a Revolution

By Justin Katz | June 18, 2007 |

As much as I encourage our readers to come up with brilliant political reactions to instances of our state government’s corrupt insanity, I’m not prepared to be sanguine about the midnight amendment’s (PDF) effects. According to a plain reading of the text, here’s how the in-house group that may potentially be privatized (read, the union…

Go Ahead. Make My Father’s Day.

By Justin Katz | June 15, 2007 |

What better preparation for the arbitrary holiday celebrating fathers could there be than to goad readers into explaining why fathers don’t matter? Or, more specifically, why children don’t need mothers and fathers. The Wall Street Journal offers the opportunity: A growing body of research offers new insight. Fathers can have a distinct impact on children…

Separation of What and State?

By Justin Katz | June 14, 2007 |

I get the feeling that people (like Peter O’Connell of East Greenwich) who would get incensed at this paragraph, from a story about Philadelphia’s declaring itself the City of Brotherly Love and fetal massacre: Cardinal Justin Rigali, the spiritual leader of hundreds of thousands of Roman Catholics in the region, immediately responded with a rebuke…

Rudy Almighty

By Justin Katz | June 13, 2007 |

Is it me, or is there something similar in the eyes of the following two pictures (both from the ad-cycling page to which Marc links)? The picture at right is, of course, from the new neo-Noah film Evan Almighty, and given Rudy’s famous social liberalism (as well as my selective cropping), I can’t help but…

Teaching Our Children to Fear

By Justin Katz | June 7, 2007 |

I’m not just being a contrarian when I say that I have concerns about this legislation: The Rhode Island Senate has approved legislation creating the “Lindsay Ann Burke Act,” an effort to protect those most vulnerable to dating violence by calling on schools to provide dating violence education for middle school and high school students.…

Drunk on Antiseptics

By Justin Katz | June 7, 2007 |

I was at a loss to choose a category for this curious bit of information — which I originally thought to be typical email-forward spam — but it seems like something worth knowing about: Just wanted to send you a quick email and warn you about using hand sanitizers wtih your young kids. We have…

How to Defuse a Rabble Rouser

By Justin Katz | June 7, 2007 |

Go beyond addressing his concerns before he’s even asked. It also helped to quell my ire that it took over two hours for the Tiverton zoning board to get to the matter of renovations to the school next to my house last night. While I waited, I was able to peruse the project plans and…

Into the Abyss or the Same-but-Different?

By Justin Katz | June 6, 2007 |

There’s an attraction, among older folks, to validating what the kids are doing. Nobody wants to become the modern version of that fuddy-duddy whom they mocked as children, but there’s a risk of overlooking important considerations as one rushes to be cool about the modern-day Walkman, the latest music, or newfangled manifestations of the recklessness…

Advancing the SSM Conversation

By Justin Katz | June 5, 2007 |

Matt from Unlikely Words makes an excellent point in response to my most recent post on same-sex marriage, excellent because it advances a conversation that tends toward talking past one another: The statistics don’t enter into it. Even accepting the claim (which I don’t doubt) that many or even most married couples have children isn’t…