Understandably the text and numbers provided in news stories about the record-setting run of a male swimmer identifying as a female in Ivy League competitions are kind of abstract to most people. Matt Walsh provides video of Princeton’s trans superstar lapping the competition:
Just to show you how absurd this is. Here’s the trans swimmer “Lia” Thomas crushing all of the female competitors by 40 seconds. This is what that looks like in real time. A total farce.
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) December 15, 2021
[Open full post]
The latest impositions on the lives of Rhode Islanders from Democrat Governor Dan McKee to make a show of doing something about COVID-19 raise two sequential questions:
- When did we all agree that the role of government is to enforce blanket rules for responsible behavior, rather than to safeguard rights and help manage the conflicting claims to which freedom can lead?
- To the extent that is government’s role, under what authority, or even reasonable standard, does the government force private businesses to act on its behalf to enforce those blanket rules?
Specifically, starting Monday, McKee has decreed that all indoor venues with a capacity of more than 250 people must enforce a mask mandate for everybody who enters the building.
Smaller establishments arguably get a worse deal: they can dangle mask freedom in front of customers if they either state that all employees and customers must be vaccinated or check everybody’s proof of vaccination at the door. This is a recipe for expense, revenue loss, and conflict no matter which option they choose.
Businesses of all sizes that do not have customers entering the premises in that way must follow the small-venue rules, mandating masks, mandating vaccines, or requiring proof of vaccination to avoid masks.
This policy is designed to allow a politician to claim that he has taken action while ensuring that other people take as much direct blame as he can offload. One wonders if his health and economic advisors gave any thought to the likely effects. One needn’t break out the social science research and build a spreadsheet-based model to predict that the people who will comply with the option-based mandate will be much more likely to have been vaccinated, anyway. Meanwhile, those who are not vaccinated will either dare businesses to card them or deprive those businesses of revenue and employees.
This problem of superficial consideration affects the other components of McKee’s “comprehensive” plan, too. On the testing front, McKee recognizes that labs are taking ridiculously long to return test results, but his solution is to distribute free home-based rapid tests. Unfortunately, these tests provide almost no value when it comes to mandates; only the slow PCR tests do that. For this provision to do any good whatsoever, McKee would have to require that organizations accept rapid tests in some circumstances. The fear mongers claim they aren’t reliable, but they are reasonably reliable when the person has symptoms, as a way to tell whether COVID is the cause of those symptoms.
Similarly, McKee announced a handful of additional public school districts that will be able to utilize “test and stay” policies so that students who have had close contact with others who tested positive for COVID can use a rapid test each morning for 10 days and stay in school if they have no symptoms. There are two catches, though. A source in one school tells me that this policy only applies if the close contact was in the school, not at home or elsewhere. Moreover, as stated above, the rapid tests are least reliable when a person has no symptoms. If the goal is to manage a disease rather than manage the government mandates, this is little better than a waste of money.
Unfortunately, nobody in this state wants to show the leadership to accept responsibility for the reality of risk, with the notable exception of Roman Catholic Bishop Thomas Tobin. He “encourages” Catholics to follow guidance for masking and to be vaccinated, but he affirms that “no individual should be turned away from Mass or singled out if they choose not to wear a mask.” In fact, Tobin goes farther, to affirm that “individuals may have good and substantive reasons for not doing so” while also insisting that “liturgical ministers… are not expected to wear masks while actively participating in the liturgy.”
Reading the bishop’s statement, one suspects that his “fervent prayers that Almighty God will lift this terrible pandemic from our midst” applies, as well, to the pandemic of government overreach.
Featured image by Sebastiaan Stam on Unsplash.
[Open full post]
Overly frightened people with a casual attitude about others’ right to disagree with them may be talking as if you’re unleashing death bombs on your community if you don’t subject your children to COVID-19 vaccines, but nationally, at least, you’re not alone:
Around 29% of parents with kids ages 5 to 11 said their kid is vaccinated or they are going to be “right away.” However, “about a third of parents of children ages 5 to 11 say they want to wait and see how the vaccine is working for others before getting their younger child vaccinated. About three in ten parents say they will definitely not get their younger child vaccinated, and a further 7% say they will only do so if their school requires it,” the KFF report stated.
As shown in the following chart from KFF, even among Democrats, whose 12-17-year-old children are over 80% vaccinated, only about half have or plan to have their 5-11-year-old children vaccinated. It’d be interesting to see how this data distributes by the age of the child. I’d wager a good portion of the people who say they’ll vaccinate their children “right away” have kids who are near the older age group.
It’s also interesting to note that, on the question of vaccinating young children, all racial groups fall between the positions of Republicans and Independents. As with much else in our current condition, the dividing line on something non-partisan appears to be partisan, but only for Democrats.
Featured image by the CDC on Unsplash.
[Open full post]
Those who think that a Christian flag should be unique in being disallowed from public flagpoles may not be bigots:
Over the past 12 years there have been 284 flags—from LGBTQ rainbow flags, a Turkish flag with the Islamic star, to Communist China flags—raised on a public flagpole owned by the city of Boston.
But when a local civic organization proposed a Christian flag, officials from the city—known as the Cradle of Liberty—said “no”, making it the first time ever that a proposed flag was rejected for the pole.
The debate is now heading to the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) with some unlikely bedfellows in support of the Christian organization bringing the case to the nation’s highest court.
It’s likely an indication of confusion begotten of system anti-Christian bias. These folks really are confused about what it means to “establish religion”; they’re stuck in a mindset where that which is broadly believed or traditional has to be suppressed in order to affirm the right not to believe it, while minority beliefs must be amplified to affirm the right to believe them. That’s not how freedom, rights, or even tolerance are supposed to work.
[Open full post]
Welcome to modern America (or Rhode Island, at least). An unspecified “threatening message” in a girls’ bathroom at Barrington High School has cautious administrators increasing the presence of police until the schools dismiss for Christmas break.
In turn, panicked teens are getting themselves on television by petitioning for distance learning because they are (some say) afraid for their lives.
If you’re worried that our civilization is becoming one that cannot possibly withstand obstacles or tolerate even mild risks, here’s more evidence. Arguably, we should even be concerned about our ability to function as a society.
[Open full post]
Our system is set up to ensure that infrastructure, like school buildings, is left to rot. That dynamic is inevitable when (1) budgeting and negotiations are tilted so heavily in favor of labor and (2) taxpayers can be bullied or forced into spending the additional money to repair or replace buildings when they become bad enough. The question is whether that tendency will remain viable as the number of students in the schools continues to shrink year after year and decade after decade.
Tamara Sacharzcyk mentions four school districts in an article about mounting campaigns to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on school buildings: Smithfield, Johnston, Central Falls, and Portsmouth. Let’s take a quick look at the enrollment and budgets of these districts using Anchor Rising’s enrollment tool and audit data.
As with so much else, the transparency is slipping on the audit front, but fortunately, the Wayback Machine has audits back to fiscal 2009, so we’ll compare that year to 2020, which is the latest available. Because Central Falls is largely state funded, I added the state’s revised aid number. (Note that fiscal years tend to straddle calendar years, so I’ll use the 2008-09 school year as corresponding to the 2009 audit, and so on.)
- Smithfield
- Enrollment: 2,545 to 2,382, down 6.4%
- Education activities spending: $33,482,943 to $44,817,126, up 33.9%
- Per pupil spending: $13,156 to $18,815, up 43.0%
- Johnston
- Enrollment: 3,227 to 3,258, up 1.0%
- Education activities spending: $56,946,555 to $64,208,657, up 12.58%
- Per pupil spending: $17,647 to $19,708, up 6.7%
- Central Falls
- Enrollment: 3,081 2,878, down 6.6%
- Education activities spending: $42,490,909 to $42,364,362, down -0.3%
- Per pupil spending: $13,791 to $14,720, up 6.7%
- Portsmouth
- Enrollment: 2,955 to 2,426, down 17.9%
- Education activities spending: $38,467,906 to $42,477,570, up 10.4%
- Per pupil spending: $13,018 to $17,509, up 34.5%
Keep in mind that enrollment numbers were universally down from a decade earlier. I also should note that a massive influx of federal fiscal stimulus aid around this time may have affected the numbers. More importantly, keep in mind that municipalities tend to carry their capital expenditures for school buildings outside of the school numbers.
Based on these numbers, we see that enrollment is way down in most places (Johnston being an exception), while budgets are way up. For these schools, inflation may have eaten up the increase, but on the other hand, schools’ performance has generally deteriorated.
As communities argue over indebting themselves (and state and federal taxpayers) for buildings, they must take these broader numbers into account. Damaged ceiling tiles may make for compelling images in a campaign for debt, but they should be a compelling argument that sufficient maintenance is not being done.
Featured image by Cleyton Ewerton on Unsplash.
[Open full post]
Somewhere in the wilds of Rhode Island progressive social media in the past couple months, I came across the Rhode Island Department of Corrections’ “Fiscal Year 2020 Annual Population Report.”
I think the context in which it was deployed like a statistical weapon was to support the claim that inmates at the state Adult Correctional Institution (ACI) in Cranston are disproportionately minorities from other communities, so counting them in the population of a more-white city steals the voice of people of color… or something like that.
These direct, proportional comparisons have a surface plausibility, because if race is an incidental quality, it ought to have no effect on incarceration. On the other hand, at the next layer down, the claim of “systemic racism” blurs into uselessness if the correlation is between race and criminal behavior, because the discussion shifts to the factors that drive a certain group toward crime. Without doubt, that’s an important question sociologically, but when talking about prisons, the progressives come up against the question of whether incarceration ought to be proportional to criminality.
If they bothered to dig into the RI DOC’s annual study, progressives might justifiably fear that their promotion of proportional thinking will come back to bite them. Consider the chart shown in the featured image of this post. It shows that minorities, especially black inmates, are disproportionately represented in the prison population. “Aha!,” the progressives say. “This is proof of systemic racism.”
But look at the variation from column to column. In a racist society that’s attempting to operate under the cover of a supposedly fair system, one might expect diminishing returns on racism. Those darned police would be dragging in minorities on frivolous charges, but even going through the motions of justice, they would be held while awaiting trial at a lower rate and then convicted at an even lower rate, because the police would only be arresting whites who really deserved it and “the system” would be deciding that minorities had to be held before convicted more often, with the “sentenced” population coming closest to just deserts, though still imbalanced.
Except… the percentages of inmates who are black goes up from all along the series. The fact that blacks and Hispanics move in different directions according to this view suggests that the “systemic racism” hypothesis is, at the least, problematic. If the police are racist, why are they so quick to bring in white people to be committed? And if the portion of the justice system that handles things before trial is racist, why do the hold blacks at a lower rate than indicated by their sentencing? And if the trial system is racist, why is it so much more likely to incarcerate whites?
A creative race huckster could no doubt come up with answers to these questions that fit the data in any given year. Yet, when once one enters on this level of analysis, the charts necessarily become mind-boggling from the progressive point of view. Notably, the system begins to look terribly anti-male, as if it laughs off female violence while arresting men left and right for nonviolent crimes that don’t result in conviction.
Maybe we need a more rational lens than identity politics to understand what’s going on.
Featured image by Justin Katz.
[Open full post]
Hopefully, an unanticipated silver lining to our society’s COVID-response overkill will be a return among the masses to healthy skepticism about experts. We all operate by some unarticulated calculation — let’s call it an assessment of action function — then one variable should, yes, be the best available calculation of probability, but that variable has to be divided by some factor of doubt.
During COVID, we’ve given the keys of government to experts as if the doubt factor is nearly nonexistent and the best model available must be assumed to be accurate. But then, there’s the Omicron variant:
[Open full post]The number of new positive cases of COVID-19 reported in South Africa has continued its downward trend despite increased testing, according to South African National Institute of Communicable Diseases (NICD) data. …
“The Omicron outbreak in SA [South Africa] with its extraordinary fast rise, and apparently nearly equally fast fall, is one of the most mind-boggling things I’ve ever seen during my career as an infectious disease epidemiologist,” Balloux stated on Twitter. …
The current trend appears to vary from that projected by a pre-print study in the UK that sets out to model the effects of the Omicron variant in England.
A controversial teacher training that the Highlander Institute prepared for the Westerly school district exposed two tricks that smuggle racist critical race theory (CRT) into Rhode Island schools: assuming “marginalized students” have greater affinity for a left-wing ideology, and brushing aside established systems that, presumably, have been serving non-marginalized students well.
To understand how these tricks are played, it’s helpful to review the material of another prominent government contractor, WestEd. This company received over $2,000,000 from the State of Rhode Island over the 2019-20 and 2020-21 school years to, among other things, develop curricula to help students “catch up” from the harm done by the government’s COVID shutdown.
In brief, the method is to introduce theories and techniques that are reasonable on their face, but that are joined with ideological preferences that are communicated in hidden assumptions. As suggested in the above-linked post about Westerly, favored (minority) groups have their heritage, experiences, and cultures reinforced as positive and defining, while disfavored (majority) groups have their own heritage, experiences, and cultures deconstructed and maligned.
The instruction to do this is not included in PowerPoint presentations or official documents. Instead, it’s simply understood from indoctrination in teacher education and the cult-like expectation that the truth is radical. The bias does slip through, though, in explanations and examples.
One of the reasonable-sounding concepts that WestEd promotes is “funds of knowledge.” Basically, teachers are told to find anchors in their students’ lives to make lessons more tangible for them. WestEd’s source documentation encourages teachers to create a Funds of Knowledge Inventory Matrix for each student, capturing their experiences and noting how the subjects being taught might apply in a special way to that student.
The fundamental premise here is that most school-based practices, curricula, and behaviors are based on mainstream, middle class norms and perspectives.
This might even seem like an obvious thing to do, but an assumed priority slips in to make the matrix a tool to manipulate:
By integrating patterns of learning, knowing, and doing that are familiar to culturally and economically diverse students, academic content becomes easier to connect to their lives and is understood on a deeper level.
In the example, the teacher visits the home of one student, Ruby, whose family is from El Salvador. The teacher (creepily) takes note of the contents of Ruby’s house (including her parents’ keychains) and brainstorms ways in which they might have educational application. Mostly, it’s dry and obvious, but here’s the brainstormed “classroom application” from the teacher’s note that Ruby’s house has many images of Jesus Christ and angels:
For social studies, we could compare Christianity with other prominent religions around the world and research different religions and places of worship in our city.
For math, we could compare numbers of practicing members of the different religions around the world.
The teacher tends to see other details from the student’s life as values to bring into the classroom for the purpose of reinforcing them and introducing experiences to the other children. In language arts, for example, the teacher considers having “Ruby’s mom to talk about El Salvador and her experiences with Spanish in the U.S.”
When it comes to a traditionalist religion, however, the impulse is to minimize its uniqueness. Ruby is Catholic, so the teacher leverages this “fund of knowledge” to introduce her to other religions. The goal isn’t to celebrate something unique, but to wash her religion out as nothing special.
Absent the unspoken ideological assumptions, we could easily imagine ways in which knowledge of a student’s Catholicism could be helpful to teach concepts. The Bible, obviously, is full of stories and lessons that apply not only to life but to every academic subject. So is the theology generally. Ruby’s family believes God is a Trinity, right? So, what shape has three sides? How about an art project drawing a Catholic icon?
To the contrary, as in the blockquote above, the very objective of the “funds of knowledge” approach is to find “patterns of learning, knowing, and doing that are familiar to culturally and economically diverse students.” In this framing, Catholicism has the feel of the “mainstream, middle class norms and perspectives” that teachers are being trained to avoid.
The question returns: What if most of the students are “mainstream, middle class” students? Shouldn’t the goal be “to connect to their lives,” too?
[Open full post]
Well, salmon should be hoping for global warming, anyway:
Melting glaciers may produce thousands of miles of new Pacific salmon habitat, a study published Tuesday by Nature Communications found.
As glaciers in the mountains of western North America melt, or retreat, they could produce around 4,000 miles of new Pacific salmon habitat by the year 2100, the data showed.
Just intuitively, I’ve long wondered why the warming of the planet should be considered bad. Warmth is energy and life.
Of course, this is where the alarmists will prophesy deadly storms and the planet spinning off its axis, but if we put that aside as yet to be proven, a changing climate is about the tradeoffs in nature. Salmon like new streams; some other animals liked things the way they were.
There’s something reactionary in climate alarmism (which is interesting, given its leveraging for revolutionary ends). The way things were when we first learned about them always feels right in some sense, even if change is neutral or better.
[Open full post]