Remember when the American military accidentally blew up an aid worker and seven children in his family? Yeah, well, nobody will face consequences for that:
“What we saw here was a breakdown in process and execution in procedural events, not the result of negligence, not the result of misconduct, not the result of poor leadership,” Defense Department spokesman John Kirby told reporters. “So I do not anticipate there being issues of personal accountability to be had with respect to the August 29 airstrike.”
Let’s cut to the chase. Joe Biden wanted the military to kill somebody to help him through a difficult news cycle, and they followed through. There is nobody to hold accountable, even the Big Guy, whom the news media is seeking to bolster as much as possible.
Mission accomplished.
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As we construct the stories by which we understand reality, we tend to romanticize people when they’re generalized. In healthcare, for instance, patients are “people who need help,” and we have a set of emotions and moral ideas associated with them as a concept.
The problem is people need all sorts of kinds of help, in different degrees and of different natures. The help one person needs could be help with whatever personality trait it is that leads them to abuse the healthcare system. When we zoom in to the individual person or the particular situation, the romanticism can evaporate.
A person with a lifetime of collected individuals and particulars, like Michael Morse, can gain a very unromantic impression of “people who need help.” Looking back at his time as an EMS, he writes that he didn’t expect to learn that “mildly Ill people, younger than [him] would call 911, lay in bed until [they] arrived, allow others to physically carry them from their homes and then wait for 8 hours crammed into an overcrowded emergency room with other mildly Ill people.”
This wasn’t all patients, of course, but it was some, and they have to be included in our de-romanticized idea of who uses these services when we have public policy debates about them. Writes Morse:
But the most unbelievable thing is nobody has the courage to reign in the waste, abuse and frivolity that plagues EMS, not the politicians, not the Fire Departments or their unions, not the ambulance companies, the hospitals, the doctors or even the medics on the street.
I’m not sure courage is the problem. As Morse goes on to note, the participants all profit from the situation. A lack of reasonable standards also covers them on the other side, because nobody is to blame if the intention is to help everybody and “the system” just can’t accommodate them. It’s not the people to whom we’ve assigned the task of managing the system, because they just want to help, and they’ve told us they need more and more. It’s the fault of the taxpayers or corporations or whatever bogeyman we want to focus on for not supplying what is needed.
These are the incentives that inevitably arise when we declare goods and services to be “rights” and separate the recipient from the payer. For some reason, when rights are things that we are permitted to do, we easily understand that they can be abused, but when rights are things that we are entitled to be given, we romanticize away the possibility of abusing the gift.
Featured image by Adhy Savala on Unsplash.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- The mask mandate cometh
- Omicron looms
- Union pocket-lining passes
- Press conference disrupted
- A neighborhood’s sudden homeless problem
- The RI Political Co-Op’s camping vacation
- Voter lists (partially) cleaned
Featured image by Kyle Head on Unsplash.
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This deliciously contrarian article by Patricia Adams and Lawrence Solomon suggests that our planet is increasingly green, no thanks to the environmentalist mania of the last half-century in Western countries:
The planet’s ecology is thriving thanks to carbon dioxide, despite first world policies that are undermining it. The ironic benefactors in this story are countries of the third world, led by China, whose emissions are doing the most to green the planet.
Up, up, up. Carbon dioxide, also known as “nature’s fertilizer,” has steadily been enriching Earth’s atmosphere, from 320 parts per million in 1970 to 365 parts in 2000, to more than 412 parts today. The evidence of a flourishing planet—once anecdotal—is now plain to see, thanks to satellite imagery that has been monitoring the amount of greenery on the planet since 1979.
This seems plausible to me, but you don’t have to buy it to take the lesson. Nature has a process for addressing CO2 (plants) and a process for dealing with increases and decreases (expansion or contraction of green areas). Your models of the future have to account for this, and you can’t really say whether such changes are good or bad until you’ve got decades to watch how things play out… especially when your proposed solutions force people to struggle in the present.
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One of the questions on my mind when I thought to create the Rhode Island Public Schools October Enrollment application in Anchor Rising’s People’s Data Armory was the effect of COVID and shutdowns. As the chart below shows, enrollment in 2020 was down about 3% from the prior year, and it slid a bit rather than recovering in 2021.
I didn’t put it in the chart, but if you change the race-based chart of the application to show 100% vertical bars, you can see that this shift didn’t change underlying racial trends. Statewide, the percentage of the student body that is white is dropping by about one percentage point every year, meaning the schools will be “majority minority” within four years.
A deeper investigation would show what this means, in practice. This isn’t an evenly distributed shift. The percentage of white students in Providence, for example, has been going down, but not by 1% per year, mainly because there aren’t that many white students in the system to begin with. Meanwhile, Central Falls has actually been increasing its percentage of white students. It looks like what’s happening is that majority-white districts are simply shrinking more quickly. From what I’ve noticed thus far, South Kingstown, which is still 82% white, leads the state in enrollment lost by percentage.
Its schools are currently at 59.5% their size at peak in the 1999-00 school year. Thus, the percentage of minority students in the district is increasing as a percentage, but only because white students are disappearing. (Among minority groups, what’s happening is that Hispanics and multi-racial students are replacing black and Asian students.)
Returning to the state overall, the second chart I’ve included below contains something of a mystery. It shows that low-income students (as demarcated by involvement with the free or reduced lunch program) are way down since the pandemic started — even more in 2021 than in 2020.
Featured image by Rene Bernal on Unsplash.
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As we wait with great anticipation proclamations from on high at the State House as to how we must live our lives in the Ocean State, David Catron’s explanation is worth reading about how some of the Biden administration’s own anti-COVID policies are manifestly not founded in science:
[Open full post]Last Thursday, President Biden announced his “COVID-19 Winter Plan.” Despite his claim that it will fight the disease with “science and speed,” it ignores virtually everything scientists have learned about coronavirus during the past two years. Indeed, it contains a number of elements that epidemiologists have denounced and that evidence has proven counterproductive. These include an irrational emphasis on vaccinating low risk children, the promotion of booster shots that the World Health Organization (WHO) has pronounced ineffective, travel bans that could very well jeopardize efforts to contain future outbreaks, and strident calls for private businesses to bully their employees into getting vaccinated.
Responding to a Josh Hammer column on Newsweek, Instapundit Glenn Reynolds follows up Hammer’s suggestion that Republicans have to “nurture,” not “squander” their political inroads with new voters by highlighting the importance of clarity:
That’s the hard part. But yeah, the GOP is becoming a multiethnic party of small business and the working class, while the Democrats are becoming the party of rich white urbanites.
He also highlights a line from his own April column in the New York Post:
Democrats are now the party of Wall Street, Silicon Valley and upscale suburbs. The people who have to deal with consequences will have to go somewhere else politically. And they will.
When we hear about the need for “a ‘pragmatic,’ ‘socially moderate’ GOP candidate” in Rhode Island, we have to put the words in this broader context. “Social moderate” doesn’t mean “like a liberal Democrat” anymore, because liberal Democrats have become immoderate radicals.
The media will desperately obscure this conclusion, but the Democrats are now the party of the rich and social extremists.
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Nobody should feel encouraged by statements from Democrat Mayor Jorge Elorza or the other Democrats who run the city after another shooting in Providence on Saturday night. Elorza may claim to “understand that our community needs and deserves to feel safe,” but that isn’t possible when authorities refuse to be clear about what’s going on.
Most relevant, here, is the early taste of wokism that swept Providence in 2017, essentially deeming talk of “gangs” to be racist and ultimately making it more difficult for police to get their heads around violence, much less prevent it. All that remains, then, is the hope that blind-folded police work plus somehow getting weapons off the street will fix the problems without acknowledging the reality that the Providence area has a growing gang culture. That is not going to work. Worse, the more government creates interactions between residents and authorities that have nothing to do with the problem they’re actually trying to solve, the more mistakes will be made and the more injustices perpetrated.
In contrast, John DePetro posted an investigative report on his site yesterday that shows how mysteries can be solved if we accept the reality of gangs. Investigating the murder of Miya Brophy-Baermann, a young woman murdered in Providence in August, John spots a person featured in a local gang member’s rap video who lived in the area in which Brophy-Baermann was murdered and speculates that the shooting was a case of mistaken identity.
Not only does this context give new significance to reports that the victim of Saturday night’s shooting was “a rapper,” but it shows exactly how deadly Providence’s “Community Safety Act” can be.
With a lead like the one John provides, police could work with information about rival gangs and their vehicles to solve the crime and make arrests. But since 2017, they are forbidden to have even “written notes” of anybody associated with gangs or gang members outside of an official “gang list,” and factors such as “association with other people identified as gang members” cannot be used to include them.
Thus, it would appear possible that no police officer in Providence can legally have a written note that the person who lived near the Brophy-Baermann shooting was in a video with a violent gang member and therefore devote resources to investigating a connection of other gangs to the shooting.
Little wonder Providence officials avoid the word “gang” like a hex. They’re complicit in these deaths.
But what’s the local media’s excuse? What’s the voters?
Featured image by Luis Villasmil on Unsplash.
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John the Baptist’s suggestion to Roman soldiers in today’s Gospel reading at Roman Catholic Mass has always left me feeling as I was missing some historical context:
And the crowds asked him, “What then should we do?”
He said to them in reply, “Whoever has two tunics should share with the person who has none. And whoever has food should do likewise.”
Even tax collectors came to be baptized and they said to him, “Teacher, what should we do?”
He answered them, “Stop collecting more than what is prescribed.”
Soldiers also asked him, “And what is it that we should do?” He told them, “Do not practice extortion, do not falsely accuse anyone, and be satisfied with your wages.”
Sharing from one’s surplus makes sense. Not overtaxing people for personal gain makes sense (memo to people in Rhode Island government). And of course not extorting money and not falsely accusing people make sense. But what was going on in ancient Rome to prompt the comment about wages?
I can’t claim to have any new and specific information to answer the question, but this is the first time I’ve noticed this passage since I worked my way through Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and it occurred to me that buying off or bribing soldiers was a common practice of those who became emperors. Indeed, when Galba reneged on a promised bribe that the head of the Praetorian Guard had made on his behalf to his men, it proved key to his undoing within seven months. That’s one small example, but gaining the support of soldiers by promising wages was common.
Clearly, soldiers’ desire for greater wages was well known in the empire, and its effect on the empire seems relevant to John’s admonition in multiple ways. First, it shows the effect that a broad change of perspective can have on the direction of history because, second, inclining toward dissatisfaction and greed opens the way for corruption and greater evil.
Look at the deterioration and corruption of Rhode Island made possible by a system designed around buying support from special interest groups, with a particular focus on government employees. In John’s time and place as in ours, being an agent of government had advantages which were too often abused, causing harm to both the agents and the people.
Featured image by Giovanni Battista Piranesi on WikiArt.
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Ed Driscol draws our attention to an essay on Tablet in which Liel Leibovitz, which definitely deserves the “read the whole thing” tag:
You may be among the increasing numbers of people going through The Turn right now. Having lived through the turmoil of the last half decade—through the years of MAGA and antifa and rampant identity politics and, most dramatically, the global turmoil caused by COVID-19—more and more of us feel absolutely and irreparably politically homeless. Instinctively, we looked to the Democratic Party, the only home we and our parents and their parents before them had ever known or seriously considered. But what we saw there—and in the newspapers we used to read, and in the schools whose admission letters once made us so proud—was terrifying. However we tried to explain what was happening on “the left,” it was hard to convince ourselves that it was right, or that it was something we still truly believed in. That is what The Turn is about. …
… having been there before, I have one important thing to tell you: If the left is going to make it “right wing” to simply be decent, then it’s OK to be right.
Those of us who’ve been comfortable being labeled “on the right” for years (often having undergone the Turn sooner) shouldn’t just be triumphal about Leibovitz’s conversion, because there are important lessons for us in it.
Most progressives, liberals, and et ceteras won’t be bound to the Left with successful careers in ideological alignment, as Liebovitz was, but at a minimum, the political alignment is part of their self-identity and probably roots them in a community to some extent. This means our mockery of their friends will usually be counterproductive. Leibovitz encourages them to ask real questions about what they believe, but it’s up to us to prepare relationships that help the trade. To make the shift more welcoming.
For my part, the most-worthy relationship is that with God, but in a secular world, Truth will do, which means:
- Freedom to question assertions.
- Revulsion at discrimination based on incidental qualities like skin color.
- Willingness to acknowledge facts and trade-offs.
We can offer these principles and more as a common ground, leading (if individual personalities should correspond) to new personal relationships on our side of the chasm.
Remember: when people change their minds on anything that matters, they are saying “good-bye” to something. It’s important to be ready with a “hello.”
Featured image by Tyler Nix on Unsplash.
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