Roger Kimball read through an “equity” guide published by the American Medical Association and the Association of American Medical Colleges so you don’t have to. Either way, however, the results are terrifying:
From first sentence to last, the aroma of scolding virtucratic entitlement is by turns noxiously cloying and comically rebarbative.
For the comedy, try on these opening words: “The field of equity, like all other scholarly domains . . .” You snorted, didn’t you? You know that “equity” — which is Newspeak for Marxoid attacks on private property and merit-based advancement — is not a “field,” much less a “scholarly field,” but a vapid epithet chosen because it conjures edifying moral associations. …
… This surreal emission from two of the nation’s top medical organizations presents an advancing terminal condition. The prognosis for the patient is grim. Fortunately, contagion can be contained by laughter bolstered by doses of ridicule.
I’m not so sure Kimball’s prescription will do the trick. The social contagion may be sufficiently advanced that the infected will only withdraw further from those who are causing them psychic pain.
On the other hand, widespread expression of disapproval to people who cannot withdraw from you so easily because they are your doctors and/or want your money may still be effective.
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Stalwart taxpayer advocate Rob Cote of Warwick has issued an open letter to the mayor of that city, Frank Picozzi:
Dear Mayor,
To keep you informed on the continuing Warwick Fire Department theft scandal. On Tuesday morning 11/16/21 at 9 am, former council president Steve Merolla will take a plea deal with the RI Ethics Commission to pay a fine in lieu of prosecution for his role in the YKSM / WFD debacle. In addition, due to the complaint that I filed, the Harrington report surfaced which was hidden from the council and the public which clearly indicates by statute and precedent that the WFD engaged in criminal action and that the city was on solid legal ground to seek restitution. I made that document public almost 3 months ago and I have heard nothing from your office.
I am respectfully asking you now what your position is and if and when you plan to seek restitution. Theft of taxpayer dollars is not something that can be ignored no matter if the city has to incur legal fees. You need to send the message.
Kindly inform me of what your position is on the matter. The only statement that I have heard from you is that your solicitor is “looking at it”.
I await your response.
Rob Cote
The political environment and news media being what they are in Rhode Island, it’s very easy for politicians simply to dig in and let scandals blow over. The details are often complex, and the motivation of insiders to keep the overall game going is high.
So, good for Rob Cote for staying on this issue. Even keeping track of it all can become a major time-cost for residents who simply want their local governments to operate well and fairly.
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It’s a commonplace to suggest that (in general), the Left leads with emotion while the Right leads with reason. And obviously, images are emotional tools. So Vijay Jayaraj provides a service by addressing three provocative images or stories used to advance climate alarmism that have proved highly misleading. In summary:
- Many islands have been gaining, not losing landmass.
- The polar bear population has been steady.
- Climate-vulnerable farmers in India are not experiencing problems from climate change.
Three isolated facts are not a disproof, of themselves, but as with so many hot, politicized topics, opinion-leaders are insisting that conclusions are obvious and decisions easy. They’re not, although it seems pretty obvious to me that the correct answer is in the opposite direction from what the alarmists proclaim.
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Reporting by Vox writer Dylan Matthews makes me sad for the greater good we could be doing. In brief, a study found that simply increasing the treatment of drinking water around the world would produce huge gains in health and well-being. Such actions fall under the umbrella of water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) programs, which improve parts of life that most of us in the West simply take for granted.
The problem is, however, that it’s not as simple as treating water, just as addressing hunger and poverty is not as simple as giving food and money. We might imagine that it would be relatively inexpensive just to skim off some of the surplus wealth of the world in order to feed people, but feeding somebody in a backwater dictatorship is not as inexpensive as feeding somebody in your suburban Rhode Island community. There’s shipping, preservation, storage, and (don’t forget) corruption.
That is, the solution isn’t just the public service, it’s a way of thinking about the individual and organizing government, and incredibly, it’s fashionable in the West to cast the spread of civilization as colonization.
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Parents, don’t be surprised if you’re ambushed with enthusiasm for vaccination during the car ride home after picking up your child from a school hosting a COVID-19 vaccination clinic for children from five to 11 years old. The Rhode Island Department of Health (DOH) is handing out toys — fidget spinners, to be exact — to young vaccine recipients.
Laura Damon reports for the Newport Daily News that the “fidget spinner toy [indicates] COVID vaccination status” at Gaudet Middle School, and Anchor Rising has confirmed with a source at a different school that the government is providing them for all state-run clinics.
The free gift is something of a surprise. Neither the press release announcing the availability of the vaccine for young children nor the Department of Health’s vaccination page mentions the prizes.
In fact, a spokesperson for the department disputed this characterization. Asked whether the DOH had publicly announced the program, the spokesperson told Anchor Rising that only one clinic was giving out the fidget spinners “as a distraction while getting vaccinated,” which “resulted in inaccurate rumors on social media.”
Somebody should warn the children, because they’re taking the freebies as desirable bribes for vaccination and may feel left out when other children show them off at recess. More worryingly, parents who aren’t yet convinced it’s a good idea to vaccinate young children — who already have a 99.92% chance of avoiding hospitalization with COVID in Rhode Island — have reason to fear that fidget spinners will not be the last way in which their kids are manipulated and treated differently.
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If you’re wondering why the topic of free condoms in schools is appearing in headlines and social media conversations today, it might be because “Vermont just became the first state in the nation to give access to free condoms in grades 7-12,” as Hank Berrien reports for the Daily Wire.
It’s actually a bit more extreme than that. The state legislature has mandated that all public secondary schools, which appears to cover students down to seventh grade, must make condoms freely available to students.
The interesting part, though, is that the birth control is apparently going to be donated by Planned Parenthood. Why would the private organization do that? Well, because it’s good for their abortion business. It’s product placement for sex.
The more schools remind children to want to have sex, and the more they make available implements that make children feel as if they ought to be using those implements, the more sex children will have, which means the more mistakes they’ll make, which means the more babies Planned Parenthood can kill.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- McKee’s (more than) missteps with ILO
- North Kingstown’s missteps with naked fat tests
- Potential missteps in the RI GOP’s gubernatorial plans
- RI government creates yet another PR job
Featured image by Jonny Gios on Unsplash.
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There really aren’t that many people in prison at the moment over the events of January 6, so when stories of their mistreatment continue to arise, it kinda raises questions, you know?
It also makes one question the explanations. Last week, several of them had to be removed from their cells on stretchers after exposure to chemical sprays, and the story, according to Zachary Stieber of The Epoch Times, is that one inmate wouldn’t wear a mask. As the guards attempted to subdue him with the spray, they kept missing, and the air circulation system distributed the gas into the other inmates’ cells, where they were trapped because the only person with a key had left the area.
Stories like this seem like they might justify a little more attention and might even start reinforcing the sense that the term “political prisoner” isn’t exactly without justification.
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Of course Katie Mulvaney would fail to include a single expression of contrary concern about a survey finding (surprise, surprise) that many identity groups involved with the Rhode Island judiciary believe they have suffered from discrimination there in her Providence Journal article. Apart from journalists’ general agreement with the progressive talking points, who in Rhode Island’s political class would dare to go on the record questioning an equity survey by the RI Bar Association?
A survey by the Rhode Island Bar Association Diversity & Inclusion Task Force found that a majority of respondents encountered discrimination — including instances of racism, sexism, homophobia and prejudice based on a person’s disability — in the profession and in the Rhode Island court system. Female attorneys, lawyers of color, LGBT lawyers and those with disabilities reported experiencing barriers to their professional career, such as disparate treatment, lower pay and fewer opportunities to advance.
Even more terrifying than the notion that people are scared to speak up with a contrary view is the possibility that nobody sees how incredibly dangerous this movement is to our justice system and, therefore, our entire state. Consider the proposed solutions:
The task force has recommended that the bar association and the state Supreme Court impose mandatory annual continuing legal education courses focusing on diversity and inclusion and implicit bias. It emphasized, too, the importance of bar members in underrepresented groups participating in leadership, committees and governance.
Judges and the courts should commit to equitable hiring practices, annual implicit bias and anti-racism training, and emphasize outreach from judges to a diverse pool of lawyers, the task force said.
The activists want more than simply training judges to see things in terms of identity groups. With the introduction of “anti-racism training,” they will pressure judges to rule in ways that are unjust in a particular case in order to make up for supposed injustices on a broader social scale. This will destroy Rhode Island’s legal system.
“Equity” doesn’t mean everybody gets the same, fair treatment; it means their treatment adjusts for earlier or external considerations to ensure proportional representation and outcomes. In terms of law and order, it means that the goal of the courts would not be to ensure that the parties are treated as equals and win or lose based on the facts of the case; rather, it would be to ensure that convictions and rulings don’t disproportionately go against “underrepresented groups,” regardless of whether they are overrepresented among offenders. In terms of lawyers, it will mean that those from these groups will receive special treatment.
Even worse, the risks this movement creates are not justified by the survey, although Mulvaney’s details appear carefully selected and the full results do not appear to be available on the Bar Association’s website. Only 6% (around 300 of 5,000) of Bar members even responded to the survey, and among them, 47% claim to have “experienced discrimination.” The bias of these results is baked in: members of “underrepresented groups” were obviously much more likely to take the survey, especially those with a complaint on their minds.
Of those who identified with an “underrepresented minority group” (however many that may have been), 58% do not feel as if they have ever “experienced social, opportunity or advancement barriers,” and almost half of those (42%) who do feel that way don’t think it was their identity group status that was the cause. Never mind, by the way, that we have no way of knowing how long ago these incidents may have been. If they skew back to the 70s and 80s, the results are much less meaningful.
Nobody should doubt that Rhode Island’s legal system is shot through with cliquish insiders who enjoy being part of the club and who play by selective rules, but that affects anybody who isn’t in the club. Undermining the objectivity of the courts while infusing them with radical, racist ideas — based on the results of an incredibly skewed survey, not a rigorous examination — should be met with outrage. Is there nobody of courage and clarity left in Rhode Island’s governing elite?
Featured image by Eskay Lim on Unsplash.
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The state Democratic Party in Rhode Island recently sent out a fundraising email saying:
We’ve got just over a year to reach and talk to as many voters as possible. We know the GOP is already doing its best to beat us up and down the ballot, and we can’t let that continue.
Are there really voters in Rhode Island who see this as an urgent threat that ought to inspire them to click a link and make a donation?
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