Arresting a private business manager for attempted bribery of a public official raises an interesting crime to contemplate.
Offering money for enhanced service is not a crime. I’ve never heard of somebody being arrested for trying to slip a m’aitre d’ cash to find somebody without reservations a table in a busy restaurant. And if public officials could be trusted never to take bribes, but rather simply to push those thick envelopes back across the table, there’d be no need to criminalize the attempt.
In such situations, either through oppressive regulations or difficult paperwork processes, government has created an incentive to bribe a public official, whom it cannot trust to remain honest, and so it must criminalize attempted bribery. Maybe that’s necessary at the end of the day, but it’s a curious arrangement.
That’s particularly true in the circumstance I have in mind, as reported by Sarah Doiron. Allegedly, LIT Lounge manager Daniel Marlo Caraballo attempted to pay off Providence Deputy Director of Licensing Jose Giusti to allow him to provide entertainment for his patrons after he had been ordered to stop doing so due to failure to pay fees for two months. Oddly, in halting the license, the Board of Licenses specifically forbade him from hosting a specific rap artist.
The language of the cease and desist letter is difficult to square with the First Amendment of the United States Constitution and Article I, Section 21, of the Rhode Island Constitution:
At the Board of Licenses hearing on October 27th 2021 the Providence Police Department presented numerous incidents of violence at previous performances of this artist. The Board determined that allowing this artist to perform would pose a significant safety threat to your establishment, your staff, your patrons, and the City as a whole.
I can see requiring additional security or other provisions to be made based on the proven behavior of the audience that follows a particular artist, but forbidding the artist to perform entirely, particularly by denying the license of the venue, is pretty obviously a “law abridging the freedom of speech.” (That $2,000 could have bought a lot of extra security.)
I can also see requiring overdue fees to be paid prior to a performance, but it ought to be as easy to resolve that problem as it is to attempt to slip an envelope to a city official.
So, yeah… rah, rah, Board of Licenses Chair Dylan Conley (oh, ye of the familiar name), “This is an opportunity for the world to understand what Providence is today.” It’s a place where business owners are so much the opposition that they are driven to bribery attempts, and the city officials are so clean that they call the cops on them.
Featured image by Bermix Studio on Unsplash.
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This gets better and better. Not only does “Let’s Go Brandon” carry a potent political message, not only does it offer a single unifying phrase, but it’s also getting really fun.
It’s not a phrase, it’s a movement! #LGB pic.twitter.com/MpeKAEVfWB
— Lauren Boebert (@laurenboebert) November 5, 2021
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Something about the account that Eli Sherman describes for WPRI of North Kingstown Superintendent Philip Auger being informed in 2018 about the naked fat tests allegedly conducted by basketball coach Aaron Thomas is odd and made odder by an edit to the story. Here’s a paragraph from the story, about a student who contacted Auger about Thomas’s activity:
The former student told Target 12 that Auger got back to him shortly after their initial discussion in 2018. The former student said Auger told him he took the allegations seriously and wanted him to come in to meet with school officials to talk about what happened. The former student said he felt uncomfortable at the time talking with others about something that was so sensitive and personal.
But here’s how Sherman initially wrote this paragraph:
The former student told Target 12 that Auger got back to him shortly after their discussion in 2018, saying he took the allegations seriously but that the school needed more people to come forward to corroborate his experience. The former student said at the time he felt uncomfortable asking others to speak up about something that was so sensitive and personal.
Why the change? The rest of the story makes a lot more sense with the second version (although it puts Auger in a worse light, with potential legal consequences).
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This seems like good news:
An inexpensive antidepressant drug has been found to reduce the risk of hospitalization in high-risk adults recently diagnosed with COVID-19 by over 30 percent, according to a study published in The Lancet Global Health.
Shouldn’t it be the case that available treatments factor into decisions about whether public health outweighs individual rights? We certainly acknowledge that as the case for other diseases for which we require vaccines.
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Whether one generally agrees with his ideas or not, Jordan Peterson’s podcast is unique and wonderful in its approach. He’s a brilliant guy, and he’s genuinely striving to figure stuff out. To this end, he invites other brilliant people who he thinks can help him answer some question on for a conversation. Peterson comes to each conversation with his own frame of reference and ideas he’s trying to build, and his guest often has a wholly different frame and intention for progress. Meanwhile, a listener may be working on wholly different problems. This can make conversations difficult to follow, but often rewarding.
Naturally, Peterson’s frame of reference (where guests and listeners can learn the most from him) is largely in the field of psychology, which is where his professional interests lie. In this line, he tweeted out the following thoughts last night:
People think that the purpose of memory is to remember the past. That’s not the purpose of memory.
The purpose of memory is to extract out, from the past, lessons to structure the future. That’s the purpose of personal memory.
So, you’re done with a memory when you’ve extracted the information that you can use to guide yourself properly in the future.
If you have a traumatic memory, for example, that’s obsessing you, if you analyze that memory to the point where you figured out how you put yourself at risk, you can determine how you might avoid that in the future. Then the emotion associated with that goes away.
Considering these ideas in the frame where I spend most of my intellectual time, which is first philosophical and theological and then social and political, yields great fruit.
Memories are information about the nature of reality (by which I mean God, but one needn’t share my religion to take the point). We bring this reality into being through our actions, including that which we choose to observe. In this way, we learn about the universe that we inhabit at the same time that we learn who we are. Our identity is partly defined by our experiences (mainly as circumstances to which we were forced to react), but it is decisively formed through our actions, which includes speech. We do this well when we bring into being a self and a reality that moves us in a positive direction despite negative experiences.
What makes negative experiences psychologically damaging in the long term is wholly what they say about reality itself and about us, as individuals who experienced them. To overcome them, the key is to figure out how to see that the experiences were not definitive of reality (or us), but were something more like passing circumstances.
I haven’t followed it thoroughly, but I think this is the crux of Peterson’s narrative-building approach to therapy. Recognize the past, imagine who you want to be, and think through, write down, and then live out the narrative that can get your character (you) from the bad spot to the good one in a realistic way. In short: Figure out how reality can be such that the bad past doesn’t preclude a great future — how the bad past was not definitive.
In these terms, it’s obvious that we do terrible harm to people by encouraging them to identify as victims, or even survivors (when presented as an identity label). That makes the trauma central to their identities. We see this on a grand scale with grievance and identity politics.
Unfortunately, the hucksters are doing pushing this identification because they see opportunity for profit, and the schemers are focusing on it because they see an avenue toward power. They’re causing a great deal of unnecessary trauma for their selfish ends, though, and the rest of us have to see through it to prevent it from becoming real.
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These two paragraphs from Steph Machado’s WPRI report on a Senate Rules, Government Ethics and Oversight Committee’s hearing concerning the state takeover of Providence schools convey the most-important information, with the rest describing superficial political performance:
Zack Scott, the deputy superintendent of operations, told the Senate committee Wednesday only nine departing teachers had responded to exit surveys sent out by the district, prompting a teacher from the audience to shout out that the surveys had been sent to email accounts they no longer had access to. …
A packed audience of teachers repeatedly laughed when Scott was unable to answer the senators’ questions, including about how many Providence teachers had left and how many applicants had been interviewed for jobs amid the shortage.
We’ll assume Machado’s assessment that the crowd consisted entirely of teachers is accurate, although it is strange that she would assert that the person “shouting out” was, specifically, without having asked (or have granted anonymity if she did so).
The dominant information these paragraphs provide is that the hearing was handled with the typical teachers union strategy of unprofessional disrespect. Laughing at an administrator simultaneously affects his emotional state and performance while also conveying to the elected officials and any other interested parties (like news reporters) what their response should be.
With that information, the reader can’t help but wonder whether anybody involved in the hearing (or reporting on it) remembers why the state took over Providence schools in the first place.
Two years ago, the Providence district was nationally recognized as a massive failure for students. How should we envision the necessary changes would play out? Did legislators expect the many people whose accustomed behavior was causing the damage to simply go along with a comprehensive fix with smiles on their faces?
In these cases, the concern should not be that many teachers are no longer happy with their jobs and are leaving. Their departure might be a good thing. To know whether that is the case or not, one first must know whether the administrators are making beneficial changes.
That is why a question from Democrat Senator from Smithfield Stephen Archambault might have been on the right track if it weren’t so probable he was simply playing to the jeering union audience. Knowing why teachers are leaving is an important part of evaluating whether policies of reform are causing the right teachers to leave.
And that should be the focus of these inquiries: not whether teachers are happy, but whether the state has a credible plan and is deliberately implementing it. That part isn’t at all clear.
If that were the case, administrators might not need a policy of exit interviews. They would already have a basis to judge whether the teachers were the ones who weren’t willing to do the necessary work of reform. Then they could interview any counterproductive surprises in order to tweak the plan to avoid regretable losses going forward.
Saying so in a public hearing would, of course, produce a new wave of shouts and jeers from the “packed audience,” as well as objections from the union-dependent elected officials at the front of the room.
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Remember that scene that stood out for its creepiness even in the deeply creepy Silence of the Lambs in which the kidnapper-killer is trying to get his newest victim to rub lotion on her skin to be suitable for his female skin suit, saying, “It rubs the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again”?
Elsewhere in the movie, FBI trainees talk about how smart it is for the victim’s mother to keep using her name in the media so as to get the killer to see her as a person rather than a thing.
That objectification of a human being came to mind when I saw this series of tweets from progressive Democrat State Senator Kendra Anderson (Warwick, Cranston), with key words bolded and italicized by me:
Since it’s disgusting descent down the escalator in 2015, I’ve been imploring people to stop obsessing about it& it’s family. NEVER POST ABOUT THEM. Just stop! I don’t want to see a disgusting t-shirt, slogan, a murdered animal, a new media outlet, cartoon or anything …
about them! What we pay attention to gains strength. The media is still going to hang on to the ratings that it generates but WE have to stop consuming & elevating these stories! Instead be aware of the marketing messages coming from Fox, OANN and Newsmax then…
find ways to counter those in our messaging This is friggin marketing 101. They are fueling the fervor and fear and people are jumping on that train. In VA McAuliffe was the wrong candidate to reach the voters & his anti-tfg message instead of telling folx how he…
would augment & support policies that work for people especially people most impacted by years of abuse & neglect is what lost the election. There are Dems who have solutions! We gotta get the message out, instead of obsessing about a thing that will eventually self destruct!
So, yeah, yeah, you might say, “She’s talking about Donald Trump, for crying out loud, not one of her actual constituents.” True enough, but this bespeaks a deliberately cultivated mentality, and she’s an elected member of the Rhode Island government, for crying out loud.
My objection is particularly relevant in this very context, because Anderson is talking about marketing, indicating that dehumanizing President Trump is a messaging decision. Who else do the imperatives of her marketing plan require her to un-person? Republican candidates? Business owners? Me? You?
I’ve been putting emphasis, recently, on the degree to which the local news media, Democrats, and progressives have given themselves permission to simply ignore people with whom they disagree or stories or issues that might benefit those people and their causes if they become widely known. That is, let’s just say, very much in keeping with Senator Anderson’s attitude.
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We’ve said this around here, well, forever. Justin even gave it a shot in Tiverton and exposed the depth of depravity of the true political insiders. But that the road can be tough shouldn’t dissuade conservatives and moderates from seeking elected office and making some local change. As Stephen Kruiser writes:
It’s important for more conservatives to get involved at the school board level not only because it pushes back on leftist indoctrination curricula, but because it keeps Democrats off of the boards. Dems have long used school boards as a sort of farm system for their politicians with national ambitions.
Sounds familiar. Conservatives and moderates need to stop entering the political fray for the first time by running for Congress or Governor. We know our own communities and the real, day-to-day concerns of our neighbors. Think globally, act locally and all that.
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I’ll admit that WBUR’s tweet calling the campaign for mayor of Boston on Tuesday caught my eye for reasons of humorous wordplay:
RACE CALL: Michelle Wu (@wutrain) makes history, as the first woman and person of color elected to lead the city of Boston.
Get it? What excites them is, in large part, her race, and they (probably inadvertently) start their tweet pronouncing an all-caps: “RACE CALL.” Gotta love Freudian puns.
But as I’ve seen local progressives look to Wu’s success for consolation against their party’s much-more-consequential failures elsewhere, the cognitive dissonance of it all keeps striking me. After all, Boston and Cambridge, the home of Harvard University, pretty much blend together, and a lawsuit that Harvard violates the Constitution by overtly discriminating against Asian applicants has now approached the U.S. Supreme Court. Note that the question isn’t whether Harvard discriminates against them, but whether it is legal for it to do so.
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It takes a certain level of fanaticism among journalist and our global elites to so obviously lament the world’s going back to productive activity after a year of pandemic-driven lockdowns:
With 2020’s dramatically clean air in cities from India to Italy, some people may have hoped the world was on the right track in reducing carbon pollution, but scientists said that wasn’t the case.
“It’s not the pandemic that will make us turn the corner,” LeQuere said in an interview at the climate talks in Glasgow, where she and colleagues are presenting their results. “It’s the decisions that are being taken this week and next week. That’s what’s going to make us turn the corner. The pandemic is not changing the nature of our economy.”
The rest of us must take the hint. 2020 was where these people want us to be.
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