State Representative Brian Newberry, (R; Burrillville, North Smithfield) joins Richard August to discuss a wide range of legislation and concerns including but not limited to civics and Black history to be taught in RI schools; behind the scene political power struggle; immigration; need for affordable housing; growing state budget; proposed hospital merger and more. Regarding public school curriculum, Newberry encourages parents to become more involved in what is being taught to their children.
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Dr. Tim Shafman discusses breast cancer in women and men, Ed Cabral announces a special Waterfire to honor veterans, Attorney Mark Smith talks about the Second Amendment, and former Trump White House economic advisor Peter Navarro presents his new book.
Featured image by Raul De Los Santos on Unsplash.
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I’m not sure whether pro-COVID-vax people or anti-COVID-vax people will be more enthusiastic about a finding in Israel that COVID vaccines become less effective over time. Does that reinforce the need for regular boosters, or prove that they aren’t worthwhile?
What strikes me is that such a finding is framed this way in the first place. After all:
For the adult age group, there were 0.34 severe COVID-19 cases per 1,000 for those aged 60 and older who were vaccinated in January, and 0.12 cases of severe infection per 1,000 for those vaccinated in April and May, according to the authors of the study.
People are more familiar with percentages than per-1,000s, so let’s adjust the numbers of severe COVID cases that way: 0.034% for January vaccinations and 0.012% for April/May vaccinations.
Both of these numbers are extremely small. How is it we get pushed so quickly off the question of why one person in 2,941 among the most-vulnerable age group isn’t good enough to get back to normal?
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This week a Providence public school teacher appeared on the highest-rated cable news show in the nation talking about the ideological revamping of her school’s curriculum and the retaliation she has faced for publicly objecting to it.
Whether one thinks Ramona Bessinger is acting as an invaluable whistleblower (which is my view) or is part of some fringe movement bringing harmful distractions to already-struggling school districts, her story is newsworthy. Either she is releasing information that the public needs to know or the public needs to know why the information isn’t what it appears to be.
Yet, Ted Nesi’s weekly Nesi’s Notes column — his self-branded “briefing on local politics & more” — which he’s always presented as a roundup of everything that Rhode Island news consumers may have missed but should know, includes no mention of the appearance. In fact, a search of WPRI’s entire website for the term “Ramona Bessinger” produces zero results, as shown in the featured image of this post.
Clearly, WPRI’s journalists, producers, and managers don’t want to bring attention to such stories, but the question is why. They might claim that a large portion of society has succumbed to disreputable beliefs that they don’t want to fuel, but the more plausible reason seems to be that WPRI is trying to protect the narrative of the powerful. It’s a partisan, progressive Democrat news organization, and its audience would be discomfited by information outside of the propagandistic storyline that the party has prescribed.
Honestly, even I was surprised to discover how one-sided the station’s flagship political news program, Newsmakers, has become, as I scrolled through its episodes page, just now.
We’re way beyond bias, at this point. Such outlets are simply not doing the job that they publicly claim they do.
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Want proof that there’s no depth of silliness that radical activists won’t plumb and that the news media won’t take seriously?
With the World Series underway, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is calling on Major League Baseball to stop using the term “bullpen.”
According to PETA, “bullpen” references the holding area where terrified bulls are kept before slaughter, in favor of a more modern, animal-friendly term.
What do they propose to call it instead? The “arm barn.”
Keep this in mind next time you see some progressive accusing conservatives of trying to divide with culture wars. This is so silly, it’s hard to believe it’s not a deliberate strategy to distract Americans (“Squirrel!”) from something else, whether the utter failure of the Biden administration or just PETA’s lack of interest in Fauci’s puppy experiments.
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Anchor Rising cofounder Andrew Morse retweeted the photo from ABC6’s Doreen Scanlon that I’ve used as the featured image of this post with the following commentary:
Literally and figuratively: How big decisions are made by Rhode Island government.
This is the sort of observation a conservative makes when seeing a campy lottery-style method for giving out extremely lucrative contracts to act as the government’s storefront when it legalizes an illicit industry in order to make a buck. Namely: we don’t care (or have the competence) to evaluate various proposals in order to maximize the chances of success, balance social policy with budgetary concerns, or (as if it matters) benefit taxpayers, so we’ll just randomly choose from among the people who paid the scamtacular $10,000 up-front fee; at least that way we won’t be tempted to follow former Fall River Mayor Jasiel Correia to prison.
Andrew’s dead-on observation is that this is simply Rhode Island’s characteristic style of governance amped up to the 2020s degree.
Note, by way of contrast, the tweeted reaction of progressive podcaster Bill Bartholomew (whose career is proving the market viability of giving Rhode Island insiders exactly what they want) to the same scene:
That is a lot of white folx. What happened to using cannabis deregulation and opportunity as a corrective measure? Legalize it, please, and create an infrastructure for competition and equity.
To lay it out succinctly, conservative Andrew put a spotlight on the fundamental corruption of the way Rhode Island government does business, while progressive Bill indicated that the fundamental sin is a failure to reflect progressive shibboleths about equity. Bartholomew gives himself some wiggle room, with his prescription to “legalize it” and allow “competition,” but he leaves ambiguous whether he’d be fine with a process that did neither but ensured that the outcomes conformed to his vision of “equity.” What if the state had put a thumb on the scale to ensure that there weren’t only “white folx” in the lottery drawing? Would BB be fine with the fundamental corruption then? We can’t say. (But we can guess.)
Joining the two reactions to this unseemly scene, one can’t help but find that Andrew was more right than he intended. For progressives, the ridiculous spectacle of the state’s choosing multi-million-dollar bids with lottery balls would be fine if it were prefaced with the ridiculous spectacle of a bouncer allowing entrance to the room based on skin color. Exactly this measurement of special interests’ strength is what makes the drawing emblematic.
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Chris Maxwell of the Rhode Island Trucking Association (RITA) has put out a statement shining a spotlight on the road sign pictured in the featured image of this post:
This sign presumably pertains to the weight restriction recently placed on a Route 37 bridge. The restriction, posted without public notification on October 11, lowered the maximum vehicle weight to 16 tons. Trucks up to 32,000 pounds are still permitted to traverse this bridge.
“No trucks means no trucks,” emphasized RITA President Chris Maxwell. “This is a clear contradiction to the 16-ton posting of the bridge itself. You cannot deter all trucks when there still exists and allowable weight of which many carriers are running at or under.”
According to Maxwell, this area in particular, in proximity to TF Green International Airport, has a “very high frequency” of trucks that should still be able to use the exit and the bridge. Why an incorrect limit may have been attached to the exit signs (North- and Southbound) is not clear; the Rhode Island Department of Transportation (RIDOT) has not provided an explanation or response to Anchor Rising as of this writing. The limitation (whether the total ban of trucks or the weight-limited restriction) does not appear to force trucks through additional gantries in the state’s controversial truck-tolling system.
Whatever the cause of the confusion, the incident is emblematic of the economic experience of living in Rhode Island. Trouble with infrastructure following on years of inadequate planning and maintenance force restrictive actions, and the method and execution of those actions forces Rhode Islanders to lose time, money, and peace of mind as they take the long way around to get to their goals.
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On October 20, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran foiled an attempted armed robbery in Arizona. Video of his heroic efforts has since gone viral. …
In recognition of his actions, the Yuma County Sheriff’s Office presented James Kilcer with the Citizen’s Valor Award “for extraordinary heroism and exceptional courage while voluntarily coming to the aid of another citizen during an incident involving criminal activity at extreme, life threatening, personal risk in an attempt to save or protect human life.”
Kilcer accepted the award wearing a “Make America Great Again” cap and a “Let’s Go Brandon” t-shirt …
Marketing analysts may already be writing book chapters on how a reporter’s transformation of “F*** Joe Biden” into “Let’s Go Brandon” opened up a whole new field of opportunity for the slogan and the sentiment.
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The state and federal governments are preparing the country, with the help of the news media, to be pressured to vaccinate young children against COVID-19, despite the documented reality that children are not at great danger from this disease (see here and here, for starters). As part of the performance, the doctor-advocates are making the rounds for interviews such as Lynn Arditi’s The Public’s Radio talk with Dr. Elizabeth Lang.
Lang was one of the five signers of that irresponsible and misleading letter from the Rhode Island Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics advocating for the continued masking of children in schools, so it isn’t surprising to see responses like this, which should raise all sorts of red flags along the boundary of medical advice and political advocacy:
So we tend to think of children as not getting very sick from COVID. How many children in Rhode Island have been hospitalized with COVID-19?
Dr. Lang: Now the children are out and about and running their normal lives, even with masks on mitigating measures, and now that the grandparents are all vaccinated, or the majority of them are, the illness is still looking for people to infect. And so the infection age of people who are sick with COVID is much younger . Children are getting sick. Just a couple of weeks ago 25% of the nation’s infections for COVID were in children.
Most obviously, like a politician, Lang just doesn’t answer the question, although it would be easy enough to do so. Since we’re talking about children who will be newly eligible for the vaccine (aged 5 to 12), we can look at the state’s numbers for the 5 to 14 age group. The answer is that 88 children have been hospitalized for any reason at any point while testing positive for COVID since the pandemic began. That rounds to 0% of all children in this age range. That’s not a typo; it’s zero percent.
When she does give a number, it’s national, without context, and for a different metric. Is that 25% of cases across the country since the start of the pandemic? Recent? On a given day? What age groups is she counting as “children”? And how many “infections” were just the result of an overly sensitive testing mechanism generating false positives?
One gets the impression that Lang knows the answer to Arditi’s question won’t be sufficiently frightening, so she dodges. Readers with some training in writing, marketing, or politics may spot another tell: In response to a factual question, Dr. Lang jumps right to generating images rather than providing numbers: “children are out and about and running their normal lives.” Oh, no! They’re not being cautious! This allows Lang to interject the most objectionable part of the whole answer: “the illness is still looking for people to infect.”
That image has been central to the fear mongering and it is false. As I noted back when the discussion concerned summer camps: “COVID isn’t a demon floating in the air seeking somebody to infect; except for brief jumps, it’s trapped in the people who have it.” Personifying the disease exaggerates the risk. If lighting is simply a natural process that occurs in certain circumstances at calculable odds, then the risk can be assessed and absorbed. If there’s a lightning god looking for human beings to strike, it might aim for you. The odds of bumping into COVID in a highly immune population seem much higher if we envision the virus scheming, somehow able to know who is still vulnerable.
As the pressure mounts to subject our children to this new vaccine, we’ll have to assess the credibility of advocates very carefully, and the honorific of “doctor” before somebody’s name can no longer be used blindly as a shortcut.
Featured image by Francisco Goya on WikiArt.
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