Here’s a headline on a Steve Matregrano article for WPRI that might very well make you say, “Oh, come on”:
‘Earthshine’ levels indicate the planet is dimming due to climate change, researchers say
The key question the headline skips over is: dimming from the perspective of whom? No, the Earth isn’t getting darker. It’s just not reflecting as much light out into space.
Gasp! Oh, no! Umm… wait… doesn’t that mean we’re keeping more energy in our system on net? Should that be a good thing, if we can figure out how to harness it?
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It’s hard to know how much to debate an essay like Greg Brailsford’s on his site Uprise RI.
The entire thing is stale propaganda. It’s a sales pitch. He’s selling you something. You can see it in every sentence. It jumps out even in a side note about how he caught COVID despite being fully vaccinated, which he proclaims to be a reason for everybody to… get vaccinated. To be clear on this point, the numbers suggest vaccination is worth doing, but only a progressive/socialist could follow a description of his horrible experience with a breakthrough COVID infection with the sentence: “I cannot fathom why anyone would prefer this aggravation over a harmless vaccine, but just like with capitalism, the media holds far more sway over certain types of people than we realize.”
This is similar to his argument that restaurants could pay more money to attract workers and improve your experience dining out. His explanation for restaurants’ being short staffed is a ” lack of wanting to pay wages that would bring in staff.” In his view, it’s simply obvious that restaurant owners are so doggedly opposed to exponential pay increases for their employees that they’re willing to go out of business, presumably to live off that huge pile of money they were sitting on while their business languished.
What he doesn’t bother to address is the cost of your meal. Sure, maybe an entrepreneur who made a fortune when he was young and now spends his time promoting socialism can afford for his night out to double or triple in cost, but most cannot, which will mean restaurants will… go out of business. But if only they’d vaccinated themselves with higher wages!
But arguing against these exact arguments got old and boring for me some 15/20 years ago. What’s interesting, here, is the casual extremity and the LOL line from his sales pitch that I’ve emphasized in this passage:
Capitalism for the vast majority of working Americans is not a whole lot different than slavery. We are told America is a “free country”. But are you really free if, for five days a week – 260 days every year, you spend the better part of each weekday helping somebody else make money? If you quit working tomorrow, would you be able to feed your family and provide a roof over their head? If the answer is “no”, you are an unwilling slave to capitalism.
There’s the pitch. Vote progressive and you can quit working and still feed your family and pay your rent. Who will pay it? Kind of like the supposed ease of exponentially increasing waitstaff pay, he doesn’t say. Who will produce the goods and work the jobs? Again, he doesn’t say. Don’t look under the hood; concentrate on the shiny paint.
It’s a scam. The only question is whether Brailsford really believes this stuff or just expects his readers to be that foolish so he can profit from what he’s selling somehow.
Want to know what system really does allow you to quit working tomorrow and still feed your family and provide a roof over their head? Capitalism. Why? Because it generates enough wealth and opportunity that you can easily find another job or perhaps start your own business and employ others.
If paying restaurant employees more is the obvious solution to staying in business, then savvy business folks ought to be jumping at the chance to corner the market. They can’t do that, first, because the progressive/socialist claim is a lie, but also because regulations and taxes imposed by progressives/socialists make true the fairy tale that only a special group of people can accomplish such things.
Featured image by Nick Karvounis on Unsplash.
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Beth Leconte, Director of R.I.’s chapter of OLLI (Osher Lifelong Learning Institute) talks with host John Carlevale. The program is dedicated to supporting lifelong learning experiences among those fifty years and older. Members are able to takes courses at the URI campus in a variety of subject matter content areas and of special interest at greatly reduced fees, without the concern of grades, exams, papers, etc. Learn more by visiting the OLLI website: Uri.edu/Olli
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What an embarrassing puff piece from the Associated Press and run by WPRI. You know that old line about discomfiting the comfortable? How about skepticism about the powerful? Yeah, not so much. Instead, one can only wonder whether Raimondo’s people slipped the writer, Josh Boak, cash or promises or he’s just a cheap date who puts out voluntarily, being so much in the bag for Raimondo’s gang.
I leave it to the reader to decide how much treacle he or she can take, but two things demand notice because of their practical consequences. First:
To end the shortage, Raimondo, 50, must bring back production of chips as well as solar panels and batteries on the premise that these sectors are key to prosperity. This means consulting semiconductor executives almost daily, following data on plant shutdowns in Asia, seeking additional government support for these industries and making her department something more than a generic envoy to business.
“If we do our job right, and I believe that we will, 10 years from now you’ll see a fundamentally more vibrant, larger and revitalized manufacturing industry,” Raimondo said. “It is a national security problem that we don’t make any leading edge semiconductors in America, that we don’t make enough solar panels in America, that we don’t make critical batteries in America. This leaves us vulnerable, not just economically.”
It is a fundamental misunderstanding of the legitimate role of government and of the measure of its competence to leave it up to the commerce secretary “to end the shortage” of computer chips. Boaz and Raimondo should not be framing this as something that she will accomplish.
Yet, that’s how they frame it because, as made clear in the second paragraph above, the Biden administration is not letting the crisis go to waste and is using it to nationalize huge industries. From here on out, the manufacturing industry is a matter of national security, which means government control.
This is of acute concern for reasons related to the second passage of note:
Raimondo anticipates the computer chip shortage will last well into next year — and hurt. The White House noted in a September report that the shortage could lop a full percentage point off economic growth this year.
“We all probably underestimated how disruptive COVID is to our supply chains,” Raimondo said. “We just abruptly shut down our economy. Automakers just stopped ordering semiconductors.”
Who is this “we”? Boaz lets this slip without pointing out that a prominent member of we was Gina Raimondo, who issued her own statewide lockdown order on March 28, 2020. So vehement was she, that the Boston Globe reported she felt she had no choice because “only 50 percent of residents [had] been complying with her previous orders.”
She underestimated how disruptive COVID would be. She declared an emergency and insisted that it gave her perpetual dictatorial powers for as long as she wanted to renew it. She did it.
And now she is going to take charge of the American manufacturing industry? Are we crazy?
Boaz gets one thing right: “For the trappings of a technocrat, Raimondo is making choices on personal terms.” Politicians like Raimondo claim that they’re making decisions based on science and the collective good, but they’re really making them for personal gain and based on personal feelings.
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Why not both? I’m not sure Stephen Green has it quite right when he casts his chips with the “power” side. After all, many provisions in the plan go directly to maintaining Democrat power, like this one:
Illegal aliens will be having a field day. Not only will they continue to be allowed to flood into the country largely unimpeded thanks to the Biden border crisis, but they will be immediately eligible for free college enrollment, student loans, and the child tax credit, effectively giving them a permanent guaranteed basic income.
But then, a big motivation for the spending (which I’ve been tracing since I noticed the Obama administration requiring states to hire specific contractors to spend federal money) is to give Democrat and progressive activists rivers of money.
But then again, that money is to fund the radical transformation of our country, which goes back to power.
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This article from Michael Balsamo and Colleen Long would be a great study in propaganda and how the news media constructs a narrative that’s true-ish for political ends. It wraps facts in the perspective of the writers.
A U.S. Capitol Police officer has been indicted on obstruction of justice charges after prosecutors say he helped to hide evidence of a rioter’s involvement in the Jan. 6 insurrection.
In this case “helped to hide evidence” means acknowledging to somebody that leaving pictures online of being in the Capitol could get one arrested. We don’t know the extent of the person’s involvement, what the relationship with the officer was… or much of anything. Yet, mentioning the widely reported investigation of social media is somehow transformed into the same offense as hiding a bloody murder weapon.
This affects the description of January 1, too:
… many of his colleagues were brutally beaten in the insurrection. The riot left dozens of police officers bloodied and bruised as the crowd of pro-Trump rioters, some armed with pipes, bats and bear spray, charged into the Capitol, quickly overrunning the overwhelmed police force.
One officer was beaten and shocked with a stun gun repeatedly until he had a heart attack; another was foaming at the mouth and screaming for help as rioters crushed him between two doors and bashed him in the head with his own weapon.
Research each fact claimed in those paragraphs, and you’ll find they’re all at least arguably true, in themselves. Yes, somebody had bear spray but never used it, for example. An officer was shocked and at some point had a mild heart attack, but I can’t find an article substantiating the “repeatedly” or the direct link of the shock with the heart attack.
The point is, you really can’t know where the truth ends and the propaganda begins.
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It’s never an easy call to side with people on principled grounds when you vehemently disagree with something mind-blowingly stupid and offensive they’ve done or said, especially in an environment prone to witch hunts and cancellations. But that’s the sort of thing principled people have to do in a free society.
So, I have no choice but to argue that we should be very concerned about the turn indicated by this statement from the University of Rhode Island’s freshly-arrived-from-overseas president Marc Parlange:
The University learned today of an offensive, unacceptable and racist comment posted to social media earlier today, allegedly by one of our students. This language is abhorrent and has no place in a community that is deeply committed to anti-racism.
Given the significance of this issue, the University has taken immediate action and referred the matter to the University student conduct process for review.
According to NBC Boston, the statement is a response to an incident in which some guy, who happens to be a graduate student at URI, sent a vicious message using the n-word to one of the Miami Dolphins’ defensive linemen, Emmanuel Ogbah. Perhaps he was a disgruntled fan, or perhaps he had just lost a bunch of money dabbling in the Ocean State’s government-run sports-gambling racket.
Whatever the case, Parlange’s characterization that the message was “posted to social media… by one of our students” is inaccurate in an important way: The message was sent via private direct message over Instagram. This error, while perhaps technical, distorts important context. It’s one thing to discipline somebody for public comments; it’s another to discipline him or her for comments made privately.
Applying reasoning skills that I learned in part at URI back in the pre-woke days of the Twentieth Century, the more significant context relates to the participants.
The only reason anybody is aware of this objectionable private message is that the recipient — a $7.5-million-per-year celebrity — knew he held the power to destroy the sender’s life, and he exercised that power. Do some searching of comments, and you’ll see that everybody knows this to be the case, to the point that some are criticizing others who are joining in the exercise for not being careful enough and targeting people who happen to have the same name as the sender.
In the eyes of URI President Marc Parlange, being “anti-racist” apparently means participating in a powerful man’s destruction of a less-powerful person among the students under his own authority, based on the private utterance of a forbidden word.
My use of the word, “authority,” took some consideration, and I settled on it owing to my aversion to the tendency to handle men and women in their 20s as children. I thought at first to use “under his own wing,” because that is how our society has long looked at college. (One thinks of the complaints of students involved in the infamous beratement of Yale Professor Nicholas Christakis in 2016.)
For my entire life and, as far as I can tell, that of my parents, too, college was supposed to be a place not only to learn subject matter, but also to experiment with and learn about life. To be provocative. To take some risks. To make some mistakes.
Everybody can learn from each other when that’s permitted. Imagine the magnificent discussions that could be held across the campus, really interrogating the incident and the assumptions of all perspectives about the details and the principles. Naturally, you’d also have to imagine that it’s possible that adherents to the “anti-racist” zeitgeist might have something not quite correct in their philosophy and approach.
URI may no longer be a place where that sort of analysis and discussion is possible. Instead, we find that Marc Parlange has brought existential truth along with him from Australia, and it will be proclaimed!
Students and families should factor this deterioration of cultural confidence and institutional maturity into their own decisions. “Immediate action” and the faceless “University student conduct process” are fearsome specters you and your children should seek to avoid, even if that means pursuing education somewhere other than the Kingston campus.
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Such stories as this one are among the first things to come to mind every time our political system lurches left:
Over a decade ago, UCLA physician-scientists began using a pioneering gene therapy they developed to treat children born with a rare and deadly immune system disorder. They now report that the effects of the therapy appear to be long-lasting, with 90% of patients who received the treatment eight to 11 years ago still disease-free. …
In the gene therapy approach detailed in the new paper, Dr. Donald Kohn of UCLA and his colleagues removed blood-forming stem cells from each child’s bone marrow, then used a specially modified virus, originally isolated from mice, to guide healthy copies of the ADA gene into the stem cells’ DNA. Finally, they transplanted the cells back into the children’s bone marrow. The therapy, when successful, prompts the body to produce a continuous supply of healthy immune cells capable of fighting infections. Because the transplanted stem cells are the baby’s own, there is no risk of rejection.
This sort of thing requires large, risk-taking investments (including the learning investment of the researchers themselves). It requires functioning supply chains. It requires all of the things that innovative businesses require, which can fall apart faster than we like to think.
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Nicole Solas of South Kingstown has widened her efforts to return sanity to Rhode Island schools to North Kingstown, where she has filed a police report highlighting a very graphic graphic novel that North Kingstown High School provides to its students, most of them minors. Following her reports can be challenging, if you have children and an open floor plan, because the images have to be hidden whenever the kids walk by… yet, there’s the book promoted in a school display case.
She’s attracted enough attention, at this point, that she’s receiving responses from across the country, including this interesting one from Purdue University literacy and language education professor Christy Wessel Powell:
We had this same discussion about Lolita and Shakespeare and a bunch of other ones too
Nicole responds by drawing a distinction between written texts and illustrations, but the point can be broadened.
Comments like Powell’s always remind me of this scene in the classic movie, Field of Dreams.
In short, the protagonist’s wife turns the crowd at an Iowa school committee meeting from a position of moderate support for removing novels by a fictional ’60s writer named Terence Mann from the rural high school to a position of supporting the Bill of Rights. I imagine folks like Purdue’s literacy professor have this scene, or another like it, when they enter the public debate on such matters, complete with the interpersonal baggage of the characters in the film: This type of person supports censorship, and I’m that other type of person who “halts the spread of neo-fascism in America.”
Yet, every new wave of these fighters for free thought is missing a key lesson that people who think out to consider: History and the causes of goodness and freedom do not follow a straight path. It’s a curvy road through a complex landscape that swerves around impassable obstacles and sometimes even requires turns onto other routes.
Statements like “we had this same conversation” are a sign of lazy thinking, ideological assertions masquerading as intellectual principles, or both. It can be true that a book like the made-up novel in Field of Dreams, The Boat Rocker, can be appropriately be present in a particular high school library at a particular time, based on the type of people who live there, the degree to which the book is objectionable, and the underlying motivation for removing it. However, I doubt even Professor Powell would insist that there is no line that can be crossed along this road.
The thing is: Everybody wants the easy high of cosplaying a principled stand. Everybody in Powell’s life will applaud her perspective; there’s no risk to her that the crowd in the auditorium will begin to “boo.” She’s certain of victory. For that to be true, however, such folks can never be the ones (like Nicole Solas) shouting out that the road is turning and we’re headed off a cultural cliff if we don’t shift our thinking, and they can never acknowledge that maybe it’s a sort of neo-fascism promoting the endless corruption of children while also censoring and investigating those with different political views.
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In New York City, a judge has suspended a father’s visitation rights to his daughter “unless he submits COVID-19 tests on a weekly basis or gets vaccinated.” He’s had the virus before, as well.
The key, though, is the judge’s reasoning, which is (let’s say) pretty far from the actual science:
[Open full post]“Here, in-person parental access by defendant is not in the child’s best interests, and there are exceptional circumstances that support its suspension,” wrote Justice Matthew Cooper, according to the New York Post, in a case involving the father’s divorce and custody dispute over his 3-year-old daughter.
Cooper also wrote that that the “dangers of voluntarily remaining unvaccinated during access with a child while the COVID-19 virus remains a threat to children’s health and safety cannot be understated.”
