On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- Whiteboarding Bessinger
- Foulkes in the governor’s race
- McKee’s big plans
- Protest and pretense at the North Kingstown School Committee meeting
- Trillo’s lieutenant governor prospects
- Protesters on McKee’s trail
Featured image by Brett Jordan on Unsplash.
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The Democrat candidate for Virginia governor, Terry McAuliffe, agrees with Democrats in Rhode Island that schools should engage in a conspiracy to lie to parents whose children may be exploring a change of their gender. I’ve long wondered what the mechanics of this deep deception would look like, and it’s frightening to know it’s a nationwide question.
It’s also discouraging to think how much this attitude seems to be part of the public school culture, as indicated by the “red flag” of a district refusing to provide access to library catalogue lists.
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Given it all to do again, I’d probably have studied systems engineering in college. I love plans and planning. But I loathe self-described “plans” like Rhode Island 2030, still in draft form from the so-called McKee-Matos Administration.
The duo claims that they “launched RI 2030 to craft a vision both for the state’s economic recover as well as for what we want Rhode Island to like like in the years ahead,” but a lack of vision is the most glaring deficit of the document. I don’t mean I think the vision is misguided or inadequate; I mean that it doesn’t articulate one at all.
“Vision” is too often something people say they have or that they are explaining, but it’s not just a nice word. A plan needs a tippy-top-line statement of what the future should look like at some end-point for reference when making assumptions and designing components of the plan. About all one can infer from the document is that McKee-Matos adhere to all the standard Democrat shibboleths — policies prioritizing people who happen to be of particular races or other identity groups, climate alarmism, progressive ideals, and so on.
As for a “vision” for the scope of government within a broader society, most of which occurs in institutions outside of political control, forget about it.
Consequently, the “plan” is really just a list of things that government will do. It’s a recipe for meddling and screwing things up (while giving lots of money to special interests). The only question is whether the politicians involved will be able to get credit for starting programs without facing consequences for their inevitable failure.
And its failure is inevitable if the plan is ever actually put into action. One key component of system design is a process for checking the effect of each component’s output on other components. If one component of a mechanical system vibrates and that affects the operation of another component, the designer has to know that, and the end-user has to have a process for reporting new discoveries back to the designer.
For proof that these considerations are foreign to government planners of the McKee-Matos sort, consider the “objective” on page 26 to “establish a target level of housing production.” This is an absurd objective, because there’s no way government officials, even with “stakeholder and community input” can know what demand “across the array of income levels and communities” will be in the medium-term future.
If a planner wanted to set an objective this absurd, however, he or she should at the very least make a process of constant re-evaluation intrinsic to the objective, preferably with a mechanism to constantly review the likely consequences of every other “objective” in the 53-page plan. Every decision locks in other decisions. A target for housing will impose restraints and requirements for decisions about Rhode Island’s target mix of industries, which lock in decisions about education, and on and on and on and back to housing.
These documents never go that deep because… well, first, because they’re really just political fluff wasting the “stakeholders” time, not serious plans, but also because that sort of engineering takes a lot of thought and work, not to mention humility.
That reality, in turn , illustrates how poorly suited government and the political process are to the development of plans and the management of the society. In recent podcast episodes exploring economics, Jordan Peterson also frequently refers to the market as a computing device. It takes highly specific information from every living person within its scope and translates that into prices. Even in theory, government cannot possibly match the level of computing power in that constantly evolving algorithm.
Featured image by Fernand Leger on WikiArt.
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I find self repeatedly coming back to a photo that John DePetro posted of the controversial meeting of the North Kingstown School Committee last week. As reported, Chairman Gregory Glasbalg ended the meeting on the pretense that two people in the room were not wearing masks. Given that excuse, what do you notice about the police who were called to disperse them in this image:
In the amazing advance of our technology comes the possibility of smart watches’ diagnosing health issues before symptoms begin, Steven Reinberg reports for HealthDay News. Keeping track of your vital stats on an ongoing basis as you go about your day (and sleep at night), you can get an early start on treatment, which can help avoid more-serious illness.
Linking to this article, Glenn Reynolds laments on Instapundit:
Too bad we have so much reason to distrust our smart devices — or rather the Big Tech companies behind them — on privacy grounds. Big Tech’s untrustworthiness will cost lives.
I’d extend that distrust to Big Government, too, and I’m not sure I’d offer it as a lament, but rather as a call for relief. Note this terrifying passage in Reinberg’s report, which highlights how the folks investigating the technology aren’t thinking so much of your health, but of how they can use the information:
“One of our goals was to be able to detect that infection before a person feels symptoms, because they may be spreading pathogens without even knowing that they’re sick,” explained senior researcher Jessilyn Dunn, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Duke University in Durham, N.C.
The wristband does this by reading biological signs, including resting heart rate, heart rate variability and skin temperature, she said.
“The device detects illness and that your body is fighting something,” Dunn said. “We’re still working on trying to improve the distinction between different types of infections.”
Having this information can help patients by alerting them to contact their doctor, she noted. This, in turn, can help in planning how best to use limited resources in a time of crisis like the coronavirus pandemic.
Who can read this, now, without having visions of mandates, forced quarantines, and the rationing of resources based on proven compliance?
Scarier, still, is the certainty that many people have no problem with this. The folks asserting the public’s right to mandate that you put a still-new drug in your body to protect against a virus that is not fatal for most people (and with comorbidity markers that seem pretty consistent and identifiable, making it easier to protect the people who are actually vulnerable) will soon rationalize mandates to wear these devices around the clock, or maybe have them implanted, and tracked by authorities.
In that light, we should be relieved at the thought that we might have strolled right into that trap if we trusted the tech oligarchs. Let’s be grateful that Facebook and Twitter came first and that their nature limited the damage they could do (massive as that has proven).
Importantly, however, this isn’t to say that we can never enjoy the benefits of technology. Rather, we have to do more work convincing our fellow Americans to value individual liberty, rights, and privacy again. There is a path forward! If government were doing what government is supposed to do (securing “certain unalienable Rights” so as to allow us to live cooperatively together while remaining free), instead of trying to do and be everything, then we could force strong protections with firewalls around our information that are reliably safeguarded, rather than probed and exploited by, government agents.
Featured image by Chris Yang on Unsplash.
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Tony Lemonde of Senior’s Choice Rhode Island talks open enrollment, Joel Griffith from Heritage talks inflation, Dean Cheng of the Davis Institute talks Chinese economics, and Sal Mercogliano of Campbell University talks supply chain problems.
Featured image by Hanna Morris on Unsplash.
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Yesterday, I wondered why the plight and complaints of Providence middle school teacher Ramona Bessinger weren’t of more concern to teachers, parents, the community, the union, and Rhode Islanders generally. Today, the Wall Street Journal editorial board has proven that somebody actually cares, giving their editorial the sharp headline, “Education Horror Show, Continued.” (Search the headline in Google or Bing to access the text if you don’t subscribe.)
Although not noting that Bessinger’s classroom whiteboard and Twitter became a forum for the expression of hatred against her while she was at a pretext-smelling disciplinary hearing, the essay makes key connections, such as:
The district would be unlikely to win a disciplinary case against Ms. Bessinger for opining online about critical race theory because the Supreme Court in Pickering v. Board of Education (1968) held that the First Amendment protects teachers from retaliation for speaking on matters of public concern. Hence, the district needed a pretext to target her.
Readers may recall a 2019 report by the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy (see our editorial “An Education Horror Show,” July 2019) documenting teacher misconduct, chaotic classrooms, student violence and academic failure in Providence public schools. Teachers were rarely disciplined even if they abused students, skipped classes, dozed off or lied about grades.
It is far from gratuitious for the WSJ to bring readers’ minds back to the 2019 Johns Hopkins study, because the two are intrinsically connected. The reason the district is so abysmally failing its students is related to the reason its employees get away with failure, which is related to the ideological indoctrination on which Bessinger put a spotlight as well to the efforts to discipline her for doing so. Fixing any link in that chain goes a long way toward fixing the whole thing.
So, I ask again: Where are the local voices? Standing up for Bessinger is a step toward improving education for Rhode Island’s most-disadvantaged students.
The silence shows that Ocean State politicians, unions, and other activists (in and out of the local news media) understand that their fates are all tied to an ideological agenda, which is more important to them than the mission for which they’re supposedly involved in public education in the first place.
The silence of parents and others in the community, not to mention the participation of students in attacks on Bessinger, shows that there’s still a wide open field that can be claimed simply by getting them to see the truth behind the special-interest talking points.
Featured image by Niamat Ullah on Unsplash.
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And we’d hardly know it if John DePetro weren’t paying attention.
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Appointing political allies to cushy ambassadorships has long been something of a political joke in the United States, but Mike LaChance observes that the U.S. transportation secretary is apparently also a similarly non-essential worker:
While U.S. ports faced anchor-to-anchor traffic and Congress nearly melted down over the president’s infrastructure bill in recent weeks, the usually omnipresent Transportation secretary was lying low. …
They didn’t previously announce it, but Buttigieg’s office told West Wing Playbook that the secretary has actually been on paid leave since mid-August to spend time with his husband, Chasten, and their two newborn babies.
Another political joke in the U.S, has also been that people who are forced out of their offices always say they wanted to “spend more time with family.” Apparently, folks in the Biden administration are so competent that they can manage to spend all their time with family even while remaining on the (no-show) job.
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If you blinked (or don’t get your information from non-mainstream-progressive news sources), you might have missed the Biden administration’s explicit attempts to politicize the United States military along partisan lines. John Lucas explains for The Federalist:
President Joe Biden and his administration are continuing to purge and politicize the American military. Consistent with the totalitarian left’s effort to control curricula down to the grade-school level, their latest effort targets the education of America’s future military leaders at the service academies: The U. S. Military Academy at West Point, the Naval Academy at Annapolis, and the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. …
Each of the service academies is overseen by a bipartisan “Board of Visitors,” comprised of accomplished members of Congress, retired military personnel, and distinguished civilians. By federal statute, these Boards of Visitors are charged with a duty to “inquire into the morale and discipline, the curriculum, instruction, physical equipment, fiscal affairs, academic methods, and other matters relating to the Academy.” The members visit the academies regularly and by law are required to submit an annual “written report to the President of its action, and of its views and recommendations pertaining to the Academy.”
On September 8, the administration moved to “fire” the 18 board members appointed by President Trump, without regard for the likelihood that these positions have three-year terms precisely so that a political takeover of our government must last at least that long to completely remove the influence of prior officials. That is, it’s to keep the board from becoming political and ideological. Lucas notes an important divulgence (emphasis in original):
As of this writing, the administration and its allies in the press have not yet coordinated their defense of this political purge. The first weak effort was Jen Psaki’s in her Sept. 8 press briefing. She gave the game away when she defended the firings, saying among other absurdities, that “the president’s qualification requirements are …. whether you’re aligned with the values of this administration.”
Think about that: Those overseeing the education of our future military leaders must align themselves with Joe Biden’s thinking and values. Scary thought.
Alignment with an administration’s “values” may be a satisfactory requirement for a new appointment, and maybe even a re-appointment, but retroactively applying it to all positions on a board is the sort of coup attempt about which liberals used to warn people. Unfortunately, a certain set of Americans have misunderstood the lessons of history. A case in point is the lesson to watch out for this sort of action because the action itself betokens a dangerous intention. Instead, progressives apparently took the lesson to be don’t let your opponents do this before you have the chance.
Featured image by Damir Spanic on Unsplash.
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