Look, I’m vaccinated against COVID-19, and I’m hesitant-but-persuadable on a booster at some point, but the fact is that everything Anthony Fauci says has to be considered a convenient lie, at this point:
“Ultimately I believe that the optimal regimen for the vaccine for the mRNAs is going to include that third booster shot,” Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said during a remote talk held as part of the Atlantic Festival.
Three doses will become “the proper, complete regimen.”
Yeah, whatever. This guy says whatever he thinks will get people to act in the way he wants. He’s the face of lost credibility of our public health establishment and ought to have gone long ago.
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The Cranston dentist has simply stated that he will not be vaccinated:
“I won’t be vaccinated by tomorrow,” Dr. Stephen Skoly, who has a practice in the Chapel View shopping center and provides services to several state agencies, told The Providence Journal on Thursday. …
Among changes Skoly would like to see is a medical exemption for people who have acquired natural immunity to COVID by surviving the disease. He said that he had it in December and thinks he probably contracted it through work he did at the Department of Corrections.
Skoly said he is not aware of any standard for judging whether the level of antibodies he carries confers immunity.
Skoly is posting notices to ensure that his patients are informed about his status and continues to take the same heightened precautions he has throughout the pandemic.
Take particular note of the last line of the above blockquote. There is no standard because public health authorities have refused to investigate and set one, which would be an obvious step to take were their intention truly to manage a pandemic within the context of a free society. Their vaccine-with-no-exceptions approach indicates either an attempt to absorb more power or an elitist attitude that the public is to stupid for anything other than the most blunt message, such as one might use for a roomful of preschoolers.
Of course, both options amount to the same thing. The latter will inevitably lead to the conclusion that people cannot be trusted with freedom.
The state’s response to Skoly is interesting, though:
Joseph Wendelken, a spokesman for the state Health Department, told The Journal that the state will audit various groups of licensed health-care providers to ensure compliance with the vaccine mandate. The department will also respond to complaints about unvaccinated providers.
What does that mean? It looks like the state might be looking for a way to enforce its mandate only softly but is inviting complaints to trigger specific action.
The implied role of the people is disturbing. Rhode Islanders cannot be trusted to make their own decisions about whether to see a doctor who “only” has natural immunity, but they can be trusted to act as tattletales for the government. Thus, a people deprived of their freedom are transformed into agents thwarting the freedom of others.
Featured image by Jonathan Borba on Unsplash.
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That dynamic has defined the disheartening turn of national politics over the past couple of decades, and as often happens, we can see the lines of the problem more clearly when they’re close up. When people aren’t able to win fair and square and have a reasonable go at changing things, they don’t change their minds. They radicalize.
After months of voicing the concerns of many Rhode Islanders about contentious topics like critical race theory (CRT) and what Westerly Sun reporter Jason Vallee euphemistically calls “social issues,” Chariho School Committee member David Stall has resigned:
Stall, who serves as pastor of First Hopkinton Seventh Day Baptist Church, was critical of the committee and its handling of the pandemic and social issues, chastised Chairwoman Linda Lyall’s for rejecting his requested agenda items and vowed legal action as he spoke from the podium during the public forum at the beginning of the committee’s meeting Tuesday at Chariho High School.
“Some of you are smart enough to predict this separation precedes legal action that I am starting against you,” Stall said. “For the last 18 months, you have tried to silence me, dismiss my perspective, given me the run around and literally refused to allow my requested agenda items. In a few cases, I believe your actions were illegal, and often they violated reasonable and decent practice for a school committee.”
Yesterday Republican State Senator Elaine Morgan posted on Facebook a YouTube video from a few weeks ago in which Stall explains one instance of this “run around.” Part of what makes these things so frustrating for those of us who get involved is that it takes so much detail on a very narrow, facially inconsequential incident to explain it to others who follow the issues only casually. It’s like trying to explain to a passerby why the color on a microscope slide could be a fatal indication for somebody who looks healthy.
Increasingly, the people whose co-ideologues dominate in the bureaucracy and the news media are proving that they do not believe in compromise, and they do not believe it is worth spending time listening to people whose ideas they already know they’re going to refuse to consider. Worse, they think it’s detrimental even to let people share such ideas.
The subtle difference is between treating opposing ideas as arguments that may win politically and reacting to them as if they might be infectious agents that are so obviously harmfully and so dangerously attractive that they must not be heard.
The risk to such suppression is this: David Stall was willing to sit at a table and speak with them in measured tones on a regular basis. They’ve driven him away, and now he’s going to try the court system. My experience leads me to be pessimistic about that approach, so what comes next? Perhaps not from Stall, but from the next person who won’t sit by while their community goes in the wrong direction.
People sitting at the table is how we resolve our differences peacefully. Nobody should be more concerned about the implications of Stall’s resignation, therefore, than the people who drove him out.
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Per Conn Carroll in the Washington Examiner, “Mexico warned Biden his border policies would cause migrant surge“:
[Open full post]Buried 30 paragraphs into a New York Times story on President Joe Biden’s “chaotic” immigration policies, the paper reported that the Mexican government warned the Biden administration that its plan to undo President Donald Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy would lead to a surge in migrants at the border.
Two very distinct news stories in my feed this morning seem to share something intrinsic. The first involves the challenge facing the (unelected) Federal Reserve:
Resolving “tension” between high inflation and still-elevated unemployment is the most urgent issue facing the Federal Reserve right now, Fed Chair Jerome Powell said Wednesday, acknowledging the central bank’s two goals are in potential conflict.
“This is not the situation that we have faced for a very long time and it is one in which there is a tension between our two objectives…Inflation is high and well above target and yet there appears to be slack in the labor market,” Powell said at a European Central Bank forum, an apparent reference to the 1970s bout of U.S. “stagflation” that combined high unemployment and fast-rising prices.
The worry is that the Fed might have “to make trade-offs between the two” metrics. Not sufficiently considered (to the degree it’s mentioned at all) is that those “trade-offs” are people’s lives. People around the planet are sending out market signals, and somehow we’ve put a handful of technocrats in the position of collecting the signals and deciding on the trade-offs themselves. How in the world do they presume to have sufficient information to make such decisions?
Remember, by the way, that this conversation was with other central-bank institutions. With this supranational cabal making decisions about its own self-selected metrics, turn to the second story:
YouTube says it has shut two German channels of Russian state broadcaster RT in a move centering on alleged COVID-19 misinformation, a decision that drew threats of retaliation from Russia on Wednesday.
YouTube, which is owned by Google, said RT’s German branch had received a “strike” for uploading material that violated YouTube’s standards on COVID-19 misinformation, and as a consequence was suspended from uploading new videos to its channel.
“During this suspension, RT DE tried to circumvent this restriction by using another YouTube channel to upload its videos,” which resulted in both channels being terminated for violating YouTube’s conditions of use, it added.
Put aside the fact that the malefactor, here, is Russia, because many of us could be (and have been) treated in like fashion whenever we’ve done anything worthy of Big Tech note. Putting the best light on YouTube’s action, the division of Google is simply making “trade-offs” between the value of free-flowing information and the value of accurate information (as defined by Big Tech).
In both cases, we see the same progressive urge toward dominance by an elite. The decision-making is consolidated, and a small, powerful group makes the call for everybody because people and natural communities cannot be trusted to make decisions for themselves.
The implicit catch, of course, is that the elite are both people, and no good explanation is on offer for why we can trust them uniquely. One suspects that their decisions will rarely be made at the expense of their own natural community.
Featured image by Andrew Stutesman on Unsplash.
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I can’t help but wonder whether the ideologies directing our domestic politics affect the amount of coverage this sort of incident gets:
[Open full post]An estimated 49 people, including women and children, were killed in a two-hour-long attack by Muslim Fulani herdsman who “came in large numbers and began shooting at anything on sight,” according to the priest, who spoke to Middle Belt Times on condition of anonymity because he serves in the region.
Horror of horrors! They have a clip of Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis actually saying that people should be able to make their own decisions! The imagery is especially laughable given that, as I noted earlier, crime has fallen below the national rate in Florida under DeSantis’s leadership.
[Open full post]Stop what you are doing and watch this immediately. If you are ready to remove Ron DeathSantis from office retweet this new ad and make sure everyone can see it. pic.twitter.com/AyaHQ77fqs
— Remove Ron (@RemoveRon) September 29, 2021
The mainstream media — represented for this post by Brian Amaral of the Boston Globe — may not know what is to blame for the increase in violent crime across the country, but they sure know who:
In 2019, a Rhode Island man released from a life crack-dealing sentence under the First Step Act, a criminal justice reform signed into law by President Trump, was accused of stabbing a man to death at a Providence bar. Joel Francisco has pleaded not guilty in the death of Troy Pine.
Oddly, the article doesn’t mention that progressives love to cite harsh sentences for crack-related crimes as evidence of systemic racism.
[Eric Bronson, dean of the School of Justice Studies at Roger Williams University,] points to a deep sense of anger in the country, part of which political leaders, like Trump, fostered.
“When you have politicians telling you to rough people up, that does have a direct effect on human behavior,” Bronson said.
By “political leaders like Trump,” presumably Bronson and Amaral mean Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, and Barack Obama.
The truth is that a quick look at the relevant FBI data produces no easy answers. Some states where the “defund the police” rhetoric was strong saw below-average increases, or even decreases, in violent crime (like Oregon), while others saw above-average increases (like Minnesota). Meanwhile heavy-lockdown California saw no big increase, while heavy-lockdown Michigan saw a big jump. (Red-state bogeyman Florida, by the way, dipped below the national average for violent crime in 2019 for the first time since the earliest records in 1985 and didn’t see much increase in 2020.)
The most reasonable conclusion is that all of the various factors play a role and then intermix with local issues and local culture in different ways.
That makes it entirely unreasonable that Amaral’s article spends no time talking about Rhode Island policies. Note, for example, that the article does not contain the word, “gang,” much less the Community Safety Act that took effect in Providence in the summer of 2017. The timeline is conspicuous, because unlike the national bump in violent crime from 2019 to 2020, Rhode Island’s increase has been steady since 2018.
In fact, we can get more specific. “Violent crime” divides into two categories, with homicide and aggravated assault shooting up since 2018 in the Ocean State (the homicide rate doubled during that time) and rape and robbery dropping along with property crimes.
With that information, consider this paragraph striving to blame “national trends” and (of course) “guns” for Rhode Island’s increase:
Many crime experts and law enforcement officials point to the social disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the wide availability of guns as contributors to the national trends that are playing out in Rhode Island. According to [Attorney General Peter] Neronha, when going to a shooting scene, it’s not unusual to see placards labeling upwards of 20 shell casings on the ground.
“Upwards of 20 shell casings” is not an indication that somebody did something reckless because his or her access to a gun was too easy. It’s an indication of a deliberate attack or a shootout. That probably means gangs.
Perhaps we’ll start seeing that word again when there’s a way to blame gang violence on a Republican, whereas anything Rhode Island–specific can only be blamed on Democrats.
Featured image by Maxim Hopman on Unsplash.
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When I wrote this yesterday, I was speaking from personal perspective:
… the price in a transaction between two people has to account for what they both value, and sometimes price and value can be inversely related. …
The purity of [Jordan] Peterson’s currency won’t suddenly lead him to pay five times as much for things that people are willing to give him at cost because they made them for love of the craft or to hand over an equal sum to somebody who gives him a gift for love of the giving.
From its beginning nearly 20 years ago, Anchor Rising has been a mission-driven labor of love. No matter what, it will go on in some form and at some level of effort.
That said, the Peterson conundrum mentioned above is real. We need this — Rhode Island needs this — to become something more than a labor of love. Because it’s a labor of love, every dollar you give us will be maximized and amplified through our efforts.
To clarify those efforts, our goal with Anchor Rising is to provide news, analysis, and perspectives that would otherwise not be voiced, but without which our state will surely fail. We’re not here to grab eyeballs with clickbait claims. We’re not here to jump on bandwagons because that will get us attention. We’re fully conservative and ready to fight the Left, but we want to make sure the information and opinions you see here are substantiated and contribute to improvement of the Ocean State.
For those reasons, we need you to make the conscious decision that what we do is worth supporting for the long term. Please consider signing up for a fully secure regular monthly subscription of $7.60. If you’d rather make a one-time donation, or if you’d like to set up a smaller (or bigger!) regular payment, our Tip Jar will allow exactly that. If you’re interested in advertising or some other form of relationship, our Contact Us form will make the connection.
Whatever you are able to do financially, we value you and your readership. Just knowing that people are reading keeps us going, and if what you can do is read and share our work, that’s wonderful, and we’re grateful for the connection. If you have the means, though, please don’t hold off on contributing, because we really could use the help.
Featured image by Lucas Sankey on Unsplash.
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Mike Stenhouse, CEO RI Freedom & Prosperity, shares his perspective regarding the management by Rhode Island government of Covid19 money received from the federal government. The distribution of monies has been delayed and speculates that a struggle for control of the money between general assembly leadership and the executive branch is at the root of this delay. How the money is to be used is part of this struggle.
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