Without naming names, I’m observing an interesting phenomenon on Twitter, recently.
I’ve been saying that the Trump era led mainstream journalists to give themselves permission to ignore everybody with whom they disagree — which is to say, “conservatives.” This has a downstream consequence, though: when you determine to ignore people with whom you merely disagree, you forfeit your ability to differentiate the credibility of people with whom you merely disagree and those who are truly obnoxious.
I offer this admittedly vague point as a lesson for consideration. If your standards for respectability become too tight, you can’t expect the differentiations of “unrespectable” to stay in place. It becomes a big, undifferentiated mass.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- Calls for an inspector general
- The GOP’s nice-guy failing
- Media tilt
- Non-profit boards and politicos
- Political trips in the storm
- Who cares about plagiarism (and when)?
- Vote fraud
- Shekarchi and the Democrats’ pro-Hamas wing
Featured image by Justin Katz using Dall-E 3 and Photoshop AI.
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The state has announced the end of the sparsely used ferry from Bristol to alleviate traffic on the Washington Bridge. Amanda Milkovits has some of the details:
Since its inception on Dec. 21, when just 162 passengers boarded the ferries, ridership on the ferries between Bristol and Providence has reached 2,814, through Sunday, Dec. 31. The boats have run every day, except for Christmas and New Year’s Day, and RIDOT found that ridership was higher on some of the days around the holidays than on other weekdays.
The state has so far spent $738,000 through Tuesday to provide the ferry service, including the fuel, said RIDOT spokesman Charles St. Martin. The total cost, including the fuel and renting the barge for the ferry dock, is around $66,597 per day, according to RIDOT.
That works out to $262 per passenger, and an average of about 255 passengers per day barely affects the 90,000-per-day traffic across the bridge.
One can understand the well-meaning impulse; a ferry likely came to the mind of anybody who wondered how people could get across the bridge. But rational people who factor in budgets to the smallest degree should have quickly dismissed the idea. Much of the traffic through Providence doesn’t stop in Providence. A ferry might make sense when a large number of people are going to a specific, walkable place.
Indeed, if a ferry did make sense, it would probably exist already, and for a profit.
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The featured image is by RIDOT of a broken steel rod on the Washington Bridge Westbound, one of the critically failed components that caused the sudden closure of Interstate 195 west on December 11.
How these components went critical between July, its most recent inspection (link to report) until December 8, when they were purportedly discovered almost by accident by a “young engineer” remains an important open question. Had the components, in fact, gone bad long before and RIDOT had failed to catch it?
Broadening this out. How do we know whether any of the dozens of bridges in “Poor” condition that WPRI Target 12’s Eli Sherman identified from federal data as not having been inspected since 2017 or 2018 do not harbor similar dangerously compromised components?
Well, it turns out we may not know, though we had initially been told otherwise in the immediate aftermath of the report. WPRO’s Tara Granahan brought up WPRI’s disturbing report on her December 22 show. RIDOT Director Peter Alviti called in to her show. He stated categorically,
The data that Eli Sherman put on the Channel 12 website is completely wrong and I’m calling for them to remove it from their website because it’s so misleading and so incorrect and so outdated that the representations they are making is completely false.
He went on to call on WPRI to retract their report. He stated that all “deficient bridges” have been inspected at least annually and some more frequently, stating, “The inspection dates are all wrong on their website”.
Whew, that’s good. Maybe it’s just a paperwork issue between the state and the feds and these bridges have been inspected after all. WPRI Target 12 diligently followed up with RIDOT to get the details. They updated their story with the response:
… Alviti spokesperson Lisbeth Pettengill initially refused to release the state’s own dataset with [bridge] inspection dates, saying the information had to be obtained through a formal R.I. Access to Public Records Act request.
Pettengill subsequently reversed course and provided a spreadsheet with encrypted inspection dates, but warned that interpreting it correctly required a “data key” — a wonky term meaning a code that essentially allows recipients to decrypt data that’s otherwise unreadable.
“The data key must be applied correctly,” Pettengill explained in an email.
The state has not provided the key. [Emphasis added.]
So RIDOT’s response to a legitimate question from a reputable news organization about a vital issue of public safety that has suddenly been very much in the news is essentially:
Here’s the information. PSYCH! You can’t have it!
Really? That … does not seem either well-advised or serious.
Pettingill identified to WPRI Target 12 two bridges on their list whose condition had changed due to repairs or replacement. But what about all of the other bridges?
What are we to conclude from RIDOT’s deliberate withholding of information that the press and the public are obviously entitled to? Is RIDOT playing possum because they dropped the ball and have not inspected all of those other bridges? Or have they actually inspected these bridges and are holding back the results of those inspections, either out of pettiness or, more ominously, because of the condition of those bridges?
See what happens when you wrongly withhold important information? People are left to fill in the blanks and think the worst.
People are also left to question the taxpayer funds received by the agency, especially one whose one whose public mission is as lavishly funded as RIDOT’s; here and here. We start to wonder if, perhaps, some of that funding would be put to better use elsewhere; either by nursing homes in Rhode Island, many of which are on a precipice, or even
This latest development in Rhode Island’s bridge saga involves more than accountability, important as that is. It’s a simple yet vital question:
Does RIDOT know whether it is safe for vehicles to traverse those bridges identified by WPRI?
I sincerely hope that RIDOT will soon or has already changed course on this response.
An unserious non-answer is not going to shut down a serious question about public safety. On the contrary; it only hypes it.
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Politicians have forced people in the Northeast to invest heavily in wind energy by means of our electric bills and taxes, and more problems are appearing:
The linked article is worth reading:
Equinor, along with its joint venture partner BP, has agreed with NYSERDA to cancel the contract for the project, citing rising costs due to inflation, interest rates and supply chain disruptions.
Elon Musk suggests Americans aren’t sufficiently aware of the rivers of illegal immigrants continuing to flood toward the United States:
Cartoonist and author Scott Adams adds: “We are literally importing poverty.” Poverty isn’t all. We’re also importing illness, social disorder, political disfunction, and more.
Americans, of all people, should not be anti-immigration, and legitimate arguments exist across multiple intellectual disciplines over how regulated it ought to be, but we’re not having those discussions. Led by the Biden administration, Democrats are pretending this massive influx is not happening, or at least cannot be controlled, which means we’re not adequately preparing or handling it appropriately. This justifies beliefs, like mine, that the illegal immigration is being permitted to happen (even encouraged) for some ulterior motive, like political dominance for Democrats or clients for the administrative state.
That context makes me wonder if the strange hostility we’ve been seeing in Rhode Island toward Mike Flynn and, more broadly, Donald Trump, and their supposed “treason” is a quasi-deliberate movement to own the term, “treason,” and undermine its power, making it more difficult for Americans to articulate what it means that Democrats are betraying our country.
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Honestly, I expected the COVID experience to put an end to the high-school-civics-project of banning single-use plastic bags, but stores’ bag dispensers now sit empty, and Rhode Islanders have another reason to lean toward shopping in Massachusetts or online.
In Rhode Island, our legislators have a chronic difficulty understanding consequences and the availability of alternatives. A state the size of ours has relatively inconsequential influence on the amount of plastic in the oceans and far from total control of the plastic litter in our state, and there are no suitable alternatives to plastic bags, with the possible exception of paper bags, which we were told we mustn’t use when I was a kid. If there were suitable alternatives, people would likely use them without being forced.
One would have thought that concerns about repeat-use bags for things like groceries during COVID would have at least given our mandarins a smidgen of understanding that they cannot foresee every consequence and micromanage life. Bags for carrying raw food home from the store, for instance, are not conducive to multiple uses, unless we’re to add shopping bag laundry to our list of nuisance activities.
That is not to suggest, however, that the state should exempt some products from a ban while leaving it in place for other products. Everything has consequences, and minute regulations ripple throughout the economy, ultimately harming somebody, usually the most vulnerable. Even on the environmental front, laundering shopping bags has an environmental cost, as does the packaging and shipping of goods ordered online.
Rather than focus on crumbling infrastructure and failing schools, the people we’ve elected and whom we supply with copious funds choose to put on their Master of the Universe hats and tell other people how to conduct their lives. Two possibilities arise: either the state will try increasingly intricate regulations to minimize the consequences of its moral preening or people will adjust their behavior without bothering to make a stink. For one thing, the less convenient shopping becomes, the more people will simply shop online, which will destroy jobs and (more subtly) human interactions in the state.
Perhaps, like most of the people in and around state government, you don’t work in retail, so your job won’t immediately be threatened. Just wait, though. There is surely something you do every day that bothers somebody, and in Rhode Island, government officials are in the business of helping them come for you.
Featured image by Justin Katz using Dall-E 3.
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I wondered, the other day, whether young Americans are so much ignorant of history as they are indifferent to the truth. Here’s another shocking datapoint in that set:
Following the trail of links suggests that the culprit is not ignorance or, for that matter, indifference. This is part of an approach. A filmmaker (presumably of an activist bent) made a film about a document apparently by the lieutenant governor in Massachusetts Bay, and an AP “reporter” presented it in a way designed to solidify and expand the impression that it was widespread and the simplistic impression that aggression was entirely one way (rather than part of the jumble of people during more-violent times). Now, other AP “reporters” take the next step by defining “scalping” as a practice “taken up by white colonists,” expanding the impression once again. The next step will be to remove the already tenuous hint that the colonists might have initiated the practice to advance the rewritten history that all evil comes from white men, and everybody else is innocent or, at worst, merely reacting to white aggression.
Keep your printed history books, folks. We may not be far off from the possibility of tracing these claims back through history as we move increasingly on the shifting sands of the Internet.
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John DePetro and I discussed this a few weeks ago, but the topic is worth a short, written note, too, because the vignette presents too perfect a lesson:
While tens of thousands of Rhode Islanders were stuck in traffic for upwards of three to four hours, Governor Dan McKee was attending a political fundraiser for Rhode Island Department of Transportation Chief of Staff John Igliozzi on Tuesday night. …
The fundraiser was held at “The Social” at 1449 Mineral Spring Avenue in North Providence. Igliozzi is expected to run for Rhode Island Attorney General in 2026.
Igliozzi, who is following family tradition in his involvement in Rhode Island government, was a long-time member of the Providence City Council and became its president when Sabina Matos took the appointment to fill Dan McKee’s lieutenant governor position, when he took the appointment to fill Gina Raimondo’s gubernatorial seat, when she took the appointment to work in the Biden White House.
Our state government is filled with such people. There is nothing wrong with building such a life; indeed, from some perspectives, it could be seen as a life of dedication to the city and state. However, when that culture becomes too entrenched, and when there is no opposing set of insiders in another party to throw randomness and cooperation into the system, it’s a problem.
Thus, during a time of infrastructure calamity resulting from poor government services, the governor is at a fundraiser for a guy who notched up the insider ladder along with him a few years ago, who is a leader in the department that had just experienced such a massive failure, and who is preparing to take another horse in the state government merry-go-round… and there’s nobody in a political position to give Rhode Islanders a way to have an electoral say on the matter.
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So much of Rhode Island’s predicament can be explained by incentives. People who rely on government for their prosperity, for instance, have a great deal of incentive to manipulate the processes thereof, whereas our community lacks institutions with incentive to counterbalance them politically. Something similar and related — though much broader on a social scale — is observable in the news and the stories we tell.
Not that long ago, newspapers had incentive to find success stories in their communities, at whatever level they covered. People subscribed to see their families and friends receive recognition, and then they bought the photos that went with the stories. They took out ads even just to announce happenings in their lives. Whether because such stories can’t survive in a quick-read, free-based, social media environment or because journalists moved from blue-collar workers to over-educated scion of the elite, the stories and the newspapers are less robust than once they were.
At the same time, we’ve entered the world of PR, especially in government. Whereas newspaper editors used to collect the press releases of organizations and make decisions about the size, placement, and mix of the articles, well-paid government PR flacks now craft articles and posts, and their content permeates social media, reaching those who follow the government accounts and promoted by those with a direct financial interest in the content.
So we see another type of story promoted more frequently. Modern success stories are not about achievement but receipt. For instance, we don’t see a story about a student from Rhode Island College who is working two jobs while studying a practical topic because he or she knows the degree will lead to a better life as part of a meritocratic plan, advancing his or her family generation by generation. Rather, we see a story about a student who was working while en route to certification as an art teacher who now does not have to work because Rhode Island taxpayers will be covering his tuition.
Don’t underestimate the importance of the cultural stories we tell each other. If we celebrate people who resolutely overcome obstacles with their own effort and grit, we’ll get more Americans growing the economy as they pull our society forward based on their own initiative and incentives. If we celebrate people who fill out applications for handouts at the expense of others whom politicians force to pay, then, well, we’ll get more of that.
Rhode Island may have removed the word “plantation” from its official name, but the state has internalized the idea as its social model. On the government plantation, special interests cultivate recipients for public services and then go in search of servants to pay for those services. Meanwhile, we’ll see stories touting the stress relief afforded to recipients who don’t have to work too hard, but other stories, especially about Rhode Islanders whose businesses can’t survive the heat of local public policy, go untold and are maligned when mentioned.
Featured image by Justin Katz using Dall-E 3.
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