As I’ve said, it’s possible to make too much of such incidents (and politics often seems designed to make too much of them), but they’re worth noting as they happen, nonetheless:
In a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray, [Republican Congressman from Ohio Jim] Jordan alleged the FBI “relied on at least one undercover agent to produce its analysis, and that the FBI proposed that its agents engage in outreach to Catholic parishes to develop sources among the clergy and Church leadership to inform on Americans practicing their faith.” Jordan further alleged the FBI suggested that “certain kinds of Catholic Americans may be domestic terrorists.” …
In March 8 in testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Wray said when he learned of the memo, he was “aghast.”
Withdrawing a memo after it is released is an easy way to CYA. The question is how many similar memos are out there unwithdrawn that have simply not been leaked, yet.
The greater concern is that all of these supposed problems go in the same direction, like the incident with the Franciscan Catholics and Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, to which I recently linked. If these “errors” were ideologically distributed, we could believe they aren’t systemic and targeted. Instead, it does seem there’s at a minimum an unstated, ideological, and partisan culture in the bureaucracy.
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Whether it’s peculiar or not (given his governance style) the most-conspicuous thing about the Learn 365 RI initiative — for which Democrat Governor Dan McKee has sought (and received) a PR boost — is how undefined it is. There’s some effort to get municipalities to commit to something, although what that may be isn’t clear. The governor is promoting a modest $47 million to ” help cities and towns build out community centers to support out of school learning activity,” but the strings and activities are not defined.
And there’s some sort of new non-profit on the scene, but it’s even more shadowy than the other vagaries:
The state will offer guidance to participating municipalities with the help of a newly created nonprofit called Always Learning. McKee was tight-lipped on what exactly the organization will do. However, he said “my interpretation is that they’re going to be able to access philanthropy and other dollars and then they become a facilitator and can provide guidance through staff to help municipalities maximize the learning opportunity.”
In short, there’s no plan, here. The initiative is a general idea and statement of aspiration.
Rhode Islanders should also worry it’s actually not as benign as that suggests. McKee owes the teachers unions, the construction unions, and other state insiders big for his election. Building community centers and pulling together government funding to provide babysitting and other services all year long could help to pay off some of his political debt.
At best, then, Learn 365 RI may be one of those PR stunts that flashes in a news cycle or two and then peters out after the spending of some millions of dollars for the benefit of special interests. At its worst, it could be part of the relentless push by ideologues to gain uninterrupted access to children while creating jobs for themselves.
In that case, the best response would not be mere apathy, but an active effort to Turn 180.
Featured image by Caleb Woods on Unsplash.
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As we’re rightly reminded frequently in the face of such incidents, we would err if we overgeneralized from incidents like this one:
A homeless woman “was wiping blood off of her hands with a paper towel” after she allegedly killed a homeless shelter coordinator with an ax, police said.
Zaaina Asra Zakirrah Mahvish-Jammeh, a 38-year-old resident of Morningside House shelter in Brattleboro, Vermont, wanted to talk to Leah Rosin-Pritchard, a 36-year-old social worker, in the living room, according to a probable cause affidavit. …
After attacking Rosin-Pritchard, Mahvish-Jammeh then turned to another employee and said, “I like you. It’s Leah I (sounds like didn’t like or don’t like). I like you,” the affidavit alleges.
On the other hand, we would err if we didn’t realize that historical narratives can become established because they may have truth. Sometimes people are in circumstances like homelessness because they have mental problems. Axes and knives will do in lieu of guns for the purpose of killing.
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To solve problems without causing unexpected damage, you have to have some reasonable explanation for the circumstances. This recent anti-gun tweet from Democrat Congressman Seth Magaziner illustrates how politicians are moving farther and farther away from problem-solving:
If you’re accustomed to analyzing data visualizations, it might take you a moment to understand Magaziner’s point. The most conspicuous observation from this time-series data is that gun deaths among kids remained largely flat for twenty years — even after the 1994 “assault weapon” ban lapsed in 2004. So, what is Magaziner claiming happened in 2019 to cause a problem that more “gun safety bills” will solve?
The answer is probably “nothing.” He’s just picking a discouraging datapoint (the 50% increase in gun deaths over the two latest years), assuming his audience will agree that gun availability is the problem, and demanding a policy that has long been part of his political party’s platform, regardless of the data.
But if something else is causing the increase, cracking down on constitutional gun-ownership rights probably won’t reverse it. Meanwhile, unknowable consequences ranging from increases in crime to erosion of civil rights to worse political division may emerge.
One suspects Democrats like Magaziner don’t actually want to explore the causes of such problems because they may whipsaw against their own political interests. Ideological takeover of our education system, soft-on-crime and anti-cop policies and district attorneys, and radical deconstruction of social norms may be destroying the mental health of upcoming American generations, and discovering such a thing would undermine the careful work of their party.
On the other hand, it serves Magaziner’s party very well if its policies cause social instability that results in ongoing fear, tragedy, and division that Democrats are then able to exploit to crack down on civil rights and cause more instability.
Featured image by Taylor Turtle on Unsplash.
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Conflicts like this can be nothing more than bureaucratic squabbles. They can also be evidence of a move toward a Communist China–esque absorption of religious organizations. And they can also be mere bureaucratic squabbles that prepare the ground for government absorption of religious organizations.
[Open full post]The Archdiocese for the Military Services (AMS) slammed Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for issuing a “cease and desist order” to Holy Name College, a community of Franciscan Catholic priests and brothers who have provided pastoral care to troops and veterans at Walter Reed for nearly two decades, just before Holy Week.
On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- A state worker’s mysterious offense.
- Connors moves a notch around the insider wheel.
- How McKee is digging an economic hole.
- Who’s out and who’s in? An update on the CD1 race.
- Who made PVD’s ATV problem so difficult?
Featured image from Shutterstock.
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To what extent, do you think, is our current predicament caused by a feedback loop of blindness? Perhaps the people investigating society’s questions are actually incapable of considering some possibilities for ideological reasons. They therefore craft policies and advance cultural changes whose outcomes they cannot measure because of the blind spot with which they began.
A few days ago, John Burn-Murdoch sent ripples throughout social media with a Financial Times article titled, “Why are Americans dying so young?” (Putting the title in a search engine may provide you a link you can read without subscribing.) Burn-Murdoch doesn’t investigate the answer or even tally deaths by various causes. Rather, in the clickbait method of our day, he produces charts like the following:
The primary point to remember when viewing such charts is to check the axes. Yes, Burn-Murdoch shows American children to be four times more likely to have died by the age of 40, but that’s still only 4% of them. His other charts do similar things, such as cutting the vertical axis to make a couple years of longer life, on average, look like a 50% increase.
Such methods aren’t necessarily tricks; sometimes we do want to zoom in to spot differences. Magnitude is important to remember, however, when we’re seeking causes. The United States is incredibly diverse in just about every way it’s possible to be diverse — geography, demographics, wealth, etc. Comparing us to England or to a selected collection of “peer countries” might not be as appropriate as comparing us with a similarly sized area somewhere else on the planet. A few years of life or a few percentage points of difference are easy to make up by changing the dataset.
Such gaps are easy to make up in other ways, too. One factor that Burns-Murdoch does not consider, for example, is abortion. Data from Johnston’s Archive for the United States and the United Kingdom suggests that one in eight (12.4%) children conceived in the United States is aborted, compared with 1 in 4 (24.8%) in the United Kingdom. Start Burn-Murdoch’s clock at conception rather than the age of 5, and the picture is very different.
This isn’t only a point about the proper starting point of human life. A society’s comfort with killing children before they exit the womb will tend to eliminate those who might have faced challenges. Out of every 100 children conceived, the United States gives an extra 13 a chance at life. If only three of those would have been aborted in the United Kingdom because they tested positive for genetic problems or because their mothers were destitute and unlikely to raise them healthily, then the gap in the left chart above disappears.
Whether it is better for those children to live or to die before they’re self-aware is a cultural question for which we’ll have different answers. That said, investigators like Burn-Murdoch probably won’t even identify it as a relevant question as they’re compiling statistics to fault the United States for its health care system, gun laws, or some other cause of the day.
Featured image by Rene Bernal on Unsplash.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- RI becomes a Wall Street Journal poster child for Democrats’ need for bailouts and big budgets
- Arlene Violet’s plea to stay in public eye
- McKee’s search for people to blame
- Rhode Island government- the newest real estate developer
- Who’s out and who’s in? An update on the CD1 race.
- McKee and Silva: the disastrous duo
Featured image from Shutterstock.
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Talk about housing has been all the rage in Rhode Island over the past year. Unfortunately (and tellingly), it doesn’t seem to be a policy area in which activists, politicians, and journalists believe data ought to be front and center. Sure, we get numbers about the effects of the problem — housing costs $X; Y number of people are homeless; it takes a middle-income family Z number of months of income to cover their housing — but nobody seems inclined to use data to understand why those conditions hold.
Folks do seem pretty confident, however, that a big part of the problem is local zoning and a reluctance to accept multi-family housing in every corner of the state. Progressive activist and politician Cynthia Mendes made an April Fools joke about Rhode Island “remov[ing] the zoning ban on multi-family homes” to “swiftly eliminate the classist practice of single family only exclusionary zoning!”
While not as extreme, Democrat Speaker of the House Joseph Shekarchi recently unveiled a package of bills with the following explanation:
“We are experiencing a housing crisis in Rhode Island, and it is a homelessness crisis as well – our state simply does not have enough housing, and the folks at the low end of the socio-economic spectrum are feeling the brunt of it,” Democrat Shekarchi said at a State House news conference to unveil the legislation.
While such legislation tends to require a degree of parsing I haven’t done, two of the provisions would give all homeowners the right to add “accessory apartments,” whether under the roof or separate from the main house, by right, without zoning permission. This seems like a de facto ban on truly single-family housing zoning. In any event, the implication is clearly that the state needs more density and apartments. The legislature is fighting, in the words of Providence Journal reporter Patrick Anderson, “the dark arts used by housing-averse municipalities.”
But here’s an interesting fact I haven’t seen anybody note in the Ocean State: According to data from the U.S. Census, Rhode Island has the third-smallest percentage of housing that is single family, after New York and Massachusetts. Only 60% of Rhode Islanders report living in such homes — making ours one of only nine states for which that number is lower than 70%. Rhode Island, New York, and Massachusetts are all known for high housing prices, which goes pretty far toward ruling out single-family housing as the key culprit. In fact, matching the U.S. News ranking of “The 10 States With the Most Affordable Housing” produces no observable correlation with their single-family ranks.
Iowa is #1 in affordability, but #20 in single-family home percentage. West Virginia is #8 in affordability and has the highest percentage of single-family homes. Affordable state #2 is Ohio, which is 29th for single-family homes. (None of the ten most-affordable states rank lower than Ohio for single-family homes.)
One might do better to look at the percentage of land owned by government, although it is clearly not sufficiently explanatory. Among the top 10 states for affordability, the percentage of land that isn’t privately owned averages less than 10%. Massachusetts, New York, and Rhode Island average over 15%.
To the extent there’s correlation here, however, I’d suggest its probably related to some other factor. States that are doing whatever it is that produces unaffordable housing also tend to take more land off the housing market for government purposes and suppress single-family homes, for that matter. What that something is, I don’t specifically know, but Rhode Islanders should remember that there are two ways to make things affordable: lower the price of those things or ensure enough opportunity that people can earn the money to afford them. Rhode Island should focus on the latter.
Featured image by Kostiantyn Li on Unsplash.
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