They may not be straightforward or easily articulated, though, so just read them through and absorb the awfulness. Here’s the background:
Built in the 1980s and 1990s where Scituate Avenue meets Furnace Hill Brook, Alpine Estates was one of the first of what would become many modern subdivisions on what used to be western Cranston farmland.
It features large Colonials with stately garages – some might call them “McMansions” – on half-acre lots. Only one home was listed for sale in the neighborhood on Zillow last week: a 3,200-square-foot three-bedroom whose owner was asking $800,000.
The undeveloped western edge of the neighborhood still requires a minimum of 2 acres per lot because, despite the city’s Comprehensive Plan calling for it, it was never rezoned to match Alpine Estates. …
In 2019, the Casales asked the city for a zone change to half-acre minimum lots so they could build eight houses in Alpine Estates instead of the four possible under the existing 2-acre zoning.
Being a bit of a policy nut, I think the most-important detail is the plaintiffs’ argument that “under state law, the Comprehensive Plan trumps the zoning ordinance.” That’s a crucial reminder to Rhode Islanders that we can’t think of these planning activities as somebody else’s nice little community-focused hobby. The intent is to dictate the rules for our towns and cities when nobody is watching and make it impossible to resist the push of the top-down planners. I think of a nice lady in town who casually talked about figuring out the best use of Tiverton’s waterfront and manipulating ordinances to devalue the land so its current owners wouldn’t be able to continue their current usage or sell it for use that might not fit the nice lady’s ideal view for her commute home.
That said, the nitty-gritty political processes are telling, too. The reason a mayoral veto was not overridden to change the zoning was that Democrat Speaker of the Rhode Island House Joseph Shekarchi once represented the plaintiffs as a private attorney, so one of the Democrat council members recused from the vote because she works in Shekarchi’s legislative office at the State House.
The speaker of the house has long been understood to be the most-powerful elected official in the state, yet a person in that office is out there advocating for paying clients before other elected officials in his own political party, one of whom works for him. Imagine if the governor maintained private practice as an attorney while in office. The incestuous knot is tangled, indeed.
To be fair, the practical solution is not obvious. Voters can’t really expect part-time legislators not to have other jobs, and not many people agree with me that we’d be better off with a full-time legislature enabling people with ordinary jobs to substitute elective office for them. As it is, running for legislative office only makes sense for those who are retired (often from unionized government jobs that enable early retirement), independently wealthy, and/or able to integrate elective office profitably into their careers. Banning lawyers from holding these offices, however, would be politically impossible.
On the other hand, the theoretical solution is obvious. We need a government that is less intimately involved in our lives. If voters preferred politicians who promised not to meddle, rather than promising to impose their interests on everybody else, “part-time legislator” could, indeed, be a side gig of community service. Moreover, the speaker would not be so powerful, and towns wouldn’t be grappling with progressive planning schemes pressured on them from above.
Featured image by Justin Katz using Dall-E 3 and Photoshop AI.
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… by the discomfiting fascist, Orwellian tone of this campaign from supposed good-government-group Common Cause RI:
It’s bad enough on its face, but it’s worse when you break down the manipulative message. First, Common Cause wants you to believe that you can instantly identify “disinformation about voting.” Next, the organization asserts that you have a responsibility to act against it. The first step in doing so is to help censor it by failing to “engage, react, or comment.” Instead, you’re to run to the nearest authority — Common Cause — in order to file a report.
And who are these authorities? That’s the curious part. Common Cause RI has been a leading force in our state creating regulatory barriers to civic engagement, with the excuse of providing voters with information about who’s supporting candidates and causes. Yet, the ReportDisinfo About page is laughably sparse. There’s a box on the bottom that looks like a button, saying “Paid for by Common Cause Education Fund,” but it’s not a button. You’d have to investigate even that.
There’s little doubt in my mind that Common Cause RI will be onboard someday when progressives start rounding people up for wrongthink.
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Although it feels as if genuine policy debates have receded into the background in Rhode Island, reviving them may help correct the corrosion spreading throughout our civic house. Corporate tax incentives, for example, are an area in which conservatives and progressives in Rhode Island tend to agree on the binary “yes/no” question, raising the possibility not only of collaboration, but also of changed minds. If we agree on the conclusion, perhaps interaction will give us the farther-reaching chance to be persuasive about our reasoning, which is where the difference comes in.
Put in context, the problem with government’s corporate incentives is not that private-sector greed corrupts the pure intent of government officials, but that they allow the corrupt impulses of all people to work around natural social forces while failing to accomplish their stated goals. Rather than fix an unhealthy regulatory environment, for example, the relevant government offers to compensate its chosen businesses for the regulations’ cost while imposing new requirements that have nothing to do with the economic reality of the area (such as employment targets, products offered, and store hours).
John Mozena explains the problem succinctly, with examples, for the Iowans for Tax Relief Foundation:
The Hy-Vee saga demonstrates one of the biggest flaws with the way government-run “economic development” programs function in Iowa and across the country: Elected officials and bureaucrats always have big plans, but the marketplace often has different ideas. These taxpayer-funded subsidies are meant to cover over the gap and create incentive for businesses to locate in one place instead of another.
The problem is that subsidies have become so common — and are so valuable as a political tool for politicians wanting to claim they “created jobs” for their constituents — that not getting money from taxpayers is now far more unusual for a project of any meaningful size than receiving it. As expensive as they are, however, the real-world evidence is that these subsidies aren’t big enough to change companies’ decisions about where to go, what to build, and how many people to employ.
Mozena cites a study from Iowa academics finding that these incentives are a waste of money 90% of the time.
Unfortunately, they’re so darned attractive to government officials, at least as long as taxpayers are apathetic, bought-off, or confused by the tangle of issues on which they’re supposed to base their votes. Officials get to pretend that they can use other people’s money to wish away economics and human nature. Their urge to control gets another boost when they find themselves empowered to pick and choose the beneficiaries of that largesse, which they can dispense based on their own pretense to entrepreneurial insight, organizations’ alignment with their ideology, or the tendency of the company’s officials to put money in their campaign coffers. And finally, rather than private sector businesses’ being a competing source of power and influence in the local community, they become dependent on government for subsidies.
In theory, in studies, and in common sense, corporate subsidies can be seen to be worse than useless. After agreeing on that proposition, however, progressives and conservatives part ways, with the former seeing it as a reason for putting more resources under total government control. Conservatives, in contrast, see it more like mold in the basement; you can clean it up and dress up the damaged areas, but the wiser course would be to understand it as a symptom that points to a deeper problem to resolve.
Featured image by Justin Katz using Dall-E 40.
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Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby offers a startling statistic:
Blaming the Department of Education isn’t only a matter of post hoc ergo propter hoc, and I’d say the unionization of teachers played an equal or greater role in destroying American education. To be sure, both developments echo a similar underlying problem in the same direction: They move education farther from families’ ability to force accountability for failure on the system. The Department of Education facilitates top-down policy from far-away D.C., in part by empowering academic experimenters, while teachers’ unions transform the workforce on the scene into an unaccountable jobs program.
But again: People don’t have to agree with my conclusions for us to agree that we ought to be debating this problem more.
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I mean the title of this post in the sense both that progressivism/socialism ignores human nature and that it pretends people aren’t human. Consider:
The underlying assumption appears to be that producers will simply produce because they are producers. Human beings don’t fall into nice progressive categories. We make decisions and change our status, and it can be in directions that produce better outcomes for everybody or that don’t.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- A union thug embarrasses pro-wind labor
- State workers’ accountability to nobody for the Washington Bridge
- Nobody explains why anybody should run the Providence School District
- A far-left Republican demands her opposition stop exposing her record
- The media backs the establishment… as usual
Featured image by Justin Katz using Dall-E 40.
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I may revise my opinion if conflicting results come in, but for now, I’m choosing to believe that this is 100% on the money:
Among 6,001 Health and Retirement Study participants in the U.S., drinking two or more cups of coffee a day was associated with a 28% lower risk of dementia over 7 years compared with drinking less than one daily cup (P<0.05), reported Changzheng Yuan, ScD, of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston and the Zhejiang University School of Medicine in China, in a poster presented at the meeting. …
When total caffeine intake derived from coffee and tea was calculated, participants in the highest quartile of caffeine consumption had a 38% decreased risk of dementia (P=0.032), Yuan and co-authors said.
At the very least, people should have learned by now to be cautious about accepting or rejecting proclamations about what is or isn’t good for us, with especial wariness when the instruction is to stop doing something you like.
Generally, I’ve found that “believers in science” don’t seem to appreciate the complex ways in which our bodies were conditioned through evolution to interact in complex, overall beneficial, ways with substances we enjoy.
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Whether you think Mark Smith’s reasoning here is dead-on, insane, or somewhere in between, an element is important to consider:
Namely, he’s not just stating dislike and projecting an action, á la “Trump will end democracy.” He’s offering actual policy steps by which Democrats could achieve that end.
The same can’t be done in reverse because Donald Trump will be opposed by the entire governing and media establishment, whereas the same powers will support the Democrats, as we’re seeing in the efforts to place Harris in office.
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The past week has brought us a startling display of dishonesty from the Democrat Party. Politicians with multiple mansions talked about not letting people take more than they need. The Party’s stated policies, not to mention its level of respect for people who are not its supporters, are nearly inverted from what they’ve actually done while in power. They’ve created the fictitious belief that hordes of Republicans mocked Tim Walz’s son and spread false rumors about a surprise celebrity guest to keep people watching through Harris’s speech o’ lies.
Fortuitously, this item reached the top of my to-post list this morning:
As you may recall, Hutchinson said that on January 6, as President Donald Trump was driven from his speech at a Save America rally to the White House, he “lunged” at the Secret Service driver when he learned that he wouldn’t be going to the Capitol Building for a “peaceful and patriotic” protest. That was the story she told the January 6 Committee.
Hutchinson, immediately turned into the darling of the Never Trump left. She testified before the January 6 Committee — which, coincidentally, put their documents into the wood-chipper too, small world — that the angry orange man caused quite a scene in the car. …
Hutchinson’s “source” for the gossip was, she claimed, former Secret Service agent-turned-Trump White House Deputy Chief of Staff Tony Ornato. Ornato says he never witnessed the event, much less told her.
Furthermore, the IG’s redacted report says the Secret Service took more than four months before he made himself available where he reiterated that this Trump episode never happened. The other Secret Service agents who were in the car said Trump never lunged at the driver, though one reported that he was angry that he couldn’t go.
So much of what people think is real has entered their minds in this way. Through lies and innuendo, Democrats created the impression of Donald Trump orchestrating a coup. That’s the negative version of the massive propaganda push to recast Kamala Harris in a positive light. If you’ve reached my level of suspicion, you’ll observe that the former gives them cover for by-any-means-necessary legal attacks, assassination attempts, and fraud, while the latter gives them plausible deniability for these things when they win… sorry, “win.”
Here’s how things look to me: The Party knew that, in the absence of COVID, they couldn’t repeat Biden’s small-audience non-campaign of 2020, so once they’d forced Joe out because they couldn’t keep him under control and he couldn’t perform even minimally, they staged a series of identity-group online events as a pretense for campaign donation laundering, used those resources to generate a spectacle of a convention and fund a massive deception campaign, and are keeping their candidate away from extemporaneous interviews. With perfected mail-ballot fraud and votes from illegal immigrants, they’ll likely avoid the much-too-conspicuous middle-of-the-night results switch that got them over the line in 2020.
Featured image Giovanni Bellini Four Allegories: Falsehood, downloaded from WikiArt.
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Further to yesterday’s post on Johnston politics, don’t forget this corresponding news about the state legislature:
In 2022, just 20 percent of Rhode Island’s 113 General Assembly seats went uncontested in a primary and/or the general election.
But this year, 52 percent of those Assembly seats will go uncontested thanks to a sharp drop in Democratic primaries and Republican candidates.
That combination — of plunging numbers of progressive challengers in September and a truncated GOP field in November — will benefit incumbents, but leave Rhode Island voters with far fewer choices as they head to the polls this fall, observers say.
COVID and mail ballots were the end. You’ve been able to practically feel it in the air ever since. Until something fundamental shifts, it’s all over. The Party is in total control.
The article has some perfunctory hand-wringing from John Marion, whose organization, Common Cause, has been right in the mix for causing the current condition, but the fact that Boston Globe journalist Edward Fitzpatrick still goes to him to set the tone of the article shows how performative the concern is. The truth can be found in this from AFL-CIO poohbah Patrick Crowley, who came up as one of the most aggressive and offensive activists in the state and who once told the progressive NetRoots Nation conference when it came to Providence that the radical Left in the Ocean State was implementing a “one union” strategy to fuse progressivism with labor unions to take over the state: “Generally, the General Assembly has performed exactly as Rhode Islanders are expecting them to.”
Just as union organizers always mean “union members” when they say “workers,” when Crowley says “Rhode Islanders,” he means is particular far-left faction. They’ve completely bought state government, and neither journalists or supposed good-government groups are interested in causing them any problems.
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