News out of Georgia adds to the impression that no society that treated the right to vote as sacred would allow no-reason early and mail-in voting:
[Open full post]A Cobb County judge extended the deadline for 1,036 absentee ballots because Cobb Elections officials did not send them out to the recipients.
The ballots have to be postmarked by Election Day, which is tomorrow.
Am I crazy to think it’s just too coincidental that one of the key battleground states for control of Congress is having this sort of unbelievable electoral complication?
Some of Pennsylvania’s largest counties were among those working Monday to help voters fix mail-in ballots that have fatal flaws such as incorrect dates or missing signatures on the envelopes used to send them in. …
Elections officials in Philadelphia and Allegheny, which includes Pittsburgh, announced measures they were taking in response to state Supreme Court orders in recent days that said mail-in ballots may not be counted if they lack accurate handwritten dates on the exterior envelopes.
No-reason early and mail voting are invitations to fraud and corruption and will be the end of democracy in America.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- Candidates for governor debate, fight, and deal with curve balls
- McKee versus media (who are still on his side)
- CD1 contrasts
- State of other campaigns
Featured image by Justin Katz.
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John Loughlin interviews Ed Cabral on WaterFire’s Salute to Veterans and Michelle Cruz on Trinity Rep’s community engagement.
Featured image by Peter John Maridable on Unsplash.
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Here’s a noteworthy WPRI headline: “‘Speechless:’ 7-year-old child brings gun to Boston school.” Must be all those Republicans who control the city!
Out of curiosity, I went in search of information about how strict Massachusetts’s gun-control laws are and found myself reminded of that old Weezer song about unraveling a sweater: “If you want to destroy my sweater, hold this thread as I walk away… watch me unravel; I’ll soon be naked.” As with many “social issues,” the information surrounding gun control provides a case study in information manipulation.
This is Boston, we’re talking about, in Massachusetts, which the left-wing/Democrat advocacy group Everytown ranks as number 4 for the strength of its gun-control laws: a “national leader”! If the gun laws in Massachusetts have results that leave you “speechless,” then you simply want to ban guns altogether.
Everytown’s chart comparing “Gun Law Strength” with “Gun Violence Rate” would be an excellent lesson in the use of data for propaganda, if educational institutions were still capable of teaching such subjects objectively.
The Gun Law Strength appears to be based on a 100-point scale, presumably reflecting Everytown’s policy preferences. On the chart, this measure is matched up — as if they are of equal scale — with the Gun Violence Rate, which is calculated much differently. Judging from the chart, that side of things is based on a 30-point scale, specifically the number of gun deaths per 100,000 residents.
So, the Gun Law Strength measure is a percentage of the perfect policy portfolio, in this left-wing group’s view, but for the Gun Violence Rate, they simply pick a round number that’s a little bit worse than the worst state in the country. If we were to convert the Gun Violence Rate to percentages of the population, the chart would show no discernible difference at all. One gun death out of 100,000 people would be 0.001%, whereas 30 gun deaths would be 0.03%. You can’t see such differences on a fully scaled chart. Alternately, Everytown could have made a case for some number of gun deaths that would be experienced somewhere with absolutely zero restrictions, which (however high that might be) would have also decreased the differences in the chart.
This is a classic example of what should have been taught to every high school graduate at some point in his or her education. Watch the scales. If somebody is zooming in to super-fine detail, it may be because they’re trying to make miniscule differences seem significant.
In this light, the observer might notice something else about the chart. Sorting by either measure makes that sorting measure into a smooth curve, but the other side is not smooth. For gun-control, 12th place Rhode Island has 5.1 gun deaths per 100,000 residents, while 42nd place New Hampshire has 8.9, which isn’t a tremendous difference. Somehow, 16th place New Mexico, which Everytown labels as “making progress” is the 7th worst for gun deaths, with 22.6 per 100,000.
One might reasonably speculate that the difference between states depends more strongly upon something other than gun control. Population, for instance, density appears to play an important role if you compare the states at the top with the states at the bottom. If gun deaths tend to increase at less than the rate of population growth, then the seeming correlation with gun control may be entirely coincidental.
Look at Everyday’s “National Failures.” Somehow states like Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming aren’t known for being particularly dangerous, but based on the chart, you’d think people would avoid them more carefully than an inner-city gangland.
Featured image by Thomas Eakins on WikiArt.
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Many in Rhode Island are too steeped in the mainstream narrative to even consider such a thing, but Joe Biden is, in his way, nastier, more divisive, and more destructive of our civic norms than what Democrats claim of President Trump. In fairness to Biden, however, his is just an exaggerated and less competently executed instance of progressives’ ordinary approach to politics.
I have in mind this tweet, which is easy to gloss over as the sort of political baloney that everybody who pays attention knows is dishonest. Given the background, it’s much worse than that:
What makes this instance of a politician taking credit for something he didn’t do (indeed, a statistic that would have been even better were it not for his involvement) worse than ordinary isn’t just that he must diminish the sense of shared American success by casting shade at his “predecessor.” The reason everybody knows this statistic to be barely a shade more-true than an outright lie is that the shared calamity of COVID (and our response thereto) is entirely to blame for the downturn from which we’re recovering.
Knowing that low-life hacks like Biden will try to pass off recovery from calamity as their doing, and the calamity the fault of their predecessors, makes it more difficult for public officials to make intelligent decisions. Democrats and the Left led the way in wanting shutdowns. I think that was the wrong move, but the next time it might not be, and the party in power will feel an even greater need to make decisions based on what future politicians might say.
One additional point about something I sensed during the 2020 election: Part of the desperation to place Biden in office that year (amplifying the motivation to cheat) was that the economy’s swinging back was highly predictable. That meant not only that slimes like Biden could take credit for the recovery, but also that progressives could do quite a bit of harm to the economy and hide them under relatively positive numbers.
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I just saw a formerly conservative pundit agreeing with an always ridiculous advocate for rule by “experts” that the right is more prone toward and tolerant of violence. I honestly cannot understand how anybody could believe such a thing.
I mean, we could maybe have an interesting conversation about tendencies toward what we might call “masculine” and “feminine” violence, with the former being of the beat-you-up or shoot-you kind and the latter being of the lock-you-out-of-the-shelter or euthanize-you kind. Still, if I had to rank the two sides, I’d say the left is more dehumanizing and violent, but to state that the right is obviously more tolerant of violence seems blind.
But it occurs to me that maybe our impressions are like traffic. Have you ever arrived at work and complained about the traffic to somebody who arrived from the same general direction five minutes after you only for that person to claim that traffic had been unusually light? For whatever reason, you just happened to land in a pocket of traffic.
Maybe that explains some of this differing perspective.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- The mob in the Speaker’s House
- Rumors as news when they attack a Republican
- Dems for Kalus
- Magaziner imports support from D.C.
Featured image by Arisa Chattasa on Unsplash.
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Why are Rhode Island parents so lackadaisical about the poor value they’re getting from the state’s government schools? As Dan McGowan reports, SAT scores are down from where they were before the pandemic, and they were already low compared with those of neighboring states:
Math (minimum score of 530 out of 800): 25.3 percent
English language arts (minimum score of 480 out of 800): 47.1 percent
By comparison, 31.2 percent of students were considered proficient in math in 2019, and 50.5 percent were considered proficient in English language arts.
When it comes to overall scores in math and English language arts, the average Rhode Island student scored 971. In Massachusetts, the average was 1,129. In Connecticut, it was 1,025.
When I looked at SAT scores in Rhode Island compared with those of other states in which a majority of students take the SATs in 2015, I found the Ocean State public schools performed worse. I also found that our private, religiously founded schools performed as well as or better than similar schools in other states (much higher than public schools, in both cases), and that a larger percentage of Rhode Island families choose that option than elsewhere (18% versus 8%).
My conclusion at the time was that Rhode Islanders were using the relatively low-cost religious (mostly Catholic) schools as a form of school choice, and their children were benefiting from that choice.
So, how is it that Rhode Island parents aren’t storming school committee meetings and demanding improvement? Let’s take ideology and partisanship off the top of the analysis, with many families going along with the establishment Democrats because they are caught up in a shared belief system and/or benefit financially from the status quo.
Addressing the problem is an intimidating prospect, given how locked in Rhode Island’s governing system is, and to acknowledge how bad things are would be to acknowledge a responsibility to address the fact that your children are being deprived of an adequate education. Many parents, upon coming to this conclusion, simply take their children out of Rhode Island’s government schools, either by moving out of state or paying a little bit more for education in a private school.
Featured image by Vahid Moeini Jazani on Unsplash.
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Guest: Ashley Kalus, Candidate for Governor, https://ashleykalus.com
Host: Richard August
Description: Kalus asserts that she will fight for Rhode Island and it citizens to make the state affordable to live in with high performing schools for its children, parents and teachers. She provides an overview of the partnership she will develop to improve schools, which shall include public school choice. Other topics discussed include: guns laws; Second Amendment rights; mental health concerns; abortions rights; illegal resident driver permit rather than license; and more.
