One despairs of our ever coming together if we live in two separate realities. Many details of the attack don’t make sense, starting with the fact that the Pelosi’s home is apparently so vulnerable and the fact that calling somebody a “friend” to 911 is apparently a code that we’re all supposed to know, let alone that Pelosi reportedly managed to get to the bathroom for a phone call but didn’t lock himself in there.
On the other side, some of the details being promoted may be the fog of early reports. For example, regarding the fact that somebody let the police in, it’s entirely possible that Pelosi got to the door to open it and that act initiated the struggle the police witnessed when they entered.
Of course, if the incident was a collision of a crazy person with an inebriated person in the middle of the night, we have to leave allowances for a lot of strangeness. There’s a whole lot of space for this story between a hammer-armed nudist MAGA assassin and a gay tryst gone wrong.
That’s why the most disturbing aspect may be Democrats’ immediate rush to make it a political hit against their enemies. We can’t possibly function as a society when every incident is immediately leveraged to split us into competing realities.
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As with myriad issues, many of them related to COVID-19, we’re seeing an instant demand that we accept the approved narrative so zealously that confounding details cannot be considered, with disagreement, or even doubt, being framed in entirely partisan terms. This doesn’t necessarily mean the 180-degree opposite narrative is correct, but it does mean we can’t trust what we’re being told.
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John Loughlin interviews Dr. Shafman, Colonel Ray Deniswich of VFW Post 272, and Executive Director Meghan Grady of Meals on Wheels.
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I’m also seeing RI Democrats attempting to raise money with emails saying things like:
Ashley Kalus is no imaginary monster …
We have to stop her from gaining any power in Rhode Island and trying to drag us back into a terrifying past with less freedom.
Remember that the people who write these messages probably aren’t unable to see what they’re doing, which means they think you are.
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One person was seeking Justice Kavanaugh with a gun. It is perfectly reasonable to ask, “what about,” now, as progressives and Democrats behave as if an attack on the Speaker of the House’s husband is not only the most outrageous event in recent memory, but also a direct consequence of “MAGA Republican” rhetoric.
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A recently released book by Gale Pooley and Marian Tupy, Superabundance, explores the amazing fact that the prosperity and the availability of scarce resources is proving only to increase as the population grows. Their most fundamental argument is that people have value. Every child added to the world increases the wealth of all of us.
The authors don’t mean that as a religious or philosophical claim, although it’s accurate in that context, too, but as an economic one. In fact, they find that new people don’t just cover their own price of existence, so to speak, but generate additional wealth.
The topic reminds me of my early attempts to take economics seriously. I searched in vain for a definition of “the economy” that could imply a total existent and potential sum, sort of like one can estimate the total kinetic and potential energy in a system. Finding no satisfactory answer, I started thinking it through from the bottom up. Begin with a single person, who brings value into the world as an entity who values goods and services and provides value through productive activity. Add in another person, and their combined value is greater than their sum as individuals.
Just so, more people will always increase the economy… unless they are prevented from finding ways to provide value to each other. Maybe the most fundamental (and offensive) swindle of socialism is its claim to be humanistic and to reduce alienation while dehumanizing everybody and alienating them from each other.
The central planning prevents us from finding ways to coordinate, solve problems, and create a cooperative new world. The central planners try to force the human system into a scheme that makes sense to them, as central planners, without taking any account of that which people value and how particular individuals can best create value for others.
Being charitable, we might observe that socialists cannot possibly have sufficient information to place everybody perfect (and never mind the all-too-human fact that people tend to prefer conclusions about their purpose to which they feel they come themselves, without being instructed). Being less charitable (although perhaps no less correct), we might also observe the defining trait of socialists to be their unhappiness with the choices people actually make when left to their own devices.
And so, we hear about a 9.6% increase in natural gas prices in Rhode Island (kept low, we can be sure, by political bullying) even as the State of Texas has such a glut of natural gas that the prices have fallen below zero. That means it makes more economic sense for producers to burn gas in Texas rather than try to get it to consumers in Rhode Island.
Beyond raising their go-to specter of climate change, the meddlers find this sort of activity incomprehensible, but it is the result of their meddling. Such disconnects don’t just happen. They result from foolish policy — from progressives’ standing in the way of people finding ways to serve one another. Note, for example, that resisting so-called “gouging” in New England prevents the value of transporting energy here from overcoming the cost of doing so.
The sorts of people who make political decisions in places like Rhode Island may believe this situation to be preferable to continued reliance on fossil fuels, but in that case, they ought to be honest about their calculations. They can’t be honest, though, because they know that they’d have few supporters. Instead, they distract and spin narratives about how people are a cancer on the planet and there are too many of us anyway.
Featured image by Mike Benna on Unsplash.
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Clearing out the links I’ve put aside, I came across a tweet that Bill Bartholomew sent out with a clip of himself on A Lively Experiment in early September, and he makes a point that’s still worth considering, related to stories around that time that schools were accommodating students who’d declared themselves to identify as cats:
Teen suicide rates, depression, anxiety is through the roof. If a kid wants to wear cat ears or cat whiskers, or whatever it may be, however they want to dress, y’know, let them do it, as long as it’s not distracting and disruptive to the other students in the building.
Let’s put aside all of the ideological differences — wokeness and the backlash thereto. Perhaps the most discouraging thing about public discourse in Rhode Island (and much of America) is that nobody thinks to do the most important and obvious thing, namely challenging Bartholomew’s assumptions about the effect of such accommodations on depression, anxiety, and suicide.
Perhaps there’s a debate to be had (I haven’t recently done the research to say otherwise), but it seems at least as likely to me that allowing troubled children to force others to bend to their whims and fantasies will increase their anxiety and depression. I think this for several reasons:
- Structure is a positive part of self-improvement and advancement.
- Forcing others to pretend that something is perfectly ordinary when it manifestly is not creates a condition in which the child is living within a lie, which can’t be healthy.
- Realizing that other people’s reactions are not arbitrary or pernicious, but rather constitutes fully half of every interpersonal interaction is a necessity for cultivating healthy relationships.
Yes, suicide, depression, and anxiety are high, these days, but who has been steering the culture for the past half century? Progressives, who are like those parents who cannot say “no” to their children and so turn them into neurotic messes whose core problem, I’d argue, is that they can’t get the world to respond to them no matter how much they act out.
Featured image by Thomas Le on Unsplash.
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If you’re thigh deep in the muck of Rhode Island politics, as I am, you may find something about the local society inexplicable. The game is so locked up, in Rhode Island, that it isn’t clear whether anything can shake the stranglehold of insiders and special interests. Consider two recent stories.
On the National Education Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test, Rhode Island — which, let’s remember, is near the top of the country for education spending — is about average nationally and low for New England. Democrat Governor Dan McKee appears to be hiding the state-specific proficiency scores until after the election, but we can be confident they won’t tell a better story than the NAEP.
Rhode Island spends a lot for inferior results in the area of society that many people consider to be the single most important: education of children. Why is this not a pivotal, election-changing issue? Well, McKee is now the political property of the labor unions, including the teachers’ unions, which are little more than progressive activist organizations that use labor management to raise money and secure votes, and most journalists (whether they’ll say so publicly or not) share the progressive agenda.
Still, that doesn’t excuse the rest of us. Where are you all? The lives of Rhode Island’s children are being stunted. Shame on us.
I’ve done enough independent research over the last two decades to make a relevant observation in this context: Many of the movers and shakers who might otherwise advocate for Rhode Island children long ago simply concluded that they must live in just the right districts or utilize private, including Catholic, schools, where the level of education is still good. As even the “good” public districts have deteriorated and housing costs have become such that even some elites can’t live in the right zip codes, charter schools have filled some of the gap.
In short, RI insiders are buying themselves the flexibility not to advocate for all Rhode Island children. They can ignore the bad results because it doesn’t affect their children.
The other recent story that ought to be making more waves is Rhode Island’s return to the bottom 10 of the Tax Foundation Business Tax Index. Progressives can poohpooh such metrics as free-market propaganda, but they do measure something worthy of consideration, and they do affect the impressions and decisions of people across the country.
We’re going in the wrong direction, and there will be a price to pay (even for insiders). So why doesn’t anybody seem to care?
In my decades (now) of asking variations of this question, I’ve concluded that Rhode Islanders (by which I mean you) are in one of four groups. The first includes those who are in on the take. Plenty of union members, for example, will agree with me politically, ideologically, and culturally, but their life plans are now dependent upon supporting the system as it is, and so they do.
The second includes those who have the resources to counterbalance the imposed detriment for themselves and their families. Whether they are ideologically sympathetic with the ruling progressives or remain in the state for some other reason, they can buy their way out of the ill effects of public policy. This group deserves the lion’s share of the shame.
The third group is simply ignorant. Maybe it’s a culpable ignorance, and they actively avoid learning that which should require action, or maybe it’s not, but they simply don’t know what’s going on.
The fourth group includes those who see what’s going on and would change it if they could but have concluded that it is beyond their power to affect, so they’ve made plans for exit. This group, frankly, I can’t blame.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- The Democrat-union “home team”
- Republicans out in the community
- Hiding the scores
- More debates
Featured image from the original cover of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities.
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They spent all of Republican President George W. Bush’s two terms talking about how he was “selected, not elected.” They spent all of Republican President Donald Trump’s term claiming he’d won because of Russian interference.
Now they’re claiming that if their party doesn’t win majorities during the election in a few weeks, it will be the end of democracy in America. Why? Because some Republicans have doubts about the outcome of the last election.
So, a party that has made a recurring theme of challenging the legitimacy of every Republican President this century is claiming that all elections going forward will be illegitimate because a portion of the other party is taking the view they, the Democrats, have promoted ceaselessly. Why do their voters never stop and question this stuff?
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