On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- Union-owned officials rally in Pawtucket
- The governor insults CVS
- The mayor casts shade on the election
- Pelosi in town
- Gorbea skirts election law
Featured image by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash.
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The Rhode Island Saga, Post 3
Having introduced the heroes of our salvation story for Rhode Island, we must now observe them more closely. They are young, yet, so the details of what they may become — what they should become — are hazy, but what we want to understand at the moment is the irreducible something that hints at their ability to overcome the specific challenges of our time.
In a business story, this could be an extraordinary inner drive, a particular talent, or a unique idea for a product or service (or talent for developing products or services). A political story has corollaries to all of these, but our heroes find themselves in such a squalid and corrupt setting that the irreducible something must be fundamental and profound. It must be a basic idea — a different way of answering the question, “What should we do?”
I propose that what sets our heroes apart and hints at their promise is an innate conviction that a community should pursue the optimum balance of cooperation and individual liberty, structured so that people can be as free as possible while having opportunities to cooperate as much as possible. In these broad, abstract terms, even the forces of local corruption might express agreement with this proposition, but their view is actually its inversion.
The conviction of Rhode Island’s status quo (which progressives work relentlessly to amplify) requires an a priori definition of cooperation as a deliberate act codified by setting the rules for everybody through a centralized power. Put in its best framing, their idea is that we all come together and determine what sort of society we want, and by a fair and equitable process, we write that into law. With this form of cooperation they pair a concept of individual liberty that accepts, even celebrates, differences in identity (which encompasses not only one’s innate qualities, but also one’s beliefs and actions, all of which are inextricably connected, in their view).
Thus, they’d say, do we achieve balance. Provided their identities do not prevent others’ expression of their own, then people are as free as they possibly can be within a system in which we’re maximally cooperating.
Our heroes sense, however, that underneath this positive-sounding vision is a dark lie promulgated under the manipulation of some unseen evil. Curiously, when the community comes together, some ideas for the sort of society we want are simply disallowed. Moreover, the allowance for individual liberty is entirely conditional. If your individual desires are politically helpful, they are encouraged; if they are indifferent to the objectives of the collective, they will be tolerated but easily lost as soon as they become politically inconvenient; if your beliefs contradict the needs of the political rulers, however, they forbidden, and if you won’t repudiate them, you’re not even human or deserving of basic protections.
Our heroes’ sense of right and wrong is very different. For them, cooperation does not require a formal agreement enforced by a central authority but is, rather, proven by action. Members of the community don’t have to agree on anything except to the degree required to interact for specific purposes. One person sells, while another buys, and their only necessary agreement is that the transaction is worthwhile. The civic society should be structured, therefore, to facilitate cooperation wherever possible and otherwise allow people their liberty.
This approach draws out a natural magic at the core of our being that expresses itself in two ways. First, although any two people might not cooperate on as many things, because everybody is pursuing his or her own desires and cooperating wherever possible, total cooperation increases. Second, when they cooperate in one area, people find that their other differences fade in importance.
And so, the heroes of the Rhode Island Saga grew up in their little cottage, under the care of the kindly couple, and with the conviction that something was off in the larger world, which held a suppressed, more-magical possibility. They matured with the years, and they watched as the comfortable and familiar fields around their cottage began to decay, as if The Evil was drawing the life out of them.
As life became more difficult, the boy and girl, now a young man and a young woman, had to begin taking responsibility for their family, so they ventured down into the Marketplace.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- A state that can’t handle rain
- A secretary and board that can’t handle elections
- A debater who can’t handle criticism
- A lieutenant governor who can’t handle debates
- A president who can’t handle disagreement
Featured image by Amanda Pitts on Twitter.
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Today the most prominent themes among the flotsam on RI Twitter are hagiographic tweets about labor unions and reports about failing infrastructure in the Providence area with respect to water management. Folks, thank the unions for the flooding, because the expense they’ve imposed on infrastructure in Rhode Island is largely to blame. Ignoring this reality is among the central missions of our government and news media.
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… if you see people citing the strange flash flooding in the Providence area and Rt. 95 as evidence of “climate change,” ask them whether the blame mightn’t more reasonably land on government officials’ poor management of the infrastructure under their authority.
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The Rhode Island Saga, Post 2
When people begin thinking in a deliberate way about how to turn their ideas, capital, and effort into businesses (which they sometimes get around to years after they’ve started operations), I put the process in terms of a story.
The hero of the story is, obviously, the person or group of people who are beginning the business. This is not only because they are the clients with whom I’ve contracted, but also because the real hero is the underlying idea, and they are its human incarnation.
So, when I suggest that Rhode Island needs a hero, I don’t mean a political savior. That sort of thinking has helped to bring our state and the establishment’s political opposition to their current, undesirable positions. The way to start is with the idea or concept of the hero. What does the idea that would save Rhode Island look like?
If a person or group emerges to personify the ideal, great, but political reform, like product marketing, requires a positive something to sell. It isn’t enough to describe the villain. If all the story has is a villain, people stuck in the plot will have no choice but to endure or to flee. This condition describes Rhode Island as I’ve been experiencing it since I began paying attention a quarter century ago.
Mind you, the idea doesn’t have to be fully identified or developed, just yet. That will be a product of the process we’ll be going through on Anchor Rising (and beyond) as we move forward.
Picture the country boy and girl who live in the cottage shown in the featured image of this post. Let’s imagine them as biological siblings both adopted by the same kindly and hard-working couple on the outskirts of the kingdom. Somehow, deep in their very being, they know that life can be better — more magical — than their experiences suggest. Similarly, their parents — indeed, their entire village — can sense that something is special about these children.
Before we can set the story into motion, this is what we must define. What qualities set our heroes apart? What sorts of things do they do differently, even if only a little bit… a hint of something different or more?
Featured image from Shutterstock.
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The Rhode Island Saga, Post 1
Somehow, I’d naively believed that my ridiculously busy summer would cool as the children returned to school and I overcame a few large projects. New content from me on Anchor Rising has certainly been lacking, and I apologize for that, but more has simply not been possible.
To recap: After my time with the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity ended in April 2021, I took stock of my position and opportunities, deciding to take what felt kind of like a last chance to pursue an advanced degree as something other than a leisure-time activity and set up shop as an independent contractor. Now, in September 2022, I’m beginning my third semester on the way to a Master of Business Administration (MBA), and my contractor efforts have turned into a full-blown business consultancy.
I’ll have more on that as I make everything official; my purpose, here, is to explain my relative absence, as well as to put a first toe on a slightly divergent path for Anchor Rising.
Given my recent activities, I’ve been making a deliberate effort to systematize my understanding of how businesses function — especially how they function within markets, address external threats and internal challenges, and exchange value with their customers. These concepts translate easily to non-profit organizations, but they are also relevant to a struggling state.
The (small) change in emphasis I expect you’ll observe in my work around here is that I’ll be more deliberate about a priority that has always been implied. After all, the website’s name is about rising — getting the Ocean State out of the whirlpool that was already circling when we started nearly 20 years ago. As I’ve learned about policy and politics, I think my tone has shifted away from complaining and toward explaining what, exactly, it has been about the status quo that has been harming Rhode Islanders.
These days, I’ve got the experience and the tools to emphasize what we can do about it… economically, socially, politically, informationally, strategically, organizationally, and so on.
Podcaster James Lindsay often reminds his listeners that American education has not become Marxist as much in the sense of teaching from a Marxist perspective (though it does that) as in the sense of teaching through the use of Marxist practice. The activists’ doing education in a Marxist way is much more damaging than their doing education to convey Marxist ideas.
Perhaps the restorative response should be similar, and I propose to give it a shot. We’ve gone over and over everything that’s wrong with how Rhode Island operates while one conservative reform politician or group after another has stepped into the accelerating buzzsaws of the state’s corruption, partisanship, and mindless progressivism.
After all these years, if you and I are still here, it’s for a reason. So let’s acknowledge the marketplace we’re actually in and orient to that. The greater part of the time life leaves me between other things will be spent exploring how that can be done, and I hope you’ll be active in the conversation.
Featured image by Hanna Morris on Unsplash.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- Nellie’s big advertising error
- Fung on TV
- Hopelessness in Providence politics
- Strange celebration of general treasurer candidates
Featured image from Shutterstock.
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Did you know that the United States generates only 12.67% of human-made greenhouse gases (GHG), with the balance generated by all other countries? I sure didn’t, until I went looking for the figure. That’s not much talked about in the media, nor is the fact that at 94%, naturally generated greenhouse gases dwarf human’s contribution of 6%. So of all greenhouse gases, natural and human-made, the United States generates less than 1% (.76% to be exact). 
Now, AGW scientists and advocates quietly acknowledge that it would not be enough for the United States alone to abate its greenhouse gases in order to head off (hypothesized) catastrophic global warming; not even if we stop all our emissions. But they tell us that we must set a good example to the world so that everyone else will emulate us, give up fossil fuels and thereby prevent a global warming catastrophe.
But how likely are other countries to do so? Let’s review the list of emitters below. Setting aside feasibility for a moment, how many other countries on it are at least willing to stop using fossil fuels given the compelling example of the United States doing so? Canada. Probably most countries of the EU.
Important to note, though, that Europe and the UK are being rocked by Russia’s sharp reduction in its natural gas delivery. Accordingly, at least one country has notably taken steps back towards fossil fuels and all European countries dependent on Russian natural gas are looking at staggering prices spikes in their electricity. (Odd; why haven’t they simply cranked up their green energy production to make up for the generating capacity shortfall caused by the withdrawal of Russian gas?)
No other country, certainly none of the other three top-five emitters, China, India and Russia, is taking real steps to shut down on a broad scale their use of a widely-available, reliable fuel source. In fact, China, the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, continues to ratchet up its use of coal.
We are told, often in the most urgent tone, that most if not all human greenhouse gases must cease if we are going to stop catastrophic global warming. And while there are models that claim global warming will slow if all or most human-made greenhouse gases cease, there are no models that claim a reduction of 12.67% (or even 21.71%, emissions of the US + EU + Canada) would have even a moderate impact on global warming.
In short, there is no point in the United States giving up one barrel of or one joule generated by fossil fuel because, by the standard set by AGW scientists and advocates themselves, elimination of 12.67% of human emissions wouldn’t get it done.
President Joe Biden, strongly abetted by the silence or outright approval of Congressional Democrats, has paralleled Russia’s fossil fuel strangulation of Europe here in the United States by artificially restricting domestic fossil fuel production. Some states have gone further and, remarkably, passed laws outlawing fossil fuels altogether down the road. Neither the state nor the federal officials who have taken these reckless steps have identified a feasible replacement fuel source. We have already been experiencing the corresponding spike in the price of fuel, food, goods, electricity, with a jump in heating costs on the near horizon.
Our leaders need to stop, take a breath, and be guided by the analysis of AGW scientists and advocates themselves about the (non)effectiveness of the United States reducing or eliminating its GHG. Europe’s acute electricity and looming home heating crisis as
The benchmark European gas price has soared 550% in the past 12 months
is showing us in real time the stark consequences of moving even further away from fossil fuels without a ready, reliable, reasonably priced alternative in place.
Breakdown by country of human-generated greenhouse gas emissions
(As of 2018. Excludes naturally-caused greenhouse gases.)
China 26.1%
US 12.67%
EU (27) 7.52%
India 7.08%
Russia 5.36%
Japan 2.5%
Brazil 2.19%
Indonesia 2.03%
Iran 1.74%
Canada 1.52%
“Others” = 31.29%
Source: World Resources Institute
[Amended 8/30/2022 by addition of second chart, above.]
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Although families and individuals who can show a direct link to harm by a specific government entity should, of course, have recourse, the idea that a city, state, or country should broadly atone for the sins of the people who used to live there is wrong-headed even in concept — more so in a churning, dynamic country like the United States, which coheres through principle, not identity. When Democrat Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza pursued the subject of “reparations” for his city, therefore, it seemed politically cynical, at best, and deliberately divisive, at worst.
So, it is probably a good thing that the whole effort is exposed as a massive head-fake, now that he’s no longer running for office:
A new report suggests ways Providence, Rhode Island, can atone for its extensive ties to the transatlantic slave trade and centuries of racism and discrimination by, among other things, establishing home repair funds, launching financial literacy programs and boosting aid to Black and Indigenous organizations.
The report, issued Monday by the Providence Municipal Reparations Commission, notably doesn’t recommend giving out direct payments to Black and Native American residents, as some had called for.
If the idea is programs, rather than restitution for a specific harm done, then the recommendations only amplify the racist immorality at the heart of the effort. Under this definition, restitution involves compensating people for hardship they face presumably as a consequence of past injustice. At the same time, it means not helping disadvantaged people who can’t check a politically beneficial box on a list of grievances. The government would be helping people whose ancestors may have suffered for an identifiable reason by giving them advantages over their peers who may have gotten to their own challenging circumstances by a different historical route.
That is wrong on its face.
Perhaps recognizing this, the Providence Municipal Reparations Commission’s recommended beneficiaries are incredibly broad:
The report recommends limiting eligibility for reparations-related efforts to those with Indigenous heritage or ancestors originating from sub-Saharan Africa, residents of neighborhoods disproportionately impacted by the pandemic, and low income households earning less than 50% of the area median income.
So, the program would help anybody who is disadvantaged for income or (assumed) pandemic reasons and to give it the aura of a “reparations program,” it would also help people who are not disadvantaged (or not as disadvantaged) if they have a particular ethnic heritage. At what point will progressives have an “aha” moment that it simply won’t work to dabble in racism in the now to correct racism in the past?
Featured image by Maick Maciel on Unsplash.
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