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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I mean, look at this:
The scores were abysmal to start; the goals were obviously fictitious when considered in the absence of a practical plan; and the final results are offensively bad. If these results aren’t causing outrage, it’s because nobody in the Democrat establishment or news media wants to address the underlying problems, which are entangled with labor union privilege and political power.
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On its surface, the controversy looks obvious. I mean, the guy winning the no-bid contract had a relative in the relevant office of the school department:
Astro of New England, a different moving company, first raised issues with the bidding process after Astro owner Chuck Lamendola said he noticed Jada had been awarded work in late June without him ever seeing the district advertising the work publicly.
He also highlighted that Jada owner David Oliver is cousins with the school district’s facility director, Kevin Oliver, whose name appeared on Jada contract paperwork submitted over the past couple of months to the School Committee.
On the other hand, consider that Jada doesn’t have the relevant licensing, which is probably just a matter of paperwork, but has already been doing such work as a subcontractor under Astro. That framing changes the coloring a little, to make Astro seem like an unnecessary middleman kept in the game through the state’s licensing regime. One might wonder whether there’s anything to find in Lamendola’s family and friend network, too.
Rhode Islanders have long joked about the need to “know a guy” to get things rolling in our state, given our institutionalized corruption. As different factions of people who know different “guys” compete in that sort of system, who gets pegged with corruption violations becomes like a game of musical chairs.
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I suggest the title of this post acknowledging I don’t know a whole lot about Johnston’s unique political scene. Locally, things can be very specific to the individuals involved and their disputes, but I have been a keen observer of factors that make it more difficult for Republicans to work through those disputes.
Apparently, Johnston has a single opponent candidate, an Independent, in its Town Council and School Committee races, and not a single Republican. Sandra Taylor, the president of the local Republican town committee, it’s a matter of her candidates’ having to focus on supporting their families. That’s a downstream indicator of other problems, in the absence of which, I suspect people would make the time for civic engagement.
Motivational Factors
First, Republicans are less inclined to engage in local politics as a step toward a political career. It genuinely requires sacrifice of their economic and other interests, whereas the Democrat machine can be a route to personal prosperity in the Ocean State.
Second, running (and especially winning) as a Republican means you will instantly become a representative villain for the news media. Holding office is not a route to positive attention for conservatives around here.
This is compounded by, third, the increasing nastiness of progressive activism. The legislature has written student activism into school curricula, which the teachers union will happily leverage. Progressives are happy to show up at your house and make a scene. Progressive activists will take to social media in a swarm of bullies.
Structural Factors
Fourth, statewide media doesn’t cover local government unless there’s a controversy, and people no longer get their news from local media. Thus, fewer people who aren’t political junkies will happen to come across stories that might get them interested in civic engagement. Relatedly, the arena of letters to the editor has disappeared, and those written debates used to draw people in.
Fifth, retirees may not be staying around, at least enough to hold public office, and perhaps younger retirees (the Boomers) may not be as civically engaged. In any event, they have now marinated in a lifetime of “Republicans are bad” propaganda, and so they are less likely to step forward to represent that party (see above).
Sixth, all of Rhode Island’s biggest problems are simply insurmountable. The labor unions have state government locked up, and any advancement made in local government will draw their attention at that higher level. While it makes local engagement even more important, this means repairing local government requires something more like a crusader than a friendly local seeking to give something back to the community because all of the negatives of running as a Republican will be exponentially heightened if an elected official actually intends to address real problems. Not only are crusaders harder to come by, but they can be harder to work with, come into conflict with each other, and, in their passion, are apt to branch apart when they disagree.
Solutions
I’ve got some ideas that I’ll be developing and testing in the near future, but there are no simple and easy fixes to this problem. Inasmuch as it’s a clear problem not just for the Republican Party, but for the entire state, it’d be helpful if well-meaning members of the political establishment, especially the news media, would recognize the challenges and consciously adjust how they cover news and treat people who step forward.
I wouldn’t count on that, though, which means the problems are likely to get worse before they can possibly get better.
Featured image by Justin Katz using Dall-E 3 and Photoshop AI.
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