The news comes from the beginning of the digestive process…
The out-of-stock rate for baby formula hovered between 2% and 8% in the first half of 2021, but began rising sharply last July. Between November 2021 and early April 2022, the out-of-stock rate jumped to 31%, data from Datasembly showed.
To the end…
Sky-high prices for industrial fertilizer are projected to reduce American farmers’ corn and wheat plantings this spring, according to U.S. government data. That further threatens global food supplies as domestic wheat inventories are the lowest in 14 years, and the Russia-Ukraine war is disrupting grain shipments from those key suppliers.
Meanwhile, Hans Bader notes the downslide of the stock market, with the economy underperforming.
One can observe the effects in daily life. My daughter and I stopped by our bank branch the other day, and it was unexpectedly closed. Another surprised customer observed that a teller had recently mentioned the bank’s trouble finding workers.
Meanwhile, thanks to the premature death of our septic system, we’ve been undergoing the massive, expensive project of replacing it. Not only are all the materials ridiculously expensive, but every contractor involved in the project has complained about the inability to find workers, and the knock-on consequences of that problem have shown. I can attest to the fact that the workers they can find may not be bringing the best work ethic to the job.
Any trend this pervasive will be subject to interpretation (if we want to put it positively) or distortion and muddied water (if we want to be a little cynical), but it seems to me that these are the fruits of progressivism (aka socialism). In the fantasy world of the people running our country, products get made and work gets done… simply because. In their minds, one need never consider human nature or the incentives their policies create.
Such folks won’t listen, of course, but it’s worth pointing out that the world doesn’t work that way. Vilify productive people and buy the votes of the unproductive with promises of magical taxpayer debt, and the message will get out.
Too late will people realize that they should have worked a decent job when they had the chance, because it was better than sorting through trash for a meal.
Featured image by Hermes Rivera on Unsplash.
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Speaker Shekarchi on Current Legislative Matters (4/11/22) from John Carlevale on Vimeo.
Speaker of the House of Representatives Joseph Shekarchi speaks with Richard August, candidly and straightforwardly discussing some of the current matters facing the legislature. Topics include recreational marijuana, the size of the budget, voting rules, policeman’s bill of rights, access to the shoreline, gun laws, driver’s permits for undocumented persons, elimination of voter ID, legalization of prostitution, and bonus payments to state employees.
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For the growing “our elites are insane” file, WPRI gives this propagandistic headline to an AP article: “Early transgender identity tends to endure, study suggests.” See, the editor is implying, it’s not just a faddish thing that fades quickly. But think objectively about what precisely the study found:
The research involved 317 youngsters who were 3 to 12 years old when they were recruited to the study. Five years later, at the study’s end, 94% were living as transgender and almost two-thirds were using either puberty-blocking medication or sex hormones to medically transition.
Most children in the study were from white, high-income families who supported their transitions. On average, the kids began identifying as transgender at around age 6.
To be exact, 77% of study participants were white (68% non-Hispanic and 9% Hispanic), and 66% had household income over $75,000. The study doesn’t provide the actual data on other demographics, only noting that the parents were disproportionately college graduates, and it doesn’t give details about whether these demographics correlated with results. The average age at which the children had their “first transition” was 6.5, and only 22% were fourteen years old or older by the end.
On average, we can characterize the study as having found that six-year-olds — first graders — whose relatively wealthy white parents encourage them to see themselves as inhabiting the wrongly sexed body (or at least do not discourage the idea), taking action to reinforce that belief to the extent of entering them in a professional study, don’t push back or decide that they’ve been placed on the wrong path before they get to middle school.
This isn’t a sign that the children and their parents correctly identified their genders. It’s an indication of societal child abuse.
What’s more, with the academics and the news media so inclined to be boosters for this ideology, we can have no trust that they will ever deliberately find, release, or report evidence of harm it may be causing to children, teens, and adults. Consequently, we’re setting these kids — and our entire civilization — up for an irrevocable and tragic outcome.
Featured image by Caleb Woods on Unsplash.
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With a bit of spectacularly bad timing for Rhode Island insiders (who may very well win anyway), an employee of the state Department of Labor and Training has been charged with stealing funds from exactly an area that labor unions are trying to make more flush:
An employee of the Rhode Island Department of Labor and Training is accused of stealing $115,000 in settlement checks.
Rhode Island State Police said Wendy Antonelli of Foster faces charges of obtaining money under false pretenses, forgery, counterfeiting and money laundering. …
“In her capacity as Chief Labor Standards Examiner, Ms. Antonelli was responsible for overseeing employee misclassification investigations and distribution of misclassification settlement checks intended for employees of the businesses investigated. An employee is misclassified when their employer incorrectly deems the employee as an independent contractor,” state police said in a release.
“Misclassification” is what labor unions misleading call “wage theft.” They imply that employers are stealing from their employees, but it can be — and may often be — simply the case that the employer and worker have agreed to have an independent contractor relationship. I’ve certainly known both carpenters and office workers who’ve preferred that arrangement.
But the more unions can restrict the ability of employers and workers to come to mutually beneficial arrangements on their own — and the more they can be made to distrust each other — the more likely unions will be able to insert themselves into the deal and take a cut that otherwise would have been divided between the parties. Politicians and bureaucrats (most of them active union members, themselves) are happy to facilitate this third-party intervention.
According to the state police, we here have a state employee (who makes $87,000 per year) taking the money that employers have paid to settle these claims for herself. One only stretches slightly to suggest that this action is only a more-direct redistribution than the unions are seeking by lobbying for stronger laws.
Obviously, we shouldn’t take this example as representative, but the lessons are broader. The unions’ rhetoric suggests that Rhode Islanders can’t trust their employers, so government must step in to take their side. Well, we obviously can’t trust state government, either.
Maybe we should start trusting ourselves to live as professionals and adults.
Featured image by Devin Kaselnak on Unsplash.
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This, from Mark Tapscott in The Epoch Times seems like exactly the sort of thing we’d be hearing a lot about if those tasked with promulgating and debating information were truly committed to the American project of freedom and experimentation:
There were 78.3 million employed individuals in the [right-to-work (RTW)] states in February 2020, when the economic impact of the virus that’s also known as novel coronavirus, first began to be felt across the nation.
As of March, the total number of employed individuals in the 27 states had climbed to 79.2 million, an increase of 1.2 percent, according to an analysis that was made available to The Epoch Times by National Right to Work Committee (NRTWC) researcher Stanley Greer.
By contrast, in the non-RTW states, in February 2020, there was a total of just more than 80 million employed individuals; but by March, that total fell to 78.6 million, for a decline of 1.75 percent (figures are rounded for reporting purposes).
Many variations exist, of course, but there are basically two models on offer to the American people. One emphasizes centralized control through a political process, while the other emphasizes a system of cooperative freedom that decentralizes control and deliberately incorporates decision-making outside of the political process.
The first distrusts people to act independently in the management of their lives and, in an organic way, society while the second distrusts people to act hierarchically in the management of other people’s lives and society in a deliberate way. The better choice is, in my view, obviously the second approach.
I could be wrong, however, which makes this question a perfect — perhaps defining — case to run through the laboratory of competitive states. Unfortunately, albeit predictably, the system that seems likely to win that competition is not the system favored by people who control information and government.
Featured image by Adeolu Eletu on Unsplash.
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As Anchor Rising readers know, last week a Providence Journal headline proclaimed, “RI’s record-shattering baby shortage could spell trouble for state’s economy.” This week, Lieutenant Governor Sabina Matos proclaimed her aspiration for the Ocean State to kill more:
I’m confident RI can become a national leader for reproductive rights at a time when these rights are coming under attack. We can not go back.
I can understand the reasoning of the pro-abortion side and the complexity of the moral issues should one acknowledge the life of the baby. We must also be compassionate about the implications for women who have had abortions as science and law clarify exactly what abortion is.
Still, the rhetoric we’re hearing from Matos and others reveals fanaticism in the face of reality and an unwillingness to grapple with complexity.
Another glimmer of this madness appears in the legislation (H7442 and S2549) that would force taxpayers to fund abortions for state employees and people who receive subsidized healthcare. That policy shift would be bad enough on its own, but the legislation takes the additional step of disappearing the word “women” as the category of “persons” who can actually become pregnant.
Not long ago, this would have been recognized — indeed, lampooned — as the anti-scientific madness that it is. Yet in Rhode Island, we’re letting these people control our government and news organs.
Matos’s notion that “we cannot go back” is being proclaimed up and down the political hierarchy, but it’s yet another example of the delusion. Backwards is exactly where these radicals are taking us, and we’re not going to like the society that they impose on us. Although, they will naturally leverage their propagandistic power to find others to blame.
Featured image by Dawid Zawila on Unsplash.
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Culture and history are funny things. Over the centuries, our civilization learns things about human life and codes them in cultural norms that everybody can know without having to be able to explain. They’re just how we do things — lessons learned over centuries, sometimes through painful experience.
No doubt, our ancestors coded the wrong principles into the culture from time to time, but often things appear wrong to us because the circumstances that prompted the rules have changed, and we’re not great at remembering how different things were. Yes, sexism existed 150 years ago when the workplace was thought unsuitable for women, but even putting aside birth control, we did not yet have cars, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and countless other conveniences we take for granted that transformed homemaking into something that can be done on the side. In the workplace, we’re talking the difference between nail guns and hammers, transforming the nature of work. In a sense, the sexism coded culture for simple facts of reality. It’s messy business.
These are the sorts of things we should consider when, in the name of “Gender Equality on Beaches,” Nantucket goes fully topless. Importantly, note how action in the name of “equality” leaves no room for compromise. The activists, led by “love and pleasure educator” Dorothy Stover, phrased things in terms of rights, so those who might still like a beach where the already-blurred line of modesty is maintained at a 2010s level have nowhere to go on the island.
That was deliberate; an amendment to leave two beaches, including Children’s Beach, as safe havens for the modest was proposed and withdrawn, perhaps because our confused gender equality language (requiring the phrase “all persons”) made it difficult to articulate a rule that was sex-specific.
It is all well and good (and easily done) for advocates to insist that the answer to the discomfort and riskiness of public nudity is for parents to “teach their children respect for the human body,” but that attitude may prove callous. If many women avail themselves of the liberty, families may go elsewhere, and behavior may degrade. If few women do, their discomfort may set the “love and pleasure advocates” in search of new rules to impose on their oppressors.
Like traditional norms or not, there’s a reason they became the norm, and it isn’t simply that our ancestors were less sophisticated than we are. We may discover that those reasons still exist, even as we make it impossible in thought and language to correct our mistakes as we erase them.
Featured image by Rusty Watson on Unsplash.
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As a conservative writer in Rhode Island, I find it difficult to know where to begin a reaction to the apparent, likely, or maybe only as-yet possible decision of the United States Supreme Court to reverse Roe v. Wade this session.
The place to start, I suppose, is with the biggest and most-obvious point. Unless our country is indefinitely to continue its slide into the ravenous maw of pure evil, Roe v. Wade’s reversal is at some point inevitable. Like slavery, a policy permitting the brutal slaughter of unborn babies — as in, literally tearing them into pieces placed in a metal dish to be sorted and perhaps sold — for any or no reason up to the last moment during which their bodies are touching the skin of their mothers during birth is simply too barbaric for a society that values human life to permit. And, in case it needs to be said, we should be a society that values human life. Correction of this evil can and should be done on ways that accord with our pluralistic and democratic heritage, but Roe v. Wade subverts ideological pluralism and democracy.
That raises the next-most-obvious travesty of Roe v. Wade, which is insisting that a handful of judges should be permitted to make this decision for the entire nation. I believe the horror of abortion deserves universal opprobrium, but other horrors await a nation that hands a political wildcard to a small group of judges simply because the national elite wants a policy that the people aren’t ready to accept through the usual rules of our governing game.
Subsidiary to that point is the problem that this wildcard has been yielded by means of incoherent, excuse-making reasoning. Even now, social media is awash in commentary with which it is impossible to engage because it is entirely unmoored. If the court returns decisions about abortion to the states, some are saying, that represents the judges’ imposing a rule on the entire nation. That is the opposite of reality! The more fine-grained analysis has it that Justice Samuel Alito’s reasoning puts a target on other historical rulings of the court, but that is explicitly not the case, and Alito explains why.
Last comes the deceitfulness of progressives, which was laid absolutely bare last night as this news leaked out. No limit appears to apply to the power that they would place in a few hands, centrally controlling vast swaths of humanity. Yet, despite their fondness for such terms as “democracy” and “the will of the people,” when that centralized decision-making machine takes a turn with which they disagree, they present it as simply illegitimate. If five progressive justices on the Supreme Court insist that there cannot be any small area of our massive country in which people can be governed according to beliefs with which those five disagree, then progressives proclaim them guardians of rights. If five other justices insist that we have a right under our Constitution to make such decisions more-locally, progressive decry the tyranny of permitting civic choice.
Featured image by Aditya Romanca on Unsplash.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- McKee plummets in the polls
- And he hides from debate
- And Kalus is on the air
- But voter legislation may destroy trust
- The progressives start to implode on their radicalism
- A congressional candidate has a strange interaction with the police
Featured image screen-captured from Coalition Radio video.
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It is remarkable that Paul Edward Parker’s Providence Journal article about the “record-shattering baby shortage” in the Ocean State goes on as long as it does without making the key, irreducible point.
… The number being born in the Ocean State has ebbed to its lowest point in more than a century.
The phenomenon has been so pronounced that, for the first time since the state began keeping records in the 1850s, the yearly number of deaths eclipsed the number of births, creating a condition that demographers call “natural decrease.”
The problem, according to Parker, is that businesses need people to sell stuff to and to hire, not to mention the increased burden of an aging population and lost tax revenue. Parker’s most definitely not alone in this, but such analyses fall into the progressive trap of thinking of people as dehumanized pieces on the board and business as a static class.
Perhaps because it is so obvious that analysts don’t even think to notice it, the point missed is that people are the economy. It’s not just that they’re consumers who need services, which is a typical New England progressive way to look at the economy. They’re also producers and innovators and volunteers. The economy exists by their desire to turn their time and work into capital.
Parker puts forward the standard excuse-making line that Rhode Island mainly follows national trends, as if national trends always have to rule in RI, but the reality is that the sorts of people who would have children have no reason to be in our state. We cut off job opportunities, and our education system is terrible, especially for the cost. To the extent that our big spending on education does children any good, they’re apt to take our investment and move elsewhere for better opportunities.
Like a wild garden that grows where it can flourish, if our population isn’t growing, it’s because our social, economic, and cultural soil isn’t healthy. Some of that’s national, to be sure, but not all of it, or even most of it. The people who run our state (gov, media) are killing it. No wonder they want to miss that.
Featured image by Annie Spratt on Unsplash.
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