Maybe I’m just entering that late-middle-age phase, but it seems to me that younger adults — or all of us, with reference to times that were before our time — too infrequently understand the experience of the past. Consider this find from Tim Worstall for Accuracy in Media:
A new piece from Teen Vogue says that student loans really must be forgiven because going traveling on vacation is so good for mental health.
No, really, that is what the piece says: “[T]he repayment pause went into effect soon after, and she was grateful. Without needing to make that monthly payment, she’s been able to put money into other things that are important to her, such as travel, which she says has helped her mental health.”
Sure, we like to travel, a vacation, as much as the next person. We do differ with the conclusion reached though: “You know, that’s not only eliminating student loan debt.”
As Worstall goes on to explain, “the economy must add up.” Somebody, somewhere, will bear the cost of your education, and a generation steeped in social justice ideology ought to understand that somebody will probably be way down the hill from them.
Paying your debts is social justice.
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Patrick Anderson follows up on the state’s ongoing efforts to change its official name everywhere, following a constitutional edit during the last election:
You don’t have to look too hard to find the words Providence Plantations on state buildings, a year and a half after Rhode Island voters deleted them from the state name.
The phrase is still on the State House’s Smith Street façade, on the marble floor of the rotunda, the façade of the Department of Transportation building and the marble outside the Licht Judicial Complex in Providence.
The picture of the lettering around the seal in the State House rotunda suggests the question posed in this post’s headline. Buildings, unlike official documents, are historical artifacts, and erasing the past is a dangerous game, especially when it comes at great expense.
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Gas prices have hit record highs in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, according to AAA. We’ve achieved and exceeded the pain some of us remember all too well from the Obama years:
In one week, Rhode Island gas prices rose 58 cents and Massachusetts saw a growth of 54 cents.
AAA Northeast says Rhode Island’s average gas price of $4.17 per gallon is the highest average price ever recorded in the Ocean State.
During the last peak, I was a carpenter using my own van for work, and at $80, I couldn’t always afford to fill my tank. Younger folks and those who weren’t as attentive to the news back then may not remember how it became a joke that recovery from the recession was always just around the corner. In a sense, it turned out to be true; the corner was the presidency of Donald Trump.
Before that event, some said slow growth was just the new normal for a less-dynamic U.S.A. Others suggested that the Democrats’ economic error, nationally, was that they didn’t borrow, tax, and spend enough to realize the benefit of their Keynesian economic policies.
Well, they’re certainly testing that now. Personally, I marvel that so many people who are ideologically disposed not to care or too blinkered by their theories to evaluate reality have managed to take positions of serious responsibility.
They’re going to try to spin, of course. Here’s Mike Raia, an alum of Gina Raimondo’s PR machine, complaining that Washington Post economic columnist Heather Long didn’t adjust her price comparisons by inflation:
It’s not hard to adjust those comps for inflation, and it’s kind of reckless not to.
$4.11 in 2008 = $5.37 in 2022.
You know, I’m not sure inflation can be blamed for a 15% increase over one week or, for that matter, a 50% increase over one year, which is what Long’s table shows.
More relevantly, however, I wonder whether it is appropriate to adjust one of the most important drivers of inflation for inflation. The cost of fuel is so central to overall prices that Raia’s admonition is kind of like saying that we have to adjust price increases by the amount that the price went up.
Featured image by Gabriel Cote on Unsplash.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- RI’s corruption retention policies
- McKee’s COVID messaging
- Sudden concern about Ukraine
- Raimondo: Designated Survivor
Featured image by Snehal Krishna on Unsplash.
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It’s depressing to say, but it looks like the anti-reform strategy of the teachers unions and other special interests succeeded. From the beginning, it was clear that the plan was to delay and obfuscate attempts at correcting the unforgivably terrible performance of Providence schools until the attention of the public moved on.
For some reason, it was this tweet from Providence Teachers Union VP Jeremy Sencer that heralded their success:
Last night’s @RISenate hearing made it clear that we can do the TAP work for @pvdschools better without the divisive, chaotic @RIDeptEd takeover. We have the passion & talent in PVD!
If anybody was (1) paying attention, (2) remembered the recent past, and (3) cared, Sencer would have been too concerned about backlash to state such a thing publicly.
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Ed Driscoll rounds up a little bit of the commentary, including:
TWITTER THREAD ON 2020 AND ITS AFTERMATH: “The Democrats saw an opportunity with the emergence of Covid to crush a roaring economy under a president they didn’t like. So they, & their base, did everything in their power to impose crushing restrictions on small businesses…Locking people up at home not only tanked the economy & drove up prices, it completely disrupted the global manufacturing & supply chain that was in place. You can’t just flip that on and off like a light switch.”
And:
As Ace of Spades writes, at the start of a lengthy post on that last headline, “The masking mandates that the corrupt US and state and local governments forced on children, under pressure from the corrupt teachers unions have imposed developmental disorders on children that they may never recover from. The early years of development are critical ones. You don’t get those back. These are critical years of development in which children’s brains are wired to rewire themselves like crazy. Their brains will reconfigure themselves during these years like in no other point in their lives, ever. There is no ‘Do Over’ switch on a child’s formative years.”
I suspect the average person would be reluctant to believe people could be evil enough to do this kind of harm knowingly, let alone deliberately. Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?
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And just like that, the whole thing’s wished away. Strategies that some of us have been down-throttled, blocked, or even deplatformed for suggesting over the past two years are suddenly the common wisdom of the “experts,” and images of Anthony Fauci are floating around social media with the text, “Have you seen me?”
Since the pandemic started, Fauci has been out there offering the public health establishment’s point of view, even if it was contradictory from week to week. While a quick review of headlines shows he continues to pop up every few days, his appearances have become much less common. One does wonder whether he’s keeping quiet because he disagrees with the softer direction the government has taken or simply because the Biden administration wants people to begin forgetting the ordeal of COVID.
Either way, the approaching election is conspicuous, and the shift in tone feels entirely political — if not to bury dangers for politics’ sake, then to acknowledge that skeptics were right all along without admitting error.
Let’s remember that COVID struck just before an election that Democrats desperately wanted to win (and, therefore, that the news media desperately wanted to win for them). Around April of 2020, Rhode Island shifted its methodology for counting COVID hospitalizations from an attempt to understand who was in the hospital because of COVID to a simple tally of anybody who happened to test positive for COVID while in the hospital. For weeks, we had been told that hospitalizations were the key metric to watch, and suddenly “cases” were the measure.
Now we’re approaching another election, and this time Democrats desperately do not want to lose — or at least to lose everything. COVID is no longer “novel” to Americans, so ramping up the fear as cover for electoral cheating risks massive backlash. The only option, therefore, is to go the other way and try to make people feel more optimistic while enjoying (partisans hope) an economic boost as the last of the COVID restrictions fade.
Maybe it’s a coincidence, but it sure is suspicious to see the CDC shift its approach to tracking COVID in a way that produces the map shown in the featured image of this post. Jon Miltimore, of the Foundation for Economic Education, describes the change thus:
“A community’s COVID 19 level is determined by a combination of three pieces of information,” Massetti explained, “new hospitalizations for COVID 19, current hospital beds occupied by COVID 19 patients or hospital capacity, and new COVID 19 cases.”
By simply changing its formula to include hospitalizations and hospital capacity, the CDC took the vast majority of the US from a state of high community transmission to low or moderate. The color red is also conspicuously absent.
Sorry. I call fraud… and on such a scale that the response ought to sweep the halls of government clean and usher in historic reform.
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Host Richard August and guests Jim McGwin and Megan Reilly focus on two topics of concern involving the North Kingstown School Department. One relates to a study to evaluate if systemic racism exists in the local school system. The other relates to allegations of sexual abuse of students by a faculty member, described herein as “The Aaron Thomas Affair.” Complaints regarding the latter date back to 2016 with little or no action taken by the school department officials on behalf of students who may have been abused. This interview is alarming on multiple levels involving various adults who seem to have failed to protect students in their care.
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Strange how little I’ve been seeing about stories like this in my rounds of news collection. You’d think it’d be of broad interest.
Rampant fraud and abuse occurred statewide at Wisconsin’s nursing homes and other residential care facilities,” according to the Office of Special Counsel’s second interim report filed on March 1 with the Wisconsin Assembly. That conclusion represents but one of the key findings of election irregularities detailed in the nearly 150-page report—a report that also confirms the conclusion of the Racine County Sheriff’s office last fall that fraud occurred at nursing homes in Wisconsin.
Special Counsel Michael Gableman, the retired state Supreme Court justice appointed by the Wisconsin Assembly to investigate integrity concerns about the 2020 election, vetted more than 90 nursing homes in five different counties before concluding there was “widespread election fraud at Wisconsin nursing homes in November of 2020.”
Don’t worry. I’m sure we’ve got nothing of the kind in Rhode Island.
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Look, I know this is normal and human, and I wouldn’t actually fault the people involved, but for a little Friday-afternoon fantasizing, let’s imagine this not being the case:
When Rhode Island received its $1.13 billion slice of federal American Rescue Plan Act funds, it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make tangible investments across the state. But 10 months later, organizations, businesses, unions, and key stakeholders have proposed programs that would cost the state a whopping $7 billion.
“It makes it more difficult [to spend this money] because $6 billion of the asks will be disappointed,” said Speaker K. Joseph Shekarchi, a Warwick Democrat, during the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce’s Legislative Leadership forum on Tuesday.
No doubt they’ll be disappointed. Some might even be outraged. But on some alternative timeline in the multiverse there’s a Rhode Island in which “organizations, businesses, unions, and key stakeholders” are so humble about their activities and conscientious about their spending of tax dollars that $1,130,000,000 is more than enough to go around. In that better world, people getting free money would be embarrassed to be so gluttonous at the trough.
That’s especially true because this really isn’t a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.” The pattern is nearly established that Democrats manage to leverage some crisis or other in order to take over the federal government and shuffle mind-boggling amounts of borrowed cash across state and federal government agencies roughly once per decade.
Indeed, one wonders whether they’d manage to be elected at all if they didn’t have these growing promissory notes out there in the political marketplace.
Featured image by Konstantine Evdokimov on Unsplash.
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