On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- An RI newcomer at the top of the GOP ticket?
- Which fact doesn’t fit in the McKee-Scott conflict?
- What district is Seth in, anyway?
- How’s it looking in the Congressional race?
Featured image by Chanhee Lee on Unsplash.
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Granted, I’ve been falling behind lately, but it still surprised me when some of the other participants in a class I attended last week brought up the compounding effects of the massive trucker convoy taking place over weeks in Canada to protest vaccine mandates. As Russell Brand notes in the video below, following the news media wouldn’t lead one to understand just how big a deal it is, if they even know about it at all:
As this disconnect between what’s going on in the world and what’s reported about what’s going on in the world increases, we may truly see the next tectonic shift in how people get their information… and how people make a living providing information.
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Writing for J&S Transportation, Travis Van Slooten tries to understand why Americans have moved during the pandemic. To start with, though, we should probably think about why they have not:
A lot of attention has been focused on how the COVID-19 pandemic affected moving trends in the U.S. While some use terms like exodus when reporting about Americans who left the cities for the suburbs and smaller towns, others say these reports are an exaggeration.
For instance, William Frey of the nonprofit public policy organization Brookings Institution reports that “New Census Bureau data released this month [November 2021] shows that despite the attention given to COVID-related migration out of cities, college towns, and other pandemic-impacted areas, overall permanent migration levels in the U.S. plummeted to a historically low level during the first year of the pandemic.”
Upending your life is a stressful, risky thing during the best of times. Who wants to be learning a new area (Where’s the pharmacy? Where’s the hospital?) during a pandemic?
The included map, however, shows that, as usual, Rhode Island was not a destination state. J&S apparently ships people’s vehicles for them, and the only states in our entire region that saw an increase were New Hampshire and Maine. To be sure, that particular measure might throw some confounding variables into the mix. For example, people moving to a major city like New York may not have or not bring vehicles with them.
That said, the measure, here, is change from previous trends, and the story is familiar. As people can live farther from work, they tend to head where Big Government can’t tell them what to do, and the pandemic has certainly added fuel to that fire: Northeastern New England, Florida, South Carolina, Texas, and so on.
The really interesting question is what happens next. If I had to bet, I’d predict that, when people stop having the fear of illness-driven lockdowns as they’re trying to establish themselves in new areas, they’ll take the opportunity to move away from Big Government states at an even greater pace. On the other hand, those heavy-lockdown areas have been suppressing their economies, so they may experience a larger-than-average rebound… unless they’ve done permanent damage to themselves, of course.
Featured image by Markus Spiskey on Unsplash.
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Jon Miltimore explains why Dolores Umbridge is the best character in the Harry Potter books (as distinct from his favorite character). She’s an archetype, and unfortunately, our society is becoming more archetypal, these days, so to speak:
[Open full post]Like Dolores Umbridge, Australian leaders (and Lemon) apparently see no problem in using force for the greater good, including using the military to enforce lockdowns and prohibit free assembly. They are a chilling reminder of what the Christian author CS Lewis once described as perhaps the most dangerous kind of oppression.
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive,” the Christian author once observed. “It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
I notice, here and there around social media, that the Trump derangement inexplicably continues. He truly is the face on the screen for a daily two-minute hate. One wonders about the degree to which it’s a deliberate decoy from news like this:
A new court filing by special counsel John Durham reveals that Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General Michael Horowitz concealed crucial information from Durham in connection with the ongoing prosecution of Michael Sussmann, a former attorney to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
The filing also reveals that Horowitz failed to disclose that his office is in possession of two cellphones used by former FBI general counsel James Baker. The phones may contain information that’s important to the Sussmann case, as well as to a separate criminal leak investigation of Baker that Durham personally conducted between 2017 and 2019.
Oh, but President Trump gave a speech and used language!
Once again, the concerns one hears in the mainstream are not really about what people are doing, but about what side they’re doing it in service of.
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Brown sociology professor Hilary LevyFriedman presents us with an interesting philosophical and sociological question:
Like, seriously: “Not a single kid has died in a mass reading, yet they’re banning books instead of guns.”
As far as I can tell, the quoted text is an uncited retweet of BlackKnight10k, whose deep insight has had a healthy run around Twitter. Of course, the accuracy of that depth is subject to challenge. Guns are all but banned from schools, and one could argue that the removal of a particular book from a particular school is not quite “banning” so much as prudential judgment in some cases. (Note that neither LevyFriedman nor BlackKnight gives us any specifics to go by.)
However, taking the sentiment as intended would probably require translating it as something like, “Those other people for whom I have contempt are afraid of knowledge, while good people like me genuinely want to protect children, and those other people are clearly incapable and undeserving of an equal say in our governance.”
Asked to defend the fairness of my translation, I’d raise the probable overlap between people who agree with the “mass reading” quip and people who agree that Joe Rogan should be removed from Spotify. Observe that BlackKnight’s name on Twitter at the moment is “I Smoked $4B Worth Of Spotify Stock.” Ah, well of course that’s different. The “misinformation” one might hear on Joe Rogan really could result in death, while the books that the good people defend could not.
So, the “not a single kid” talk turns out to be a sort of hyperbole in service of the good people’s inherited moral superiority. They reserve the right to be contemptuous on the grounds of categorical principles like free speech and the sanctity of books while adhering to a more practical politics that makes banning books they dislike obvious, even obligatory. Doubting my fairness again? How many public schools do you think have copies of — much less prominently display — the highly successful Word on Fire study Bible?
Certainly, this is not a new debate, and plucking hypocrisy from the Twitterverse is cheap sport, but its casual promotion by an Ivy League sociology professor who is working on a law degree seems so obviously out of character for that role as to expose deep cultural problems that we’d best resolve soon.
Featured image by Luca Signorelli.
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Tomaquag Museum Update (1/24/22) from John Carlevale on Vimeo.
Many exciting things have happened at the Tomaquag Museum since Loren Spears’ last appearance. She reacquaints us with the museum’s beginnings and updates with some of the most important program changes, partnerships developed, enhancements to historical collections, exhibits, classes in indigenous history, and much more. The most exciting of all is the expected groundbreaking and start of construction in the Fall of 2022 of the long-awaited, state-of-the-art, four-building campus of a new Tomaquag Museum.
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We just got in from the whole family shoveling snow, with some drifts up to three-and-a-half feet. Here’s the recovery formula:
- Six ounces of mid-roast Starbucks espresso out of the machine
- Mix in a shot (or so…) of Mister Katz’s Rock & Rye whisky
- Put on Miles Davis Kind of Blue
- Light a candle
- Choose to be fully present in the moment, observing it with all my senses, and feeling God’s presence in it
As I’ve been finishing off some chores while catching up with podcasts during the blizzard, a thought that’s been forming for a while struck home very clearly.
In general, we’ve got two approaches to understanding our existence: top-down and bottom-up. Top down is more concerned with meaning and teleological understandings of purpose. From this approach, it makes perfect sense to respond to the question of why there are biological cells by pointing out that they’re needed in order to explain us.
Bottom-up is more the approach of science. Whether one believes in divine intention or randomness and chance as the fundamental explanation for all things, the bottom-up approach starts at the beginning of time and winds things forward. Particles form atoms form molecules form compounds form cells form organs form us.
Sorting all that out will be the work of many essays, probably on Dust in the Light. Today’s Ripple-level thought had to do with something one doesn’t often find strongly enough stated from either perspective. Namely, the very core of existence, utterly essential to being and understanding, is relationships.
That’s a disconcerting conclusion for a periodically intemperate introvert who seems to have a knack for rubbing people the wrong way!
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Going through links I’d flagged for comment, I came across a Fox News article by Danielle Wallace after Winsome Sears — “the first Black woman elected to statewide office in Virginia’s history” — won her campaign for lieutenant governor:
[She] attributed her victory to voters being sick of seeing Black and White people pitted against each other.
“They’re tired of the Black against White and the Asian against Latino,” Winsome said of those who voted for her during a “Fox News Sunday” interview. “They’re tired of it, and they’re tired of politicians who won’t let the wounds of the past heal.”
“I’ve just always assumed whatever room I’m in, I belong. Whatever I want to pursue, it’s mine for the taking,” Winsome told host Chris Wallace. “Nobody is denying that we don’t want to hear all the history, least of all me. I certainly don’t want the sins of the past to be repeated. We don’t have to tear one person down in order to build another up. That’s no way to be. That’s not America.”
Amen. It’s nothing but a malicious talking point from progressives that anybody actually wants to cover over the racist scars in American history. Scars are a reminder for the bearer and a lesson for others. What we need to do, however, is to let the wounds heal.
The unexpected reality is that the wounds were healing right up to the time that America elected its first black President, Barack Obama. The easy (facile) explanation that anybody on the Left will likely recite is that American racists realized they had to redouble their efforts and, in doing so, leveraged the subconscious discomfort of a “systemically racist” population. They can almost construct a coherent story along these lines pointing to obscure “alt-right” figures and drawing conspiratorial flow-charts to President Trump.
The problem with this theory is that it evaporates the moment you look up from the page. News of overt racism is almost always news of a racial hoax. The high-profile cases of racism (or alleged racism) are high profile because they are so rare, yet so valuable to the progressives promoting them. The pieces of the theory just don’t connect.
A contrary explanation, to which I subscribe because I find there to be much more evidence and much more coherence between pieces, is that Obama’s election brought two related developments. The first was the proof he embodied that one of the Left’s greatest levers (racial division and animosity) was slipping away. A black president was proof that the American promise was true, and American progressives are largely animated by a deep desire that it not be true.
Then, when Obama (a progressive academic) took office, he leveraged his power during a financial crisis, with an unimaginable mass of money to be spent in the name of “stimulus,” to fund and otherwise reinvigorate the radical movement. A decade after this comet of cash crashed into the sea of progressive activism, tsunamis of critical race theory and queer theory engulfed our coastal elites.
The metaphor suggests the solution: We have to get to higher ground until the waters recede, while saving as many people as we can from drowning in the madness and preventing the cascade of calamities such events can cause.
The good news is that the solution is ultimately a choice. Survival as a society is a choice.
Featured image by L. Filipe C. Sousa on Unsplash.
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