With the head of one of Rhode Island’s teachers unions saying “the responsible decision” is to shut schools and force students back into distance learning, his reasons are worth a look:
… the overwhelming number of cases, the inability to do meaningful contact tracing, the arctic temperatures we are expecting so windows cannot be opened, the insufficiency of supplies, etc. etc. …
Except for the number of cases, every one of these items is a matter of money — for government processes, for air filtration, for supplies — and Rhode Island has been sitting on a billion dollars of federal windfall.
Here’s the real problem: our governing class (including the heads of the teachers unions) thought COVID was just about done thanks to the vaccine, so all that money could be laundered into their pockets and those of their key supporters. Even though their calculation turned out to be wrong, they’re not willing to give up their dreams for the sake of something as unimportant as the education of our children.
If you’re of a mind to draw a longer-term lesson, this is essentially an amplified instance of the way Rhode Island government does business every year.
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Have you ever seen a mainstream news report that treated scary environmental projections with even an iota of skepticism? Consider Tolly Taylor’s report for WPRI, which bears the headline, “Parts of Barrington will be underwater by 2035, sea-level data shows.”
The first paragraph of the story gives the impression that the headline is a bit of an overstatement. The dramatic warning is that “in just over a dozen years, Barrington will contend with several key roads flooding every month.” That’s not “underwater,” and the statement doesn’t reflect “sea-level data”; it reflects projections:
These projections show a roughly three-mile stretch of Route 114, the town’s evacuation route, will be submerged twice a day by 2050. Teresa Crean, a coastal research associate at the University of Rhode Island Coastal Institute, told Target 12 that Barrington is one of the leaders in climate change mitigation across the state.
Crean, we learn in a parenthetical note tacked on to the article’s sixth paragraph, has just been hired as Barrington’s planner, which pays around $100,o00 per year, so she’s not exactly a disinterested party when it comes to projecting that the town has a lot of work to do (and a lot of money to spend) preparing for environmental changes. But the personal interests of key figures in the story aren’t the only area that screams for at least a hint of skepticism. For instance:
Rhode Island’s STORMTOOLS website shows that, because of sea-level rise that’s already occurred over the past two decades, if a storm like 1954’s Hurricane Carol hit Barrington today, it would effectively make it a series of islands.
The obvious question not asked is what Barrington looked like during that storm seventy years ago. Carol destroyed whole towns with wind, and “a quarter of the downtown area” of Providence was submerged under 12 feet of water. As terrible as that was and would be if it happens again, it’s not climate change; it’s weather. And it’s not a mandate for hundreds of millions of dollars in redevelopment; it’s a reminder to buy insurance.
Here’s another statement that justifies a bit of skepticism:
Brian Thimme, owner of Bluewater Bar + Grill in Barrington, began leasing the building 11 years ago, and said he is considering buying the property. But data shows that by 2035, his restaurant will be surrounded by water.
The featured image of this post does indeed show Thimme’s restaurant surrounded by water, but according to the STORMTOOLS website mentioned above, that is the scenario with three feet of sea level rise? Is that likely to happen by 2035?
Not at all. In fact, a 2015 report from the statewide Division of Planning projected potentially a one-foot increase in sea levels by 2035 under its second-highest scenario. The highest projection, which came from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), warned that the foot could be reached by 2029. Well, we’re at the midway point between the report’s publication date and 2029, so how much sea-level rise have we seen? Six inches?
No. Data from NOAA’s gauge in Newport puts the increase over the past seven years at about two and three-quarters inches. For perspective, keep in mind that sea level can fluctuate that much month to month. At this rate of increase, the water will have risen a foot in Rhode Island after about 30.5 years, which is within the report’s “intermediate” range. However, if we zoom out on the chart just a little, we see that there’s been essentially no increase in sea level since 2010. Shouldn’t the experts be asked to explain this 10-year pause before we heed their budgetary advice?
Before the pause, according to the Newport gauge, we saw about ten and half inches of sea-level rise over 80 years, which brings us back to the curious omissions in local reporting. Why do these stories continue to center around projections? At some point, we should be seeing documented evidence of what’s happening right now, and if it’s not there, then hundreds of millions of dollars in debt and highly paid planners might not be justified.
As local governments collect taxes and impose restrictions, residents should demand at least a regular display of evidence that the predictions are coming true.
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This is encouraging and long overdue:
[Open full post]As ESPN reports, the NCAA’s COVID-19 Medical Advisory Group updated its definition of “fully vaccinated” to account for various new vaccinations, boosters, and immunity factors.
“Fully vaccinated individuals now include those within two months of receiving the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, five months of receiving the Pfizer vaccine series or six months of receiving the Moderna vaccine series;” reports ESPN staff writer Jeff Borzello, “and individuals who are beyond the aforementioned timeline and have received the booster vaccine.”
But perhaps the biggest development came in the following line.
“Individuals within 90 days of a documented COVID-19 infection fall within the equivalent of ‘fully vaccinated.’”
On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- Will McKee awaken from his purely reactive COVID strategy?
- Is it really important for teacher assistants to be woke?
- Will the General Assembly fall back to sleep (in a good way) for election season?
- Should Fung put rumors of a gubernatorial run to rest?
- Will Providence residents wake up if Elorza starts firing cops for lack of vaccination?
Featured image by Alexandra Gorn on Unsplash.
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Many of us sure do hope that Lindsey Burke is onto something, here:
The only way out of this mess is to free families from the clutches of the teachers’ unions. Funding students directly would empower families to access educational alternatives. The good news is that the unions’ political games could further the movement to fund students instead of systems, which already enjoyed significant growth in 2021.
It has been said that Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers, has provided more fuel to school choice than Milton Friedman. Perhaps, then, a recent New York Times article asking glowingly “Can This Women Save American Public Education” wasn’t that far off.
Unfortunately, most people just don’t pay enough attention to make these connections, even for their own children. Moreover, I’ve been increasingly astonished, as I’ve gotten older, how quickly people want to move on from bad experiences, even if it means not holding accountable those who made those experiences bad to begin with, or at least worse than they had to be.
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A reddit post by somebody claiming to be a student at a “specialized high school” in New York City has been getting a fair bit of attention. (Note that the post has been edited, with some commentary found in earlier screen captures deleted.) The student describes a school day during the Omicron surge as something like a Stephen King novel (back when Stephen King was good):
… 90% of the bathrooms were full of students swabbing their noses and taking their tests. I had one kid ask me — with his mask down, by the way — whether a “faint line was positive,” proceeding to show me his positive COVID test. I told him to go the nurse. One student tested positive IN THE AUDITORIUM, and a few students started screaming and ran away from him. There was now a lack of available seats given there was a COVID-positive student within the middle of the auditorium. …
One teacher flat out left his class 5 mins into the lesson and didn’t return because he was developing symptoms and didn’t believe it safe to spread to his class.
Conspicuously, the anecdote about the teacher (which is not in the latest version of the post) is the only mention at all of symptoms, and in that instance, it could have been anything. Was it a tickle in the teacher’s throat? A mild feeling of impending congestion? Who knows? The point is that all of the drama and fear is related to testing positive.
One needn’t dismiss the danger of COVID to find it strange that the virus itself is an afterthought in many of the horror stories about its spread. Indeed, the student’s experience could apply even to an illness that didn’t exist, as long as tests could be contrived that gave a positive at some random interval. As the parent of multiple school-aged children during this pandemic, I can testify that the fear is of the disruption and loss of opportunities that testing positive would bring.
One recalls this experiment at the University of Arizona in 2013:
Conducted in an office on the UA campus, the study included about 80 participants, some of whom received droplets on their hands at the start of a normal work day. While most of those droplets were plain water, one person unknowingly received a droplet containing artificial viruses mimicking the cold, the flu and a stomach bug.
Employees were instructed to go about their day as usual. After about four hours, researchers sampled commonly touched surfaces in the office, as well as employees’ hands, and found that more than 50 percent of surfaces and employees were infected with at least one of the viruses.
Now imagine one of those old-fashioned psychological experiments from the ’50s or ’60s in which researchers deceived participants and, in this case, told everybody the “artificial viruses” weren’t harmless. The experiment would have generated a panic not unlike what we see at the NYC school.
This isn’t to say that we should be cavalier about the coronavirus, but context and focus is important, and we’re really heavily focused on positive tests — the increasingly infamous “case” count. Don’t be surprised to learn in years to come that mass testing can produce similarly frightening evidence of “super spreader” events for viruses that we’ve lived with for centuries.
Featured image by the CDC on Unsplash.
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I’ve long speculated that Rhode Islanders start businesses at a healthy clip because the economy isn’t producing work at the level of hours and/or pay that they want. That is why the Ocean State sees a lot of businesses struggle when they start formalizing things. All the business stuff is too complicated, especially when the folks starting the businesses just want to do what people in their professions do. Management is not really the job they were intending on building for themselves.
So, it’s not surprising to see Grant Welker of the Boston Business Journal report that Rhode Island saw some record business starts last year, when ordinary work patters were disrupted.
Welker also points to a SurePayroll study of startup-related Google searches. It turns out, the most-searched prospect in the Ocean State was for starting a fitness company. One imagines unemployed Rhode Islanders establishing fitness routines for themselves during lockdown and thinking, “Hey, I could do this for a living!”
While a concentration on good health is nice to see, I can’t help but think that, economically speaking, Massachusetts’s result as the only state in the country for which “consulting” is healthier. Of course, it’s difficult to know what consulting even means to people!
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Law and order is shifting in the United States. On one hand, it seems as if our justice system is increasingly reluctant to hold criminals accountable, with sometimes tragic outcomes like the recent death of an East Greenwich teen in a car crash. Increasing assaults on college students in Rhode Island’s capital city raise no concerns in official halls (including the news media). Drugs are being decriminalized. Our border is wide open.
And yet, Heritage researchers, led by GianCarlo Canaparo, must resort to algorithms even to count the number of federal crimes. The obvious question is how the average American can be expected to know what activity is considered criminal when researchers can’t even count the crimes?
The Roman Emperor Caligula, infamous for his caprice and malice, published new tax laws in small font and hung them high atop pillars to entrap the people into unknowingly violating them. For more than 2,000 years, this sort of behavior has been condemned as fundamentally unjust because no person can fairly be expected to obey a law that is unknowable. A government might hide its laws by putting them out of sight, but it achieves the same result by passing so many laws that no citizen could possibly read them all. James Madison made this point in The Federalist Papers saying, “It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read.” This problem is most dire when the laws at issue are criminal ones because violators may be deprived of liberty and, in some cases, even life. …
Some are so vague that even if they were known, no reasonable person could understand what they mean. Others forbid behavior that no person exercising ordinary good judgment would expect to be a crime. And in some cases, it is a federal crime to violate the laws of other countries. Former U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese III, who, perhaps more than any other public figure, has brought attention to this problem, has written that this profusion of scattered, vague, and unintuitive criminal laws “create[s] traps for the innocent but unwary and threaten[s] to make criminals out of those who are doing their best to be respectable, law abiding citizens.” In other words, the United States has accomplished by carelessness what Caligula accomplished by scheme.
Combine the two trends noted thus far in this post, and you get the chart shown as its featured image. From 1994 to around 2012, the number of federal prisoners shows a steep increase. Oddly, however, that total has been falling steeply.
Three possibilities come quickly to mind. The first is that scrupulous Americans may take a little time to learn about the federal government’s laws but then change their behavior so as to return to their formerly law-abiding condition; this does not seem likely and, if true, would raise frightening thoughts about the government’s ability to dictate people’s behavior. The second possibility is that the federal government is creating crimes that nobody commits or that agencies lack the ability or will to enforce, which creates potential for arbitrary prosecution when officials find a person whom they’d like to determine is a criminal. The third is that a general sense that there are too many crimes on the books is leading to leniency when it comes to other crimes that officials opt not to prosecute, even though most people would agree that they should be crimes.
In all cases, the credibility of the system comes into question, and American life becomes more difficult — and more dangerous — to live, because the law is understood as something not to taken with either moral or practical seriousness as written.
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Black Lives Matter-RI PAC 12/13/21 from John Carlevale on Vimeo.
Harrison Tuttle of Black Lives Matter Rhode Island PAC speaks with Richard August about his organization and possible his own possible campaign for office.
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What a joke this all is:
The open government coalition ACCESS/RI and a number of municipal officials had urged McKee to provide the authorization for remote meetings as COVID-19 cases soar across Rhode Island. The East Providence City Council was among the entities forced to cancel a scheduled meeting this week after members tested positive for the virus.
Rhode Island’s Open Meetings Act usually requires public bodies such as city councils and school boards to meet in person and in public. But in 2020 former Gov. Gina Raimondo signed an executive order suspending parts of that law so meetings could take place online or on the phone — with public access — during the pandemic. …
Senate President Dominick Ruggerio rejected McKee’s suggestion, saying his chamber wanted to hold more hearings before making any changes to the Open Meetings Act. He instead urged McKee to issue a new executive order, saying they had discussed the issue “ad nauseam.”
John Marion, executive director of Common Cause Rhode Island, argued that a legislative fix was still the best long-term option.
“We need to work toward permanent changes to the Open Meetings Act that will allow for greater remote participation while safeguarding the public interest so that in the future we don’t have to rely on executive orders,” Marion tweeted Thursday. He also said he was pleased that the language of McKee’s order lays out “the administration’s guidance for public bodies.”
The legislature specifically refused to act on this matter. Under what conceivable authority, then, does the governor proclaim that public bodies are “relieved from the prohibitions regarding use of telephonic or electronic communication to conduct meetings contained in Rhode Island General Laws § 42-46-5(b)”? That isn’t how any of this works.
It’s not as if public officials can’t spread out on a stage and conduct meetings in locations with plenty of seating for those who wish to attend. Plenty of taxpayer dollars have been spent on large public spaces.
And these innovations come with the “pleased” blessing of a so-called good-government group!
Simply put, we do not have the rule of law in Rhode Island. The law is whatever a handful of elites say it is. Meanwhile, government agencies can return to their super-control of who can speak at their meetings. The declaration that everybody should have remote access to view meetings is joined with the reality that nobody has in person access to them.
How little we care about the way in which we’re governed in Rhode Island these days.
Featured image by Compare Fibre on Unsplash.
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