Civil Liberties
One part of my diagnosis of Rhode Island’s problems is that it’s just not big enough for opposing factions to build up and keep each other honest in state-level government. Pushback against the New York governor’s mask mandate at the county level brough that to mind: At least 13 counties in New York state are…
Those who think that a Christian flag should be unique in being disallowed from public flagpoles may not be bigots: Over the past 12 years there have been 284 flags—from LGBTQ rainbow flags, a Turkish flag with the Islamic star, to Communist China flags—raised on a public flagpole owned by the city of Boston. But…
As we construct the stories by which we understand reality, we tend to romanticize people when they’re generalized. In healthcare, for instance, patients are “people who need help,” and we have a set of emotions and moral ideas associated with them as a concept. The problem is people need all sorts of kinds of help,…
Is it just me or do the people who support mask mandates seem deliberately to be avoiding the points that those in opposition are actually making? At some point after my post responding to his call for a statewide mask mandate, Boston Globe reporter and columnist Dan McGowan tweeted a link to the CDC’s (incredibly one-sided)…
When I worked with the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity, we would periodically get tips from people about problems or corruption in our state, but the tipsters would very rarely volunteer to step forward. They feared, with good reason, audits, safety reviews, property inspections, and other forms of government harassment. Silence and toleration has…
Problems with Rhode Island’s health care industry indicate an across-the-board failure of government management. Remember when they shut down our economy to avoid overwhelming our medical infrastructure? Well, that move — and all that came after it — may be resulting in a much more intractable, longer-term failure. Want to count the ways? One. Staff at…
I don’t know that I’ve ever seen it characterized as “doubling down” before when a party to a lawsuit has appealed to a higher court, but here’s Sarah Doiron on WPRI: Several parents who are challenging the state’s school mask mandate are doubling down on their efforts by appealing a Rhode Island Superior Court judge’s…
Dr. Tim Shafman on lung cancer, Dr. Stephen Skoly on vaccine mandate harm, Laurie Gaddis Barrett on the school mask mandate lawsuit, and Major Wayne Morse.
Roger Simon asks Republican Congresswoman (and pharmacist) Diana Harshbarger a question pondered often in this space: So she was a perfect person to ask why she thought the Democrats—aka “The Party of Science,” or so our learned president tells us—ignores natural immunity in favor of taking a militant stand on mandates. Rep. Harshbarger’s reply: “When it…
Some news stories, even ones where “my side” wins, so to speak, gives me a how-did-we-get-to-this-place headache. The somewhat autonomous British island of Guernsey nearly passed an anti-discrimination law that would have forced all organizations, including Catholic schools, to ignore their belief systems when hiring employees, even in leadership positions. Even local Protestants spoke up…