Culture
One difficulty with assessing sympathetic stories associated with public policy debates (and the reason advocates actively seek and promote them) is that they short circuit rational discussion about tradeoffs. The position of seeming to lack sympathy is so uncomfortable that the public debate leaves important details unraised and, typically, the villain is assigned to be…
While he goes a bit far in framing ’80s dance parties as a path to God, Mark Judge makes a great point, here: Going out was a long ride uninterrupted by texts, which didn’t exist, or phone calls, because phone booths were hard to find. The experience formed a kind of meditation. The professional world…
The most infamous and egregious case, of course, is the reported rape by a boy in a skirt of a 15-year-old girl in the girls’ bathroom in a Loudon County, Virginia, school. The school department lied about the case and tried to bury it, and the case wouldn’t be nearly as infamous if the news…
It’s never an easy call to side with people on principled grounds when you vehemently disagree with something mind-blowingly stupid and offensive they’ve done or said, especially in an environment prone to witch hunts and cancellations. But that’s the sort of thing principled people have to do in a free society. So, I have no…
Nicole Solas of South Kingstown has widened her efforts to return sanity to Rhode Island schools to North Kingstown, where she has filed a police report highlighting a very graphic graphic novel that North Kingstown High School provides to its students, most of them minors. Following her reports can be challenging, if you have children…
In New York City, a judge has suspended a father’s visitation rights to his daughter “unless he submits COVID-19 tests on a weekly basis or gets vaccinated.” He’s had the virus before, as well. The key, though, is the judge’s reasoning, which is (let’s say) pretty far from the actual science: “Here, in-person parental access…
The Democrat candidate for Virginia governor, Terry McAuliffe, agrees with Democrats in Rhode Island that schools should engage in a conspiracy to lie to parents whose children may be exploring a change of their gender. I’ve long wondered what the mechanics of this deep deception would look like, and it’s frightening to know it’s a…
Phil Eil’s attack on RI Historian Laureate Patrick Conley is not the perspective of a tolerant person; it is the voice of an ideological movement that seizes power through division and dishonest appeals to fairness and then crushes all dissent the moment it thinks it has succeeded.
Not only did I learn that actor Clint Howard is the brother of Richie Cunningham, but also that he isn’t the same person as Curtis Armstrong. Just when you think you’ve got a grip on reality…
Rocky IV was iconic when I was young, and for decades I’ve heard what a let-down Rocky V was. I finally got around to watching it tonight (while cleaning the kitchen, lest you think I’m a couch potato or something). It actually wasn’t bad, and I think the promo summary has done it harm all these years…
