Culture
Culture and history are funny things. Over the centuries, our civilization learns things about human life and codes them in cultural norms that everybody can know without having to be able to explain. They’re just how we do things — lessons learned over centuries, sometimes through painful experience. No doubt, our ancestors coded the wrong…
It is remarkable that Paul Edward Parker’s Providence Journal article about the “record-shattering baby shortage” in the Ocean State goes on as long as it does without making the key, irreducible point. … The number being born in the Ocean State has ebbed to its lowest point in more than a century. The phenomenon has been so…
A theme of progressive politics is coming into sharp clarity, exposing how the ideology brings about totalitarian ends while using the language of freedom, democracy, individualism, civil rights, and so on. Many on the right have observed that the progressive dictionary is simply different from standard English — they use words to mean things that…
Something about creating an acronym out of technical jargon for life experiences gives it a dangerously dehumanizing feel. I have in mind this pair of tweets from Democrat state representative Marcia Ranglin: What are Adverse Childhood Experiences? CDC indicates that ACEs can have Traumatic experiences in childhood and the teenage years may put children at…
One bit of trivia that marks a step on road to full assimilation into the Ocean State when one learns it is that the State House dome is the fourth largest self-supporting marble dome on the planet. The list goes St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, the Minnesota State Capitol, the Taj Mahal, then Rhode Island’s…
Sometimes it isn’t clear whether progressive activists are warning about what they genuinely believe their nemeses will do or explaining what they will do once they have the power. Such is the case, here: “When we react to [legislation in Florida],” Equality Florida Nadine Smith apparently tells Disney employees in a virtual meeting, according to a…
I’m glad to have learned about the Abernathy Boys’ cross-country adventures a century ago, but I do wonder. Sure, the 10- and 6-year-olds’ adventures do echo across the decades as something lost. And yet… their story was unique even then, and life has become less dangerous for children, which is a good thing. On the…
The response to COVID showed that we aren’t a serious society. One hallmark of that condition for all to see (if they look) is that we are institutionally incapable of identifying the actual causes of our difficulties and, therefore, of addressing them. Consequently, because the solution of the clueless must always be to throw more…
Of course, I agree with Erika Sanzi across the board on the issues she mentions in her latest Valley Breeze op-ed. Support for school choice and opposition to vaccine and mask mandates, radical gender ideology, and racial indoctrination — check, check, check, and check. For that reason, I want to issue a little bit of a…
Issuing his groveling hostage statement for expressing his professional opinion at a public meeting, Charlestown Emergency Management Agency Director Kevin Gallup may have saved himself from cancelation, but in doing so, he gave more of our shared ground of freedom away to the woke wave: “Like everyone, I have blind spots,” Gallup said. “I hope…
