Political Thought
I’ll start with two arising from Ian Donnis’s recent article about the state’s approval of the sale of two hospitals “to an Atlanta-based nonprofit with no experience in managing hospitals.” The first question arises from the description of the institutions as “cash-strapped safety-net hospitals.” Rhode Island, among all states, dove right into the centralizing forces…
Which is: Why is our system not producing the type of leaders we need? With Governor Daniel McKee, Rhode Island is getting a distilled lesson in our nation’s problem in D.C. At the same time his administration is signing a contract to pay a premium to dismantle the Washington Bridge quickly, he can’t find a…
I appreciate Ken Block’s intellect and civic engagement, but his political commentary leaves much to be desired. Consider this, from the end of a long recent tweet: I cannot imagine either of these candidates effectively dealing with a crisis, commanding the situation room, keeping the complexities of a crisis fully in their heads, ready to…
Consider two general principles of political theory while reading this: 1) Government starts by telling the people how much money it needs and then proceeds to collect it, not the other way around. 2) The less competitive political races are, the more incentive those who are predictably elected have to spend money on corruption and…
This ad for Rhode Island’s CollegeBound Saver fund promotion looks like a sleazy investment ad because it is: Around $22 million in administrative fees from the program go to the private companies that handle the money and the state. This isn’t necessarily corruption, per se, but we can put it in the questionable bucket of…
A theme one picks up from podcast discussions with cognitive scientists is that much of our perception — what we understand as real — is a matter of our choices about what we don’t pay attention to. A fully capable human has five senses, all of which are constantly sending more data to the nervous…
The New York “justice” system may or may not jail Donald Trump, but the impression Democrat partisans are giving is that the entire charade of a trial was meant primarily to produce the label, “convicted felon.” This marketing ploy, as Roger Kimball notes, may not be working: “It’s my sense that the effort to weaponize…
The need for national unity on a landscape where it may be impossible leaves only few options and hard work on the table, but hope, nonetheless, if we take Memorial Day to heart.
A self-improvement celebrity’s partisan trigger warning provides a warning about the extent to which we’ve lost our civic heritage.
They can be won, as James Brooke suggests in the The Sun: In the latest sign of a rightward swing of the pendulum in Latin America, voters in Ecuador opted overwhelmingly for tough anti-crime measures, including joint army and police patrols against cocaine gangs. Ecuador is only one example. This reminder does not mean the…
