Written

A water drop and ripples

The Left will never understand its failure.

By Justin Katz | October 23, 2021 |

Frida Ghitis of CNN reminds me of that classic arcade game, Dig Dug, the way she works to inflate Joe Biden’s performance during a softball town hall on her network, but her closing line raises an interesting question: In the end, Biden’s political standing will depend not on the impact of the town hall, but on…

A water drop and ripples

Solar power just doesn’t seem to make sense as a core energy source.

By Justin Katz | October 23, 2021 |

Joel Holmes explains: Yes, the battle against the insane electric car policy and the whole Green New Deal can be won, using just three little words. Well, to be exact six words, and here they are: Solar Panels Don’t Work At Night As an alternative energy engineer, I had the misfortune to work with solar…

Shadowy RI State House

Alex Cannon would definitely be an improvement on the East Side of Providence.

By Justin Katz | October 23, 2021 |

Alex Cannon is the Republican candidate in the race for the open Rhode Island Senate seat representing the East Side of Providence, but progressive journalist Steve Ahlquist conducted a lengthy, interesting, and fair interview with him on Uprise RI. Cannon, who hails from Las Vegas, Nevada, and arrived in Rhode Island in 2017, describes himself as…

A water drop and ripples

This ought to be the dominant rule on teaching “white privilege.”

By Justin Katz | October 22, 2021 |

We need to order some of this attitude from across the Pond: The British government has instructed schools not to “teach contested theories and opinions as fact,” including contested views about so-called “white privilege.” The government on Thursday published its response to a report from the UK Parliament’s Education Select Committee, which said that the…

American flag in a field at sunset

Three types of rights cast a shadow on RI’s current situation.

By Justin Katz | October 22, 2021 |

Locally, the Rhode Island opposition (such as it is) is grappling with the shifting ground of our rights. Presumably, for example, parents have a right to send their children to schools that do not provide pornographic material to them and to demand a reversal via school committee meetings when that reasonable expectation is not met. …

A water drop and ripples

We have to stop taking offense at the drop of a feather.

By Justin Katz | October 22, 2021 |

Here’s the key paragraph in this Epoch Times article about a California teacher who’s been put on leave after wearing a paper headdress and dancing in a (let’s say) indigenous fashion to drive home a math lesson: “It is damaging and disheartening to see Native American and indigenous culture represented in such a trite and…

A child being vaccinated

Injecting small children is where I get off the COVID vaccination train.

By Justin Katz | October 22, 2021 |

Pfizer is claiming a diluted version of its COVID-19 vaccine is more than 90% effective among small children, but the numbers in its study implicitly raise the question of whether it’s necessary: A Pfizer study tracked 2,268 kids in that age group who got two shots three weeks apart of either a placebo or the…

A water drop and ripples

Flood insurance looks like a looming surge in the bite of climate alarmism.

By Justin Katz | October 22, 2021 |

This shift in the calculation of and requirements for flood insurance will be something to keep an eye on: For the first time, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is about to incorporate climate risk into the cost of flood insurance. The impact will be a dramatic increase in the cost of flood insurance. In…

Robin Williams charts poetry in Dead Poets Society

The woke measure everything with the wobbly ruler by which they judged poetry (and killed it).

By Justin Katz | October 22, 2021 |

Since human beings are wired to measure and compare, we are susceptible demands to judge things of less-overt merit by something other than merit that is measurable, like the skin color of the participants. 

A water drop and ripples

Private sector jobs were down in RI in September, partly owing to health care workers.

By Justin Katz | October 21, 2021 |

The RI Department of Labor and Training has changed the way it reports monthly labor information. But one notable observation is that the number of payroll jobs based in Rhode Island actually fell from August to September.  Total jobs went up, however, owing to big increases in state and local government jobs. The industries that…