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This tweet from Democrat Attorney General Peter Neronha is a little old, but I didn’t want to let it pass without comment in this space: The people who own property in the state have rights, too. Many, probably most, of them are “people of this great state.” The AG has to enforce the laws as…
Although it no-doubt reveals my prejudices, if I were to rank Rhode Island’s handful of institutions of higher education on matters of freedom of thought, I’d expect Brown University — the Ivy League bastion of the elites and producer of the likes of Aaron Regunberg and Tiara Mack — to top the list of badness. …
I believe in humanity’s ability to adapt and recover, but it typically comes at the expense of a lot of waste and pain. I’m increasingly worried that we’ve cheated younger generations of the ability to think. Not only are schools failing to teach it, but our emphasis on schooling has drawn many children and young…
Providence Democrat City Councilor Miguel Sanchez has been catching some deserved flack for marching with the anti-Israel rally in Providence over the weekend (although the criticism is coming from people who don’t exist within the awareness of Rhode Island power): If local journalists weren’t so intent on not paying attention to the wrong people, they…
When you chant “Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea,” what those within Israel or externally supportive of the country hear is similar to what you would hear if a large group of conservatives marched in the street chanting: “White people will be free, from Bar Harbor to San D.” You would…
Step 1: Construct a simplistic narrative with obvious good guys and bad guys and a conclusion with which nobody reasonable could disagree. Step 2: Ensure that the “bad guys” can’t actually harm the people protesting. Step 3: Provide singsong, rhythmic slogans that sound innocuous, but that the intended opposition will understand as threatening. Step 4:…
Hamas executed a brutal sneak attack with no declaration of war against innocent people in their homes and at a music festival. The big complaint against Israel’s response, recently, has been that one day was not enough warning for people to evacuate an area they were planning to attack after a declaration of war. Which…
Dan McGowan notes that new standardized test scores are out for Rhode Island public schools, and they’re not good. Elsewhere, he finds a silver lining in the fact that English-language learners do better at English and are nearly caught up in math, but it seems like an indication of how poorly the schools are doing…
Nonetheless, it’s worth noting this mild corrective from Brown University’s Dr. Ashish Jha on Newsmakers, as summarized in a recent “Nesi’s Notes” column: “I think we all in public health could have done a better job of communicating with more humility about what we knew and didn’t know. There was a desire by some people to…
As people newly look up from their lives to wonder about the craziness with which we’re surrounded — from collegiate support for Hamas to economic ignorance to scientific illiteracy to an inability to grapple with logic — they should turn their gaze toward our schools. Consider this recent Boston Globe column from Dan McGowan: The state’s most…