Written

A water drop and ripples

The U.S. government moves toward state-approved churches.

By Justin Katz | April 11, 2023 |

Conflicts like this can be nothing more than bureaucratic squabbles. They can also be evidence of a move toward a Communist China–esque absorption of religious organizations.  And they can also be mere bureaucratic squabbles that prepare the ground for government absorption of religious organizations. The Archdiocese for the Military Services (AMS) slammed Walter Reed National…

Children at sunset

American kids’ life expectancy isn’t so bad, if all things are considered.

By Justin Katz | April 6, 2023 |

To what extent, do you think, is our current predicament caused by a feedback loop of blindness?  Perhaps the people investigating society’s questions are actually incapable of considering some possibilities for ideological reasons.  They therefore craft policies and advance cultural changes whose outcomes they cannot measure because of the blind spot with which they began.…

A house made of money

Too much single-family housing is not nearly a problem in Rhode Island.

By Justin Katz | April 3, 2023 |

Talk about housing has been all the rage in Rhode Island over the past year.  Unfortunately (and tellingly), it doesn’t seem to be a policy area in which activists, politicians, and journalists believe data ought to be front and center.  Sure, we get numbers about the effects of the problem — housing costs $X; Y…

A water drop and ripples

The bitter taste of Projo alums…

By Justin Katz | March 29, 2023 |

It’s interesting to watch these partisan ideologues bash the newspaper that contributed so much to their careers. One wonders whether they’ve ever considered whether their work-product and the journalistic culture they’ve perpetuated has contributed to the paper’s plight:

Fane Tower rendering

Fane Tower Shows Rhode Island Has No Center to Hold

By Justin Katz | March 28, 2023 |

Now that it is no-longer-proposed, we are free to look at Fane Tower renderings in detail, beyond the gut reaction that it is odd and would be misplaced in Providence.  Structurally, the building would have been akin to a tree trunk that began to split near the ground.  The strength comes from the middle, providing…

A water drop and ripples

It may be tempting to be accommodationist on the cultural front.

By Justin Katz | March 17, 2023 |

And we definitely should not understand the alternative to be aggression and disregard of others’ humanity.  Still, we have to recognize that it will not stop with the cause of the day.  Just as it did not stop with same-sex marriage, it will not stop with the trans demands.  Similarly, it did not stop when…

A water drop and ripples

Everybody knows what “woke” means, even if they can’t articulate a definition.

By Justin Katz | March 16, 2023 |

Woke is a parasitic derivative of Marxism providing cover for dishonesty with the claim that reality is subjective and aggression with the weaponization victim status and the psychological instability of its adherents.  Its purpose is to destabilize our civilization under the theory that a perpetual revolution will somehow boil away the imperfections of society, leaving…

Child being grabbed by monsters

Something more than hypocrisy is going on on the Left.

By Justin Katz | March 15, 2023 |

We’re probably all feeling the increasing (let’s say) incoherence of things over the past decade or more, but I’ve found it clarifying.  Distinctions and beliefs have reached cartoonish levels, which teaches lessons that may continue to apply in subtler degree when (if) life moves back toward sanity. One may long have suspected that progressives (once,…

A couple uses self-checkout.

Self-checkout laws are the sort of question civics education should address.

By Justin Katz | March 10, 2023 |

Americans really need to be able to step back a bit from the immediate issue addressed in legislation and think about how it relates to our understanding of society’s proper structure.  A Rhode Island bill going after self-checkout lanes in retail stores is an excellent case study.  Kathy Gregg writes in the Providence Journal: An army…

Adraien Van De Venne's Allegory of Poverty

How many weeks do you have to work?

By Justin Katz | March 9, 2023 |

Oren Cass’s analysis of the weeks required to support a middle-class lifestyle for American Compass raises some interesting points.  The study focuses on the income of men and shows that the combined cost of food, housing, health care, transportation, and education surpassed the median male income in the mid-’90s.  By 2022, that income was about…