Written

A Christian mug with colored pencils and an apple

The administration is raiding the homes of political opponents as well as Catholic schools (in a sense).

By Justin Katz | August 12, 2022 |

Maybe my brain is excessively wired to see connections and patterns, but the raid on President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home and the Biden administration’s efforts to bully Catholic schools into promoting radical sexual ideology seem very much connected. Rod Dreher gets us most of the way there, in an essay titled “Trump & Our Late Roman…

Help wanted sign

What’s up with gas demand?

By Justin Katz | August 10, 2022 |

The economic news is peculiar, lately.  Inflation is high, and the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) is shrinking.  Yet, government data shows a strong increase in payroll jobs in the most-recent month.  It’s difficult to know which side of that “yet” the following news supports, or whether it helps explain how all of the above…

Allan Fung and Kevin McCarthy in Jamestown 2022

RI Republicans must stop taking an apologetic stance.

By Justin Katz | August 9, 2022 |

As long as I’ve been paying attention to politics in Rhode Island, mainstream Republicans have given the impression that they are ashamed of their affiliation — that they just found the ruling Democrats to be so off-base and corrupt that they needed a different option, and the GOP was the only viable one.  This isn’t…

A woman dances around a fire

Just a little shift in perspective goes a long way on climate change fear.

By Justin Katz | August 5, 2022 |

An underappreciated risk laps at the legs of our advanced knowledge.  When people didn’t know why things were happening in the world around them or how to predict change, they just dealt with them.  They invested some energy in a relationship with gods in the hope of exerting some control on their environments, but mostly,…

A water drop and ripples

Monkeypox may prove the cost of woke restrictions on acceptable observations.

By Justin Katz | August 4, 2022 |

As local media sources have started to track instances of monkeypox in our area, I’ve wondered how many Rhode Islanders know that it is mostly (although not entirely) a venereal disease spreading mostly among gay men.  Except, as Rod Dreher points out, that’s not a fact to which we’re permitted to react: Scott Gottlieb, former…

Cooling towers at Brayton Point

Energy and the environment are not separate stories.

By Justin Katz | August 3, 2022 |

When discussing public policy, responsible politicians, journalists, and members of the public should never separate the issues of energy and the environment.  They are a single, nuanced, and extremely complicated issue.  Absent this imperative, Democrat Governor Dan McKee feels free to brag about his environmental policy thus … “Over last 16 months my administration has…

Rock quarry scene from Breaking Away

A note about being a genuine cutter…

By Justin Katz | July 30, 2022 |

The secret is that we can always be geniune.

A water drop and ripples

We’ve entered the pervasive-rent-seeking phase of our nation’s decline.

By Justin Katz | July 28, 2022 |

Something about this story feels profoundly discouraging to me: Forty Rhode Island business owners traveled to Washington D.C. last week as part of the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses Summit to meet with hundreds of officials to discuss how to boost access to capital, child care and government contracting. Katie Schibler Conn, owner of KSA…

A man with a mirror mask

Don’t let our disrupted lives put our children in ideologues’ hands.

By Justin Katz | July 26, 2022 |

Stories like this, from WPRI’s Shannon Hegy, too easily slip under the radar without anybody’s pointing out what, specifically, is happening: [Cranston Park View Middle School] STEM Coordinator Caitlyn Blankenship tells 12 News she’s seen firsthand the evidence of key skills lost during the pandemic in middle schoolers, who are struggling to problem solve, work…

A water drop and ripples

Don’t forget that legislative grants are still out there.

By Justin Katz | July 26, 2022 |

Rhode Island provides an excellent case study in how corruption works.  Elections aren’t stolen at the ballot box (except as a last resort).  Rather, corruption rigs the game at every opportunity — buying and coercing votes so that they don’t have to be stolen or manufactured.  The only way to stop this is to get…