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Almost since I began keeping an eye on it, the unemployment rate has primarily been a means of disguising the underlying weakness of RI’s economy. With the latest iteration, the AP writer seems to accentuate the positive, but you don’t have to dig far to see the negative — as far, say, as the state…
A lack of housing is a problem, and racism is simply wrong, so we have powerful emotional incentive to join the two matters into the story we tell about our society. In a more-specific way, advocates and researchers have even more-powerful economic incentive to do so. In that space, as with “equity audits” in schools,…
For the record, I’ve never tried hallucinogenic drugs. Even as a reckless teenager who was otherwise open to self destruction, I knew myself well enough not to roll the dice on that experiment. This disclaimer is context for my agreement with progressive Democrat state representative Brandon Potter’s proposal to move toward decriminalization of psilocybin, which…
The RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity has localized a study from the Mackinac Center finding that some school districts in Rhode Island continue to have provisions in their teacher contracts that don’t reflect the right of teachers to work without joining the union and requiring express consent to enroll them: According to the Mackinac…
Maybe I’m just entering that late-middle-age phase, but it seems to me that younger adults — or all of us, with reference to times that were before our time — too infrequently understand the experience of the past. Consider this find from Tim Worstall for Accuracy in Media: A new piece from Teen Vogue says that…
Patrick Anderson follows up on the state’s ongoing efforts to change its official name everywhere, following a constitutional edit during the last election: You don’t have to look too hard to find the words Providence Plantations on state buildings, a year and a half after Rhode Island voters deleted them from the state name. The…
Gas prices have hit record highs in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, according to AAA. We’ve achieved and exceeded the pain some of us remember all too well from the Obama years: In one week, Rhode Island gas prices rose 58 cents and Massachusetts saw a growth of 54 cents. AAA Northeast says Rhode Island’s average…
It’s depressing to say, but it looks like the anti-reform strategy of the teachers unions and other special interests succeeded. From the beginning, it was clear that the plan was to delay and obfuscate attempts at correcting the unforgivably terrible performance of Providence schools until the attention of the public moved on. For some reason,…
Ed Driscoll rounds up a little bit of the commentary, including: TWITTER THREAD ON 2020 AND ITS AFTERMATH: “The Democrats saw an opportunity with the emergence of Covid to crush a roaring economy under a president they didn’t like. So they, & their base, did everything in their power to impose crushing restrictions on small…
And just like that, the whole thing’s wished away. Strategies that some of us have been down-throttled, blocked, or even deplatformed for suggesting over the past two years are suddenly the common wisdom of the “experts,” and images of Anthony Fauci are floating around social media with the text, “Have you seen me?” Since the…