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The strangest thing that’s ever happened to me as a Eucharistic minister, distributing communion at Catholic Mass, was the time shortly after I’d started doing it that an elderly man threw coins in the ciborium* with his right hand as I placed the Eucharist in his left. I didn’t know how to react or what…
If I were a teacher or professor of creative writing, I’d save headlines like the following from a WPRI story by Melanie DaSilva for class assignments. English is wonderful for ambiguities, which makes it an excellent language in which to embed two, three, or even four layers of subtext, but a sometimes-challenging language with which…
Rather than simply proclaiming doom and destruction at the hands of the unvaccinated, Patrick Anderson dug a bit more deeply into Rhode Island hospitals’ capacity issues for the Providence Journal: Hospitals have lost thousands of employees since March 2020 — to retirement, to less-demanding professions and to lucrative contract health-care work in other states. And yes,…
This is a notably aggressive tweet, responding to provocations from progressive gubernatorial candidate Matt Brown, from the historically reserved Senate President, Dominick Ruggerio: Mr. Brown claims to know working people. I’ve fought for working people my whole life, and I just got done fighting for wage bonuses equating to $15/hr for childcare workers. Matt, you…
If the story Brian Amaral wanted to frame with his apocalyptic Boston Globe article about COVID in Kent Hospital in Warwick is that hospital employees are struggling because the state has mismanaged their industry and because it’s disappointing to watch unvaccinated patients die with COVID, he overshot by a long way. The message from his…
Headlines are proclaiming the difficulty of finding at-home rapid COVID tests. Some folks might not get what the big deal is, considering that, in the government’s eyes, rapid tests don’t count for anything. My personal research prior to Thanksgiving led me to conclude that rapid tests probably won’t catch every trace of the disease, as…
The threads are multiple and not worth finding and consolidating, but there’s been some social media chatter hereabouts around a dustup between progressive podcaster Bill Bartholomew and freelance COVID commentator Andrew Bostom. Bartholomew was guest-hosting for WPRO, and Bostom called in to argue about COVID-related mandates and then posted audio bragging of having “eviscerated” the…
Reading political tea leaves from interviews is an iffy game, but this feels like a bit of a tone change from Democrat Senate President Dominick Ruggerio: On the Rhode Island Report podcast, state Senate President Dominick J. Ruggerio said he opposes raising the income tax rate for the richest Rhode Islanders, saying he fears they…
As elite colleges begin the process of peer pressure among institutions to implement mandates for COVID-vaccine booster shots, an op-ed by Johns Hopkins medical professor Dr. Marty Makary is a must-read: The U.S. government is pushing Covid-19 vaccine boosters for 16- and 17-year-olds without supporting clinical data. A large Israeli population study, published in the…
This is an interesting report from Joseph Curl, for the Daily Wire: Scientists at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research think they have created a new vaccine that is effective against all COVID and SARS variants, according to a new report. “Within weeks, scientists at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research expect to announce…