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Those who think that a Christian flag should be unique in being disallowed from public flagpoles may not be bigots: Over the past 12 years there have been 284 flags—from LGBTQ rainbow flags, a Turkish flag with the Islamic star, to Communist China flags—raised on a public flagpole owned by the city of Boston. But…
Welcome to modern America (or Rhode Island, at least). An unspecified “threatening message” in a girls’ bathroom at Barrington High School has cautious administrators increasing the presence of police until the schools dismiss for Christmas break. In turn, panicked teens are getting themselves on television by petitioning for distance learning because they are (some say)…
Our system is set up to ensure that infrastructure, like school buildings, is left to rot. That dynamic is inevitable when (1) budgeting and negotiations are tilted so heavily in favor of labor and (2) taxpayers can be bullied or forced into spending the additional money to repair or replace buildings when they become bad…
Somewhere in the wilds of Rhode Island progressive social media in the past couple months, I came across the Rhode Island Department of Corrections’ “Fiscal Year 2020 Annual Population Report.” I think the context in which it was deployed like a statistical weapon was to support the claim that inmates at the state Adult Correctional…
Hopefully, an unanticipated silver lining to our society’s COVID-response overkill will be a return among the masses to healthy skepticism about experts. We all operate by some unarticulated calculation — let’s call it an assessment of action function — then one variable should, yes, be the best available calculation of probability, but that variable has…
The method is to train teachers with theories and techniques that are reasonable on their face, but that are joined with ideological preferences that are communicated in hidden assumptions.
Well, salmon should be hoping for global warming, anyway: Melting glaciers may produce thousands of miles of new Pacific salmon habitat, a study published Tuesday by Nature Communications found. As glaciers in the mountains of western North America melt, or retreat, they could produce around 4,000 miles of new Pacific salmon habitat by the year…
Remember when the American military accidentally blew up an aid worker and seven children in his family? Yeah, well, nobody will face consequences for that: “What we saw here was a breakdown in process and execution in procedural events, not the result of negligence, not the result of misconduct, not the result of poor leadership,”…
As we construct the stories by which we understand reality, we tend to romanticize people when they’re generalized. In healthcare, for instance, patients are “people who need help,” and we have a set of emotions and moral ideas associated with them as a concept. The problem is people need all sorts of kinds of help,…
This deliciously contrarian article by Patricia Adams and Lawrence Solomon suggests that our planet is increasingly green, no thanks to the environmentalist mania of the last half-century in Western countries: The planet’s ecology is thriving thanks to carbon dioxide, despite first world policies that are undermining it. The ironic benefactors in this story are countries…