Written

Kara's threatening "thank you"

How the Rhode Island opposition can stop harassment.

By Justin Katz | December 9, 2021 |

This suggestion from Nicole Solas has stayed near the top of my “to post” list for a month because it gets to an important strategic discussion too often rushed through on the Rhode Island right. Nicole retweeted the picture used as the featured image of this post, which was posted by Kara.  The “thank you”…

A water drop and ripples

Transgenderism sometimes seems conveniently to reinforce male norms.

By Justin Katz | December 9, 2021 |

Back in October, a report from the BBC caught the attention of the trans movement because it conveyed the experience of lesbians who’d felt pressured into straight sex with trans-women (i.e., men presenting themselves as women): One woman described her dates with trans-women as conversion therapy: “I knew I wasn’t attracted to them but internalised…

Emotions with masks and shades

Don’t worry! The science has studiously avoided figuring out how harmful masks are to children.

By Justin Katz | December 9, 2021 |

Is it just me or do the people who support mask mandates seem deliberately to be avoiding the points that those in opposition are actually making? At some point after my post responding to his call for a statewide mask mandate, Boston Globe reporter and columnist Dan McGowan tweeted a link to the CDC’s (incredibly one-sided)…

A water drop and ripples

Biden is what having a president who is a foreign asset would actually look like.

By Justin Katz | December 9, 2021 |

Back when Democrats and members of the media who once had credibility were insisting that President Donald Trump was a foreign asset (that is, doing the bidding of another country’s rulers), wiser people looked at what he was doing.  Like him or not, he was strengthening the United States as a country and limiting the…

A water drop and ripples

The rules are different for Democrats.

By Justin Katz | December 9, 2021 |

Now that she’s been confirmed as the U.S. attorney for Massachusetts, interest has surged in a video of her berating journalists outside her house while she was still a county district attorney back in January.  The bullying and defensiveness are noteworthy, of course.  It takes a certain personality type to tell a reporter she’s going…

A toy school bus

RI charter schools are a haven for low-income minority students.

By Justin Katz | December 9, 2021 |

Charter schools offer a prime example of how the easy access to data enabled by Anchor Rising’s People’s Data Armory can shed light on public debate. Listening to public debate about charter schools and how they take money from regular district schools, one gets the impression of advantaged families drawing resources away from disadvantaged ones,…

Burning $100 bills

Reality killed TCI.

By Justin Katz | December 8, 2021 |

Activist-paid-as-academic Timmons Roberts of Brown University rends his garments in the Boston Globe that the Transportation & Climate Initiative (TCI; i.e., another layer of gas tax) never managed to ignite.  The question of his headline is, “Who killed the TCI?,” which I’ve already answered.  In a word, it was Biden, who quickly drove up the cost…

A water drop and ripples

More audience-guilting, this time from an NPR host.

By Justin Katz | December 8, 2021 |

Without making too much of it, I thought this was interesting.  NPR host Sam Sanders received a letter from listener saying he (Sanders) is distracting in the amount that he “grunts and murmurs (‘Uh!’, ‘Mmm…’, ‘Ahhh…’) when a guest is speaking.”  Perhaps because the letter writer went a bit far in likening it to the…

Painting of a forest monster.

This is how obvious falsehoods can become objective realities.

By Justin Katz | December 8, 2021 |

Just about every hot topic these days has something surreal about it — something that’s obviously not true or at least certain, that is affecting how hundreds of millions of people are having to live their lives. An early revelation for me, when I first moved from creative writing toward essay writing, was that an…

A water drop and ripples

Canceling a police training academy’s classes shows how crazy we’ve gone.

By Justin Katz | December 8, 2021 |

Canceling the remaining classes among a group of presumably very fit police candidates because one person with symptoms and six people without symptoms tested positive for COVID shows how crazy and weak we’ve become. We’re going to be paying for this recent shift in attitudes for decades, and one suspects the people pushing it expect…