Place these two paragraphs from a recent Amy Russo article in the Providence Journal next to each other, and the real headline emerges:

From July into September, Jallow said about 50 migrants arrived in the state by plane from the southern border. Yet they come from a wide array of countries, including Afghanistan, Senegal and the Congo, as well as Guatemala, Mexico and Honduras. …

Jallow said previously she might have seen only one migrant per month – not counting the many refugees the center has served. Being deemed a refugee is a legal process that involves a lawyer and court proceedings required to gain asylum as a person who was persecuted or in mortal danger in their home country.

One migrant per month compared with about 50 in two months.  That’s an increase of 25 times.

Our government is deliberately repopulating our country to change it from within.

Really, can’t we do better? Why do we put up with this?

The answer to my questions may be that the people who won’t put up with it leave and take their income with them. Then the state redoubles to draw in people who’ll need government services, because that’s what their incentives are.

But I have to wonder: as these groups come forward demanding more money, is anybody — whether journalists or state agencies — investigating the services that are being provided, the mandates imposed on the providers, or the nuts and bolts of the organizations providing them?

Such stories typically evince no trace of skepticism about the claims of the providers and to be based wholly on the assumption that they’re selfless and doing all that can be done for all the right reasons.  Maybe they are, maybe they’re not, or maybe they’re good people caught in a corrupt system, but journalists seem seamlessly and maybe unconsciously to jump from the existence of a problem to the conclusion that more money is the answer.

Conversations related to the Washington Trust settlement with the government, requiring the bank to address alleged racial discrimination on its part, indicate two views or standards for handling blame in society.

One side is convinced that somebody is to blame for the circumstances of life and that the job of society (particularly government) is to find people and organizations on which to pin that blame and impose a consequence for “justice.”  The fact that a rationale or investigative methodology is able to assign blame is, of itself, proof that the rationale or methodology is valuable and accurate.

The other side believes that blame isn’t so direct, simplistic, or easy to assign and, therefore, thinks it is the burden of society (particularly government) to prove that an individual or organization truly is to blame for a specific result before imposing consequences.

The first is the conduct of an easily guided mob.  The second provides a path to civilization and true justice.

Here they are.

The other day, I wondered whether younger folks have any sense of how long-standing is the problem of the huge gray area between journalists within the Palestinian territories (and elsewhere in the Middle East) and the terrorist organizations they’re covering.  Whether or not they’re more like terrorist propagandists is a gray area the terrorists have long manipulated.

The topic is now front and center, with images around social media of an AP reporter hugging Hamas leaders and apparently speeding toward the October 7 massacre with a grenade in his hand.  Personally, I’m sympathetic with those who see no moral doubt on the point, but it is a classic question of journalist ethics that people debate (or used to debate, anyway).  If you’re a journalist embedded with a militant faction and learn that they are planning an attack, should you warn the other side?

The question seems more difficult when it comes to official militaries in a declared war, because that’s much more clearly documenting the blundering trail of history.  Everybody involved understands it’s a contest of killing and destruction, and the world, writ large, has an interest in increasing documentation, not the least so that the rules of war, such as they are, can be maintained over time.  Everybody has an interest in the factions’ willingness to give journalists access.

In this case, though, with terrorists heading toward civilian areas on the way to a massacre of civilians, complete with rape and baby beheadings, the moral question evaporates, especially when the monsters were content to document it themselves.  There’s no excuse that doesn’t have the “journalist” counted among the terrorists.

Consider this tweet from WPRI’s Ted Nesi as an indication of the dehumanizing aspect of the fashionable “community” phrase:

This politically correct practice allows 80 people to stand in for a “community” of nearly 20,000 people.  It’s careless identity politics, and it’s ideologically corrupt.  How do 80 people get to speak for 20,000?  Does Ted Nesi review a poll or survey the population?  No.  When it serves the progressive line, the speakers are part of the “community.”  When it doesn’t serve the progressive line, different language will be used — “some Jews” or the like.

If “genocide” on the other side of the world justifies defacing statues, vandalizing buildings, and shouting down speakers, it will justify violence.

While I’m catching up on noteworthy items I’ve had on my to-do list, I have to point out that General Treasurer James Diossa’s grandstanding talk about “evaluat[ing] the banking relationship and the state’s business with Washington Trust Company” ought to be disqualifying for him to continue holding his position.  I’ve offered my opinion on the Biden Administration’s shake-down operation for financial institutions, but the point here is broader.  I could see the general treasurer having a position if asked in passing, but Diossa promoted his statement as part of an ideological pile-on.  Somebody in his position should be more respectful of the fact that Rhode Islanders’ livelihoods depend on businesses within the state.

Sadly, politicians’ words matter, and we’ve got a particularly callous and irresponsible bunch in office, these days.

This tweet from Democrat Attorney General Peter Neronha is a little old, but I didn’t want to let it pass without comment in this space:

The people who own property in the state have rights, too.  Many, probably most, of them are “people of this great state.”  The AG has to enforce the laws as written, in which case we, the People, should take up abuses with our legislators, but being triumphal about being a free lawyer for some Rhode Islanders against others is the sign of an unhealthy political philosophy.

I believe in humanity’s ability to adapt and recover, but it typically comes at the expense of a lot of waste and pain.  I’m increasingly worried that we’ve cheated younger generations of the ability to think.  Not only are schools failing to teach it, but our emphasis on schooling has drawn many children and young adults away from the work that would once have taught them the same lessons outside of school.

When you chant “Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea,” what those within Israel or externally supportive of the country hear is similar to what you would hear if a large group of conservatives marched in the street chanting: “White people will be free, from Bar Harbor to San D.”

You would infer an insinuation that “freedom” in this context means expulsion of the Other and that this prohibition must span from one border of a region (i.e., the United States) to the other.  And you’d be correct to object to a group’s shouting chants that ignore the reality of representative democracy and the rule of law.

I suspect many progressives’ thought process is that Hamas’s recent atrocities were horrific, but the solution is to allow Palestinians, more broadly than Hamas, their area of autonomy.  I’d be surprised if most don’t think “the river to the sea” means the borders of Gaza.  Alternately, they may be using the apartheid framing, imagining that non-Jews are oppressed in Israel, in which case “freedom” means their enfranchisement throughout the country.

They should learn that those responses are not captured by the “river to the sea slogan.”  Rather, the people chanting it are responding to the terroristic slaughter of Jews in Israel by endorsing their expungement from the region, which the rest of us understand as genocide, indeed.

Step 1: Construct a simplistic narrative with obvious good guys and bad guys and a conclusion with which nobody reasonable could disagree.

Step 2: Ensure that the “bad guys” can’t actually harm the people protesting.

Step 3: Provide singsong, rhythmic slogans that sound innocuous, but that the intended opposition will understand as threatening.

Step 4: Cultivate a supportive environment with quick dopamine rewards for easy actions and peer reinforcement.

Step 5: Guarantee no (or nominal) consequences for ostensibly rebellious behavior.

Step 6: Repeat to the point of violence or absolute control.

Hamas executed a brutal sneak attack with no declaration of war against innocent people in their homes and at a music festival.  The big complaint against Israel’s response, recently, has been that one day was not enough warning for people to evacuate an area they were planning to attack after a declaration of war.

Which of those seems more likely to blow up a hospital or the vehicles of those attempting to evacuate and blame it on the enemy?

Dan McGowan notes that new standardized test scores are out for Rhode Island public schools, and they’re not good.

Elsewhere, he finds a silver lining in the fact that English-language learners do better at English and are nearly caught up in math, but it seems like an indication of how poorly the schools are doing that native English speakers can’t keep up with those who are new to the language. In both subjects, in fact, we should question whether it’s a success that numbers are so low even those with language challenges are able to match them.

Nonetheless, it’s worth noting this mild corrective from Brown University’s Dr. Ashish Jha on Newsmakers, as summarized in a recent “Nesi’s Notes” column:

“I think we all in public health could have done a better job of communicating with more humility about what we knew and didn’t know. There was a desire by some people to act more certain than they were.” But he also thinks major damage was done by the decision to effectively impose a nationwide lockdown in the spring of 2020, which he blames in large part on a lack of visibility caused by the botched rollout of testing. “The virus was in big numbers here in Rhode Island, Boston, New York, Washington, D.C.,” he recalled. “There was almost none in Mississippi, almost none in Montana. And because we did not know that, we had to do a nationwide lockdown. And people in Mississippi rightly said, ‘Wait, you’re doing all these public health measures — our hospitals are empty, I don’t know anybody who’s got COVID, no one’s getting sick, this makes no sense.’ And that very blunt response actually I think was the basis for a lot of people losing faith in the public-health response.”

Notice two major omissions, though.  The first is from Jha, who doesn’t elaborate on how the overreactors will be held accountable.  As always, the experts get an unlimited “oops” card.

The corresponding second omission is from Nesi and the rest of the media.  Some folks had it right at the time.  A healthy media system would be rewarding them for that, now.

As people newly look up from their lives to wonder about the craziness with which we’re surrounded — from collegiate support for Hamas to economic ignorance to scientific illiteracy to an inability to grapple with logic — they should turn their gaze toward our schools. Consider this recent Boston Globe column from Dan McGowan:

The state’s most recent report card shows that 81 percent of students [at Providence’s Mount Pleasant High School] were chronically absent during the 2021-2022 school year, zero percent of students were considered proficient in math, and the four-year graduation rate was 67 percent.

But here’s the worst part: McGowan puts those numbers forward to support one side over the other in a dispute over school building construction.  In other words, the discussion is miles and miles away from where it ought to be, which is the use of our education to provide a jobs program for labor unions and indoctrinate into progressive causes.

The building won’t matter until that’s fixed, and it’s not even a topic of conversation.

True enough that it’s important to be skeptical of all reports, particularly the most horrific, at a time like this, but still… there is an air around some of those insisting that the story is not yet verified that implies if this story isn’t true, the whole atrocity is not that bad.  Psychologically, they seem to hope for excessive accusations so that they can discount anything below that mark as within tolerable bounds of unspeakable horror.

… the explanation might be more than silent discomfort with a faction of their tribe’s doing something nakedly evil.  To progressives, this sort of thing must happen and is expected.  Maybe they find it lamentable (or maybe not), but they see it as inevitable on the path to their vision of justice.

Tom Holland argues, in his excellent history of Christianity, Dominion, that the Woke represent a distorted offshoot of the faith.  Just so, through their Marxist perversion, they carry forward the expectation for which Jesus prepared his followers:  “when you hear of wars and revolts, do not be alarmed; for these things must take place first.”

This is the deeper truth of their hypocritical responses to current events.  The revolution is everything, and they’ll respond the same when it comes for you.  The real question is whether enough people’s eyes are opened before it’s too late, and I’m not seeing it, even now.  So, the progressives will go about their lives… and wait.

I ask because that looks pretty clearly to be what happens in the video attached to this tweet:

Given some online interactions, I’m not even sure Democrat partisans are psychologically capable of seeing the kick — as if it’s one of those optical illusions that some people just don’t process. I suppose the best-case scenario (if I suffer from an opposite shortcoming) is that the frail White House occupant tripped on the dog like he recently tripped on a stage, but that’s a problem in its own right.

Of most fundamental concern, however, is the need for a single standard.  We all know how this video would be treated were Biden a Republican.  In that way, this minor matter is too perfectly representative of so much about Biden’s time in office.  Powerful forces are set on ensuring he is propped up and his disasters are spun to be positives.  If this video does catch some attention, expect Democrats to crow about how agile he must be to kick a big dog like that.