Gabrielle Caracciolo, of NBC 10, reports that the McKee administration is hiding behind its lawsuits to avoid releasing the “forensic analysis… to determinhe what went wrong and who is responsible for the failure of the Washington Bridge.”  But she did do some investigating:

An NBC 10 News investigation found when it comes to “quality control and assurance,” the state’s bridge inspection manual indicates both the consultant and the state bear some responsibility.

According to the manual, consultants responsible for inspections are required to ensure the reports are reviewed for “completeness, accuracy and content.”

It is (or should be) obvious that the government entity accountable to the public for public works projects is ultimately responsible for failure.  Journalists shouldn’t have to investigate that proposition, and the governor shouldn’t pretend it isn’t so for the sake of lawsuits.

We’re entering a truly bizarre form of representative democracy in Rhode Island.  Just as the government regulates speech in the one area in which it should be least involved — politics and elections — it is claiming to be the one entity not accountable to the public.  In essence, the governor’s position is that Rhode Islanders don’t need facts to ensure accountability of state department because the governor represents us, and he knows them, so we can hold him accountable for facts that we don’t know… or something.

… to relieve their existential anxiety, people want a simple story in which the good guys and the bad guys are easy to identify.

Genuinely bad people are willing to lie and tell that simplistic story, while good people acknowledge nuance and accept a share of blame.  This imbalance tilts the community’s judgment scale against the good people and worsens as individuals who are less bad become more invested in the story and individuals who are less good become less willing to stand with the nuance because they are then saddled with disproportionate blame.

A moment will come (and we’re fast approaching it) when the lies of the bad have become so outrageous and harmful to everybody that their badness is, indeed, obvious and nuance does not apply because their blame is wholly owned.  Yes, that moment will come, but its arrival does not inevitably portend the victory of the good; it may come too late.

Mark Steyn raises the peculiarity of the mysterious deaths of two businessmen who actually managed to beat the U.S. Department of Justice’s process-is-the-punishment racket.  Apparently, the statistics suggest that the DOJ way overcharges its targets in the hopes of pushing for a settlement:  “95 percent of cases are won by prosecutors, 90 percent of those without trial.”

Despite the odds, Mike Lynch and Stephen Chamberlain won their case, but now both are dead under mysterious circumstances.  Lynch’s yacht fell victim to a fluke boating calamity, and Chamberlain was hit by a car while on his daily run.

The latter is what brings to mind a bit of forgotten Rhode Island mafia history.  Shortly after his paper published information about a secret mafia ceremony, publisher Michael Metcalf died by falling off his bicycle.  Sure, authorities concluded it was simply an accident, but Projo chairman and publisher, at the time, Stephen Hamblett expressed some skepticism: “we cannot forget that Mr. Metcalf was publisher of newspapers known for their investigative stories and editorials on crime. This fact, coupled with the unique circumstances surrounding his death, make it impossible for us to rule out foul play.”

I’ve often noted that the popular Crimetown podcast had a notable shift in its first season, starting with mafia corruption and moving into government corruption. It has seemed to me that perhaps that captures a trend that actually happened in the Ocean State. If the United States government is following the same trend, we should all be worried, indeed.

In the heat of the battle, political controversies over yard signs can become an almost comedic proxy for heated disagreements.  I’ve seen people in the heat of a busy campaign drop everything to do battle with people stealing the yard signs of the other side or placing their own signs on property where they aren’t allowed.

A consistent lesson is that people will cheat when they perceive the stakes to be high, when they’re caught up in the result, and when they think it unlikely they’ll be caught.  So, it’s disconcerting to see mail ballots joining yard signs in the heat of the Democrat primary for Rhode Island House District 9.

In addition to the normal yard sign controversies, State Representative Enrique Sanchez is raising a red flag about voters’ phone numbers being switched for mail ballots.  More dramatically, one of his opponents, Santos Javier, has filed complaints, accompanied by notarized letters from people alleging that a Sanchez supporter has been pressuring voters to sign ballots before taking the ballots and filling in the vote for Sanchez.

That sounds like a pretty drastic and risky approach to mail ballot fraud, leaving campaigns apt to be caught, but we should take it as a warning.  The placement of a particular yard sign is of unknowable value in a campaign, but these are actual votes.

… by the discomfiting fascist, Orwellian tone of this campaign from supposed good-government-group Common Cause RI:

It’s bad enough on its face, but it’s worse when you break down the manipulative message. First, Common Cause wants you to believe that you can instantly identify “disinformation about voting.” Next, the organization asserts that you have a responsibility to act against it. The first step in doing so is to help censor it by failing to “engage, react, or comment.” Instead, you’re to run to the nearest authority — Common Cause — in order to file a report.

And who are these authorities? That’s the curious part. Common Cause RI has been a leading force in our state creating regulatory barriers to civic engagement, with the excuse of providing voters with information about who’s supporting candidates and causes. Yet, the ReportDisinfo About page is laughably sparse. There’s a box on the bottom that looks like a button, saying “Paid for by Common Cause Education Fund,” but it’s not a button. You’d have to investigate even that.

There’s little doubt in my mind that Common Cause RI will be onboard someday when progressives start rounding people up for wrongthink.

Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby offers a startling statistic:

Blaming the Department of Education isn’t only a matter of post hoc ergo propter hoc, and I’d say the unionization of teachers played an equal or greater role in destroying American education.  To be sure, both developments echo a similar underlying problem in the same direction:  They move education farther from families’ ability to force accountability for failure on the system.  The Department of Education facilitates top-down policy from far-away D.C., in part by empowering academic experimenters, while teachers’ unions transform the workforce on the scene into an unaccountable jobs program.

But again:  People don’t have to agree with my conclusions for us to agree that we ought to be debating this problem more.

I mean the title of this post in the sense both that progressivism/socialism ignores human nature and that it pretends people aren’t human.  Consider:

The underlying assumption appears to be that producers will simply produce because they are producers.  Human beings don’t fall into nice progressive categories.  We make decisions and change our status, and it can be in directions that produce better outcomes for everybody or that don’t.

I may revise my opinion if conflicting results come in, but for now, I’m choosing to believe that this is 100% on the money:

Among 6,001 Health and Retirement Study participants in the U.S., drinking two or more cups of coffee a day was associated with a 28% lower risk of dementia over 7 years compared with drinking less than one daily cup (P<0.05), reported Changzheng Yuan, ScD, of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston and the Zhejiang University School of Medicine in China, in a poster presented at the meeting. …

When total caffeine intake derived from coffee and tea was calculated, participants in the highest quartile of caffeine consumption had a 38% decreased risk of dementia (P=0.032), Yuan and co-authors said.

At the very least, people should have learned by now to be cautious about accepting or rejecting proclamations about what is or isn’t good for us, with especial wariness when the instruction is to stop doing something you like.

Generally, I’ve found that “believers in science” don’t seem to appreciate the complex ways in which our bodies were conditioned through evolution to interact in complex, overall beneficial, ways with substances we enjoy.

Whether you think Mark Smith’s reasoning here is dead-on, insane, or somewhere in between, an element is important to consider:

Namely, he’s not just stating dislike and projecting an action, á la “Trump will end democracy.”  He’s offering actual policy steps by which Democrats could achieve that end.

The same can’t be done in reverse because Donald Trump will be opposed by the entire governing and media establishment, whereas the same powers will support the Democrats, as we’re seeing in the efforts to place Harris in office.

Further to yesterday’s post on Johnston politics, don’t forget this corresponding news about the state legislature:

In 2022, just 20 percent of Rhode Island’s 113 General Assembly seats went uncontested in a primary and/or the general election.

But this year, 52 percent of those Assembly seats will go uncontested thanks to a sharp drop in Democratic primaries and Republican candidates.

That combination — of plunging numbers of progressive challengers in September and a truncated GOP field in November — will benefit incumbents, but leave Rhode Island voters with far fewer choices as they head to the polls this fall, observers say.

COVID and mail ballots were the end.  You’ve been able to practically feel it in the air ever since.  Until something fundamental shifts, it’s all over.  The Party is in total control.

The article has some perfunctory hand-wringing from John Marion, whose organization, Common Cause, has been right in the mix for causing the current condition, but the fact that Boston Globe journalist Edward Fitzpatrick still goes to him to set the tone of the article shows how performative the concern is.  The truth can be found in this from AFL-CIO poohbah Patrick Crowley, who came up as one of the most aggressive and offensive activists in the state and who once told the progressive NetRoots Nation conference when it came to Providence that the radical Left in the Ocean State was implementing a “one union” strategy to fuse progressivism with labor unions to take over the state:  “Generally, the General Assembly has performed exactly as Rhode Islanders are expecting them to.”

Just as union organizers always mean “union members” when they say “workers,” when Crowley says “Rhode Islanders,” he means is particular far-left faction.  They’ve completely bought state government, and neither journalists or supposed good-government groups are interested in causing them any problems.

I mean, look at this:

The scores were abysmal to start; the goals were obviously fictitious when considered in the absence of a practical plan; and the final results are offensively bad.  If these results aren’t causing outrage, it’s because nobody in the Democrat establishment or news media wants to address the underlying problems, which are entangled with labor union privilege and political power.

On its surface, the controversy looks obvious.  I mean, the guy winning the no-bid contract had a relative in the relevant office of the school department:

Astro of New England, a different moving company, first raised issues with the bidding process after Astro owner Chuck Lamendola said he noticed Jada had been awarded work in late June without him ever seeing the district advertising the work publicly.

He also highlighted that Jada owner David Oliver is cousins with the school district’s facility director, Kevin Oliver, whose name appeared on Jada contract paperwork submitted over the past couple of months to the School Committee.

On the other hand, consider that Jada doesn’t have the relevant licensing, which is probably just a matter of paperwork, but has already been doing such work as a subcontractor under Astro.  That framing changes the coloring a little, to make Astro seem like an unnecessary middleman kept in the game through the state’s licensing regime.  One might wonder whether there’s anything to find in Lamendola’s family and friend network, too.

Rhode Islanders have long joked about the need to “know a guy” to get things rolling in our state, given our institutionalized corruption.  As different factions of people who know different “guys” compete in that sort of system, who gets pegged with corruption violations becomes like a game of musical chairs.

Rhode Island Governor Dan McKee tweets yet another area in which Democrats manipulate language to insinuate ideology:

A grant from a government agency to another government agency is not “momentum.”  Momentum suggests that the entity or project is moving on its own.  Government subsidies are pushes… force.  Democrats’ language is (deliberately) manipulative and always to make government the center of all of our lives, which it absolutely should not be.

One can absolutely make the case that generous time-off policies have their benefits for employers and do right by employees, but we allow Democrats like Magaziner to throw around terms like “fundamental human right” far too easily:

You cannot have “an absolute human right” to be given things by other people, no matter how nice or just it might be if only for the reason that it grants either an absolute right to individually seize property or for sleazy politicians like Magaziner to do so as middlemen.

Well, look, Electric Boat relies hugely on government funding in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.:

Radicals in the Democrat Party will hold a lack of such policies against Electric Boat, while even the most conservative Republicans who can possibly gain decisive power in government won’t hold it against them very strongly.  Barring discrimination lawsuits in our judiciary, which is increasingly intellectually captured, the economic incentives all point in one direction.

Conservatives frequently note this disparity in incentives, and it’s a genuine problem.  Imposing regulatory consequences on private companies for social policy we don’t like is not (and should not become) our thing.  That brings us back to two courses of action.

First, we have to concentrate on gaining the ability to reduce government’s ability to create these incentives in the first place by limiting its power and budgets and reviving Americans’ understanding of its appropriate limits.  Second, we can start laughing at people associated with companies like Electric Boat.  I mean, imagine catering to the gender cult for a buck.  Where is there integrity?

Perusing Twitter or X (which I may henceforth call “TwiX”) often leaves me feeling panic at the state of our world and the hopelessness of recovering humanity’s footing. No doubt, this is at least partially the way it feels to have your attention manipulated, but stepping back, even that reality is just another contributor to our worrying state of affairs.

One way I see people responding (particularly the profiteers) is to assume the world always feels like it’s full of danger and risk, so the best response is to ignore all that and go about building your life and career, leveraging the reality of the moment toward those ends.  After all, humanity has gone on, generally progressing, despite the ups and downs, and as the large timescale has life improving, some people suffer relatively little during the smaller-scale changes.  It would be better to focus on being one of them, while waiting for the rising tide to lift all our boats, than to live with anxiety and missed opportunities worrying about things one person can hardly change.

In this frame, neither Harris nor Trump will destroy it all. Life will go on, so concentrate on what you can control.

On the other hand, most of our advancement has been relatively recent, and there was no reason it had to take as long as it did.  Electricity, for example, didn’t change.  Humans’ choices about how to perceive the world and organize themselves were the primary catalyst for the prosperity we’ve enjoyed, and we can go in the other direction, too.

Of course, my tendency toward these concerns is why I’ve made one of my daily reminders to “remember what world you live in.”  Ultimately, it all pales in comparison with eternity with God.  But I can’t help but conclude it has been preferable to be grappling with others’ personal demons on an individual scale than seeing those demons coalesce into an existential threat.

I was puzzled recently when I discovered that updated registration forms had somehow not made it into two of our cars.  The technician inspecting one of them told me many Rhode Islanders are accidentally throwing their registration forms out.  I chuckled along with him but wondered how that would be possible.

A couple days later, I was about to put new plates on my car, and I realized that I was about to do exactly that. The registration is printed on the folded inside of the piece of paper with your mailing address on it, which is stuck to the envelope.

At around $20 per online duplicate registration, that little error can add up quickly for the state (let alone tickets and fees for people who don’t have the current registration in their cars).  If the state were a private company, it might find itself subject to a class action lawsuit.  As it is, I guess the best we can do is alert each other about the scam.

I came across a quotation from Nassim Taleb’s book, Antifragile, suggesting that the more immediate your focus (e.g., hourly versus annually), the greater the noise-to-signal ratio.  That is, the effects from moment to moment are more likely to result from random or unrelated factors, while longer-term trends are more likely to reflect genuine changes.  The advice is worth keeping in mind while listening to commentators try to fit every moment’s occurrences into a long-term analysis and prediction.

The same goes for assessing strategies.

I don’t know if they reflect a deliberate plan (with Donald Trump, I tend to doubt it), but much of the reaction to statements from the Trump campaign seem blithely to ignore the fact that there are still months of campaign to cycle during which he can cycle through all variety of evidence that Harris is a dishonest chameleon, whether about her identity, policies, Biden coverup, etc.  An off-color comment, now, about her race will get a lot of attention, embed ideas about whether he life story is truly reflective of a particular demographic’s experience, which people might not otherwise have considered, and then fade with the constant news cycle.

How much is instinct and how much is strategy is always a difficult question with Trump, but commentary at the speed of Twitter is mostly noise.

The Democrats’ appointed Presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, kicked off a universal trend among Democrats to call straight, married men “weird,” while Transportation Secretary Peter Buttigieg, who is homosexual, told a call full of racially segregated white men that abortion makes life better for men, too.  See, that way, we don’t have to worry our sex will create children, because we can rely on the women to kill them in the womb.

Naturally, underlying these cultural prescriptions is the expectation that big-daddy government can always come in and fix your problems for you, provided you keep Democrat socialists in power.

… but it’ll require a turn away from progressives’ insistence that everything must be politics.  This clip of Eric Weinstein and Nicole Shanahan discussing the “mind control at scale” we’re seeing at the national level is worth the four minutes of your time.

It’s not only that our system has been coopted by the gaslighters, but also that it has been restructured to punish truth telling.  One way in which this is true, as Weinstein points out, is by refusing to exonerate those who were attacked for telling the truth even when the lie blows up.  (His prime example is the “Joe Biden is just fine” lie.)

I can’t help but see a common thread with Democrats’ shameful whitewashing of COVID so they can take credit for the economic improvement that came inevitably after unlocking the economic door.  A healthy society would have a tacit agreement not to seize on such dire circumstances for cynical political gain, but a healthy society wouldn’t serve the progressive Democrat Party.  Indeed, one could easily foresee during the 2020 election that one reason they were so desperate to cheat and win was that they knew the economic recovery would be an easy talking point.

If this is true, Secretary of State Gregg Amore deserves credit for undoing at least one instance of the state Democrat Party and Nellie Gorbea’s invitation to voter fraud:

RI Secretary of State Gregg Amore just corrected a wrong made by his predecessor, Nellie Gorbea. In 2017, she unilaterally changed a policy to only provide years of birth in the RI voter data file after I raised issues with how the voter rolls were being maintained. Gorbea made this change without following the rule-making process dictated by RI law.

Amore unwound Gorbea’s unlawful action, and RI now delivers full dates of birth in the voter file. Huge kudos to Secretary Amore for being reasonable, lawful, and executing his job without regard to ideology.

Worth noting that Ken Block, who reported the above on X, is on the right side of this one, too.