Some days watching the news can seem like a punishment because there is little that reflects common sense.
Q. What is TCI?
The Transportation & Climate Initiative (TCI) is a multi-state regional agreement designed to drive up the price of motor fuel (gasoline and on-road diesel). As a regressive tax, the TCI Gas Tax will disproportionately harm low-income families, especially those who live some distance from commercial centers or their workplace.
Increasing sexual activity among school-aged children in Massachusetts (or Rhode Island) would help Planned Parenthood develop life-long customers.
It is not by accident that the proposed Transportation & Climate Initiative (TCI) is losing support among many of the states it has targeted… to the point where some proponents are considering a Plan-B.
Last week, I traveled to Boston to meet with other organizations from east coast states who oppose TCI, a regional compact targeting 12 states and Washington DC that seeks to impose a 5 to 17 cent per gallon tax on gasoline and diesel fuel, with the intent of forcing Rhode Island to drive less often and into more costly and less convenient electric vehicles and public transportation options.
In President Trump’s economic speech in Davos, he attributes the recent economic strength of the United States to policies that put “the American worker” at their center. Agree or disagree with the president (from any of the angles at which it would be possible to do so), he raises an important point. We tend to get caught up in our preferred solutions or our own interests, to the detriment of our causes and our communities.
Listening to episode 10 of the Tiverton on Track podcast from the Tiverton Taxpayers Association, titled “Living in (And Budgeting for) a Community,” one hears that theme sneak in repeatedly.
The more freedoms we have, the more prosperity we will enjoy. The constitutional government of our great nation was formed to preserve our freedoms. But in the Ocean State, we reduce freedoms … and we suffer the consequences.
As the 2020 General Assembly Session begins, and we are once again looking at even more of status quo (or worse) based on the policy agenda from the political class, when will Rhode Islanders say enough is enough?
Instead of focusing on the real issues harming the business climate of our state… the insiders are looking to restrict the rights of citizens by stopping the use of plastic straws and bags. Give me a break.
Peculiarities in long-term polling suggest that our increasingly progressive society is becoming more materialist and more Balkanized, which should raise concerns about the future.
Why would a high school student who has no idea what Stanford is like want to apply there? Because it’s a ticket to the upper classes, and we should be honest about that.
Take action! Stand up to the upcoming TCI Gas Tax. The prices for gasoline could soon rise dramatically for your family if the Raimondo administration gets their way. It is not a sin to drive our cars and trucks! Click here to sign the growing petition.
Teenage brawls at Providence Place Mall provide a good example of how the advantages of progressive rhetoric lead to bad outcomes.
My weekly call-in on John DePetro’s WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM show, for December 30, included talk about:
The well intentioned but hasty, ill formed Opioid Stewardship Act passed by Rhode Island lawmakers last session is now creating medication shortages and chaos within our healthcare community instead of properly addressing the problem.
A kangaroo relationship-court at Johnson & Wales raises the question of the place that colleges (in general and in specific) hold in our society.
The Democrat Congress produced a sham impeachment of President Trump the day after the “secretive court that approves sensitive surveillance issued a rare public rebuke of the FBI on Tuesday, saying the bureau misled the Justice Department and the court when it sought permission to wiretap a former Trump campaign aide.” Democrat Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi had to shush her members to stop their shouts of glee at what they had done, thus cheering away any pretense that this was anything other than a political stunt.
A somber moment of answering the call of history to preserve the nation? Ha! Anybody who has watched this travesty play out over three years has known since the last election that this was coming. This is not evidence of the competence of the speaker, as some want to see it. Had she failed to answer the three-year-old calls of her rabid base for this moment, it would have been a political disaster. And having failed to use her power responsibly, it is now a moral failure.
A bad situation for her and dangerous times for all of us.
Also yesterday, the Providence Journal gave this headline to an AP article, “MMA fighter says victory over Trump supporter was for the ‘entire world’”:
Kamaru Usman sent a bloodied, bleary Colby Covington spiraling to the ground for the second time. Usman then leaped on him and went to work on Covington’s badly injured face, battering his dazed opponent with hammer fists until the referee mercifully intervened.
Although he had to wait until the final minute, Usman settled his very personal feud with his sharply divisive challenger in perhaps the most satisfying way possible.
“This one is not just for me,” Usman said. “This is for the whole entire world right now.”
The article goes on to explain that antipathy toward Covington is much more about him, personally, than about the President of the United States. That puts a spotlight on the irresponsible decision of the press to play up a political angle. They are encouraging violence.
It is unfortunate, in that context, that the last name of the “Trump supporter” is the same as the high school whose Trump-supporting students became the target of a national two minutes of hate, last year. The coincidence of these names gives the impression of a divine author who is making His connections almost too obvious. Shame on us if we can’t figure out the lesson.
If the Raimondo administration gets its way and bypasses the General Assembly to sign on to a new regional carbon-tax scheme, called the Transportation and Climate Initiative (TCI), Rhode Island motorists will find a plan to increase gasoline taxes in their stockings this year.
The TCI gas tax is a cap-and-trade tax on gasoline proposed by environmental extremists who purposely want gasoline to become so expensive — estimated at an extra 24 cents per gallon — that you will be financially forced to walk or bike to work and around town. We’re expecting an important announcement this week on the new tax…stay tuned.
James Holmes plumbs the zombie apocalypse, as described in World War Z by Max Brooks, for strategic lessons, concluding thus:
Resourceful folk fashion new weapons and tactics while unimaginative foes plod along, doing the same thing time after time—which makes a hopeful note to close on. When facing new circumstances, get to know the circumstances and stay loose. Recognize that the nimbler contender is apt to be the victor—and broad-mindedness is the key to staying nimble. I daresay Epstein and Clausewitz would agree.
Being something of a jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none type, myself, this paragraph near the beginning of the essay caught my attention:
Maintains [David] Epstein, specialists encounter trouble when tackling the problems characteristic of a “wicked” world. Wicked problems are intricate. They involve variables that combine and recombine in offbeat ways. They defy the boundaries of a single field and often vex specialists. By contrast, generalists hunt for “distant” analogies to challenges. Analogies seldom reveal answers, but they help inquisitors discover the right questions to ask. Asking penetrating questions constitutes the first step toward a solution, toward wisdom.
Exactly right. We err if we look to analogies for answers, but by our nature we understand situations by comparison, through metaphors — stories. The closer the metaphor we apply to a situation, the more correct (even if unexpected) conclusions we can find. Having a broad range of experience allows us to cast more broadly for metaphors.
For example, a social problem will have nothing to do with building a house, but metaphorically, they may have some things in common: the need for a strong foundation on which sturdy framing supports the useful and aesthetically pleasing components. If your social institutions and artistic productions are crumbling, the metaphor might direct your attention to problems with the cultural foundation that is failing to support it all. If your popular art is cracked and allowing evil ideas in, they can rot the institutional framing.
Metaphors can be pretty abstract. We still use the metaphor of particles to understand physics, but we know that the building blocks of material reality don’t act very much like particles. They can act like waves, they can occupy the same physical space, and so on. Perhaps a different abstract metaphor — seeing “particles” as identities with certain qualities might help us resolve some of the remaining puzzles.
This is why innovators in particular fields are often newcomers who aren’t bogged down in standard ways of thinking, but bring metaphors from their earlier lives.
State of the State co-host Richard August invited me on for a full hour of the show to cover a broad range of topics, from Tiverton’s recall election to broad political philosophy.
12-9-19 A Different View of Matters from John Carlevale on Vimeo.
Far too many Rhode Islanders are fleeing our state, leaving a swath of empty chairs at our family dinner tables.
If we want to keep our loved ones at home with us and give those who have left a reason to return, we must take bold action to reform our approach to public policy and to civil society.
Whether “adversity scores” are appropriate or useful changes whether the intention is to redistribute wealth or judge schools to which we might send our own children.
Review of a classic experiment finds that, no, most people won’t hurt others just because they’re told to (but telling people that they would has probably made it more likely).
The problem of public education grows from two deep social changes and therefore won’t be easy to solve.
How much more money can Rhode Island’s political class take from your pocket using green energy as an excuse?
The Ocean State has already signed on to the Transport and Climate Initiative, a cabal of Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic states designed to foster a radical change (for the worse) to our economic well-being through costly green energy policies.
Indeed, this very well could be Rhode Island own version of the “Green New Deal,” driving costs higher and higher.
If some evil force were determined to break apart our society and increase the world’s share of misery, it might invent a concept like “non-judgmentalism.”
In George Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984, the unironic slogans of the totalitarian government are: “war is peace,” “freedom is slavery,” and “ignorance is strength.” The modern totalitarians of the progressive American Left who have ramped up their efforts in the past decade have added “discrimination is tolerance.”
Witness this statement from the American Geophysical Union (AGU) explaining why the organization, along with the Geological Society of America (GSA), banned Brigham Young University (BYU) from advertising jobs for which their members might be qualified:
“AGU has always encouraged and fostered a diverse geoscience community throughout its history because we believe—and repeatedly see—that diversity and inclusion are essential to advancing science,” Billy Williams, the union’s vice president of ethics, diversity, and inclusion, wrote in a statement. “Since the job posting from BYU referenced its Honor Code as a requirement of employment, which conflicts with our policy, we removed the job posting from our website.”
This isn’t just a faint echo of Orwell’s constructs; it’s the actual thing. To restate, the VP of “ethics, diversity, and inclusion” is saying that his organization must shun a well-regarded university because “diversity and inclusion are essential to advancing science.” That is, they must discriminate against adherents of a religion because the Honor Code that it inspires conflicts with the progressive fundamentalism of the geological organizations.
Science, according to this way of thinking, is advanced by restricting participation based on ideological rules that have nothing to do with the narrow field of study or practice of investigation. In the view of these organizations, no geologist who belongs to either the union or the society and who has beliefs that would fit with those of BYU should be permitted to find a work environment in which they’d be comfortable. Indeed, the message is clearly sent that they should keep their beliefs to themselves if they know what is good for them.
That a statement like the one quoted above could be passed off with a straight face and without bringing upon its author a wave of ridicule is terrifying.
As he so often does, Michael Morse brings out the human detail in the heart of a terrible incident. In this case, the incident is the death of Worcester fire lieutenant Jason Menard in the early hours of Wednesday. Writes Michael:
I’m certain that until the very last seconds he thought he would pull it off and be on his way to Disney when the shift was over. …
I hope Lieutenant Menard’s family understands this, and that he had every intention of coming home.
But he couldn’t. He just couldn’t.
The reference is to the Menard family’s planned vacation, which was to start at the end of his shift just a few hours later, and it speaks to the looming uncertainty that surrounds the lives of those who undertake dangerous jobs.
The heart-wrenching, humanizing details abound. A cafe at which Menard and his wife would eat breakfast together once they’d gotten their three children to school put out a memorial mimosa, accompanied by his picture and the Fireman’s Prayer.
The words of that poem are especially poignant in this case, given that they appear to have been written after a fire during which rescuers were not able to save some children. Menard’s crew reportedly went out on its own dangerous limb in response to information that two people, including a baby, were trapped there.
As Michael writes, Menard died in the line of duty “simply doing what his training allowed him to do.” That includes making split-second decisions about the amount of risk justified in unpredictable circumstances. A professional calculates risks based not on the moment alone, but on the likelihood that the same decision made over and over again by different people will turn out well. But sometimes risk turns into tragedy and, as the prayer’s author wrote of his own uncertainties, “according to Your Will I have to lose my life.”
When that happens, with or without the details so richly available around Jason Menard, the rest of us should pause and reflect for a moment in gratitude, because the fallen partake in the unknowable rescues whose incalculable number we cannot know.
What if, all of a sudden, the force of gravity doubled throughout the universe? This, according to social scientist Jonathan Haidt, is analogous to what society has experienced with the rapid effect of social media on human nature.
The implications for political science are particularly immediate:
… in “Federalist No. 10,” James Madison wrote about his fear of the power of “faction,” by which he meant strong partisanship or group interest that “inflamed [men] with mutual animosity” and made them forget about the common good. He thought that the vastness of the United States might offer some protection from the ravages of factionalism, because it would be hard for anyone to spread outrage over such a large distance. Madison presumed that factious or divisive leaders “may kindle a flame within their particular States, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other States.” The Constitution included mechanisms to slow things down, let passions cool, and encourage reflection and deliberation.
The palliative effect of time and distance apply on a smaller scale, too. Even in a relatively small community, when people were having their feuds either face-to-face or in the necessarily well-paced medium of letters to the editor, they could not spread as broadly or as powerfully. Now the group think and the side-picking spreads at the speed of the Internet, and as I’ve recently written, there is no escaping it.
While he captures something in social media and offers some suggestions for adding a little distance and friction to its processes, Haidt doesn’t go far enough in assigning responsibility to changes in society with which social media interacts. A need for space and friction is also why our system limits the activities that we pursue through government, with its powers to tax, regulate, and police.
As government becomes an increasingly efficient way to impose our wills on each other, not only does it become easier to accomplish that goal, but the stakes go up for winning the fight. The attractiveness of leveraging the tools of social warfare goes up even as the opportunity to defend against them goes down.
This is much like campaign finance reform. We can make changes around the edges, but the only way to really “get the money out of politics” is to reduce the value of winning. The same is true of social media. The nasties have escaped the bag, so the better approach would be to become the type of society in which their bad effects will do less harm.
The public events during East Greenwich’s Veterans Day activities did not match the reverence remembered from childhood or that the day deserves.
History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon, presents an alternating image of the Roman military. At times, it’s the savior of the empire; at times, it’s the cause of its downfall. At times, it’s the only institution carrying forward the essence of the people; at times, it aligns with foreign forces. At times, one gets the impression that the Roman soldiers were driven centrally by a sense of honor; at times, the impression is more of a collection of mercenaries.
As is the way with history, these changes were both causes and effects — amplifying the direction that the circumstances, the enemies, or the emperor dictated while also changing the course of history. How differently the people must have looked at soldiers in each of those epochs.
Over the course of my life, the United States has treated its military personnel with a complicated, often contradictory, presentation. In the times of the old movies, the nation was all but uniformly convinced of the honor of such service. After the ’60s, and with Vietnam, we experienced a flip. Rather, we experienced a division, with one part of the culture flipping to present military service as inherently suspect and the military condemnable as an institution.
At the same time, both sides of that division focused more on personalities and archetypes, or at least that is how it has seemed. If the portrayal is one of villainy, the characters are villains; if it is one of honor, such is invested in the personage of demigods, often performing superhuman feats.
What we need in our time is a sense of the honorable hero defined simply by service, holding the lines and traditions in a way somewhat better than we arguably deserve. What we need even more is for those heroes to be honored by more than a day — but rather by a history-changing imitation.
Recently, our Center released our 2019 Freedom Index and Legislator Scorecard for the Rhode Island General Assembly.
Sadly, with only 12 of 113 lawmakers scoring above zero, the members of the political class failed to fulfill their promises to help everyday citizens. Worse, the 2019 legislative session was an unadulterated assault on individual and economic rights, the totality of which I have not seen before.
“Imagine that! Teachers sending out postcards with a picture of violence to silence others in town.” Tiverton Town Council member Donna Cook makes that statement in a new letter to the editor informing people about some facts from the recent recall election in town (which knocked me out of office).
She’s referring to one of the five mailings that the recall advocates sent to homes in Tiverton. The return address claims that it comes from “Progress RI,” which although not registered appears to be a “doing business as” name of the state’s teachers unions. The return address is that of a middle school teacher in town. And this is the front of the card, which Cook describes as “a violent picture similar to a kidnapping, hijacking, robbery, or a hostage situation.”
Note that the claim at the top of the card is demonstrably false; it’s a lie.
While recording an episode of a soon-to-be-released local podcast, Cook contrasted this card with all of the talk we hear from those in the education system about bullying. That’s an important contrast that isn’t made often enough in our world of hostile politics and toxic social media.
Imagine a high school student sending out something similar on social media about other students. Nobody would have any trouble seeing that as inappropriate bullying, and the student would face consequences, probably including suspension.
Of course, we rightly balance freedom of speech versus the giving of offense differently for children and adults. Grown-ups should be able to handle more, and society has less right to impose restrictions on them, at least in an official way. Still, this card was sent out by teachers in our public schools, behind a thin veil of anonymity and the thin excuse that it actually came from their labor union.
Is that the sort of standard we want for our nation, state, and community?