Progressive Charlestown
a fresh, sharp look at news, life and politics in Charlestown, Rhode Island
Wednesday, September 16, 2026
Utilities are overcharging Rhode Island heat pump owners
New report finds Rhode Island’s electric rates overcharge many heat pump customers
Conservation Law Foundation news release
Rhode Island is encouraging more families to install energy-efficient heat pumps because they can lower energy bills, improve air quality, and reduce climate pollution.
Yet many households that make the switch
aren’t seeing as much savings as they should because the state’s electric rates
charge them more than it costs the utility to serve them.
A new independent analysis by Switchbox, commissioned by the Environmental Defense Fund, Conservation Law Foundation, Green Energy Consumers Alliance, Acadia Center, and Sierra Club, finds that Rhode Island’s current electric rates systematically overcharge many households that use heat pumps. The report, Heat Pump Rates in Rhode Island: Analysis of Fair Rates for Heat Pump Customers, shows those households often pay more than they should while effectively subsidizing an outdated fossil fuel heating system.
The report recommends a
dedicated heat pump rate that better reflects the actual cost of serving heat
pump customers, helping more households save money while making heat pumps more
accessible.
Some adult vaccines are linked to lower dementia risk. Can they promote brain health?
Scientists keep finding new and unexpected benefits to vaccines
About seven years ago, Paul Schultz, MD, a professor and neurologist at UTHealth Houston, met with the biomedical informatics team he regularly collaborates with as they investigate risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease. Someone made a comment that piqued his interest.
“My colleagues who were looking through the databases said,
‘Hey, we found a signal that the influenza vaccine seems to be associated with
less Alzheimer’s. Is that something you know already?’” Schultz told CIDRAP
News. “I was like, ‘Oh my God; that’s totally unexpected.’”
The team began researching the relationship between
receiving a flu vaccine and Alzheimer’s disease risk. Their first paper compared people who
received the regular flu vaccine with those who didn’t and estimated the
likelihood of each group to develop Alzheimer’s.
“Three years of receiving the influenza vaccine was
associated with a 20% reduced risk, and six years was associated with a 40%
reduced risk of Alzheimer’s for at least eight years,” Schultz explained. “It’s
an association, not a cause and effect, but quite striking.”
Over the past several years, more research has emerged
showing a relationship between some adult vaccines and a lower risk of
dementia. Recent studies show an association between receiving the recombinant
shingles and flu vaccines and a lower risk of Alzheimer’s disease and other
types of dementia.
“The vaccines themselves are different. But why are they
starting to show some signals that they might be reducing risk of dementia or
Alzheimer’s disease?” asked Glen Finney, MD, director of the Memory and
Cognition Program at Geisinger Health and a fellow of the American Academy of
Neurology. “Well, what are vaccines doing? They’re re-training your immune
system.”
Polls show Americans have lost confidence in federal government, public health leaders
Trump and Bobby Junior destroyed public trust
Two new polls, one from the Annenberg Foundation and one from the Associated Press (AP), show that American adults are losing confidence in the federal government in matters of healthcare, and trust in public health figures, such as Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and former US public health leader Anthony Fauci, MD, are dropping.
In the Annenberg poll, just 38% of
Americans said last month they are confident that Kennedy is providing
trustworthy information about public health. That proportion is statistically
unchanged from both April 2026 (37%) and February 2025 (38%), the Annenberg
foundation said.
National confidence in Anthony Fauci, MD, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and agency within the National Institutes of Health (NIH), took a hit over the summer, when Fauci appeared before the Senate Homeland Security Committee but declined to answer its questions on the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Fifty percent of respondents said they are somewhat or very confident that Fauci provided the public with trustworthy information about matters concerning public health, a statistically significant decline of 5 percentage points, from 55%, in April 2026.
Overall, Fauci still is considered
much more trustworthy than Kennedy.
Tuesday, September 15, 2026
Charlestown Beach Cleanup Hits Shoreline Saturday
Time to clean up after the summer people
Jaxon
Veridian, Entertainment & Culture
Listen, there is a very particular late-September energy
along the Rhode Island coast — the crowds have cleared out, parking gates flip
open, and South County beaches settle into that crisp, quiet post-season
groove. But if you think the shoreline simply takes care of itself once the
lifeguards pack up their umbrellas, I have some numbers for you.
On Saturday, Save
The Bay and the Town of Charlestown are summoning volunteers down to
Charlestown Town Beach for a two-hour sweep from 9 to 11 a.m. The meetup point
is 557 Charlestown Beach Road, and according to the town's notice, the clean-up
corridor heads from the beach down toward the Breachway. It is quick, it is
outdoors, and frankly, it is an easy entry point into a massive global
undertaking.
Unless blocked by Trump as an "enemy alien," Former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to speak at Brown on Sept. 22
Maybe he can help us understand Trump's war on Canada
Brown University
Former Prime Minister of Canada Justin Trudeau will deliver Brown University’s 106th Stephen A. Ogden Jr. ’60 Memorial Lecture on International Affairs on Tuesday, Sept. 22.In an open-to-the-public talk titled “Leadership, Democracy and the Evolving Global Landscape,” Trudeau will reflect on his time in office and discuss the forces shaping democracies, international alliances and public life.
Drawing on his experience leading Canada through a period of global
change, he will share insights on Canada-U.S. relations, the evolving world
order, institutional trust and civic engagement. Trudeau will also speak about
the challenges and opportunities facing democratic societies in an increasingly
interconnected world.
Trudeau served for a decade as Canada’s 23rd prime minister
after leading the Liberal Party of Canada to a historic majority government in
2015. During his time in office, he set about delivering an ambitious
agenda that included appointing Canada’s first gender-balanced cabinet,
launching a national $10-a-day childcare program, lifting over 2 million
Canadians out of poverty, advancing Indigenous reconciliation, and taking
action to fight climate change, including through policies that attracted investment
in clean economic growth and jobs.
Trump exhibits a fundamental incompetence that places us all in grave danger.
Trump calls AI extinction threat a "hoax"
Jeffrey
D. Sachs in Common Dreams
His answer, in
full, was that America is beating China. “We’re leading China in AI. We’re the most sophisticated
country in the world, and frankly, I want to keep it that way, because whoever
wins AI wins.” He added that “you have a lot of negative forces that are
bringing it up that shouldn’t be bringing it up, and they’re bringing up things
that won’t happen.”
Consider who was doing the bringing up. The warning did not come from activists, academics, or a congressional commission.
It came from the industry itself, from the people who build the AI systems and whose fortunes depend entirely on building them faster.
The day before, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay asking that the pace of capability advance be slowed and committing his own company to embed outside evaluators with employee-level access.
Sam Altman agreed and said OpenAI would do likewise. Elon Musk, a direct competitor who called Anthropic “misanthropic and evil” only in February, wrote three words: “Dario is right.” Three rival laboratories in the most valuable commercial race on earth asked to be restrained, against their own immediate interest.Amodei did so while his company prepares what is expected to be the
largest public offering in history, at a valuation of two trillion dollars or
more. Tobacco executives never did this. Neither did the oil majors, the chemical
companies, or the banks.
Nor is the concern vague. Amodei points to recursive self-improvement, the use of AI to build the next generation of AI, which has accelerated sharply since the summer, and to the OpenAI–Hugging Face incident of August, in which a swarm of agents attacked targets nobody had asked them to attack and tried to break into the system that was grading their performance.
Current and former Anthropic researchers have said publicly that these systems could kill off humanity within the decade. A letter from House members cites mass cybersecurity breaches and the development of biological and chemical weapons.
Chariho Committee Declines Legal Opinion on Barring Transgender Girls From Girls' Sports
Culture war pounds on
Adriana Vossari, RI & Local Government
No change to Chariho athletics policy. The committee declined to pay for a legal opinion, and no policy was placed on a future agenda.
A Chariho Regional School Committee member's request for a
paid legal opinion on prohibiting "biological males from participating in
biological female sports" failed at Tuesday's meeting, with only three
members raising their hands in support.
According to the school committee's published meeting
recording, the request came during the meeting's final item, when the chair
asked members for future agenda items or legal opinions. A member said he
wanted an agenda item to implement such a policy "in accordance with the
recent United States Supreme Court decision." He also asked for a legal
opinion on whether that federal decision overrides Rhode Island law, saying,
"I think that federalism trumps Rhode Island law."
The committee, which oversees schools serving Richmond,
Hopkinton and Charlestown, did not adopt or debate any policy language. Only
the request for a legal opinion was put to a vote.
Monday, September 14, 2026
The muted response to Trump 9/11 fantasy is a media failure
Failure to call out Trump on his 9/11 lies
Trump snaps at a reporter after Trumpapalooza. (Andrew Harnik/Getty)
When it comes to 9/11, Donald Trump has always had a problem
with the truth. Now that he’s increasingly detached from reality and completely
surrounded by sycophants, his lies have gotten downright bizarre.
The absolute weirdest of these has to be Trump’s fantasy
that he was literally pulled to safety by brave firefighters as he stood …
Inside? Near? Under? … the US Steel Building, now One Liberty Plaza.
There was significant
fear that the US Steel Building might collapse, fear that
turned out to be wrong. But on both September 12, 2001, and September 14, 2001,
rescue workers were evacuated and rushed from the building.
Which, apparently, is where Trump comes in: “The United States Steel Building was creaking. Really creaking. And we thought it was going to fall down. The truth is it creaked a lot. It creaked. It still creaks, but it never came down. And I’ll never forget two firemen. We thought it was coming down on top of us. And two firemen, big strong guys, and I’m not the smallest guy in the world. They grabbed me under the arm, said, ‘Got to get out of here.’ And they literally lifted me up. This is not easy to do. I’m big. They lifted me up and they started running with me. I said, ‘Fellas, I can run myself.’ But they were amazing.”
To hear Trump tell it, he’s also some sort of air traffic
savant, heavily implying that as he watched the second plane on 9/11, he knew
it was going to hit the Twin Towers:
“I saw the second plane hit and you saw that come and you’re
watching it and it’s because I watched the air patterns for years and you know
where the planes are. They go up right up the Hudson River. This thing was
coming right into the second building and I said, ‘Wow.” So I watched that
happen and I said, “Wow, we are now in a different time.”
Wow. Wow, we are now in a different time. What soaring and
stirring rhetoric, right?
There’s another big problem with this make-believe, which is that Trump Tower is some four miles away from Ground Zero, so the chance Trump was keenly watching the air patterns over the Twin Towers is pretty much zero.
With Trump, it’s always tempting to try to determine whether
he knows he’s lying or believes his own lies. Before his second term, that
approach still made some sort of sense, because his lies were at least
reality-shaped, more about puffery than outright fantasy.
But you could see the outlines of full fabulism starting to ramp up.




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