Here are some photos from my recent trip to Cambridge, Newton, and Wayland. The high school where the Tsarnaev brothers took Tolerance and Diversity classes features a “Black Lives Matter” banner in 4X the font size of the sign that describes the building’s secondary purpose (“school”):
(Where is their rainbow flag? And why not a banner to celebrate immigrants, who are roughly 27 percent of the city’s population?)
Traffic delays slowed all of my excursions around the Boston suburbs. The eight-lane I-95 ring highway was jammed at midday on Saturday. The main road that goes to Wayland would be four or six lanes in Florida, plus dedicated left and right turn lanes at intersections, but in Maskachusetts it is only two lanes and a single car wanting to turn left can create a mile-long backup. Fortunately, there are plenty of opportunities to learn and improve when stopped at a light:
(The locals nearly all profess faith in population growth via mass low-skill immigration. Yet the transportation infrastructure of Boston plainly cannot support even the current population. The road network is jammed and the locals who eagerly cowered in place are unwilling to ride public transit due to COVID risk.)
The weather featured highs in the 30s, cloudy skies, and light rain or snow flurries, so it was perfect for ducking into the Harvard Bookstore to see what the nation’s smartest people are reading. Just a few steps from the front door, I learned a new vocabulary word: Filipinx. (Unclear why this title makes sense for a cookbook. It is not humans in a rainbow of gender IDs who are being cooked, I hope!)
Bernie and Cancel Culture got pride of place:
We know all about Bernie, I hope, but who is Ernest Owens, the promoter of cancel culture? The author’s bio at Amazon:
Ernest Owens (he/him) is an award-winning journalist and CEO of Ernest Media Empire, LLC. He is the Editor at Large for Philadelphia Magazine and President of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists. He hosts the hit podcast “Ernestly Speaking!” As an openly Black gay journalist, he has made headlines for speaking frankly about intersectional issues in society regarding race, LGBTQ, and pop culture.
What if you were one of the engineers who toiled mightily on Xerox’s amazing print-shop-in-a-box machine? You’ve been canceled, as of spring 2022:
The bookstore keeps the Spirit of Fauci alive with this “please wear a cloth mask against an aerosol virus” sign:
Only about 20 percent of the people inside the store were complying with this request from Science. Although 0 percent of the customers appeared to identify as Black, the store has an ample supply of books on Blackness and at least one title on how to be white:
If you love empathy and Scientific management of the U.S. economy, this book about Janet Yellen is for you:
Ms. Yellen is certainly delivering on the promise to “spread prosperity to all” in that most Americans are on track to become millionaires. (Bad news: $1 million will also be the price of a used Honda Accord.) Who will keep ChatGPT from taking over before inflation has had enough time to deliver universal millionaire-hood? Harvard, of course! The AI Safety Team lives on Church St.:
How about the new higher minimum wage? Shake Shack in Harvard Square has responded by eliminating the order-taker jobs. You order and pay at a touchscreen. How’s the labor quality now that higher wages are being paid? Some of my fries were still frozen.
We went back the next night to the Harvard Coop. They’re heavily invested in the idea that some books are “banned” in states other than Maskachusetts.
Returning to Harvard Bookstore, we found that these are referred to as “challenged” rather than “banned” books:
In conversations with white native-born progressives, none seem to have adapted to the fact that 85 million Americans are either immigrants or children of immigrants. The dominant conflict between groups in the U.S. is white vs. Black and if this conflict can be solved, e.g., via reparations or Black Lives Matter banners, Americans will all live together in harmony. They can’t understand why recent immigrants from India, China, or Honduras don’t share their enthusiasm for Black Lives Matter, allocating places in colleges or in jobs to those who identify as Black, etc. At a dinner event where most of the guests were either from India or were children of Indian immigrants, the current American race-based system was decried. “We’re ‘brown’ if we try to get into country clubs,” one professor said, “but we’re considered ‘off-white’ when we apply for jobs or to college.”
😂😂. These trip reports are THE BEST. The first one in awhile though with no rainbow flag? Not even on the back of the Prius!! 🤣
Thanks, Paul. The sacred symbol of Rainbow Flagism, however, is present in at least one of the photos… as part of a book cover! A forthcoming post on the magic of Harvard Yard will include an official rainbow flag sign.
BLM is rolling in the dough — $82 bill collected courtesy of corporate America.
https://dc.claremont.org/blm-funding-database/
Check it out and see what your favorite corporation gave to BLM. If you were a shareholder that was your money folks.
JDC: I thought you’d made a typo and BLM had gotten $82 MILLION, but I see from that link that they’re now up to nearly $83 BILLION just as you said. That is beyond my wildest imagination. We should be drowning in racial justice!
I’m as annoyed by the BLM hype as anyone, but this website uses misleading information. For example, they count 3M’s pledge of $50 million for “addressing racial opportunity gaps through workforce development initiatives” as a “BLM and related causes” donation.
https://news.3m.com/3M-to-invest-50-million-over-5-years-to-address-racial-opportunity-gaps
First of all, this is only a virtue signaling pledge, secondly, it is not BLM and only a very vaguely related cause.
I think BLM itself has about $50 million in total, some of which went into real estate for leaders. This database counts all corporate diversity initiatives and pledges.
Anon: I think a skin-color-based hiring/training program can quality as BLM!
Only $82 billion?! I guess we can say for sure now that Ukrainian lives matter more than black lives, since we’ve spent so much more on them. Hence the reason the banner must stay.
I still don’t care about Black Lives Matter!
I noticed the stickers on the car are very old: “Want to Save a Trillion Dollars? End the Wars.”
Most of the Righteous now support war with Russia. If you ever get a chance to talk to the driver of one of these vehicles, definitely ask them for their opinion on Ukraine.
Steve: That’s a good point about the sticker not aging well. For one thing, the war on SARS-CoV-2 cost the U.S. $20 trillion, not $1 trillion. And, as you observe, war is now something to continue indefinitely and without petty haggling over the price.
I just posted this on the woke SVB post, but since thats old, the idea is also perhaps applicable to Yellen re: “empathy and Scientific management of the U.S. economy, this book about Janet Yellen is for you:”
https://twitter.com/amasad/status/1635555581980479488
” Republicans are wrong to blame bank collapse on “wokeness”. SVB was not incompetent because they’re woke — instead they use wokeness to cover their incompetence, laziness, and malpractice. It’s an easy moral shield.”
RE: Don’t forget the wokeness on the regulatory side. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_C._Daly was in charge of supervising Silicon Valley Bank. “Daly is the first openly gay woman to lead a regional Federal Reserve bank, joining Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta President Raphael Bostic, who is also openly gay. She is the second woman to lead the San Francisco Fed.” She was great at having a first-class identity, but apparently not so great at noticing the impending failure of a $200 billion bank her organization was supervising.
If books are banned, how does a rebel import, e.g., “White Fragility” or “Gender Queer” into Florida? Are there border checkpoints where DeSantis personally searches for contraband?
Does Amazon prohibit the sale of “White Fragility” in Florida?
Perhaps the Harvard Coop could hand out a leaflet that details how to deal with the repression in practice.
I can vouch for the authenticity of the photo of the Prius in the left lane, driven by an SJWBLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ, BS, MS, PhD. I’ve driven through that exact location. The Prius in front of me was blue, though, and similarly festooned.
And ditto on the I-95 ring traffic observation. It gets MUCH worse during the morning and evening rush. If you’re on the Mass Pike headed toward I-95, once you reach Framingham and Natick everything becomes a crawl, including I-95 thereafter. Then you get onto the side streets and it’s a clogged septic leach field. In a lot of these towns, it will be IMPOSSIBLE to remove the bottlenecks and choke points.
So keep piling them on!
@philg: >Only about 20 percent of the people inside the store were complying with this request from Science.
Here’s a video from Ars Technica today (accompanying a pretty neat article about a serious 80’s computer nerd):
How to Deal with #Science Deniers:
https://arstechnica.com/video/watch/how-scientists-respond-to-science-deniers
Which was at the top right of this page, which is Cool, but verging on TMI:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/03/apple-atari-and-commodore-oh-my-explore-a-deluxe-home-vintage-computer-den/
The owner of the article’s subject matter apparently still runs a dial-up BBS!