Search Results for: Bookstore

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.”

A report on my January trip to Maskachusetts. Loyal readers have already seen this Logan Airport baggage claim photo:

I arrived at my old apartment to find that the AirBnB guests agree with the Covidcrats that marijuana is essential:

Not wanting to live on hemp protein, I went to the local market and found that prices had gone up 50 percent compared to pre-Biden times. There was a discussion about bags at the end of checkout and payment for two very heavy plastic bags (in Florida there is no discussion and purchased items are placed into thin plastic bags). If memory serves, plastic bags were banned in many Maskachusetts towns in order to protect our beloved planet. In 2023, thanks to the evolution of the Science of grocery bags, we are informed that plastic bags are actually the superior environmental tree-saving choice:

After I ate an apple from this bag and tossed it into the trash, a neighbor scolded me and said that it was illegal to throw out anything that could instead be put into the brown bin provided by the city for compost-style refuse. I was later scolded at Target for buying Dobie scrub pads (“we don’t use that much plastic”).

According to the folks who say “housing is a human right,” the weather was perfect for outdoor living:

At least that’s my best inference from their behavior of not missing a step when walking by those whose shelter from the biting cold and dreary rain/snow is minimal. Outside the gleaming office tower where I was enslaved as a software expert witness (testifying at an arbitration prior to teaching at MIT):

The handful of people who come into work in this massive tower report that traffic is actually worse than pre-coronapanic. It takes 1.5 hours to drive in from Wellesley where it formerly took 1.25 hours. The righteous are #StoppingTheSpread and #HealingTheEarth by driving in their cars rather than taking the MBTA. Here is the empty Red Line at 9:37 am on a weekday:

Pre-coronapanic, it wouldn’t have been possible to go downtown from Harvard Square because the train would already have been jammed. Prior to 10 am, it was often necessary to go outbound to Alewife, where the train starts, in order to get a seat or a standing spot for the train into Boston.

Despite riding the T and being exposed to germs, I was able to stay healthy with daily marijuana deliveries, advertised on about half of the available spaces in Boston and Cambridge:

Outdoor masking was popular, though not universal due to the deplorable lack of a Science-informed outdoor mask mandate. My favorite, of course, being the combination of heavy beard and mask to block out an aerosol virus:

My friend who moved from the Boston suburbs to Houston disparaged everything in Maskachusetts as “dilapidated”. I wonder what he would say about this ancient Saab on a street of $1-2 million houses (themselves misshapen from 120 years of settling):

The streets and sidewalks right next to the world’s richest university were in pretty rough shape (everything that we touch day to day in Florida is in near-perfect condition due to being at most 20 years old) and the overhead wires certainly don’t add to the aesthetic appeal:

MIT reopened on December 1, 2022, but they still had the signs and machinery to exclude the potentially filthy unvaccinated:

And the Science of test-and-trace was alive and well:

Surely no virus is a match for our test kits and protocols.

Once inside the restricted-for-three-years halls, I discovered an arms race in Rainbow Flagism. Once a handful of offices on a corridor sported the “you are welcome here” sticker with all of the colors of the 2SLGBTQQIA+ rainbow, presumably everyone else had to sticker up or face the “Where’s your 2SLGBTQQIA+ sticker, sister?” question.

Now that schools are reopened, at least until the next lockdown that Science requires, what are kids learning? A friend invited me to a Shabbat dinner in Newton and a Jewish high school student who lives among Jews in Brookline attended. Although Israel wasn’t a discussion topic, somehow he pointed out that it was ironic that Jews left Germany for Israel because of the Nazis and now the Jews are doing to the Arabs what the Nazis did to the Jews. (Note that, in fact, the Jewish population of Israel is not primarily descended from German Jews. Most of the Jewish families in Israel came from nearby Muslim and Arab countries, generally driven from their homes in 1948 when Israel declared independence. The second-largest group of Jews within Israel came from Russia.)

Shops and offices in Cambridge still sometimes have the Signs of Science on the front doors:

City Hall celebrates 2SLGBTQQIA+ and reminds us that Black Lives Matter. What about other social justice causes?

We found most of the employees at Harvard Bookstore (not part of Harvard University) wearing comfortable cloth masks. What do people in Boston/Cambridge want to read?

In a previous post, I covered the lightning speed unionization-to-shutdown evolution of Darwin’s. The vacant store still has its Pride insignia:

The Uber ride back to the airport went past multiple marijuana stores and outdoor maskers on the way to the terminal, where a lot of children were carefully masked (in cloth) to protect them against an aerosol virus that kills mostly obese/sick humans at a median age of 80-82. The flight to DCA was slightly delayed due to de-icing being required, but (hemp fabric) hats off to the Logan crew for high efficiency in spraying and to ATC for getting the plane from the de-ice pad to the runway threshold quickly.