Category: Harvard

Trip to Cambridge, Maskachusetts wrap-up (Part I)

by philg

A few photos from my April pack-up-patch-up-and-sell-the-old-condo trip to Cambridge….

JetBlue classifies The Godfather as a “comfort watch”. Nobody at JetBlue loves horses?

Note that this movie doesn’t contain the best line in the series: “‘A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns.”

A Prius drives over the sacred trans flag crosswalk (Central Square):

Compared to Palm Beach County, where apartment buildings and HOA generally ban pit bulls, seeing these loving animals (“A dog owner was hospitalized Saturday afternoon after being attacked by his own pit bull on River Street.”) is a common sight (front of Cambridge Public Library):

A few steps away, observant Muslims are forced to live in a decidedly un-Islamic society. Not only were they exposed to pet dogs (haram), but there is a shameless hussy in the background who isn’t covering her hair:

Had they wanted to sit in front of a bench by City Hall, they would have been forced to sit on the sacred trans-enhanced Rainbow Flag:

Had they gone to Harvard Book Store, they would have been assaulted by a wide variety of books on the subject of a haram lifestyle:

Had they wanted to spent a couple of weeks putting together a 1500-piece puzzle on “Women Power” they would found only a handful of hijabis (this was left in my old condo by an AirBnBer):

If they had done the “Women Power” puzzle they would have been saving our planet:

Perhaps the puzzle was made by migrants? Rust Belt cities such as Buffalo seem to be growing their economy primarily by importing people who will be entitled to taxpayer-funded housing, health care, food, and smartphone. “Know the Value of Immigrants and Refugees” (International Institute of Buffalo):

These 73,886 noble enrichers earned a total of $2.1 billion in 2025. That works out to an average per-capita personal income of $28,422 per year. According to the BEA, overall US per-capita personal income was $76,375 per year. So the majority of immigrants who live in and around Buffalo should be entitled to every form of what used to be called “welfare” (now “means-tested benefits”).

Had the above ladies, presumably migrants, wanted to enter a Harvard building and meet with one of the many virtuous people who say that no human is illegal and that the U.S. should be doing more to welcome migrants, they would have discovered the doors locked against them. According to the best minds of Harvard, the U.S. should allow any of world’s 10 billion humans (revised estimate) to come here and receive four generations of taxpayer-funded housing, health care, food, and smartphone. Requiring an ID to vote is Hate of the First Magnitude. At the same time, there are strict border walls around every Harvard building, with strict computer-enforced ID checks, and nobody can immigrate even for 15 minutes. Trying to visit a friend who teaches at Harvard Law School and also the computer science building:

Speaking of Harvard, the elite Democrats who control the institution and who say that all workers should be unionized apparently won’t pay their own union workers a fair/living wage:

According to the Crimson:

The offer, announced in an email to faculty, would raise salaried student worker compensation by 11 percent over four years — up from Harvard’s previous 10 percent proposal.

In other words, at the current rate of inflation, the workers now on strike would be paid less, in real dollars, four years from now!

That’s enough for today. I’ll post a Part 2.

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Harvard geniuses underperform the S&P 500 by 15 percent per year

by philg

“Head of Harvard’s Endowment Tells Board He Plans to Retire” (Wall Street Journal), regarding a manager paid over $6 million per year:

N.P. “Narv” Narvekar, the head of Harvard University’s nearly $57 billion endowment, recently told the endowment’s board he plans to retire, according to people familiar with the discussions. He has served nearly a decade in the post.

In the past three years, Harvard earned an annualized return of 8.1%, a rate that topped that of Ivy League rivals Yale and Princeton and which placed it in a tie for fourth among a group of 12 top schools, according to financial technology company Markov Processes International.

The Wall Street Journal doesn’t bother to ask Edward Tufte’s question, “Compared to What?” But ChatGPT can come to the rescue:

In other words, one can get paid $6 million per year for dramatic underperformance relative to the simplest imaginable investment strategy, dumping everything into the S&P 500 (a 23% annual return vs. the 8% achieved by Mr. Narvekar and subordinates). That’s a career almost as good as “receptionist in NVIDIA branch office”!

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Marijuana and book stores in Harvard Square

by philg

Happy 4/20 Day to those who celebrate. Photos from a January trip to Cambridge, Massachusetts…

The marijuana store for the 2SLGBTQQIA+ that opened in 2022 seems to have closed.

Leah also has a specific audience in mind: “Those of us who are often left out of things.” By that, within the cannabis industry, she means consumers who are older, or identify as LGBTQ, or women of any age. “That’s who I want to educate. That’s who I want to learn to believe and know that they can be a part of the cannabis community and culture too.” The programs she has in mind for the second floor at Yamba Boutique reflect that, including demonstrations and lectures that integrate cannabis with healthy lifestyles, from yoga to cooking and sex-positive practices.

For someone who has spent a lifetime trying to remove stigmas and upend stereotypes for herself and others, Yamba Boutique is a logical step. Leah began her career as a social worker, counseling teenage mothers like she and her mother before her, having gotten pregnant at 16 and 14, respectively. “I wanted to try to remove the stigma that we have as teen moms, that we are nothing and that our lives are gonna be ruined.”

Last week:

The “Marijuana for LGBTQ” store is being replaced by “Marijuana for Everyone” (don’t forget that marijuana is “essential”, which is why adults in Maskachusetts were able to go into a weed store and mingle while it was illegal for children to attend school).

For anyone who isn’t too stoned to read, there seems to be a new bookstore in the Square (note the two Rainbow Flags in the windows, a Biden-style trans-enhanced Flag and one with an innovative diagonal stripe pattern):

“No Kings; No ICE; No Fear; Immigrants are welcome here”. Looking through the window I observed at least five people in the store wearing masks. The person in the photo was my favorite. He/she/ze/they would remove the mask, sip his/her/zir/their coffee, and then put it back on repeatedly.

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Larry Summers: association with Jeffrey Epstein was a serious, but not urgent, problem

by philg

Larry Summers, veteran of the Clinton and Obama administrations, was also a bigshot at Harvard University. I wrote about the first time he got axed from a Harvard job in “Women in Science” (2006):

[Summers] claimed to be giving a comprehensive list of reasons why there weren’t more women reaching the top jobs in the sciences. Yet Summers, an economist, left one out: Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States.

Summers is in the news again… “Summers To Resign From Teaching Appointments, Relinquish University Professorship Over Epstein Ties” (Harvard Crimson):

Former Harvard President Larry Summers will resign from his academic and faculty appointments at Harvard at the end of the academic year….

Association with Jeffrey Epstein was sufficiently serious that Summers must resign, but not so urgent that the resignation can’t wait until June.

Only loosely related, since nobody cares… what exactly did Summers do with the arch criminal Epstein? ChatGPT:

newly released emails from the Jeffrey Epstein estate show that Larry Summers privately consulted Jeffrey Epstein about his pursuit of a romantic relationship with a younger woman he described in the emails as his “mentee.” In one exchange from late 2018 and early 2019, Epstein even referred to himself as Summers’s “wing man” while offering advice on how to communicate with this woman.

According to news reports about the email release, the woman in question was Keyu Jin, a well-known economist who at the time was a tenured professor at the London School of Economics and a Harvard graduate. She was in her early 40s (around 43) during the period these email exchanges took place.

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When Harvard graduates try to use numbers (Dan Koh, Massachusetts candidate for Congress)

by philg

Consider Dan Koh, a candidate for U.S. Congress in Maskachusetts, the Smart State (TM). Wokipedia says that he/she/ze/they is a Harvard graduate, has a Harvard MBA, and was a senior official in the Cognitive Excellence Administration:

In 2021, Koh was named Chief of Staff to the United States Secretary of Labor, Marty Walsh. Later, he served as Special Assistant to the President and Deputy Cabinet Secretary at the White House. He concluded his service as Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy Director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs

Here’s his/her/zir/their own tweet where he/she/ze/they attempts to do some budget arithmetic:

The first number in the tweet, “$30 billion for 10k more ICE agents”, caught my eye because it is only about one day of spending for our government (federal+state+local). The $30 billion figure turns out to be inaccurate/misleading as well. Brennan Center:

The budget also gives approximately $30 billion over four years to ICE to track down, arrest, and deport immigrants, allowing it to hire 10,000 new officers.

So it’s $7.5 billion per year, not $30 billion per year, and it covers all ICE agents, not just 10,000 new ones.

How far is $7.5 billion from covering the three items that this Harvard graduate imagines it will cover? ChatGPT to the rescue!

Prompt: On a nationwide basis, how much would it cost to – Cover all ACA subsidies for a year – End all Rx copays – Eliminate all medical debt. ?

Answer:

The Harvard MBA is off by a factor of about 30X, according to ChatGPT. The ICE funding, even if it were $30 billion per year, wouldn’t begin to cover just the first item on Koh’s list (ACA subsidies).

What’s interesting to me: (1) that this level of innumeracy isn’t a liability in American politics, and (2) that someone suffering from innumeracy to this degree wouldn’t check tweets with ChatGPT before posting. Let’s keep in mind that this person is a rising star among Democrats and is purportedly qualified to run a company (the Harvard MBA) where misunderestimating costs by 30X could lead to serious financial distress.

In case the above tweet is memory-holed:

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Getting a 20-year head start on ridiculing Larry Summers

by philg

Larry Summers is in the news lately for his association with Emmanuel Goldstein: “Larry Summers steps back from public commitments, ‘deeply ashamed’ by Epstein revelations” (Politico).

Was there anyone ridiculing him 20 years ago? Yes! See “Women in Science” from this very server:

Summers was deservedly castigated [fired from Harvard for musings regarding why there weren’t more mathematicians and physicists identifying as “women”] , but not for the right reasons. He claimed to be giving a comprehensive list of reasons why there weren’t more women reaching the top jobs in the sciences. Yet Summers, an economist, left one out: Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States. This article explores this fourth possible explanation for the dearth of women in science: They found better jobs.

Is “early ridiculer” credit a thing?

Separately, remember that Larry Summers and Claudine Gay have nothing left of their careers other than lifetime jobs and monthly paychecks that will keep flowing regardless of how senile and incompetent they become.

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The death of two Harvard undergraduates, William Cowper Boyden III and William Stanley North III

by philg

It’s the Day of the Dead for our neighbors in Mexico.

While cleaning up my mother’s possessions, I found a correspondence between my late father, apparently a friend of William Cowper Boyden III, and the young Mr. Boyden’s father. I couldn’t find much on the Web regarding the sad December 22, 1955 death of two young Harvard men, but the Crimson obliquely referred to them having been killed in a car accident:

The William Cowper Boyden III Scholarship and the William Stanley North III Scholarship, set up in memory of two College students killed while driving home for Christmas vacation, has a combined endowment of over $25,000.

I found the letters interesting because it seemed unlikely that a younger-than-average Jewish scholarship student like my dad (he skipped at least the last year of high school) would have been friends with anyone from such a well-established family, but also for the style of pre-email pre-ChatGPT correspondence. It’s also sad because so little trace is left of these two men.

19560110-bill-boyden-deathDownload
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Harvard Square: Queer Stoners for Palestine

by philg

A few photos from Harvard Square, August 2025…

Queers (“Lesbian Summer Camp”) and and “All Are Welcome” Rainbow Flag church:

A Harvard students-only dating app advertisement shows a happy couple that matched via the app:

Stoners (a healing recreational cannabis dispensary in the middle of Harvard Square):

For Palestine, a $7 million house whose fence is covered in “Genocide in Gaza” signage:

(Online property records indicate that the house is owned by two people who both have typically male first names.)

Speaking of “Free Palestine”, the riverside bike path in front of Harvard Business School:

The local high schoolers still walk past a homeless encampment and under a sacred Black Lives Matter banner to enter their temple of learning:

(Despite a death sentence, renowned graduate Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev remains alive and well and living comfortably at taxpayer expense, just as he did before bombing the Boston Marathon in 2013.)

Lots of people wear masks, indoors and out. The Staples that closed during coronapanic remains closed and the “social distancing” signs in its mini-mall are still there:

Remember that Long COVID “patients “survivors” are the real heroes:

I stopped into Harvard Bookstore to find an all-white/Asian staff and customer gathering. That’s not to say that Black Lives weren’t richly represented on the shelves, though:

What should one celebrate in a bookstore catering to an exclusively non-Black customer base? Black bookstores:

These photos were taken before Charlie Kirk got shot, but the Bookstore reminds us that if progressives don’t shoot and kill more Republicans, the still-living MAGA folks will “end democracy”:

Also, the “far right” control our elections, there is no need to follow orders from the Supreme Court (they hand out injustice, rather than justice), and the democracy that is about to be ended (or that has been ended?) was poisoned by racism:

Throughout all of this, remember that only a fool would believe that humans are divided into male and female:

When it is time to assign blame, though, it is easy to determine which humans can be classified as “men” (those who have imposed a patriarchy):

Back in Harvard Yard, the university advertises its now-free art museum (more than $50 billion accumulated so far at the “non-profit”) and shows a typical patron:

(I’ve never seen a Black visitor in this art museum.)

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New York Times and Claudine Gay

by philg

Check out the caption at the bottom of the photo in this recent New York Times article:

Claudine Gay, the former president of Harvard University, left the university only months after she started the role.

The tenured plagiarist, who can choose to collect a paycheck from Harvard every week until she is dead, even if her brain goes “full Biden”, “left the university” according to the New York Times. What does the Harvard web site say? “Claudine Gay is the Wilbur A. Cowett Professor of Government and Professor of African and African-American Studies.”

A peasant reading the article might get the false impression that there were financial consequences in Academia for elite workers who break rules or make mistakes!

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