Category: Massachusetts

The righteous of Lincoln, Maskachusetts can take credit for the calm atmosphere in Minneapolis

by philg

Never say that the elite Democrats of our former Boston suburb fail to do anything concrete or significant to advance the causes that they advocate, e.g., slow down climate change, which they post signs about, by moving to a 2BR apartment after the kids are grown up rather than staying and heating a 6,000-square-foot house with obsolete insulation.

Here’s a mailing list message from January 25, 2026, a day after Alex Pretti was tragically gunned down by DHS thugs before he could draw and use the 9mm pistol and 52 rounds of ammunition that he was carrying (see The genius of Johnny Cash and the death of a progressive in Minneapolis):

Following our recent vigil in front of town offices, Lincoln Witness would like to continue to light a path forward. We invite everyone who wishes to honor Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and others who have died at the hands of ICE, to set two candles in their windows. These candles symbolize sparks of hope, cries of lament, and messages of solidarity for the people in Minneapolis who are out in sub-zero temperatures trying to shine a light for a brighter future. We encourage you to join us.

(The message may be inaccurate in that Alex Pretti was reportedly killed by Border Patrol agents, not ICE.)

If it is calm in Minneapolis today we can only presume that either decision-makers in DC or the ICE/CBP thugs in Minneapolis somehow drove through Lincoln, Massachusetts and saw the two candles in every window. #DoingTheWork

Here’s the web site for the group, based in a town where migrants who can afford a 2-acre lot ($1+ million) to meet the zoning minimum are welcome:

The righteous blame “politicians” rather than “Deplorables”:

Politicians have used immigration as a wedge issue that divides Americans.

If not for being misled by politicians, the working class would see that open borders keep their wages high and their apartment rents low.

Also from the town mailing list, regarding KBED:

Library talk Sunday Concord re: Hanscom expansion/author Chuck Collins– Burned by Billionaires

In Conversation with Chuck Collins about Burned by Billionaires
Sunday, February 22 2:00—4:00 PM
Goodwin Forum Main Library 129 Main Street, Concord, MA, 01742
Join us In Conversation with Chuck Collins about how billionaires are burning up the planet and undermining democracy & how this informs our fight to stop the proposed private jet expansion at Hanscom or Anywhere (Hanscom is mentioned on pages 68-70). Interview by Diane Proctor, President of League of Women Voters Concord-Carlisle. Q&A to follow the interview.

(The typical recipient of this message, as noted above, is heating a massive suburban house all through the Maskachusetts winter, usually 2,000+ square feet per person, and driving a pavement-melting SUV for every errand (since the town isn’t walkable and the weather is seldom conducive to biking, which is also unsafe due to narrow roads and no bike lanes).)

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New Floridian goes back to Maskachusetts (also: catching up with NPR)

by philg

A friend moved to Florida in the middle of 2025. He went back in February 2026 to deal with issues around selling his old house in the Boston suburbs. Some of his messages to a group chat:

After Florida this is indeed f***ing torture

I spent the entire morning doing useless shit that is neither fun nor contributes to my future well being. Shoveling snow, salting.

Even though I pay hundreds of dollars a month to an entitled lazy idiot gardener who doesn’t do anything unless you tell him repeatedly.

The house was empty yet my heat bill was $1500.

In Florida that will be the electric bill for a 20k sq ft house with another 15k sq ft of usable outdoor living space

I forgot a snow brush

Now I will have to scrape snow off my car after a [gym workout], all sweaty and freezing

Took me an hour to get to my house from the airport on Friday [about 20 highway miles]

But it is good because I can spend this time listening to NPR

He included a photo:

A little later in the chat group, from a participant who lives in a South Shore suburb of Boston:

How can anyone commute to work? It’s an hour and 20 minutes going to Cambridge now [27-mile trip, mostly highway]. I guess people don’t work from home anymore?

[me] They stopped taking the T. So even though fewer are working the traffic is as bad or worse. ChatGPT: [the MBTA has] about ~64% of pre-pandemic ridership

Speaking of NPR, we had a dealer loaner while our Honda Odyssey was being serviced (some more battery trauma, this time with a 4-month-old Duracell AGM; I paid $308 for a Honda OEM part instead of trying to get another short-lived Duracell under warranty). I didn’t want to go to the trouble of getting Apple CarPlay organized so instead of my usual Audible book I listened to Treasure Coast NPR. When I tuned in they were talking about the real victims of the Gazans’ October 7, 2023 attack into Israel: American Muslims. Islamophobia in the U.S. reached crisis proportions after October 7 and then became an emergency crisis emergency when Donald Trump was elected by the haters. This piece was followed by a story about Black-white interracial marriage 60-150 years ago in the U.S. In a country that has been transformed by Latinx and Asian immigration, thus enabling the entire economy to do without Black workers (see Replacement of Black workers by migrants in Cambridge, Massachusetts), NPR remains stuck on the idea that Black-white relations are the defining issue of our time.

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Unable to move off the Gaza Genocide in Cambridge

by philg

Back in September, I showed a $7 million house in Cambridge, Maskachusetts owned by two guys that was festooned in “Gaza Genocide” messaging. See Harvard Square: Queer Stoners for Palestine.

How did it look more recently, three months after the latest round of fighting between the Gazans and Israelis was settled, signed by the elected representatives of the Gazans (the Islamic Resistance Movement, or “Hamas”) and of the Israelis? Might the owners have, for example, moved on to the battles between progressives and ICE in Minneapolis or to the outrage of Donald Trump taking over Greenland? Apparently not:

How could they ignore the killing of Renée Good? Is it because at the current level of immigration an American who gets killed is replaced within 30 seconds by a legal immigrant? (Renée Good would have been replaced within 10 seconds by a migrant during the Biden-Harris administration.)

Finally, why does their sign read “Israel Kills in Palestina”? I don’t think that’s how the river-to-the-sea nation that some Arabs hope to establish is pronounced in Arabic. The owners are “SEIDMAN, JEROME & STEVEN B. BLOOMFIELD” according to the city property database. These don’t sound like native Spanish speakers who might say “Palestina”.

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Progressive v. Progressive in Cambridge, Maskachusetts

by philg

A tale of a political fight in a place without any viewpoint diversity…

While visiting Cambridge, Massachusetts I spent a bit of time with my Harvard Square condo neighbor. In five minutes I learned more about the crimes of Donald Trump than I had in five years talking to Floridians, both Democrat and Republican. More interestingly, she told me about a rift that had opened between her and some like-minded progressive Democrats across the street. They’d all been on the street for over 30 years and now the friendship among these righteous white senior citizens was over.

It seems that two gentlemen would park alongside a fire hydrant across the street from our small condo building and spend a couple of hours smoking “essential” marijuana. They’d laugh and my neighbor would chat with them from time to time. This went on nearly every day for a few weeks. In discussing these happy cannabis consumers, my neighbor referred to them as “Black”, not out of animosity toward noble Black Americans, but simply to provide a description. The progressives across the street called her a “racist” and an argument over virtue scraps ensued from which the 30-year friendship hasn’t recovered.

Here’s what it looks like when you walk out the door of a $1,000/sf apartment… 34 degrees, gray skies (all day), light snow, filthy worn signs, overhead power lines (considered a hideous blight in Florida and unsuitable for a neighborhood occupied by people of means):

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Replacement of Black workers by migrants in Cambridge, Massachusetts

by philg

From 2010: unemployed = 21st century draft horse?

From 2014: Revisiting the 21st Century Draft Horse posting

The above posts start with a quote from economist Gregory Clark’s fantastic book about the Industrial Revolution:

“there was a type of employee at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution whose job and livelihood largely vanished in the early twentieth century. This was the horse. The population of working horses actually peaked in England long after the Industrial Revolution, in 1901, when 3.25 million were at work. Though they had been replaced by rail for long-distance haulage and by steam engines for driving machinery, they still plowed fields, hauled wagons and carriages short distances, pulled boats on the canals, toiled in the pits, and carried armies into battle. But the arrival of the internal combustion engine in the late nineteenth century rapidly displaced these workers, so that by 1924 there were fewer than two million. There was always a wage at which all these horses could have remained employed. But that wage was so low that it did not pay for their feed.” (page 286)

I thought of this on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day 2026 in Cambridge, Maskachusetts. My goal was to get photos of elite whites enjoying their fully paid day off from government, university, nonprofit, and Big Tech jobs and juxtapose those with Blacks forced to work. (See Juneteenth: a day off for white members of the laptop class and government workers)

It turned out to be almost impossible to find Black people at work on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day or on any other day in Cambridge. In any business that was independently owned or a franchise, all of the workers were either native-born American whites or migrants from Latin American and Islamic countries. All of my Uber drivers were immigrants. As far as I could tell from a full week of wandering around, the only enterprises that hired Black Americans in customer-facing roles were the largest companies, e.g., Whole Foods and Target. This was in stark contrast to my experience in the same as an MIT undergraduate (Class of 1982). The only immigrants I can remember meeting then were part of a Greek family that ran a restaurant in Central Square, Zorba’s, and returned to Greece on retirement. Native-born Black people often held service jobs of various types, e.g., cashiers in stores.

Here are a few Black workers that I encountered in Central Square:

My Uber drivers were Mohammad, Ayoub, Furkan, Rohit, etc.; never a native-born person of any race. The Silicon Valley righteous behind Uber have decided that “Mohammad” is a nonbinary name (pronoun “they”):

All of this is consistent with “Effects of Immigration on African-American Employment and Incarceration” (2007 paper by some Harvard economists), but I hadn’t fully absorbed the transformative impact of the post-1965 immigration boom on Black Americans prior to last week. The Central Square McDonald’s still had quite a few Black customers, but everyone employed there was Latinx. Most of the Dunkin’ Donuts seemed to have all-Latinx employees. The exception was one with all-Islamic staff:

I’m not sure how to square the above anecdotes and photos with nationwide statistics. The labor force participation rate for Black Americans has fallen since 2000, but not any faster than for whites:

I guess we could infer that Black Americans in Cambridge are working in high-paid office jobs that aren’t customer-facing. But the customer-facing jobs in Harvard Square paid enough to attract reasonably well-educated whites. Maybe Black Americans moved out of Cambridge as they have have moved out of New York City? NYT:

Citywide, white residents now make up about 31 percent of the population, according to census data, Hispanic residents 28 percent and Asian residents nearly 16 percent. While the white population has stayed about the same, the Asian population grew by 34 percent and Hispanic population grew by 7 percent, according to the data.

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Climate Anxiety therapy canceled due to Climate Emergency

by philg

A four-hour mental health session for climate anxiety caused by the climate emergency was scheduled for today at MIT:

The emergency.mit.edu web site, yesterday afternoon:

I.e., the folks who needed four hours of therapy because of their anxiety caused by the ongoing climate emergency suffered the cancelation of their therapy due to the climate emergency that had caused their anxiety in the first place. #irony?

I rescheduled my JetBlue flight from yesterday afternoon to Saturday night. Here’s our front yard yesterday as the snow was ramping up throughout Maskachusetts:

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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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Massachusetts Immigration Update

by philg

Recent group chat from a friend in Maskachusetts who is selling his house in the rich NW suburbs:

  • another open house today – mostly Asians and Indians on indoor camera, as I predicted. MA burbs will go that way really fast. It’s a critical mass kind of thing

Later messages from a friend in a South Shore suburb of Boston:

  • Walmart had Columbian woman deliver to my house. I went to Walmart and two employees I tried to talk to could not speak English
  • Basically all of the cashiers at Hanover Market Basket are 4′ tall women from South America.

From the same chat group, regarding OpenAI’s text-to-video generator:

  • I asked Sora to make a video of a mugger. Every single time, it made the mugger white. I asked Sora to make a video of a happy family. Every single time, it showed a black man in a relationship with a white woman. According to ChatGPT: Black people make up 60% of robbery/mugging convictions. Black man/white woman marriages make up 1.3% of marriages.
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Hand signals for Cybertruck in Maskachusetts

by philg

From a friend in Maskachusetts who owns a stainless steel monstrosity:

[college-age son] got middle finger in truck yesterday going through Boston tunnel, and today in Hanover. He has been doing Nazi salute back.

Meanwhile, at a strip mall here in Florida, an illustration of the size range of vehicles that Americans typically use to transport a single human:

Finally, my friend provided an update on Tesla’s full self-driving:

I use FSD more and more. [wife] wants me to pay for it for both cars. Thinks it makes [son] a safer driver.

(He has an old Tesla 3 and a new Cybertruck.)

If you thought that the Cybertruck wasn’t wide enough… (photo from a nearby neighborhood here in Jupiter, Florida)

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Replacement theory is false: Maskachusetts public schools edition

by philg

Boston Globe:

Massachusetts public school enrollment has long been stagnant, with international arrivals balancing out a low birth rate and high numbers of residents moving out of state.

Who benefits when public schools are jammed with undocumented migrants?

The drop in the number of students means less funding for the districts. State aid formulas provide every district with at least $150 per student, but some districts receive more than $17,000 per child on average because they serve a high number of children who require additional resources for being low-income and English learners, and do not have as much local revenue. Any cost savings from the reduced number of students tends to be far less than the amount of lost funding for those districts.

(i.e., the government workers are able to turn a profit on the migrants)

My question to ChatGPT:

Here’s a Boston Globe article that says “Massachusetts public school enrollment has long been stagnant, with international arrivals balancing out a low birth rate and high numbers of residents moving out of state.” Is this an example of native-born Americans being replaced by immigrants? https://archive.is/zbSbM

Answer:

That’s a thoughtful question. The short answer is: no, the Boston Globe article’s statement alone does not support the claim that native-born Americans are being “replaced” by immigrants. But it does reflect important demographic dynamics worth unpacking. Let’s go through what the article says, what it doesn’t, and how to interpret it.

What about Grok?

No, the quote from the Boston Globe article does not describe an example of native-born Americans being “replaced” by immigrants. Instead, it highlights a demographic balancing act in Massachusetts public school enrollment

The Great Replacement conspiracy theory remains #Scientifically proven false.

Related, a DHS.gov story about a 13-year-old detained after school:

On October 9, 2025, the Everett[, MA] Police Department arrested a 13-year-old alien from Brazil on dangerous weapons charges for allegedly possessing a firearm and a 5-7-inch knife.

The teen is mentioned 11 prior police complaints filed by Everett PD for a laundry list of criminal behavior, including ‘flash mob’ style shoplifting, consuming alcohol underage, breaking and entering, vandalism, theft, fighting and more.

The same student is featured as mostly peaceful by CNN… “Her 13-year-old son was arrested, then taken by ICE to a detention facility”:

“They didn’t give me any information,” said [Josiele] Berto[, speaking in Portuguese], who is from Brazil and along with her family have had a pending asylum application since arriving in the United States in 2021. “I asked where [Arthur Berto] was being taken, and they said they weren’t allowed to say.”

Everett Mayor Carlo DeMaria said in a news conference a teenage boy – whom he declined to name because he is a juvenile – was arrested last week after Everett Police received a “credible tip” accusing him of making “a violent threat against another boy within our public school.”

Here’s the mischievous tyke who won’t be attending Maskachusetts public schools at least for the next few days:

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