Category: Massachusetts

Boston Museum of Fine Arts Trip Report

by philg

A friend and I visited the Boston Museum of Fine Arts on April 12, 2025. Our experience started in the coffee shop where we were urged to wash bananas before eating even though no sink was provided for visitors. We were also reminded that “the Black male body … has been … criminalized” (this will be Karmelo Anthony’s defense against his wrongful prosecution for murdering Austin Metcalf?):

How about this task for our future AI overlords: custom stained glass for every house? Here’s what rich people were able to get from Tiffany and John La Farge back in the Gilded Age:

Optimus isn’t ready yet to fabricate the glass, but we can check in with ChatGPT’s response to “Please design me a stained glass window that depicts a happy golden retriever chasing a squirrel with palm trees and orchids in the background”:

(People keep saying that AI will be deflationary, but that makes sense to me only if human wants are finite. If I can get AI to design and install a custom wrap for our car every 6-12 months at a reasonable cost then I would pay for that whereas right now it is mostly businesses with a commercial imperative that will pay for wraps.)

At a van Gogh exhibit, we learned about teenage rebellion in the bad old days: put on a suit and go to work.

The French family that van Gogh painted literally went extinct (though only a conspiracy theorist would say that they’ve been replaced by migrants):

Visitors and staff had both voluntarily entered the crowded museum in reliance on inexpensive face masks as protection from aerosol viruses:

Children learn about art, and the importance of voluntarily entering crowded indoor environments while wearing a mask, from a docent:

The museum posts the idea that the ideal life for a woman is to have “autonomy”, defined by “with no kids or husbands”, so that they can “explore their identities”:

The museum had organized an exhibition by a Black artist who was an expert on Blackness and social justice. Wikipedia says that he married a white woman and then the two of them moved to Black-free Mexico. It would have been interesting to discuss this body of work with Black visitors to the Museum of Fine Arts, but I didn’t see any during my three hours there.

I posted the following on Facebook with a prefix of “Team of Harvard PhDs labels two bathrooms:”

(A loyal reader here and on Facebook pointed out that the discourse on restrooms and gender should properly be posted in multiple languages and also Braille. Given the recent influx of migrants to Maskachusetts, why not versions in Arabic, Haitian Creole, and Spanish?)

A Trump-hating, Musk-hating, Hamas-loving MIT PhD read the “Team of Harvard PhDs” prefix literally:

I don’t see any evidence of Harvard or Ph.D.’s being involved. Is it safe to assume that you are just making that up, or do you actually have information related to that? (For non-Bostonians, it’s worth noting that Phil is having his hissy fit at the MFA, which is not affiliated with Harvard… and is not even particularly close to Harvard)

A Manhattan-based immigration/asylum profiteer responded

Who cares.

to which I followed up with

who cares? How about the intellectual elites who wrote the epic-length sign depicted above? … like Jeffrey Epstein, that sign didn’t hang itself. And I don’t think it wrote itself either!

(The idea is that people who follow Joe Biden’s example and fly the trans-enhanced Rainbow Flag don’t actually care about Rainbow Flagism?)

Over lunch, my Boston-based friend (highly educated and paid) said that all of the young people in Gaza should be entitled to move to and live forever in the U.S. When I asked why those who attacked Israel get priority over poor, sick, disabled, and elderly folks in the poorest African countries, she said that they too should be able to move to the U.S. In fact, “I don’t think countries or borders should exist.”

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Rich People in Massachusetts live like Poor People in Florida

by philg

I woke up in my friend’s $2.5 million house in Brookline, Maskachusetts in which the warmest room was 60 degrees (April 11) and stepped out into the slightly-above-freezing overcast weather to see powerlines and a 32-year-old Volvo (note the cheap chain-link fence in the background, which would never be able to get HOA approval in Florida!).

My epiphany for the day: rich people in Massachusetts share many lifestyle aspects with poor people in Florida. A partial list:

  • live in dilapidated substandard old poorly-insulated housing
  • drive cars more than five years old
  • sit on old worn-out furniture
  • probably don’t have cleaners
  • can’t afford to get repairs made to their houses (high costs relative to income)
  • no HOA to answer to
  • suffer from climate-induced discomfort due to (a) unwillingness or inability to pay for heating to 72 in the winter, (b) an entire lack of AC or unwillingness or inability to pay for cooling down to 74 in the summer
  • regular power interruptions due to above-ground powerlines
  • walking distance to marijuana store (medical-only in Florida, typically in grungy neighborhoods)
  • shop in a CVS or Target where everyday items are locked up and security guards roam the store
  • likely to vote Democrat
  • wait on lines

Note that poor people in Massachusetts often, at least in some ways, live more like rich people in Florida:

  • enjoy modern well-insulated buildings (built or gut-rehabbed recently with taxpayer money)
  • heat and cool to comfortable temps all year (heat included in the free rent and A/C affordable due to compact apartment size and good insulation (also, a lot of stuff is affordable when one doesn’t pay rent))
  • reliable underground power
  • perfect condition plumbing, electricity, and HVAC (public housing is professionally maintained and there is no cost for services)

Here’s a CVS nestled among the $2-4 million houses:

Even the $2.89 Suave shampoo is too precious to be left in the open.

A mini-Target next to Boston University ($100,000/year):

The streetscape:

Within a few steps of my friend’s expensive house, a marijuana store and ads for marijuana delivery:

After the kids have learned about the importance of marijuana, they can do a longer walk to the TimeOut Market and learn that Spring is Queer and also one should wear a mask while ordering:

Wait on lines? Here are the self-described smartest people in the U.S. waiting 1.5-2 hours because they apparently can’t figure out how to brew coffee at home:

How about the “Vote Democrat” part? On a $3 million house around the corner:

And my last photos from Boston, an outdoor masker riding a bicycle, an airport masker of uncertainty gender ID, and the airport shop reminding 60-year-old married females (a group with an unfortunate tendency to vote Republican) that they can have great sex (“romance”) by suing their husbands and becoming divorced females (reliable voters for Democrats; see also Valentine’s Day Post #3 for the sexual adventures available to AARP members with the courage to sue):

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A walk to the bookstore in Brookline, Massachusetts

by philg

Happy Independent Bookstore Day to those who celebrate. A follow-up to Why does every “independent” bookstore have the same political point of view?…

I posted the following images on Facebook with no words other than “A walk to the bookstore in Brookline, Massachusetts..” (neglected to include a third period for the ellipsis)

The results were far more dramatic than I had expected. Let’s look at only the comments on a single photo:

Don Hopkins, a software engineer old enough to have worked at Sun Microsystems, kicked off the thread:

(I don’t know anything about Lulu DeParis. I think that she lives in Maskachusetts, but this may not be her real name. And, in fact, I don’t know with any certainty that Lulu DeParis is a she, other than the inference from the name “LuLu”.)

The thread continued despite nobody having any idea why “LuLu” had reacted to the photo (maybe it was a mistake?).

The software expert says “obviously she wanted…”:

I unwisely offer an explanation of why pictures relating to Rainbow Flagism are interested (“Never complain, never explain”, said the pre-Islamic British, and how right they were!):

Don Hopkins then trots out a hero/heroine of transgenderism from the world of nerds. Seth Gordon, a Maskachusetts-based software engineer (his/her/zir/their profile says “Studied Women’s Studies Minor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)”), chimes in with the assumption that the residents of Maskachusetts are, indeed, as intelligent as they claim to be:

I point out that folks in MA set up COVID-tagged death rate as the measure of a group’s intelligence and, by that metric, the residents of MA are not intelligent. The reference to a transistor nerd, of any gender ID, gives me an opening to cite William Shockley:

Don Hopkins doesn’t seem to read the “Classically” part of my statement as referring to the dark past and also “a person” as applying to 100 percent of those who are gender-confused:

Don produces some pictures from the late 1970s when VLSI design rules were fat (3000 nm (“3 microns”) vs. 3 nm today) and electrical engineers were thin:

Mark Day, MIT PhD, pronouns on his LinkedIn profile, chimes in to note that I am “wildly prejudiced”. Don Hopkins pulls in David Levitt, last seen here in Did Albert Einstein ever say anything about empathy? and notes that I am “a hateful bully”:

What is the opposite of being a “hateful bully”? Going back to all of someone’s recent Facebook posts and asking “do you hate gay people as much as you hate trans people? Why or why not?”:

He posted the same question as a comment on this post, which is literally about the weather:

(My response: “I certainly hate whoever was responsible for the steady rain and high-30s temps that afflicted me during my April visit to Boston!”)

I’m sure that Don Hopkins’s opinions of me are substantially correct, but I do find it interesting that pictures, without comment, of the righteous lifestyle are so upsetting to the righteous. You’d think that they’d be proud of their Rainbow-/mask-enhanced streetscapes.

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Lunch with an aircraft mechanic in a rich Boston suburb

by philg

I invited an aircraft mechanic friend to meet me in Lincoln, Maskachusetts, a center of righteousness, for lunch. We sat at the bar so that he could watch the end of the F1 race in Bahrain. Towards the end of the experience, he said “I really like our waitress. If you brought her home and found out that she had a penis would you run away or just say, ‘Well, it’s 2025’?”

Loosely related, while walking around the Allston-Brighton area of Boston after dinners, I learned that even in a one-party state, people can disagree. Should there be a class war first or does the war against Israel take priority? Bostonians do seem to agree on the need to stock up on marijuana, and backup marijuana, before going to war:

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Progressive town in Maskachusetts admits being 60 years late to the feminist party

by philg

Happy International Women’s Day to those who celebrate.

A January 7, 2025 post from the suburb of Boston where we used to live:

History was made today in Lincoln. Town Clerk Valerie Fox swore in Sergeant Jennifer McNaught as the newest member of the department. Sgt. McNaught becomes the first woman supervisor in the department’s history.

More than 60 years after second wave feminism made it through the United States, the righteous progressive town finally appoints a female to a position of responsibility. Why admit being this late to the feminism party? (Also, if the town has been working for years on Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, & Anti-Racism (“IDEA”, not the discredited “DEI”) why are both of the employees in the photo white? They wanted to hire some non-white people, but couldn’t find anyone qualified?)

Massachusetts progressives love to talk about how stupid, racist, and sexist folks in Alabama are, for example, yet Birmingham, Alabama appointed Annetta Nunn captain in 1995 (CBS) and police chief for the whole city in 2003. If we assume the “captain” job in Alabama is comparable to the “supervisor” job in Maskachusetts, it took the progressives of Lincoln, MA 30 years to catch up to the people whom they enjoy characterizing as primitive and prejudiced.

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Melrose High School Class of 1951

by philg

I found my mom’s Melrose High School Class of 1951 25th reunion newsletter and scanned it. The high school today is ranked #1,568 in the nation (among public high schools) and #60 in Maskachusetts.

My favorite excerpt from what is presumably a 1976 document is “then I became a baby factory putting out a new model almost every year”:

It looks like nearly everyone who wanted to go to what are today considered elite colleges managed to get in. The former high schoolers talk about graduating from University of California, Cornell, Colby, Bates, Boston University, Tufts, University of Michigan, Harvard, Caltech, MIT, Dartmouth, Amherst, etc.

Here’s something interesting… the document is so old that a white male could be hired as head of what we now call “HR”:

(Boston University today rejects 9 out of 10 applicants.)

Here’s a guy who went from Colgate University (rejects 7 out of 8 applicants today; cost to attend approximately $360,000) to selling fish. The daughter went to Bates, which is today similarly selective to Colgate.

Dartmouth today rejects 15 out of 16 applicants, but plenty of Melrose High ’51 grads got in:

Here’s a guy who seems to have gotten married just as he was graduating from Tufts (rejects 9 out of 10 applicants) and the wife of 20 years had to follow him first to Michigan and then to North Dakota:

The graduates who were most passionate about dogs had the fewest children:

Here’s a guy who achieved what today would be a moonshot:

My mother’s first cousin Ruben Gittes, another moonshot achiever by today’s standards:

She moved to Orlando and loved it:

My take-aways… people were generally married within 4 years of finishing high school. The divorce rate among this high school class was about 10 percent. These folks were born in the 1930s so they didn’t quite make it into this chart (from “Human Reproduction as Prisoner’s Dilemma”), but it looks as though we’d expect roughly 90 percent to be married at a 25th high school reunion:

A brilliant-by-today’s-standards career was apparently achievable for the Melrose ’51 cohort simply by showing up. Not only did these graduates have no immigrants to compete with, but the pay-to-cost-of-living ratio was sufficiently high that a lot of smart well-educated women withdrew from the labor force, thus leaving the field open to others. Example:

Nobody reports having joined the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community. The editor’s introduction does not mention anyone having changed names except for female graduates (a defined term back then) who got married: “We have tried to make an accounting of the entire class. People are arranged alphabetically (girls by maiden name).”

How about my mom’s report?

Zillow still shows the crummy 1953 Cape Cod house in which we grew up (address above) and lists the mansion’s 1,603 square feet of space (we also used the basement, though, and a screen porch that was glassed in and maybe isn’t included). However, it was bulldozed within hours of being sold in 2012 and the Indian immigrants who purchased it built a McMansion in its place.

What were prices like back then? I scanned mom’s 1951 cross-country family trip album. A Chinese dinner for four in San Francisco was $11:

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Maskachusetts Democrats want social justice, but not for their children

by philg

“The parents who dared to question Newton’s educational equity experiments” (Boston Globe):

The three mothers had always voted Democrat. One had a Bernie Sanders mug on her desk. They worked in helping fields — international aid, mental health, yoga instruction. They volunteered at their children’s schools. They fit right in to suburban Newton, with its liberal leanings and vaunted public education.

(Note that may be “vaunted” simply due to high test scores and the magic of heritability; the children of parents who scored well on tests tend to score well on tests.)

It turns out there’s trouble in River City:

“At first we were just trying to understand the drastic changes that took place while no one was in school during COVID,” says one of the mothers, Vanessa Calagna. “It was like we were trying to put a puzzle together. And then we were trying to ring the alarm.”

Those changes involved a heightened emphasis on racial equity and antiracism, including a district commitment to “dismantle structures rooted in racism” and seek “more equitable outcomes for all students.”

Among the moves made in the interest of equity was an initiative by Newton’s two celebrated high schools to combine more students into “multilevel” classes. Rather than students being divided into separate classes by level, students at varying levels would learn together — even in math, science, and languages. The goal: to break the persistent pattern that white and Asian students predominated in “honors” classes while Black and Hispanic students tended to be clustered in less-challenging “college-prep” classes.

The Bernie voters get tarred as “right-wing” (not quite all the way to “far right” like Nazi Party member Elon Musk?):

In late 2022, the mothers and their allies launched a petition to create an advisory panel that would give parents more voice on academic issues, modeled after a similar Dedham committee that had been well received there. The proposal drew more than 300 signatures.
It also drew fierce opposition. The mothers and their allies found themselves portrayed online and in public as dog-whistling bigots doing the bidding of right-wing national groups.
Social media comments painted their side as “racism cloaked as academic excellence” and “right-wing activism cloaked as parental concern.”

At that four-hour-plus meeting, one speaker — a professor — compared the petition’s backers to the white women who helped perpetuate segregation and white supremacy.

Speaker after speaker declared that academic excellence and racial equity are not contradictory at all, and in fact complement each other.

Are these folks aware that there is a founded-in-1854 political party that shares their point of view? No:

As for Calagna’s trio, they identify as people with “traditional liberal values.” Calagna herself has never filled in a Republican circle on a ballot, she says.

What’s next? Aping Donald Trump in getting rid of the word “equity”!

In fact, the district’s existing tagline — “Equity & Excellence” — has become “divisive,” Nolin said.
It will soon be changed to “Where All Children Thrive.”

Summarizing all of the above… Democrats in Massachusetts want and vote for social justice, equity, etc. But they don’t want it for their own children.

Loosely related… I was riding the MBTA’s Green Line out towards Newton last month (while up in Cambridge to teach at MIT). Here’s one of the righteous who has taken the trouble to wear a mask on the train, but refuses to follow the directions and shave his/her/zir/their beard (note that he/she/ze/they sits in a seat reserved for the disabled):

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New York Times calls Massachusetts for Harris with 0% of votes counted

by philg

Don’t need Nostradamus in this situation, apparently. With 0% of votes in, the New York Times has called Massachusetts for the Candidate of Virtue:

They similarly called VT, CT, and MD with 0% of votes counted. RI was more efficient, apparently, because fully 1% of votes were tallied at 8:19 pm when I checked and the NYT had called the state for Kamala:

(Florida at the same time had 90% of votes counted.)

Looks like Republicans have taken over nearly all of the U.S. Senate, at least measured by floor space, with just one victory:

Could the person who calls himself “Jim Justice” be Jabba the Hutt’s cousin in disguise?

According to official media reports, Tim Walz was the most able of all American governors, yet at 9:47 pm central, nearly two hours after polls closed, his/her/zir/their state had counted just 5 percent of its ballots. Neighboring Iowa’s polls also closed at 8 pm and, despite malgoverance by Republican Kim Reynolds, was able to count 62 percent of the votes.

If Democrats are better at governing than Republicans, why aren’t Democrat-run states able to run elections as efficiently?

Update: the forecast gets darker.

From X: “If this keeps up Democrats are going to have to ask themselves why the hell they voted for this woman in the primaries.”

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Should my friend apply to a Massachusetts town for permission to turn his house into a for-profit migrant shelter?

by philg

A friend owns a 6,000-square-foot house in our former suburb of Lincoln, Maskachusetts. Loyal readers might remember the 2019 post Harvard graduate discovers that the suburbs are packed with narrow-minded white heterosexuals:

The old white guy who led the First Parish church in our suburban town, a union of Congregational and Unitarian, retired. The Millionaires for Obama on the church hiring committee found Manish Mishra-Marzetti, a young Indian-American (Indian from India, not Indian like Elizabeth Warren) to become the new minister (in 2015). He, his husband, and their two adopted kids (characterized as “African American” in the video link below) moved into our midst.

On paper, at least, this guy is exactly the kind of person that the residents say that they want to assist and/or get to know better. He’s the child of immigrants. His skin is nearly as dark as a Virginia Democrat headed out for a party. He identifies as LGBTQIA. He organized trips to our southern border to assist migrants. He sermonized against the evils of Trump and Trump supporters.

I don’t think that I’ve written about it here, but some years ago there was a non-profit org that applied for zoning permission to turn a house in the town into a halfway house for, I think, mentally disabled adults. The halfway house would receive massive amounts of state funding for each person served. Democrats on the town discussion list went nuts. Each email started with praise for the idea of this kind of taxpayer-funded service and ended with the thought that it would make a lot more sense to operate such a house in some other town or city within Maskachusetts. If memory serves, the righteous managed to kill the proposal despite some sort of state law that ostensibly neuters local opposition.

My friend has a love of irony and he’ll soon be moving out of this house and into a tax-free Deplorable-rich state. Before he goes, though, I suggested that he have some fun by applying for zoning permission to operate a state-funded for-profit migrant shelter. His house would become home to four families of enrichers. As there is just one kitchen, the migrants would receive professionally cooked meals prepared in the central kitchen by paid staff. The migrants are undocumented and may not be able to get driver’s licenses and the town isn’t walkable. Thus, transportation would be provided by volunteers and also a paid service. Residents of Lincoln claim that they love Black people (cue the BLM signs on nearly every lawn that lasted at least until progressives transitioned to Queers for Palestine). Telegraph that the residents will be exclusively Haitian by including Haitian Creole-speaking wellness coaches and yoga instructors in the budget and asking the town for permission to have a 2’x4′ English/Haitian Creole sign in front.

Readers: What else could be added to this proposal to make it more expensive to taxpayers (yet still plausible and in line with what Maskachusetts taxpayers are currently paying for sheltered migrants) and more objectionable to the townsfolk who are the first to say that they love and support migrants and People of Color?

Based on “Massachusetts spending over $15k per month per family on migrant housing and transportation” (Fall River Reporter), my friend’s Lincoln Migrant Shelter would enjoy revenue of $60,000 per month ($720,000/year). Let’s assume that property tax is $30,000/year and two full-time people can do driving, shopping, cooking, and cleaning ($200,000/year). USDA says that the monthly cost of food on a “liberal plan” is about $400 per person so that’s another $60,000ish for the groceries (assume four “families” = 12 people). If we figure $40,000/year for maintenance and insurance, that’s about $400,000/year in gross profit for the enterprise. That’s a 20 percent return on investment if the house is worth $2 million.

Related:

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Hispanic Heritage Month at the science museum

by philg

I hope that everyone has fully prepared for National Hispanic Heritage Month, which starts today.

Friend’s daughter at the Boston Museum of Science: “Why are all of the signs in Spanish when everyone here is white or Asian?”

From August 2021, when Marjorie Taylor Greene was suspended from Twitter for falsely saying that the vaccinated righteous could still be infected by SARS-CoV-2 and transmit the virus (CBS), “Museum of Science, Boston Announces Vaccination Mandate for All Staff, Volunteers”:

The Museum of Science, Boston, one of the world’s largest science centers and New England’s most attended cultural institution, announced today a requirement that all employees and volunteers are to be vaccinated against COVID-19, effective September 13. The policy is in response to overwhelming scientific evidence of the vaccination’s safety and effectiveness in combating COVID-19.

Museum president Tim Ritchie spoke about the importance of the Museum setting an example as a trusted community resource:

“In early 2020, we closed our doors because the world was fighting a pandemic about which we had little knowledge and against which we had limited defense. Now, thanks to the wonders of science, we have the tools and expertise to eradicate this virus from our communities. We just need to act together.

Also… “Pride Celebration Weekend” at the museum for kids:

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