Category: Massachusetts

Helicopter snaphots

by philg

We’re flying with the doors off the Robinson R44 in order to avoid being baked to death in the recent weather (over 90 degrees in God’s chosen system of units). That enables your humble instructor to snap a few iPhone 12 Pro Max photos from the left seat.

On the ramp at our local airport (KBED), the F-18s that Joe Biden recommends for personal ownership (try to get a friend to pay for fuel, though!):

See if you can spot the Black Lives Matter banner on the all-white church in the all-white town of Concord, Maskachusetts:

The Concord-Carlisle High School, a $93 million project (about $71,000 per student, half paid for by the state) that taxpayers wisely decided not to use for a year (#AbundanceOfCaution; it was closed entirely for 6 months and then students were able to start attending half time):

The Lincoln K-8 school, a $110 million project, including the solar panels that were borrowed against in an off-books accounting maneuver, ($250,000 per student, 100 percent paid for by the town):

(This is being done as an in-place renovation, with students displaced to trailers for three years, because the campus supposedly does not have enough room for the usual “build new building in parking lot or on soccer field, then demolish old one” process.)

One of the families whose next 30 years of property taxes will fund the bond for the above. #InThisTogether:

(Imagine the legal fees if the “dependent” spouse “pulls a Melinda” and sues the spouse who earned enough money to build the above house! The happy plaintiff can beat the heat with Tinder dates by the pool.)

Mitt Romney’s legacy, the Mormon Temple in Belmont, MA:

Put on a mask and let your cows and sheep graze for free on Cambridge Common:

MIT Lincoln Lab:

Scroll to 1970 on the timeline and you’ll see that the Mode S transponder that is the building block for ADS-B was developed here.

Why can’t you get a seat on the Red Line trains that run every 10 minutes starting at Alewife? Check out everything that has been built recently near the station (center right of frame):

(the three red brick towers in the foreground are public housing (777 units for the worthy poor: “the towers—like many high-rise housing projects of the era—quickly became associated with crime… the complex is still a focus for law enforcement activity, and in 2008 the Cambridge Police opened a substation at the towers”) and, until a few decades ago, were the only significant buildings)

The Gropius House in Lincoln (cost about 4X/square foot to build as a typical house of the time):

A helicopter CFI gets current. We went to downtown Boston to get away from some light rain showers at Bedford:

It is a little unnerving to be using one’s phone as a camera through the open door of a helicopter. Lean out too far into the 90 mph breeze and it will be time to visit the Apple Store (don’t forget to make a COVID appointment, buy a mask, and get temperature-screened!). Maybe a case with a strap?

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PODS versus PACK-RAT for moving and storage

by philg

For the move from Massachusetts to Florida we decided that it would make the most sense to use at least two containers and a dumpster. Container A for the apartment we’re moving into. Container B to a storage facility near the apartment for eventual delivery to a house when we become stupid enough to purchase one. Dumpster for everything else.

We looked at the market leader, PODS, first. They wanted $4,770 per container (16x8x8′) for the move and $265/month per container for rental or storage. The container is wood, steel, and fiberglass and can hold up to 4,200 lbs.

PACK-RAT does not have as large a service area, but they cover West Palm Beach and Boston. The container is the same size, but all steel, like a standard container for a container ship (suitable for jamming into the Suez Canal!). The price for the container/storage is about the same, but they’ll move three containers to Florida (all fit on one truck) for what PODS charges to move two.

A typical cluttered house will require three containers. We’re hoping to trash a lot of stuff, but we also have some aviation gear currently stored in hangars.

Related:

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Can public schools suspend students who go away for a weekend and aren’t able to arrange a COVID test?

by philg

Keeping a child from attending public school is a crime. Parents can be arrested and imprisoned for obstructing a child’s access. See, for example, “The Story Behind Kamala Harris’ Truancy Program” (NPR):

In 2019, HuffPost reporter Molly Redden wrote about the families affected by this truancy program, including a Black mother named Cheree Peoples, who was arrested in April of 2013. She came on the show to help explain why this program, which initially launched without much criticism, ended up becoming so controversial, and why it disproportionately affected families of color. Here’s the extended cut of our conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Cheree is a mother in California, and her daughter has a chronic illness. Her name is Shayla, and she has sickle cell anemia, a really painful genetic disease that causes lots of complications. It’s pretty typical for people who live with this disability to miss a lot of school if they’re children. As her daughter missed a lot of school for valid medical reasons, Cheree and the school were in a dispute about how to accommodate and account for those absences.

She was in her house one morning, and the police showed up and handcuffed her. She had time to put on a jacket over her pajamas. And when she was walked by the police out of her apartment where she lived with her daughter, there were news cameras waiting, and she was booked by the police. What she said to me was that she was shocked. She was really floored. And she said to me, “You’d swear I’d killed somebody.” It felt to her like a really excessive show of force for what was essentially a misunderstanding between her and her child’s school.

[Harris] fought for this law, which raised the financial penalty and made it a criminal misdemeanor for parents, up to a year in jail, when their children missed at least 10 percent of school time.

Here in Lincoln, Massachusetts, soon to be home to the nation’s most expensive (per student) public school building, the school bureaucrats decided that students could be excluded from the building (i.e., suspended) if they went away for a Saturday overnight in another state, e.g., neighboring New Hampshire or Vermont, and did not have a negative PCR COVID-19 test result to show. As with the former state governor’s order (one of 69), the test had to be taken within 72 hours of returning to Maskachusetts. So, in a twist that only students of the absurd can appreciate, it was legal to be tested for COVID-19 on Thursday evening in MA as a way of determining if someone was going to acquire COVID by traveling on Saturday morning and returning Sunday evening.

Although the school had a fully remote option, a student kicked out of school for quarantine could not transition into the fully remote option for the period of suspension.

The governor’s order was eventually dropped, replaced by an “advisory”. The school, however, continued with their requirement that, essentially, students be tested prior to departure for weekend excursions. They’d been running a “pool testing” program at the school as well, but the pool test could not be used to meet the travel requirement. So a student who was going to go to Vermont for the weekend would end up needing two COVID-19 tests in the week prior (to see if the student acquired COVID-19 in Vermont?).

Not every family can get organized for these tests nor afford them (we spent a month without insurance and we got billed $750 per child for a test at a “doc in a box” urgent care center). Perhaps a test goes awry and a result is never returned. For whatever reason, a child may end up over the border into another state (almost any of which actually have experienced far less COVID-19 than Maskachusetts; Florida, for example, adjusted for population over 65 is at roughly 1/3rd the MA death rate) and later have no test result to show. Why is it legal to deny this child an education for a two-week quarantine period?

#BecausePublicHealth? Maybe that was a good answer when the governor’s travel order was still in place. Now that the technocrats have rescinded their order, however, what is the school’s justification for denying education to children, a criminal offense if parents had done it?

Related:

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You can sit on top of each other, but wear a mask

by philg

Part of an email from the local public school here in Maskachusetts….

To assist you in planning, our bus protocol for the fall includes:

  • All students/drivers will wear masks on the bus
  • Windows will be open at least one inch
  • No social distancing will be in place
  • Seats will be assigned

(i.e., the exact opposite of WHO advice prior to June 2020; even the simplest mask will stop an aerosol virus and therefore you should feel comfortable in a crowded indoor environment)

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Shopping in Concord, Massachusetts: Bring your Mask

by philg

“In consideration of the health and safety of our employees and guests who have not been fully vaccinated, Masks are Required AT ALL TIMES Inside the Cheese Shop.”

Vaccinations have been widely available for two months here in Maskachusetts. There will always be those who aren’t vaccinated, however, either because they #DenyScience, have an unusual medical situation, are infants (though maybe the vaccine can be given right as a baby is coming out?), etc. Therefore, doesn’t this sign translate to “masks now, masks tomorrow, masks forever”?

#AbundanceOfCaution was the general rule for the shopping district. Although the governor’s 69 orders no longer require masks, the merchants have stepped in with their own unconditional mask requirements:

The ultimate expression of caution is to close the retail store altogether:

All photos from June 8.

A few sights on the way to/from this shopping experience… a group of preschool children, age 2 and 3, marching outdoors in masks. It was 93 degrees out. A neighbor with a zoning-minimum 2-acre lot (welcome the undocumented so long as they can afford a $1 million vacant lot on which to build a $1 million structure) riding a lawnmower… in a surgical mask.

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Sacrament of Masks preserved at the Apple Store

by philg

The Church of Shutdown abandoned the Sacrament of Masks, at least for the vaccinated, here in Massachusetts at the end of May. The ritual is kept alive at the Apple Store, however. From the Burlington Mall, today:

Things are quieter at the Microsoft Store and Lord & Taylor (both closed):

Adjacent parking lot (Burlington, MA is 3.3 percent Black, so Black Lives Matter… mostly in other towns):

Although masks are now merely “advised” (only for the unvaccinated) rather than required by governor’s order, more than half of the folks in the mall and at a nearby supermarket were masked.

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Maskachusetts unmasked

by philg

We risked death-by-variant-COVID-19 today at the Watertown Mall, meeting friends for dim sum. Although the Massachusetts state of emergency persists at least until June 15, a combination of 69 governor’s orders as of yesterday boiled down to “masks are no longer required indoors”. (Or at least, “you can’t be arrested or fined under state law for not wearing a mask indoors”; maybe a city or town could order you to wear a mask.)

I would have expected an enterprise that makes money from inviting the public to share an indoor space to deemphasize the risk of sharing an indoor space as soon as that deemphasis was legal. To the contrary, however, the shopping mall operator and some individual stores had kept up their sign barrage. We walked by at least 40 COVID-related signs between the door to the small mall and the restaurant itself (waitstaff still fully masked). How does this help their business? Wouldn’t an intelligent person who believed all of these signs decide to stay home and order everything from Amazon rather than take the risk of in-person shopping?

A sampling:

The mall includes a Target and 100 percent of the shoppers whom I observed were masked, both in the Target and in the rest of the mall.

I asked two of our (adult) friends how many COVID signs they’d walked past in getting from their respective cars to the restaurant. Both answered “none”. One was sufficiently mindful of COVID-19 that he arrived in a double-mask (fabric over N95) while the other sported a plain N95 mask. Yet their minds hadn’t registered the signs.

Note that the public health experts who have technocratically managed the Massachusetts plague such that our COVID-19 death rate, adjusted for population over 65, is only 3X that of Florida’s (a Robert S. McNamara-style victory?), still advise subjects to wear masks, especially for those who are not vaccinated.

(A few days ago we went on a bicycle ride with the kids in a quiet exurb. Slender apparently health people aged 10-20 would jump off the sidewalk in order to maintain at least 10′ of distance and if they weren’t already masked would rush to raise up their chin diapers.)

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97 percent of Maskachusetts school districts shut down for at least part of 2020-2021

by philg

Headline from a rich white town’s “school committee update”:

We are among only 3% of MA school districts to hold in-person classes all year 5-days-per-week!

Of course one would not want to imagine that the government could lie to us, but, as part of his 68 (so far) orders, Governor Baker delayed the start of school here in Maskachusetts until mid-September. Therefore, the “all year” part of the above should be “almost all year” (also, the school day was shorted to end at 1:45 pm instead of 2:50 pm, except on the days when teachers already were entitled to a free afternoon (Wednesday), in which case school ended around 12:30 pm).

Flipping this around, we learned that 97 percent of school districts (and the bigger ones were in this group so it would be more than 97 percent of students) denied children at least some of what previously would have been considered their right to an education.

The same newsletter, prepared by white people who administer a school in a nearly all-white town, contains a section titled “Facing dual traumas of racism and inequity” and we learn that “School Committee members have committed to our own anti-bias training,…” and “Middle school students organized a Black Lives Matter group.” Nowhere is it mentioned that the probability of a young Black life being educated in a school in Massachusetts has been extremely low for the 2020-2021 year.

Related:

  • states ranked by COVID-19 death rate (compare to countries ranked and see that science+masks+shutdown would have landed Massachusetts near the very top of the world’s countries in COVID-19 death rate, if MA were its own country)
  • “Wellesley School District Faces Civil Rights Complaint From Parents Group” (WGBH, an NPR affiliate): In March, the [almost-all-white] Wellesley schools hosted a Zoom session described as a “Healing Space for Asian and Asian-American students” and other students of color in grades six through twelve. Attached to the complaint was a screenshot of the invitation, which stated: “*Note: This is a safe space for our Asian/Asian-American and Students of Color, *not* for students who identify only as White.” .. “If you identify as White, and need help to process recent events, please know I’m here for you as well as your guidance counselors,” the invitation read. “If you need to know why this is not for White students, please ask me!” … “The goal was to provide a safe space in which students and staff could reflect, share, and be supported as members of our school district,” the email said. “At the same time, we can also understand the discomfort that some members of our community have shared when learning of a practice that they perceive to be discriminatory. It’s important to note that affinity spaces are not discriminatory.”
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University of Maskachusetts casts out three heretics

by philg

“‘It’s Been Devastating’: UMass Amherst Students Suspended For Not Wearing Masks Off-Campus” (CBS):

Andover parents Kristin and Scott are speaking out on behalf of their daughter. She along with two of her friends are freshmen at UMass Amherst. A picture posted on social media of the three friends not wearing masks outside was handed over to the university and that has landed them in serious trouble.

“There was a photo sent to the administration of these girls outside off campus on a Saturday. This is why they lost a whole semester of their schooling,” Kristin said.

Since their suspension, the students have been studying remotely at their homes. However, last week they were cut off from virtual learning. They were not allowed to take their finals, so parents say their kids’ semester was a total loss, both financially and academically.

“That negates this whole semester $16,000 of money and they have to reapply for next semester. But they missed housing registration,” Scott said.

UMass Amherst released a statement saying: “Students received a number of public health messages this semester that emphasized the importance of following public health protocols and the consequences for not complying, and those messages were also shared on UMass social media channels.”

The Instagram post that betrayed their refusal to observe all of the rituals of the Church of Shutdown all of the time:

(Maybe they can be replaced with masked BIPOC?)

Given the depicted weather it seems that these three might well have been vaccinated at the time the photo was taken.

Stockholm Syndrome among the other invulnerable-to-covid 20-year-olds:

Students on campus say the rules have been tight this year but for good reason. “Maybe a little harsh but like I understand it because you’re not supposed to be doing that,” one student told WBZ Friday night.

The spirited hippies of the 1960s who said “Don’t trust anyone over 30” have been succeeded by college students happy to do whatever Dr. Fauci (age 80, i.e., pretty close to the median age for a COVID-19 death in Maskachusetts) tells them to.

Related:

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Maskachusetts: #Science says your backyard BBQ is illegal, but cram 150 people into a tent is okay if someone pays

by philg

An event planner whom we know says that she’s been super busy late. “People had planned backyard weddings, but they’re illegal so they’re going to pay to hold them here.” Her venue is a McMansion-sized house and a big tent with sides that come down during inclement weather. “I can have up to 150 people in the tent. It doesn’t make sense to me since a lot of these people have yards that are huge, but it is good for business.”

From the Maskachusetts State of Emergency page, which links to an appendix to Order #63:

Related:

  • Marie Antoinette of Covid: “Why is it a maximum of 10 people,” our hostess wondered, “regardless of the size of the house? Shouldn’t it be adjusted for square footage?”
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