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):
“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 Though they had been replaced by rail for long-distance haulage and by steam engines for driving machinery, they still plowed fields, hauled wagons and carriages short distances, pulled boats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.
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:
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:
Trump’s spending $30B on 10k more ICE agents. That would:
– Cover all ACA subsidies for a year – End all Rx copays – Eliminate all medical debt.
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.
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.
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
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.
“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:
A former “illegal alien” is no longer “undocumented” but rather “with uncertain immigration status”:
What if the worst happens and a “Massachusetts man” who arrived in the U.S. a few days earlier is being hauled away?
Note that, due to the two-acre zoning minimum, the typical neighborhood in Lincoln, MA is home only to those undocumented migrants who have at least $1 million to spend on a vacant lot. The town does, however, have a small public housing development in which those who don’t work, regardless of immigration status, can live at taxpayer expenses.
Here’s a friend’s photo from near the Town Hall:
In addition to the advertisement for the event, the photo includes a righteous hater of inequality who has bought him/her/zir/theirself an expensive Audi. He/she/ze/they could have made due with a Camry and donated the extra $40,000 to the worthy poor, but apparently that wasn’t an option. The photographer’s comment:
paint is coming off the house, ugly pipes on the ground and ugly wiring
(As a Floridian I’ve become allergic to the sight of utility poles and exposed wires and boxes like the ones in the photo.)
As we get our houses ready for National Immigrants Day (October 28), from a friend in Maskachusetts:
I just drove on Sandy Pond Rd in Lincoln. A Somali (I assume, since he was black with lighter skin and curly hair) took out a prayer mat, oriented it toward Mecca and was doing a midday prayer on the side of the road (there’s no sidewalk). Right in front of a house belonging to a family with a last name of Goldstein.
(Note the hateful failure to capitalize “Black”, but the friend who used the hateful language is an immigrant and, therefore, it would be wrong for me to criticize him while he is enriching us with his presence.)
In April, we posed–and eventually distilled–a question in response: What if we activated one of our spaces–the parsonage–to provide urgently needed temporary housing to refugees?
We wish to state clearly that using the parsonage for refugee housing is not necessarily what will be proposed at a special congregational meeting on September 29, but the “what if” of this hypothesis (some might even call it a lightning rod) is what we are working with to ground our debate, open our hearts, and stretch our imaginations.
*The recommendations for length of stay per family vary from several months to about a year.
In Massachusetts, appropriate housing is hard to find and expensive. Newly arriving refugees are often put up in a crowded hotel room for up to 90 days while they are connected with essential services and look for other housing. Some families are transferred to shelters.
A Biden-style trans-enhanced Rainbow Flag is at the bottom of every page of the church’s web site:
The July post had estimated the cost to the church of helping out migrants at roughly $48,000 per year, mostly in foregone rent. I contacted a friend who is a member of the church to ask whether this expenditure had been approved by the congregation:
That issue was put to rest before the meeting, thank Heaven. … What we voted on is a $7 million improvement of the stone church, which I favored. 95% of the Church agreed. Progress!
So the Righteous voted to spend $7 million on themselves and nothing on the migrants whose cause they champion.
The rub: Because of flaws in our state’s law, theory differs from practice. It takes just minutes to file a public records request, but as I painfully learned, to actually get a request fulfilled may require months upon months of follow-up; a nontrivial sum of money; a lawyer or two; and persistence verging on a pathological inability to let go.
Just after the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, the schools superintendent sent out two messages that sparked instant backlash. “As you are likely already aware, violence is escalating rapidly in Israel and Palestine,” began one note, sent to the entire school district community. Though the town includes large Jewish and Israeli populations, the note neither decried the Hamas atrocities nor expressed sympathy to the many affected local families. A separate note to staff recommended an undeniably slanted set of teaching resources. It included links to pro-Palestinian sources like Visualizing Palestine and Decolonize Palestine but no similarly pro-Israel sources to balance them, and nothing on Hamas.
(I’m not sure that it is reasonable to call the October 7, 2023 event “Hamas attacks” given that there were fighters from UNRWA and Palestinian Islamic Jihad involved, as well as “civilian” Gazans. By saying that it is only “Hamas” that wants to destroy the Zionist entity and achieve river-to-the-sea liberation the implication is that if the 6 or 7 remaining Hamas-affiliated Gazans were removed the Gazans would cheerfully accept the existence of Israel.)
On Oct. 16, 2023, when I filed my request, I figured I was just asking for a couple of days’ worth of one official’s emails on a specific topic. Type a few terms into a search bar and done, right? Wrong. It took more than 18 months to get that modest request fulfilled, and I still don’t have one central document (but I’ve given up). It took enlisting pro bono lawyers; appeals to the supervisor of records, the state team that handles public records requests; countless nagging emails; two speeches and a half-dozen emails to the School Committee. … I refiled the request in May 2024. This time, when it was once again met with silence, I knew enough to appeal after 10 days to the supervisor of records. That office promptly ordered the town to respond.
In July 2024, the Brookline town counsel did send over a document. Only one, but still — a document! Sadly, it was nothing but an email saying a draft of a Google Doc for the Oct. 7 messaging had been created. All names were blacked out, without the justifications for those redactions that are required by law. Also, I knew the superintendent had received many emails responding to his messages; our local Brookline News had even covered them. Where were they?
Stymied, I finally sought legal help through the Anti-Defamation League’s project on antisemitism in K-12 schools, and it provided two top-notch pro bono attorneys. In mid-December, I wrote to the town counsel conveying, for the first time in my life, the ultimate attention-grabber: “You’ll be hearing next from my lawyers.”
Soon came the count — the town counsel’s office had identified 368 potentially relevant emails — and the price tag: they estimated that at least 39 hours of staff time would be needed to process the emails, at a cost of $926.25.
In April and May of this year, the town counsel sent over four batches of repetitive, sometimes irrelevant emails, sprinkled with a few gems. Several indicated that two senior district staffers had led the drafting of the messages: a senior director of teaching and learning, and the director of the Office of Educational Equity.
Any Massachusetts taxpayer who wants to fund “education” instead of “educational equity” can move to Florida, I guess.
