Category: Massachusetts

Indoor, Outdoor, and Bearded Maskers in the Boston Area

by philg

Photos from August 21, 2023, Allston, Massachusetts (adjacent to Boston University):

My favorite, of course, is the surgical mask over full beard as a means of blocking out an aerosol virus. However, the most confusing are the outdoor maskers. The risk of being in a crowded city is so high that they need a mask when outdoors… yet they won’t move away from the crowded city. I guess the masked supermarket shoppers are also tough to explain. Why don’t they stay safe at home and let the Latinx essential delivery workers incur the risk of gathering groceries? (See The social justice of coronashutdowns)

I visited a friend in Brookline who warned his elderly mother to stay away from me because I was insufficiently cautious about the possibility of a SARS-CoV-2 infection (I had arrived from an oceanfront estate in Maine with about 3,000 square feet of space per person). A few minutes later, he decided that it would be too onerous to cook pasta at home, safe from COVID-19, on the high-end induction cooktop. So we then all went out to a cramped neighborhood Italian restaurant in which the elderly mom was within breathing distance of about 30 local humans (presumably not Covid heretics, however).

Both the mom, a Manhattan resident, and the grandkids spontaneously offered the opinion that Florida schools were terrible, partly due to the fact that reading was banned in Florida. Said grandkids had been removed from the Brookline, Maskachusetts public schools (one of the highest-rated districts in the state) due to being bored and the school system not having any gifted program. So they were paying private school tuition ($55,000+/year per student) on top of state income tax (banned by the FL constitution), state estate tax (also banned by the FL constitution, unless it can be credited toward federal), and property tax at a similar rate to what a typical FL county charges. I pointed out that Florida state law required every public school district to offer gifted education beginning in 2nd grade and that, if necessary, there was also the Big Hammer in which Florida high school kids can take online or in-person courses for free at any state-run college or university (and taxpayers have to buy them the textbooks as well!). Finally, the larger counties run magnet schools for those who are artistically or academically inclined (one of Miami’s is the #4-ranked public high school in the U.S.).

Related:

Full post, including comments

Signs of Justice in Maskachusetts

by philg

I stopped overnight at Hanscom Field (KBED) and visited Cambridge, Lexington, Lincoln, and Concord, MA.

Shay’s is a bar in Harvard Square that was famously committed to ensuring drunkenness among Harvard Business School students (a good hunting ground for child support profiteers?). What is Shay’s committed to now?

I wonder if they will get a ticket from the city for failure to use the trans-enhanced rainbow flag that is the federal government’s official symbol.

A friend and I stopped to pay $40 for an Indian “street food” meal (that would have cost $1 in India?). I washed my hands in the All Gender Restroom.

The suburban towns were packed with signs advocating against the construction of additional hangars at Hanscom. If they get their way, the result might be an increase in the number of private jet flights that irk the almost-rich neighbors. Instead of the rich douche’s plane living at Hanscom in a new hangar, it will have to be ferried in for the flight and then ferried out by the crew to New Hampshire or Plymouth or wherever else hangar space was found. Jesus loves Black people and Rainbow Flaggers (but not the trans?), according to the First Parish Church in Concord, MA, but Jesus hates private jet hangars:

(The Unitarian Universalists also remind us that Jesus hates Israel.)

The righteous who oppose jet hangars say that they’re doing it because they love Mother Earth and hate CO2. But if they hate CO2, why do they live in huge heat-wasting single-family houses in car-dependent suburbs? Shouldn’t they all have sold their SUVs and moved into apartments in Boston or Cambridge?

Downtown Concord was dead as a doornail on a Sunday evening. We were the only customers incurring the risk of indoor dining at an Italian place. Sometimes locals ventured in wearing masks (not always N95s) to pick up takeout (SARS-CoV-2 is terrifying, but not so terrifying that you’d be willing to boil your own pasta?).

Traffic was a disaster, even on a Sunday, due to all of the new bicycle lanes that have been introduced. Streets that were formerly two-lane bidirectional are now one-way with a car lane and a bike lane (separated by ugly plastic stick-ups). I did see a handful of people using the bike lanes, unlike in the Washington, D.C. area. Old Georgetown Road, for example, has been reduced from 6 lanes to 4 due to the allocation of two bike lanes, one in each direction. I stayed overlooking this critical DC thoroughfare and, over a 40-hour period, saw exactly 1 bicycle. If federal government workers ever stop pretending to work from home, I predict even more epic traffic jams!

Any mention of Florida yielded an array of warnings: 101-degree ocean water, the existence of Ron DeSantis (cue the Two Minutes Hate), epidemic leprosy, books and education banned, etc.

Full post, including comments

Massachusetts spends money to replace high-income residents with low-income residents

by philg

“A $100 Billion Wealth Migration Tilts US Economy’s Center of Gravity South” (Bloomberg, June 29):

Some 2.2 million people moved to the Southeast in just over two years. That’s roughly the population of Houston.

Maskachusetts did its share to unload rich people with lockdowns, mask orders, vaccine papers checks, and a recent boost to the income tax rate. Nobody on welfare would have had an economic motivation to move because welfare in Maskachusetts pays approximately 118 percent of the median wage, compared to just 40 percent in Florida and Texas (see Table 4 in this CATO report).

What kind of people are the state’s central planners seeking as replacements for the rich? “Massachusetts puts up Pride billboards in Florida, Texas” (CBS Boston, June 27):

Massachusetts is buying billboard space in places like Florida and Texas with a clear message for Pride month. The billboards say “Massachusetts For Us All” and feature pictures of LGBTQIA+ couples in the Bay State.

“At a time when other states are misguidedly restricting LGBTQIA+ rights, we are proud to send the message that Massachusetts is a safe, welcoming and inclusive place for all.” Gov. Maura Healey said in a statement. “To anyone considering where they want to live, raise a family, visit or build a business – we want you to join us here in Massachusetts.”

The largest LGBTQ+ rights organization in the country issued a Florida travel advisory in May.

“The Complexity Of LGBT Poverty In The United States” (University of Wisconsin 2021):

People who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT) have higher rates of poverty compared to cisgender (cis) heterosexual people, about 22% to 16% respectively.

So… Massachusetts is spending taxpayer funds to recruit a low-income demographic, which will be great for those who qualify for the state’s comparatively lavish welfare benefits.

Here are the billboards. Note the implicit message that people should have sex only with those whose skin color matches their own and whose age is approximately the same as their own.

Related… Drag Make-Up WERKshop from the Jewish Community Center of Greater Boston, for ages 12-17:

See also “LGBTQ-Friendly Housing Project Breaks Ground in Boston” for a project that consumed $8 million in funds extracted via taxation (2022 dollars). And “The Boston Public Library Announces $1,000,000 Gift to Expand the Library’s LGBTQ+ Programming and Collections” that will fund “Interactive programming for youth” and “Resources for teens, building upon the gender and sexual orientation resources already in place”.

Full post, including comments

Harvard and the Art of Masking

by philg

An email received this month:

(Harvard cannot offer free admission to the people who have granted it freedom from paying taxes on what it earns from its $50 billion cash hoard, except for on a few days.)

Note the Science-driven COVID prevention strategy of 1 out of 4 people wearing a non-N95 mask. The same email promotes an event in which it appears that 2 out of 3 visitors are wearing Fauci-approved cloth masks:

Full post, including comments

Remembering when Vladimir Putin tried to help us

by philg

Today is the 10th anniversary of the jihad waged by successful asylum-seekers Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Tamerlan Tsarnaev at the Boston Marathon. They lived at taxpayer expense in Cambridge, Maskachusetts after being granted permanent welfare entitlement in the U.S. on the grounds that Russia would not let them wage jihad in Russia. Dzhokhar studied diversity and tolerance at the Cambridge Public High School.

Tamerlan celebrated the 10th anniversary of 9/11 by killing two Jews and a roommate in Waltham, Maskachusetts.

Aside from eliminating access to the U.S. for asylum-seekers, what could have been done to prevent the Waltham murders and the Boston Marathon jihad? We could have heeded the warning of Vladimir Putin’s government. From “Russia Told America To Detain Tamerlan Tsarnaev Years Ago” (Insider, March 2014):

NBC News said the Russian intelligence agency FSB cabled the FBI about its concerns in March 2011, warning that Tsarnaev was known to have associated with militant Islamists.

The network said the FBI opened an investigation of Tsarnaev that month conducted by a joint task force of federal, state and local authorities. Tsarnaev was interviewed in person, and a memo was sent to the Customs and Border Protection database called TECS that would trigger an alert whenever he left or re-entered the United States.

But the investigation was closed in June 2011 after finding Tsarnaev had no links to terrorism, NBC quoted the report as saying.

In September 2011, the FSB sent a cable to the CIA, restating the warnings of the first memo. NBC News quoted sources close to the congressional investigation as saying a second note about Tsarnaev was entered into the TECS system the next month, but spelled his name “Tsarnayev.”

So we can perhaps reflect today on a time when we had a better relationship with Russia.

Related:

IMG0045.PCD
Full post, including comments

Condemning the apartheid state of Israel in Harvard Yard

by philg

Israel has been in the news lately due to a proposal to change the country’s judiciary to be more like what we have here in the U.S. (Wikipedia) This will result in “tyranny” replacing “democracy” (nytimes). (Perhaps Israelis can flee this tyranny and seek asylum in Syria or Lebanon?)

Photos taken on March 12, 2023 in Harvard Yard include a Palestine flag in a window and some messages urging a boycott of a Harvard group trip to Israel.

This was in the same building as the “BGLTQ” office (not 2SLGBTQQIA+? or LGBTQ?):

Wikipedia:

According to Amnesty International’s 2020 report on Palestine, “Section 152 of the Penal Code in Gaza criminalizes [male] consensual same-sex sexual activity and makes it punishable by up to 10 years’ imprisonment.” Palestine has no civil rights laws that protect LGBT people from discrimination nor harassment

We had previously walked by the Lutheran church featured in Bulletin board at the Lutheran chuch (2019). Their pro-Palestinian material was not visible from the exterior, but they do have a rainbow and a Black Lives Matter sign:

Down at the river, there are rainbow benches, but no BLM benches;

Full post, including comments

The Cambridge Public Library

by philg

A March 12, 2023 trip to the Cambridge, Maskachusetts public library…

Let’s stop first in the bathroom, a gender-neutral experience:

The kids’ section is heavy on Black-themed books, but all of the children present appeared to identify with non-Black skin colors. About 20 percent of the patrons, including plenty of kids, were protected by Cochrane-approved face masks (“Here’s Why the Science Is Clear That Masks Work” (NYT)):

A few of the books in the kids’ section (one authored by President Biden):

Downstairs in the adult non-fiction area…

Sunday afternoon on the ground floor…

Let’s move to the Teen room:

Before women invented the Mac and iPhone, they invented television. There was no corresponding “Because I was a boy” title. The 2SLGBTQQIA+ books were not featured as prominently as I’d hoped, but discreetly shelved.

The old building’s best rooms are dedicated to science fiction:

Summary: In the social justice and 2SLGBTQQIA+ departments, despite the hysterical media coverage about “book bans” in Florida, there was little to distinguish the Cambridge Public Library from the Palm Beach County libraries.

Related:

Full post, including comments

Maskachusetts trip report

by philg

Here are some photos from my recent trip to Cambridge, Newton, and Wayland. The high school where the Tsarnaev brothers took Tolerance and Diversity classes features a “Black Lives Matter” banner in 4X the font size of the sign that describes the building’s secondary purpose (“school”):

(Where is their rainbow flag? And why not a banner to celebrate immigrants, who are roughly 27 percent of the city’s population?)

Traffic delays slowed all of my excursions around the Boston suburbs. The eight-lane I-95 ring highway was jammed at midday on Saturday. The main road that goes to Wayland would be four or six lanes in Florida, plus dedicated left and right turn lanes at intersections, but in Maskachusetts it is only two lanes and a single car wanting to turn left can create a mile-long backup. Fortunately, there are plenty of opportunities to learn and improve when stopped at a light:

(The locals nearly all profess faith in population growth via mass low-skill immigration. Yet the transportation infrastructure of Boston plainly cannot support even the current population. The road network is jammed and the locals who eagerly cowered in place are unwilling to ride public transit due to COVID risk.)

The weather featured highs in the 30s, cloudy skies, and light rain or snow flurries, so it was perfect for ducking into the Harvard Bookstore to see what the nation’s smartest people are reading. Just a few steps from the front door, I learned a new vocabulary word: Filipinx. (Unclear why this title makes sense for a cookbook. It is not humans in a rainbow of gender IDs who are being cooked, I hope!)

Bernie and Cancel Culture got pride of place:

We know all about Bernie, I hope, but who is Ernest Owens, the promoter of cancel culture? The author’s bio at Amazon:

Ernest Owens (he/him) is an award-winning journalist and CEO of Ernest Media Empire, LLC. He is the Editor at Large for Philadelphia Magazine and President of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists. He hosts the hit podcast “Ernestly Speaking!” As an openly Black gay journalist, he has made headlines for speaking frankly about intersectional issues in society regarding race, LGBTQ, and pop culture.

What if you were one of the engineers who toiled mightily on Xerox’s amazing print-shop-in-a-box machine? You’ve been canceled, as of spring 2022:

The bookstore keeps the Spirit of Fauci alive with this “please wear a cloth mask against an aerosol virus” sign:

Only about 20 percent of the people inside the store were complying with this request from Science. Although 0 percent of the customers appeared to identify as Black, the store has an ample supply of books on Blackness and at least one title on how to be white:

If you love empathy and Scientific management of the U.S. economy, this book about Janet Yellen is for you:

Ms. Yellen is certainly delivering on the promise to “spread prosperity to all” in that most Americans are on track to become millionaires. (Bad news: $1 million will also be the price of a used Honda Accord.) Who will keep ChatGPT from taking over before inflation has had enough time to deliver universal millionaire-hood? Harvard, of course! The AI Safety Team lives on Church St.:

How about the new higher minimum wage? Shake Shack in Harvard Square has responded by eliminating the order-taker jobs. You order and pay at a touchscreen. How’s the labor quality now that higher wages are being paid? Some of my fries were still frozen.

We went back the next night to the Harvard Coop. They’re heavily invested in the idea that some books are “banned” in states other than Maskachusetts.

Returning to Harvard Bookstore, we found that these are referred to as “challenged” rather than “banned” books:

In conversations with white native-born progressives, none seem to have adapted to the fact that 85 million Americans are either immigrants or children of immigrants. The dominant conflict between groups in the U.S. is white vs. Black and if this conflict can be solved, e.g., via reparations or Black Lives Matter banners, Americans will all live together in harmony. They can’t understand why recent immigrants from India, China, or Honduras don’t share their enthusiasm for Black Lives Matter, allocating places in colleges or in jobs to those who identify as Black, etc. At a dinner event where most of the guests were either from India or were children of Indian immigrants, the current American race-based system was decried. “We’re ‘brown’ if we try to get into country clubs,” one professor said, “but we’re considered ‘off-white’ when we apply for jobs or to college.”

Full post, including comments

21-day antiracism, inclusion, diversity, and equity challenge at our former public school in Maskachusetts

by philg

Email from the K-8 public school in our former suburb of Boston, featuring 2-acre minimum zoning to ensure that nobody with fewer than 3 million Bidies ($2 million in pre-Biden money) can afford to buy a vacant lot and build a house:

We believe that in order to become and maintain being a district and larger community in which AIDE [antiracism, inclusion, diversity, and equity] thrives, members must commit to their ongoing growth in learning and awareness … To complete the challenge, each day pick just ONE piece of content. We’ve included three kinds:

reading (articles, blogs)
listening (podcasts/audio)
watching (video)

… some are explicitly created for White readers and others speak directly to people of color or specific racial groups.

Many organizations across the town and our connected communities will be participating in the challenge and we hope many of you will join, as well.

My favorite part is that each racial group gets its own reading list!

The included link has a helpful chart:

We are informed that racism is a public health emergency (example from Minneapolis; and “Declare Racism a Public Health Emergency” (New York Times)). Yet, according to the above chart, the emergency is not so severe as to preclude a “Pause for February Vacation”. It is okay to sit on the beach in Aruba while daily oppression continues.

The white background indicates that white is the default and/or preferred race? One good thing about our former town is that I’m pretty sure almost everyone there is qualified as an expert on the Day 4 subject: “What is Whiteness?” Also note that the next step after identifying as 2SLGBTQQIA+ is joining the military (days 18 and 19).

Here are the local victimhood experts:

Here are some photos of Aruba (February 12, 2022) getting ready for the February break arrival of the anti-racists:

Full post, including comments

“Do you feel safe at home?” in Maskachusetts versus Florida health care settings

by philg

One constant feature of health care in Maskachusetts was the provider asking, often as the first question of an encounter, “Do you feel safe at home?” A fit 6’2″ tall 25-year-old who identified as a cisgender heterosexual man would be asked this question just the same as a frail slight person identifying as female.

A memorable example of this was the delay of care being provided to Senior Management after I had taken her to a community hospital in Cambridge, MA at 5 am. Getting to the bottom of the “Do you feel safe at home?” question was more important than asking about the labor pains that had occasioned the hospital visit (the same hospital where she had been receiving prenatal care, so it wasn’t a new-patient situation). In order that she would be free of coercion, the person who got up at 4:30 am to do the hospital drive had to removed into a separate room so that the 9-months-pregnant person could answer this question freely before moving on to whether abortion care (perfectly legal at all stages of pregnancy in Maskachusetts) or delivery was desired.

An example in miscommunication occurred when the question followed me telling the doctor that I had recently returned from a trip to Israel. This was early in the adoption of the “Do you feel safe?” question so I heard it as “Did you feel safe?” and launched in a long explanation of security risks in Israel, the lack of street crime compared to big U.S. cities, etc. The doc then had to explain that she didn’t care about Israel but about whether Senior Management was physically abusing me.

Because I’m in possession of a mostly timed-out body, I’ve had quite a few encounters with physicians here in Florida since August 2021. What did these encounters have in common? Never once was I asked if I felt safe at home. Nor are patients asked to wear masks, even inside the full-service hospitals with operating rooms, etc.

Separately, I’m noticing that a remarkably high percentage of doctors in Florida are private jet charter customers. The specialist who toils for peanuts in MA and pays 5% income tax (9% under the new “millionaires’ tax” if there is a rare good year) will pay 16% estate tax on finally dying. He/she/ze/they can bask in the glory of institutional prestige, e.g., at MGH, even if prestige doesn’t come with a lot of money. The counterpart in FL seems to earn twice as much, pays 0% income and estate tax, and spends the extra on a luxurious lifestyle.

Full post, including comments