Boston

Open Forum: Normalcy Is Just Around the Corner, I Swear

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

(The first and perhaps the last time I will echo Warren G. Harding…)

I know, I know…for another week, I have failed to get more than two posts (on average) up per day, and even those posts have been shorter and less substantive than usual. A confluence of the many obstacles this persistent infected hematoma in my leg has imposed on my activities and an usually heavy workload in other areas have created the problem, but the leg is getting better….for example, the tips of my toes are no longer purple, and, sitting at my desk just aches rather than causing stabbing pain. Here’s an example of how loused up I am: I haven’t watched an entire Red Sox game in August, something hadn’t happened since I was 10.

Meanwhile, speaking of Boston, when did the city of my birth morph into the Confederacy? Boston Mayor Michelle Wu has been making defiant statements and Bluesky posts (signature significance, by the way) about the city in her charge being “safer” because it refuses to cooperate in enforcing Federal law. Todd Lyons, acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, vowed to “flood the zone” with federal immigration enforcement in response.

Good. I don’t understand how the sanctuary states and cities can be allowed to get away with this return to the “nullification” movement in the South that was a catalyst to the Civil War. I don’t understand the logic of Wu and other Democratic mayors and governors arguing that impeding the enforcement of laws enhances safety. I don’t understand why the Democrats have lashed themselves to the pro-illegal immigration anchor: how can this possibly help the party regain trust and respectability?

As a footnote, Wu amuses me when she boasts about Boston being the “safest major American city.” All of America’s major cities are unacceptably crime-ridden; all of them are governed by radically progressive and woke Democratic mayors. Saying that one of them is the “safest” is like raving about the best episode of “Three’s Company.”

Well, enough from me. This is your space: use it wisely and well.

Oh! One more thing: today I was offered a contribution from a new commenter that read, “Daha enerjik ve canlı bir masaj deneyimi isteyenler için İzmir masöz kızlar iyi bir tercihtir.” Sadly, I did not deem this worthy of admission to the ranks of privileged commenters.

Incompetent Elected Official of the Month: District 7 Boston City Council Member Tania Fernandes Anderson

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Ohhh, yeah, Boston must have high expectations for THIS City Council member…

Back in the Home of the Bean and the Cod, where of-color Mayor Michelle Wu held an apartheid Christmas Party to which no white officials were invited, (in case you’re curious, yes indeed, Mayor Wu has attributed Claudine Gay’s demise at Harvard to “racial bias”), newly elected city councilor Tania Fernandes Anderson has to retake her oath of office after a video was circulated on social media showing that she neither said the words nor raised her right hand during this week’s swearing-in ceremony.

Fernandes Anderson was instructed by both City Council President Ruthzee Louijeune and the city’s law department to retake the oath, both verbally and in writing. The do-over was supposed to take place at 9 a.m. today, but though City Clerk Alex Geourntas arrived to swear in, she wasn’t there. The District 7 councilor’s staff told Geourntas at around 11 a.m., and again shortly before 1 p.m. that she was on her way, but Fernandes Anderson eventually called in at 3:15 p.m. to say she wouldn’t make it.

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Two Disparate Responses To Being Caught At “Good Discrimination”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Revealed Discriminator 1: Boston Mayor Michelle Wu.

Response: “Deal with it!”

Despite the legitimate uproar over Boston’s Asian-American mayor holding a party that explicitly excluded whites [covered here on Ethics Alarms], Wu and Boston Democrats decided to go with a moldy bunch of lame rationalizations (“it’s no big deal!”…”we’ve been doing it for years”..”we don’t care!”) and not only held the discriminatory event, but proudly issued a photo of it. Naturally, the news media’s reaction is “Republicans pounce!” but long-time conservative pundit Howie Carr, who is usually a bit extreme for my tastes, was spot on, writing in an op-ed for the Boston Herald:

“What if a white mayor had held a whites-only party at a city-owned building, after specifically disinviting all the non-white members of the City Council? It would have been the end of the world, a national story for days if not weeks on end. On the night of the party, there would have been rioting, or looting and violence….had the event been held by a Republican, every GOP politician across the nation would have been asked to denounce it…

Carr added that most of of the ‘state-run media’ in Massachusetts carefully avoided criticizing the party.

The reverse-racists are getting awfully cocky these days.

Revealed Discriminator 2: Harvard

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Wait…What’s The Problem? Isn’t Mayor Wu Just Following The Tactics And Principles Of Her Party?

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I don’t understand. The Biden Administration has declared that opponents of his policies are threats to democracy. The current Justice Department has sought extreme and excessive punishment for the protesters and rioters at the Capitol in January of 2021 while ignoring the violent and disruptive acts of the George Floyd Freakout rioters and demonstrators. The Democratic Administration sought to intimidate parents who were critical of woke school boards seeking to inject sexual politics and CRT ideology into public school curricula. And yet when Boston’s mayor Michelle Wu admitted that her staff compiled a list of her most vocal critics and protesters to hand to local law enforcement authorities, the public, which in Boston is primarily Democratic and progressive, howled in outrage.

This is how their increasingly totalitarian party operates in 2023. This is what they voted for. What are they complaining about?

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Public Art Ethics Again

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Guess what American icon this newly unveiled, giant sculpture on the  Boston Common memorializes? Here are several angles…

Of course, it’s Dr. Martin Luther King! Didn’t you recognize him? Titled “The Embrace,” the artwork, which cost an estimated $10 million dollars, is supposed to represent King and his wife hugging each other in Boston when he learned of his Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.

Many seem to think the thing is not only an eyesore, but an arguably pornographic one. I know, I know, most public art is controversial, but that doesn’t mean, or shouldn’t, that anything goes. Who approved that? There are no better ways to spend ten million bucks? If an artwork is supposed to honor a person or an event, is it too much to ask that someone of reasonable intelligence should be able to discern what the hell a sculpture means without an explanation?

One virtue of the MLK memorial is that it makes the pretty awful one on the Washington Mall—

— seem like a Michelangelo by comparison.

In 2020, Boston removed its “Emancipation” sculpture, the Freedman’s Memorial

…which had been on display since 1879. It was considered by some to be politically incorrect, with the symbolic image of Abraham Lincoln freeing a kneeling former slave from his chains made some residents and visitors “uncomfortable,” 12,000 people signed a petition demanding the statue’s removal. So down it went.

I bet Boston can find at least 12,000 people who are made uncomfortable by “The Embrace.” Personally, it reminds me of the sandworms in “Beetlejuice.”

“Equity Snowplowing” May Be On Its Way To Boston

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

This may represent The Great Stupid at its zenith. That’s good news, right? Maybe it can’t get any worse from here. Maybe this means the fever is about to break.

In my old home town (sort of) of Boston, Massachusetts, they were expecting about three feet of snow yesterday. Mayor Michelle Wu, a wildly left wing fanatic who became the celebrated first Asian-American female mayor of the city, thus embodying the Joe Biden Progressive Theory of Merit: race and gender is all you need to be qualified, has signaled that the eternal Boston snow problem might be solved because Tiffany Chu will be her new chief of staff.

Chu is an advocate of “equity snowplowing,” another terrible off-shoot of the court-driven concept of “disparate impact.” She explains her passion this way:

It’s about snow-clearing and if the concept of snow-clearing can be sexist and the answer is, yes, wholeheartedly! In 2012 a number of cities in Sweden adopted a gender-equal plowing strategy where, actually, first pedestrian cycle lanes were cleared, especially near schools and day-care centers and then later on major streets. What they discovered was that [the previous] societal practice actually disadvantaged women because they were the ones who were more likely to walk and travel with children while men who are predominantly working and commuting benefited from those major corridors being plowed first. There was actually a gender equity panel or committee in Sweden where they did some data analysis and discovered that 79% of the pedestrian injuries had occurred during winter. Of that 79%, 69% were women, two-thirds of which were individuals slipping on ice.”

Do I really have to comment on something this self-evidently idiotic and irresponsible? Sidney Wang (above) isn’t enough? Oh, all right…

Comments:

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The Great Stupid And “The Postman Always Rings Twice” Meet NPR!

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

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Like the classic film starring my favorite comedy team, this is more funny than scary. And it couldn’t happen to a more deserving news organization.

An online NPR article and a tweet promoting the story reported that Michelle Wu, just elected as Boston’s  first woman and first person of color mayor, had disappointed some activists with her victory. 

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“While many are hailing it as a major turning point, others see it as more of a disappointment that the three Black candidates in the race couldn’t even come close,” the story, like the tweet, read.  This being The Great Stupid, NPR was quickly accused of being racist. Trapped like a rat, NPR’s Boston affiliate apologized and said it had deleted the tweet which was “causing harm”, though all it had done is report, and accurately, the reaction of others in the city, notably the black community. “We realize we don’t always get things right the first time,” it groveled, saying that the  “tweet/headline misrepresented the story.” No, what NPR was really apologizing for is reporting the story, which exposes the fact that black race-activists only care about one race, their own. They did see Wu’s victory as a disappointment. NPR’s sin was telling the truth, instead of being a reliable propaganda organ and spinning the story to the satisfaction of those who want to avoid letting on that the conservative criticism of the Left’s race obsession is legitimate. What “harm” had the tweet done? The harm was not following the approved script and hiding the ugly hypocrisy at the core of progressivism.

Bad progressive lapdog! BAD!

“The story is still Asians vs. Blacks for some unknown reason. The ‘tweet/headline’ was hardly the issue,” one outraged Bostonian tweeted. Unknown reason? Harvard and other elite colleges are rejecting better qualified Asian-American applicants to admit Blacks with lesser credentials. A disproportionate number of the attacks on Asian-Americans hyped by the media was at the hands of Blacks.

Now the  updated tweet says that “many were hopeful Boston would finally elect its first Black mayor,” with “Black activists and political strategists” left having to “reflect on what they can learn from the 2021 campaign season.” But they weren’t disappointed that Boston didn’t elect a black mayor, you see? 

No, I don’t either. What NPR correctly noted is that “many” in Boston and elsewhere in Progressiveland care about color more than character and ability. Continue reading →

Afternoon Ethics Excursions, 7/16/2021: Pandemic Consequences, Boston Bans Excellence, And What Do You Get When You Cross BLM With “The Great Stupid”?

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

SkipperProfilePic

I promise, this tour takes a lot less than three hours…

1. Nah, Black Lives Matter isn’t a Marxist organization! Here was the public statement of BLM regarding the pro-democracy demonstrations in Cuba:

BLM1

BLM2

BLM3

Yeah, all those Cubans waving U.S. flags and calling for “Freedom!” are blaming the U.S. for their miserable lives under Communism. “Great Stupid, thy name is Black Lives Matter!” Well, nickname anyway.

2. Ethics Quote of the Week: Sen. Marco Rubio. The Cuban-American Senator from Florida replied to this channeled Communist propaganda by tweeting, “Wait… [Cuba] had restrictions on importing food & medicine? How can that be? All week long the national media has been reporting it’s the US embargo restricting food & medicine to Cuba.” He added, “My office stands ready to help the leaders of the Black Lives Matter organization emigrate to [Cuba].”

Bazinga!

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Saturday Ethics Warm-Up, 8/12/2020: Remembering Boston Busing; Deriding BLM Lawn Signs And The Smug Bias They Represent

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

I remember this date, all right. I was scheduled to do a three hour CLE legal ethics seminar in Rhode Island on the 13th, and all the flights were cancelled. The bar association assumed I would cancel too, but I’m a “The show must go on” guy, and I said, “I’ll be there if I have to drive all night.” And I drove all night.

1. This date also had significance in the history of misguided utilitarian solutions to the problem of racial disparities. In his June 1974 ruling in Morgan v. Hennigan, U.S. District Judge Arthur Garrity held that Boston’s geographically segregated public schools created de facto school segregation that discriminated against black children. He ordered the busing of African American students to predominantly white schools and, punishing innocents for “the greater good,”  white students to black schools. Forced busing  began on September 12, and  was met with massive protests, particularly in South Boston, the city’s main Irish-Catholic neighborhood. Protests continued unabated for months, and many parents, white and black, kept their children at home. In October, the National Guard was mobilized to enforce the federal desegregation order.

The rest of the story: Boston’s draconian and unfair busing plan lasted for fourteen years, and (those who fail to learn from the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat them) didn’t work. Racial divisions were exacerbated, parents pulled their children out of public schools, and many families moved to the suburbs. Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 8/28/2020: A Bad Couple Of Months For Museums And Sexual Predators

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Good morning!

1. Related to absolutely nothing anyone is currently thinking about...I was re-watching “Spotlight” to remind myself that the news media sometimes does its job, and again was reminded how Hollywood constantly makes Americans more ignorant by its sheer arrogance and laziness. The film, which reasonably accurately recounts how the Boston Globe’s investigative “Spotlight” team broke the story of the extensive Catholic Church cover-up of pedophile priests, a scandal still unfolding now, 20 years later, has a scene in which a lawyer who represents the victims of such priests tells a reporter that he’s effective because he’s an “outsider.” “I’m Armenian,” he says. “How many Armenians do you know in Boston?” Having been brought up in Boston, I know that the answer to this question is “A LOT.” Boston was a center of Armenian immigration at the turn of the 20th Century, and its Armenian community, in the city and especially the suburbs, is huge and influential. There are many Armenian organizations as well. In Arlington, Mass., where my family lived, Armenian-Americans were prominent in business and government. The little side street where we lived, Brunswick Road, had ten families living on it: the Marshalls, the Gares, and the Moreland,  the Zeffs (who were Jewish, then two Sakoians, the Nazarians, the Catherians, the Berbarians, and the Masmanians. Just Googling “Boston Armenian conmmunity” would have let the film-makers know the scene was nonsense, and they couldn’t be bothered.

2. And speaking of  sexual predators…the cover-up of sexual predators in the coaching ranks for Olympic sports is being exposed slowly but surely.  Last month a lawsuit was filed against Richard Callaghan, an elite American figure skating coach best known for coaching Tara Lipinski to an Olympic gold medal in 1998 and coaching Todd Eldredge to a world title and six national championships. The suit alleges ongoing sexual abuse of one skater that endured over two decades. Callaghan’s victims were male, not female, but the story is familiar: parents guilelessly entrust their talented athletic children to mentor/coaches in swimming, skating, and gymnastics, without considering for a moment what attracts many of these people to working with children and teens.

Another sport that is coming to terms with a sexual predator is equestrian competition.  George Morris, an Olympics equestrian coach known as  a “kingmaker” for his success with riders,  was barred for life from the sport by the United States Equestrian Federation  based on an investigation of alleged sexual misconduct He is now facing lawsuits filed this month by two people claiming that he raped them as teenagers. Jimmy Williams, another  riding coach who guided many Olympians and  was also named in a lawsuit by a woman who said Williams had sexually assaulted her from the ages of 12 to 17.  Though Williams died in 1993, he was recorded as barred for life from the federation in 2018—yes, a dead man was banned for life— after an investigation by The New York Times revealed accusations by nearly a dozen women, including the Olympian Anne Kursinski, that he had preyed upon them as girls.

Parents are so desperate to live vicariously through their offspring that they willingly hand their kids over to the care of predators. I’m sorry to say this, but absent thorough, thorough investigation, it is irresponsible to trust these coaches. The history and what we know of human nature presents too much of a risk.

The same applies to allowing children to work in professional theater, TV, and movies. Continue reading →