From coat check to kitchen, Boston restaurants are rife with sexual harassment
I've worked in some kitchens and that is no surprise. I suppose I'm even guilty of some form of harassment regarding my reaction to being rejected for a dates. Never touched anyone, though. You don't violate a person's space.
One in a series of occasional articles examining how President Trump’s ascendance and early moves have altered expectations and reality. This story is the first of three gauging those effects in one Pennsylvania county.
The photo at the top of the piece is that of A Confederate flag hung outside a home in Yoe, a borough in York County, Pa.
Could just as easily be Weston, I guess. I'm told it's normal now.
Marty Walsh and Tito Jackson grew up 2 miles — and worlds away — from each other
And where would that be?
They bubble-wrapped it for you.
(FLIP)
"The allegations of “dangerous’’ immigrants, “fake news,’’ and “unpatriotic’’ stars “disrespecting’’ the national anthem may feel as fresh as this month's headlines. But those same themes were at the center of an incredible scandal that rocked Boston — and then the nation — exactly 100 years ago, and one that came close to toppling the Boston Symphony Orchestra....."
Related:
"Leaders of China’s Communist Party-controlled legislature, the National People’s Congress, passed a law making disrespecting the national anthem a criminal offense punishable by up to three years in prison. The move comes amid rising nationalist rhetoric from the Communist Party under Xi. After his recent appointment to a second five-year term as party leader, Xi touted a vision of achieving a ‘‘Chinese Dream’’ of a powerful, prosperous nation. Under the new law, penalties include detention, imprisonment of up to three years, and deprivation of political rights. The anthem, ‘‘March of the Volunteers,’’ has in recent months been a political flashpoint in Hong Kong, where tensions are rising over Beijing’s efforts to assert its authority over the semiautonomous territory. Soccer fans in Hong Kong have booed the anthem when it’s played at games between the home team and teams from China or other countries. Prodemocracy activists and lawmakers fear a national anthem law could be used to undermine freedom of speech. In a separate development Saturday....."
They did that for Trump.
Related: Clinton Stole Democratic Nomination
The Globe turned the Page on all that.
Also see:
"Tucked away in the Republican tax bill are several provisions aimed at appeasing conservative lawmakers. The bill released Thursday includes changes that would codify the rights of unborn children and allow tax-exempt religious organizations to engage in political activities. Antiabortion activists have long sought to enshrine into federal law the recognition of the unborn, and the bill would add such language to rules for education savings vehicles known as 529 accounts."
"A New Bedford woman was arrested in and charged with animal cruelty and child abuse last week after police found 19 dead animals and 17 other animals, some emaciated, at her home. Amanda Vicente, 39, of New Bedford was arrested Thursday on 17 counts of animal cruelty and one count of child abuse, according to a statement from New Bedford police. Dead lizards were found in cages in the bedroom of Vicente’s 13-year-old son....."
They sent the gorilla to New Orleans.
"The city Police Commission has voted to arm officers with electric stun guns in the wake of a deadly shooting. Friday’s 4-to-3 vote was met with shouts of ‘‘Shame’ from activists who contend that the weapons can kill and might escalate rather than deescalate confrontations, leading to deadly encounters."
Related: Execution backed in killing of officer
It's a double standard regarding a civilian government; however, they are our heroes so.....
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Want some candy, little girl?
"New Republic publisher resigns after harassment allegations" Associated Press November 04, 2017
NEW YORK — The publisher of The New Republic, Hamilton Fish, has resigned amid allegations of sexual harassment.
Fish, a former publisher of The Nation who joined The New Republic in 2016, has been placed on a leave of absence.
Fish, noting his time with such organizations as The Nation, a prominent liberal publication, and with Human Rights Watch, wrote in an e-mail to the Associated Press that he had spent his career in ‘‘in progressive media and the human rights field.
NOOOOOOOOOO!
Fish is among a wave of celebrities and media figures stepping down or being fired since reports in October of alleged harassment and assault by Harvey Weinstein.
Related: The ART of Sexual Harassment
I guess the reporters aren't very good at it.
Others departing include author and former NBC analyst Mark Halperin, former New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier, and former NPR chief editor Michael Oreskes, who was an AP executive from 2008 to 2015.
More than 100 employees of the Associated Press petitioned the company’s management on Friday, asking if any sexual harassment complaints had been made against Oreskes while he was employed there.
Oreskes was ousted this week as newsroom chief of National Public Radio after reports of improprieties when he worked at The New York Times in the 1990s and later at NPR.....
Looks like the scandal has been confined to the newsrooms this Sunday.
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Also see:
"Certainly, the ground seems to be shifting in Hollywood, where some of the men who have preyed upon vulnerable underlings for years are finally being unmasked. As a counterpoint to all of this good news, let me present the mayor of Everett....."
It's time to face up to the fact that domestic violence is a growing public health problem.
Maybe pot would help.
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"Hurricanes highlight strains on federal flood insurance program" by Mary Williams Walsh New York Times November 04, 2017
NEW YORK — In August, when Hurricane Harvey was bearing down on Texas, David Clutter was in court, trying one more time to make his insurer pay his flood claim — from Hurricane Sandy, five years before.
Clutter’s insurer is the federal government. As it resists his claims, he has been forced to take out a third mortgage on his house in Long Beach, N.Y., to pay for repairs to make it habitable for his wife and three children.
He owes more than the house is worth, and his flood-insurance premiums just went up.
The government-run National Flood Insurance Program is, for now, virtually the only source of flood insurance for more than 5 million households in the United States.
This hurricane season, as tens of thousands of Americans seek compensation for storm-inflicted water damage, they face a problem: The flood insurance program is broke and broken.
The program, administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, has been in the red since Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans in 2005. It still has more than a thousand disputed claims left over from Sandy. And in October, it exhausted its $30 billion borrowing capacity and had to get a bailout just to keep paying current claims.
Congress must decide by Dec. 8 whether to keep the program going. An unusual coalition of insurers, environmentalists, and fiscal conservatives has joined the Trump administration in calling for fundamental changes in the program, including direct competition from private insurers.
The fiscal conservatives note that the program was supposed to take the burden off taxpayers but has not, and environmentalists argue that it has become an enabler of construction on flood-prone coastlines, by charging premiums too low to reflect the true cost of building there.
The program has other troubles as well. It cannot force vulnerable households to buy insurance, even though they are required by law to have it. Its flood maps can’t keep up with new construction that can change an area’s flood risk.
It has spent billions of dollars repairing houses that just flood again. Its records, for instance, show that a house in Spring, Texas, has been repaired 19 times, for a total of $912,732 — even though it is worth only $42,024.
And after really big floods, the program must rely on armies of subcontractors to determine payments, baffling and infuriating policyholders, like Clutter, who cannot figure out who is opposing their claims, or why.
Roy E. Wright, who has directed the flood insurance program for FEMA since June 2015, acknowledged in an interview Friday that major changes were called for and said some were already in the works.
The program’s rate-setting methods, for example, are 30 years old, he said, and new ones will be phased in over the next 2 years. But other changes — like cutting off coverage to homes that are repeatedly flooded — would require an act of Congress.
“The administration feels very strongly that there needs to be reform this year,” he said. “I believe strongly that we need to expand flood coverage in the United States, and the private insurers are part of that.”
When Congress established the National Flood Insurance Program in 1968, about 130 private insurers gave it a shot, pooling their capital with the government. But there were clashes, and eventually the government drove out the insurers and took over most operations.
Since 1983, Washington has set the insurance rates, mapped the floodplains, written the rules and borne all of the risk. The role of private insurers has been confined to marketing policies and processing claims, as government contractors.
That worked for a few decades. But now, relentless coastal development and the increasing frequency of megastorms and billion-dollar floods have changed the calculus.
“Put plainly, the NFIP is not designed to handle catastrophic losses like those caused by Harvey, Irma, and Maria,” Mick Mulvaney, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, said in a letter to members of Congress after the three huge hurricanes barreled into the United States this season.
Mulvaney called on Congress to forgive $16 billion of the program’s debt, which both houses agreed to do.
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Forget the flood, how is your heating system?
Better get your boots on!
"Scores gather for antifascism rally on Boston Common" by Jacob Carozza and Evan Allen Globe Correspondent | Globe Staff November 04, 2017
Scores of protesters gathered at the Parkman Bandstand late Saturday afternoon to protest President Trump and the rise of what they described as fascism in the United States.
That's it? "Scores?"
So much for creating a crisis to effect regime change!
They waived signs that read “NO ALT RIGHT, NO KKK, NO FASCIST USA” and “Capitalism Generates Fascism,” and after about an hour and a half of speeches, began marching through Boston Common and Downtown Crossing.
“To me, it seems pretty obvious that the country is headed in the completely wrong direction,” said Ira Yedlin, who participated in the rally and was visiting Boston from Arizona. “There’s an obvious rise in Nazism, white supremacists. They’re all coming out into the open and the idiot in the White House is encouraging all of this.”
The event was organized by a group called Refuse Fascism, and coincided with 20 similar rallies across the United States, including ones in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.
They fizzled or it would be bigger news!
The group was issued a permit for the Boston event, according to Nicole Caravella, a spokeswoman for Mayor Martin J. Walsh.
“It’s about getting people to see that this really is fascist,” said organizer Scott Gilbert, referring to the Trump administration. Gilbert drew a parallel between today’s political climate and that of 1930s Germany, and warned of complacency by citizens.
That era is gone, and you lose the argument when you are the first to raise it.
The rally was intended to kick off an upswell of political pressure to force the removal of Trump and Vice President Mike Pence. On Saturday, the crowd started small but eventually grew to nearly 100 people. Some counterprotesters arrived, and several arguments broke out but ended without arrests. Speakers ignored the skirmishes.
Only 100 people showed?
Pfffffffffffffffft!
John Medlar, who organized a controversial Free Speech rally in Boston in August that many criticized for being a platform for racists, attended Saturday night’s rally. He noted that unlike his event, which was heavily policed and effectively drowned out by tens of thousands of counterprotesters, Saturday’s rally was allowed to proceed unfettered.
Yeah, yeah, I remember. Was all out of love.
Saturday’s event began with political songs by local folk singer Rachel Schachter, who performs under the name Rachel Marie. Several people spoke, including Emmanuel “Manny” Lusardi, liaison for immigrant affairs in the Cambridge vice mayor’s office.
“The fascism and hate that is coming out of the White House is unprecedented,” he said.
Attendees said they were compelled to come because of what they were witnessing in America. Mike Bresnahan, who works in the Lawrence Public Schools, said he has seen rising fear among his Latino students. He sees lessons in perseverance for today in the protests that flared up early in the Iraq war.
Oh, all of a sudden the Globe has discovered the antiwar movement!
“Had those people stayed [protesting] all over the country, we might have been able to stop that catastrophe,” he said.
You can shove the guilt trip. Bush and Co. were determined to go hell-or-high-water, and the papers sure helped by front-paging the lies that led to it.
We did all we could, and I've spent the last 11 years here protesting damn near every day, day after day. (Btw, it was fellow protesters who told me I should start a blog in 2006. I think they were tired of me talking about how 9/11 was an inside job).
Yeah, welcome aboard.
Similar rallies were listed on social media for Falmouth and Pittsfield on Saturday.....
If only we had a hero to save us from a world full of killing.
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As for the muck in Lebanon, it looks like a coup, and we could all be haunted by what comes next.
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I would just like to take the opportunity to share this with you:
"Rose McGowan, Colin Kaepernick and Noam Chomsky Snoffling at the Trough
Saturday, November 04, 2017
Dog Poet Transmitting.......
Readers that come here know how I feel about Noam Chomsky. I had the honor of being able to tell him how I felt. Today's posting is about frauds and impostors but mostly about crass opportunists of which there is no shortage in these times. Chomsky once tried to charge a reporter $35.00 for an interview. You can hardly be more venal and grasping than that. He's the man who said it doesn't matter if 9/11 was an inside job. He was singing a different tune before he launched into that melody. History will remember him as an oily, smarmy opportunist, a liar and a traitor, among other things.
A little while ago there was an NFL quarterback named Colin Kaepernick. He had some success with the San Francisco 49ers until the defenses figured him out. He was a one dimensional player and it doesn't take long for the opposition to neutralize that dimension. He was informed by the head office that they were going to let him go. He was getting paid around 16 million dollars a year. However, his lack of versatility rendered him obsolete in their plans for the future.
Here's what I think happened after this, according to what I saw. Knowing that his playing days were doomed in San Francisco, he sought another avenue of expression and started taking a knee during the singing of the National Anthem before the games. Here and there one or two others joined him and he managed to turn himself into an iconic warrior for social justice issues. He was protesting the police shootings of black men in Ferguson and other locations. He wore a pair of socks to the game that depicted the police as pigs. He put on a Fidel Castro t-shirt. He did a number of things that were very offensive to the general type of individual who enjoys professional football. He had a chance to take less money and keep playing but he refused to do that and left professional football. He has a girlfriend who is a social justice activist.
The kneeling before games increased. The fans became uniformly angry and attendance at games dropped and the number of people watching games has also dropped dramatically. A crisis has ensued. Trump came out and called Kaepernick a sonofabitch. Kaepernick indicated that he wanted to play in the NFL and sleazy lawyers turned sports reporters like Mike Florio began cheerleading for Kaepernick at every turn. He is a regular reporter at NBC.com and his constant commentary on Kaepernick began to annoy the readers of his articles. The negative responses were running about 40 to 1. This did not dissuade Florio who continues to this day. Other reporters have joined in. All I will say further on that portion of the matter is; you know who owns the media.
Kaepernick got tryouts with several teams. He wanted too much money and his skills were not good enough to offset the baggage and distraction that came with him. Trust me, if you can play at a certain level, you will have a job. He was offered back-up money but wouldn't take it. Then he was granted a tryout with the Baltimore Ravens. His girlfriend proceeded to make a comment that associated the Raven's owner with characters in the awful film, Django Unchained. The tryout was rescinded. Today an argument rages about there being a plot to exclude Kaepernick from professional football. Kaepernick has filed a lawsuit against the NFL for collusion. That, I think, is the last nail in the coffin concerning his ever playing in the NFL again. Football is about money. Money comes from the fans. The fans, in a significant proportion hate Kaepernick. Any team that did hire him would feel the financial wrath of the fans and the locker-room would be a scene of conflict and dissension. The bottom line really is that Kaepernick is not good enough to warrant what he insists on being paid, along with the great distraction that he would bring with him. Kaepernick is a crass opportunist. Ironically he was raised by a white couple. His own, adopted mother has even spoken out against him.
I am no fan of Harvey Weinstein. He is an evil and ugly man and I have known about his behavior for some time. It was never much of a secret but he was a very powerful man. As we have mentioned a time or two, Mr. Apocalypse is on the scene. All sorts of interesting developments are at hand. Weinstein's principal accuser is one Rose McGowan who had a brief career as an actress but like Kaepernick is now past her sell by date.
What is not generally known is that Rose McGowan is a crass opportunists who doesn't give a shit one way or another about sexual abuse. Harvey's people offered her a million dollars to keep her mouth shut. This was after she had already signed a non disclosure agreement for money previously. The million dollars was not enough for her, she demanded 6 million to shut up. This renders that impassioned speaker on women's issues a crass opportunist. She was formerly the girlfriend of Marilyn Manson. Manson is a Satanist whose music inspired the Columbine Massacre. I'm not one to argue guilt by association but there it is in any case. I could bring up a number of interesting stories about McGowan and Manson. For whatever the reason, certain information seems to find its way to me. I don't really see the point. I study events for awhile before I form my impression on them, or the people involved. Being precipitate is not a good thing if it means you have to back off, or apologize for having been misinformed and even slanderous. God knows, I don't like it when it happens to me. It is even worse when you wax disingenuous and connive with farcical logic to justify what you have done or said.
Once again, let me state that I am no fan of Harvey Weinstein and also that I think Trump and the forces behind him had something to do with what happened to him. Look for more startling exposes to come in the moments before us. Look for the lid to be ripped off of international pedophilia and its presence in Hollywood. Look for information about Pizzagate and Hillary Clinton to come front and center. At this moment, some very powerful people are trembling in their positions of influence. This is all due to Mr. Apocalypse, not Trump or anyone else. They are all pawns in his game.
Today starts the countrywide drill about an attack on the National Grid System. It is also the Day of Rage for the Antifa Thugs. It should prove to be a very interesting day. Meanwhile Trump is off to Asia on what, to some, appears to be an unnecessary trip. He'll be gone for eleven days. If I were a conspiracy theorist, I would say there are some interesting implications here. I am not a conspiracy theorist however because there is nothing theoretical about what I know or believe. I should point out that if I don't know or believe it, I don't know or believe it and I'm not going to bring it up unless I label it speculation.
As you know, we live in interesting times. Anything can happen but... it will not happen unless the ineffable permits it for the purpose of demonstration. It is good to remember, in trying times, that the ineffable is always at the helm of the ship of existence and we are on that ship. Either you are sailing with the ineffable or you are sailing under the power of your own resources, or at least this is what you think. Having seen the outcome of imagining I am sailing under my own power, more than once, is more than enough to convince me to never do something like that again. Life has humbled me. My own existence has humbled me. I can't do anything on my own anymore and I now understand that I never did. I was confused about a good many things. I may still be confused on occasion but not about those things that I have had the benefit of learning painful lessons about. Some lessons you don't forget and that is one of the astounding features concerning the grace of the ineffable. At any given moment you might feel that you are one of the most miserable and unfortunate creatures on the planet. Time passes and you see that what put you through it was a love and an understanding far beyond your own comprehension. I am a living testimony to that. Now I am grateful for everything I got put through. I never thought that would happen but, so it is.
Just in case they shut down the internet (grin) and we don't have the opportunity to meet again, I want to tell you what a pleasure it has been to enjoy this back and forth. May the ineffable guide and protect you all, now and forever.
End Transmission.......
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