| To: | Kevin.Honan@mahouse.gov, William.Brownsberger@mahouse.gov, mayor@cityofboston.gov, City.Council@cityofboston.gov |
|---|---|
| CC: | fareproposal@mbta.com |
Dear Gov. Patrick (via Fax), Rep. Honan, Rep. Brownsberger, Mayor Menino, and members of the Boston City Council,
I am writing to you all in incensed opposition to the abhorrent plan currently under discussion to close the MBTA’s budget gap by decimating Massachusetts public transportation.
Dear Governor Patrick,
Speaking as a religious Jew, I can assure you that I do not find it “inclusive” or “welcoming” for you to call the tree you’re lighting today a “holiday tree”.
If it were my choice, there would be no religious symbols of any sort on public property. But since that’s never going to happen, at the very least the symbols that are erected to recognize various people’s religious observances should actually recognize those observances, not water them down and engage in ludicrous newspeak to imply they’re something they’re not.
The only December holiday that involves a tree is Christmas. Please call it what it is and stop pandering to a class of people that don’t actually exist. Nobody who’s offended by Christmas trees on public property is mollified by calling them something different.
Sincerely,
Jonathan Kamens
I write in opposition to H.408, “legislation to establish civil or criminal penalties for motorists failing to yield to bicyclists,” which you sponsored.
Bicyclists are legally prohibited from riding in crosswalks. To use the crosswalk, a bicyclist is legally required to dismount from his bicycle and walk it, thus making him a pedestrian and therefore protected by the existing law. If he does not dismount, he is legally required to operate his bicycle as a vehicle, which means (among other things) staying out of the crosswalk.
Bicyclists riding in crosswalks are dangerous both to pedestrians and other vehicles on the road. It is both unnecessary and unreasonable to enshrine into law protections which would encourage bicyclists to violate other laws and operate their vehicles dangerously.
Drivers can already be cited for driving unsafely; there is no need for a new law protecting bicyclists in this particular context. This is especially true since the law would create a presumption that the driver of a car that strikes a bicycle in a crosswalk was at fault, when in fact it is just as likely, if not more so, that the bicyclist was at fault for darting into the crosswalk too fast for the driver to stop in time.
I speak from the point of view of someone who regularly walks, bikes, and drives in Boston; someone who strives to adhere to the law in all of those contexts; and someone who resents the many bicyclists who do not.
Sincerely,
Jonathan Kamens
I’m in the process of having solar panels installed on my roof. One of my friends is considering doing the same and asked me to share what I’ve learned so far. I figured I’d post it here since it may be useful or of interest to others as well. If you have any questions about anything I cover or don’t cover in this document, please feel free to email me or post a comment and I’ll try to respond.
Long-time followers of my advocacy may recall my story from years ago of attempting to get the Social Security Administration (SSA) to deal with the fact that they sent several of my kids’ social security cards to the wrong address because the software they were using to canonicalize mailing addresses was buggy.
Some sleuthing on my part and help from people on the Web revealed that the most likely explanation for what was going on was that the Social Security Administration was using a software package from Semaphore Corporation to perform address canonicalization. To be clear, the evidence behind this theory was purely circumstantial — the SSA was canonicalizing my address wrong, and Semaphore Corp.’s software canonicalizes my address wrong in the same way.
Semaphore was notified in August 2005 that their software was canonicalizing my address and others incorrectly. As noted in my original story, their ridiculous response was:
The USPS has a large number of esoteric rules about which ZIP+4 to match when the address-city-state-ZIP inputs are incomplete or conflicting and ambiguous, and rules don’t even exist for many cases, so you’ll continue to see the logic evolve as CASS changes to include more of the above situations.
There are two reasons why their response was ridiculous:
I originally posted my story in August 2005. Tonight, six years after I first posted it, I received a long, convoluted email message from an unnamed individual at Semaphore which can be briefly summarized as follows:
But you don’t have to trust me. Below is their email message in full, with some commentary from me. (more…)
My wife and I have lived at [elided] in Brighton since 1997. At least a third of the residential units on our block are rental units, most of which are rented to a different set of Boston College students each year. Some years are good: the students are respectful of the neighborhood, keep the noise down, and keep things clean. Some years are bad: the students host loud, rowdy, outdoor parties until all hours of the night; get drunk; throw plastic cups, beer bottles and cans everywhere; throw up or urinate in the street; set off fireworks under cars; etc.
Although we never know what we’re going to get in terms of students, we do have a pretty good idea of what we are going to get from the police department, which is that when we call the department at 2:00am on a Sunday morning because the students are playing Denis Leary’s “Cause I’m an Asshole” at top volume out of an open window, drunkenly screaming along, and waking up the entire neighborhood, and we call 911 and ask for someone to come do something about it, the odds are that nobody is going to show up.
About a week and a half ago, one of the students living on our block for the summer approached me as I was leaving my car and said the following: “Hi. You live across the street, right? Some of my friends are in a blues band, and we’re hoping to have them do a little performance from our porch on Saturday afternoon. We wanted to check with the neighbors to make sure it’s OK. Is that OK with you?”
I told him that my wife and I liked music and had no problem at all with a daytime performance. I was very impressed that he took the time to check with me and (I assume) our other neighbors.
On Saturday afternoon the band, Original Gravity, showed up and started playing. My wife and I were sitting on our porch very much enjoying the free concert, when, after only a few songs, not one but two D-14 police cruisers showed up. After the police spoke for a few minutes with the student who had previously spoken to us, the band announced that they had been ordered to end the concert, and that was the end of it.
After the police left, I went over and asked the band members what had happened. They said that someone had called the police and complained. They also said that the city requires a permit for a live band performance, and they didn’t have one, so the police ordered them to stop playing. Finally, they said that they had called city hall all week trying to get just such a permit, and no one had returned any of their calls.
The band was no louder than a loud stereo would have been. It was good music, and it wasn’t hurting anybody.
It’s simply mind-boggling to me that the same police who can’t be troubled to show up when a drunken party is disturbing the peace on our block at 2:00am, have no trouble at all showing up within a few minutes to shut down a relatively quiet party, with good music, in the middle of the day, on the basis of a single complaint from a single sourpuss resident.
It’s also incomprehensible that these students don’t need a permit to hold a raucus, alcohol-driven party at all hours of the night, but they do need one to have some friends play some live music on their porch in the middle of the day. Asinine doesn’t begin to cover it.
The band wasn’t a public nuisance, but shutting it down certainly was. I assure you that my wife and I do not believe that our quality of life was improved by the policemen’s actions.
Sincerely,
Jonathan Kamens
An interesting comment showed up a few hours ago on an earlier blog posting of mine about Barack Obama: “Just wanted to say that I am eployed at a large Pharmaceutical company in Clayton NC and I support Barack Obama with all my heart. I would love for all my friends and colleagues to re-elect Obama in 2012!! I LOVE YOU OBAMA.”
The commenter gave the name “Diane Pearce Votes for Obama Again” and linked to my.barackobama.com. I thought it was slightly weird, but not weird enough to merit further investigation.
Then, three hours later, another comment came in on a different blog posting, this time from “Diane Pearce Loves Barack Obama”: “All I know is that I work at a large Pharmaceutical corporation in Clayton NC and I endroce Barack Obama with all my being. I would love for all my friends and colleagues to re-elect Obama in 2012!! I LOVE YOU OBAMA.”
That exceeded my weirdness threshold, so I looked into it a bit further.
The two comments gave two different email addresses, Reitter@gmail.com and Lipovsky@gmail.com, both of which appear to be based on people’s names and neither of which is related to the full name given by the commenter.
One of the comments was posted from an IP address in the United Arab Emirates. The other was posted from Indonesia.
I Googled for pages matching “Diane Pearce” and Obama, and there were 264 matches, many of which were similar comments. I did the same Google search a half hour later, and the count was up to 270.
Someone is clearly astroturfing here. The motives for this, and whether the people doing it are in reality trying to help or hurt Obama, are left as an exercise to the reader.
 Diane Pearce Votes for Obama Againmy.barackobama.com Reitter@gmail.com 86.96.226.22 |
To the editor:
What a relief to see our elected officials finally getting tough on the aid recipients who spent 0.002% of last year’s welfare funds on underwear (“Pol gets tough on welfare abuse“, Feb. 15).
How dare these women buy high-quality, inexpensive undergarments from Victoria’s Secret? Wal-Mart should be perfectly fine for poor people. Or maybe they should make do without underwear; if beggars wandering the streets half-naked in rags was good enough for our ancestors, it should be good enough for us.
It’s even more outrageous that some of these women are shopping at outlet stores. If they’re going to use taxpayer money on underwear, the least they could do is pay full price.
Sincerely,
Jonathan Kamens
I play a prominent role in this article:
Good for the TAB for doing some real, honest-to-goodness journalism! In recognition, I’ve just subscribed to the TAB.
February 1, 2011
Mayor Thomas M. Menino
1 City Hall Square, Suite 500
Boston, MA 02201-2013
mayor@cityofboston.gov
(617) 635-4500
Dear Mayor Menino,
On the brink of yet another major snowstorm, I am writing to complain about how incredibly bad the city’s handling of the snow has been this winter. (more…)
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