BSO

BSO

Friday, June 30, 2017

Staring in Amherst

I took this screenshot of local media legend Scott Coen off of a news video from 1987 that is part of the Ogulewicz Chronicles and put it on Coen's Facebook page, where it turned out to be really popular!


Flower power on Main Street Northampton.


Sam's Pizza in downtown Hamp has really good slices, in fact, it is really the Northampton equivalent of Amherst's Antonio's. Sam's also serves sandwiches, or a cutely named variation thereof.


All in all, you're just another one in the wall, at Share Coffee in Amherst.


It used to be called Raos:


Whatever happened to Raos? Anyway, now it's called Share. However, who the hell is sharing anything? The ambiance seems to have little to do with sharing, as most patrons are just staring at their computer.


That's why instead of calling the place SHARE, I call it STARE.

At UMass the bike is redefined.


Sorry but there is only one Gerry Phillips.

Thursday, June 15, 2017

Serving



Pioneer Valley congressman Richard Neal isn't feeling the love from some of his hilltown constituents these days, but I wonder if much of their concerns about his level of constituent service are misplaced. I say this as a longtime critic of Representative Neal, a staunch Democrat whose voting record in Congress rarely coincides with my own libertarian views.

Grumblings about Neal's availability and responsiveness are not new. As far back as 1992, the refusal of Neal's office to respond to letters sent to him by a supporter of then presidential candidate Ross Perot named Tom Sheehan so exasperated Sheehan that he actually ran against Neal on Perot's third party ticket, garnering 16% of the vote. Last year Independent Frederick Mayock and Libertarian Thomas Simmons ran against Neal, both using inaccessibility as an issue, but combined they got only 27% of the vote. The point is that the issue of Neal's accessibility has been raised in the past, but has never translated into any kind of a serious threat to Neal's re-election. Despite the clever advertising campaign by his critics, I don't think the issue will have much impact this time either.

For one thing, elections are about candidates as much as issues, and I don't see any major figure on the horizon who might challenge Neal. I also suspect that the hilltown critics are a little naive about what they should expect from Neal. As top Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee, Neal is a major figure in devising the nuts and bolts of the resistance to the policies of the Republicans under Donald Trump. Neal will have the opportunity over the next two years to make a major impact on whether those policies advance through congress or are rejected.

Therefore, if I were as anti-Trump as the members of Indivisible Williamsburg claim to be, I would want Richie Neal to stay in Washington and on the job as much as possible. The last thing I would want him to do is wander far from the heat of battle by visiting the hilltowns to chat about the drop in the wholesale price of milk and the condition of country roads.

If Neal ever is spotted in Williamsburg, those crusading anti-Trumpers would probably be smarter to tell him to stop wasting his time visiting them and get back to waging the war in Washington.

Update - Neal couldn't be very happy about this cover story in the latest Valley Advocate.


Speaking of service, there was a really nice affair this week honoring the late Amherst blogmaster Larry Kelley, who tirelessly served the town with news, commentary and high quality photography since he made his first blog posting on St. Patrick's Day 2007. The memorial event featured framed versions of some of Kelley's better photographs and was held at the Sunrise Grill on Fearing Street, right across from where I used to live in the early 90's. I lived in the upstairs apartment and used to look out the window at the mob scenes that used to form outside that joint on Saturday nights.


The pizza and grinder place looks the same as it did then, although it had a different name that I can't quite recall.


Here I am at the event with Amherst Town Meeting member Emilie Hamilton.


Larry's beautiful daughters were also in attendance.


Mary Cary, who took most of the pictures you are looking at, is shown here with the legendary Amherst Bulletin reporter Phylis Lehrer.


Here's a video Mary Cary shot of the many nice things people had to say.



I leave you for the time being with this view of downtown Northampton through the front door of City Hall.

Tuesday, June 6, 2017

999 Page Boulevard


Springfield, Massachusetts - 1939

This is what Google captured the address as looking like in October 2016.


View out the back window of Northampton's Starbucks.


Abandoned protest sign at a Hamp bus stop.


Vehicle parked at Amherst Town Hall asks a question everyone should be able to answer.


Here's an unusually sophisticated political graffiti I came across recently.


Sadly, one sometimes comes across evidence of anarcho-communist activism online, despite the fact that it is a political dead end due to its own internal contradictions. Anarchy is the abolition of all order, where no one controls the government and it is characterized by chaos, confusion and often violence. Communists have often favored the creation of anarchy in order to create conditions where the chaos becomes so disruptive, disorienting and dangerous that the public soon begs for a return to order by any means, at which point the communists step in with an iron fist and take over.

Some people, typically young idealists, are drawn to anarchy by an understandable disgust over the stale customs, traditions, regulations and laws of the current system. It seems wonderfully liberating to just trash the whole corrupt and incompetent system and replace it with....? Because of the poor quality of our public school system, many young people today have no clear understanding of what communism is. In fact they may have been given the false impression by their left-leaning educators that communism is somehow practical, moral and consistent with human liberty.

The truth is that communism is by its very nature a system of rigid controls designed to strictly regulate the economy and society in general. It's primary feature is the low level of freedom communism allows and its domination of all major areas of life. Claiming to support both anarchy and communism is self-contradictory, you cannot have total freedom and total control at the same time. Anarchy is always unsustainable in the long run because a productive and safe society must have at least some degree of order. Therefore, despite its radical, freedom loving rhetoric, anarchy always ultimately leads to some form of dictatorship. Although it is counter-intuitive, anarchy is actually a form of authoritarianism, since by its very nature anarchy creates the circumstances where repression of freedom is the inevitable long term result, especially when combined with communist ideals. No true lover of liberty is an anarchist.

Update - June 13, 2000

Today I noted that new graffiti has been added to denounce Anarcho-Communism as "childish." It also appears as though someone tried to cover part of the original message, but someone then rewrote it:


Only in the Pioneer Valley can you have a debate on sociopolitical concepts via scrawlings on a wall.