The Northampton Urban Outfitters is located in an old bank building, as seen in this classic Greg Saulmon photo.
Here's what it looks like inside. Pretty impressive!
On the wall is this plaque leftover from the bank days, honoring a teller who was killed in World War One in 1918.
In front of it is this rack of ladies clothes.
At first I was inclined to say something to the management about the lack of respect that shows, but then I was struck by the idea that the dead soldier probably would have liked the notion of pretty young Urban Outfitter shoppers pausing all day before his plaque. That's better remembrance than a lot of vets get.
There was another one of those censorship controversies at UMass last week when Professor Andrew Bernstein tried to lecture on the virtues of capitalism and was repeatedly interrupted by screaming leftists. Here one of them is escorted from the hall by campus security.
Newt who? This Northampton van owner is supporting (and has been supporting) Vermin Supreme!
A cardboard cow on the roof of an Amherst shed.
Legendary Amherst Bulletin columnist Phyllis Lehrer (right) stopped by the Amherst Survival Center recently with her friend Gale Kuhn.
So did Channel 22's Shannon Halligan and her cameraperson.
The Northampton Chapter.
The Hot Chocolate charity run through downtown Northampton was this morning.
Some local politicians have managed to spark a political career for themselves by the use of a blog. For example, Granby teacher Mark Bail had a popular blog that helped to propel him to a seat on the town selectboard. However, since he was elected his writing has all but stopped, with his most recent post being in April and the one before that in January.
Stephanie O'Keeffe of Amherst also launched her successful campaign for selectboard with a blog, which she stills keeps more or less up to date, although she has altered her writing to be a much more dryly factual, with a lot less of the gossipy style that first endeared her to the electorate. A blog she started specifically to deal with selectboard issues, was last updated in June of last year.
No doubt many of those voting for both those candidates did so with the assumption that they would continue to receive the same level of chatty insider insight from them concerning town affairs once in office that they did before the election. Perhaps Bail and O'Keeffe fully intended to do so as well, but if so, what changed their minds?
Politics is an insiders game, something every former outsider learns soon after the inauguration. Frankly, you tend not to be invited into the innermost circle of policy-making if your colleagues fear that you are going to blab everything that goes on among the politicians to the general public.
Catherine Sanderson is one regional school committee member who blogs. Springfield School Committee member Antonette Pepe, although she never blogged, ran on a platform of greater openness. She was never afraid to run to the media when she thought her fellow pols were up to mischief that the public needed to know about. As a result, she found herself not being informed when things were happening and not invited to any social events where members might gather and share inside information.
In the latest development in the politician's war against openness, Amherst blog-king Larry Kelley reports that the committee that runs the regional school system wants to know what restrictions can be legally placed on politician's blogs. Kelley explains:
So five local school committee chairs have officially requested in writing the District Attorney create guidelines about how and when a blog may or may not violate the Open Meeting Law--key word being "Open".
The irony simply abounds. The joint letter apparently was the idea of Shutesbury School Committee Chair Michael DeChiara,. The other School Committee chairs wonder if perhaps some Anons posting comments could be School Committee members thus potentially bringing together a quorum discussing something outside a posted public meeting.
Forgetting for a moment that a blog is public, these Chairs are not showing much faith in their fellow School Committee members if they honestly believe an elected public official would cowardly cower behind a cloak of anonymity.
These phony concerns about blogging are really just a lot of hair-splitting blather designed to pervert the open-meeting law in order to use it as a club to beat into silence public officials who have the audacity (and the courage) to blog about what local officials are doing. God forbid that the public be as privy to what is going on as the political insiders. There is really no reason for any official rules for blogging by politicians, because the simple standard is this: Any action that brings more information to the public about what the political class is doing is automatically GOOD. Any action that helps to obscure or hide information from the public is BAD. I don't think you need a law degree to tell the difference.
I have long believed that EVERY elected official should be required to keep a blog and to spend at least twenty minutes every weekday composing a post telling the public about what they have done in the last twenty-four hours on the public's behalf. Any elected official that refuses to blog regularly should be considered by the voters as violating the public trust. Indeed, a failure to blog should be considered sufficient grounds for removing that official from office in the next election.
An almost eerie silence has fallen over the University of Massachusetts with classes now over and the seniors graduated.
Here is a picture of the Old Chapel as it appeared in 1885.
Here it is this morning, one hundred and twenty five years later.
Some UMass students pull a prank on their roommate in this video. What is interesting is how in the conversation before the prank a student refers to "the crazy people that chill in Amherst."
What do they think is so crazy about Amherst? Maybe the students watch Amherst Cable TV.
An incident happened last week at Northampton's Smith College that attracted little media attention but perhaps should have. Ryan Sorba, author of an unreleased but already controversial book titled The Born Gay Hoax attempted to give a speech presumably based on his belief that homosexuality is not determined primarily by genetics.
Speaking for myself, I definitely have the sense of having been gay my whole life. If it is a "lifestyle choice" then it was one I made too early in life to be conscious of doing it. But what exactly Sorba's theory is was not possible to ascertain because angry mobs of chanting protesters made it impossible for him to speak.
I didn't attend the event. The person who alerted me to it, as well as to a site with some photos and videos of the incident, was local writer and photographer Ben Duffy, whom some of you may remember as an occasional contributor to this website. He sent me the following email:
Ben Duffy
Tom , I thought that you might want to take a look at these pictures and videos. They are astounding.
I've noticed from your blog that you seem to harbor a hatred toward the so-called "religious Right", due to the fact that they think that your sexual behavior is immoral. Well, I do too.
In any case, you're still free to do it. Here's the BIG LIE of the homosexual lobby--that they just want to secure the freedom of two consenting adults to do what they want to do behind closed doors. In fact, that is NOT the case. What they want is for everyone to approve of it, nay--to CELEBRATE it.
The educational system is their vehicle. They'll get right down there in the elementary school if they need to.
I remembered once how you mention the supposedly "anti-gay" Mike Huckabee, and how you remembered a time when Republicans just wanted to stay out of your bedroom. Well guess what--we still do. Even Mike Huckabee approves of Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 Supreme Court case that found a RIGHT to Sodomy in the Constitution. Mike Huckabee is in no way suggesting that cops should be running around, breaking down doors and arresting homosexuals in their acts of indecency. He just wants the right to SAY that it is indecent.
And that's the freedom that is in jeopardy in the United States today. Frankly, the "gay rights movement"-- aka the homosexual lobby, aka the sodomy gestapo--is the greatest threat to our freedoms today. They will silence anyone who gets in their way. If this video doesn't convince you, just Google Tyler Chase Harper. Or look into the San Diego and Providence firefighters who have been forced to march in Gay Pride Parades. OR look at the Christian activists who were arrested at the Philadelphia gay pride parade for engaging in peaceful protest. Or the way that the homosexual lobby shut down Catholic Charities of Boston because they refused to put children in the unhealthy environment of homosexual parents.
If I were a bumper sticker person, I'd have one made that says "homosexuals stole my right to vote". I don't buy this bullshit that we can't vote on gay marriage because it is a "civil right". Voting is a civil right, gay "marriage" is a judicial fabrication. What happened here on June 15, 2007 was tyrannical. That was the day that the government stopped working for us and we started working for the government. Honestly, I have never seen such a dishonest circumvention of democracy in my life.
Homosexuals are not the victims. Homosexuals are the aggressors. Their rights are not in jeopardy, but the rest of ours are.
BEN
Sheesh, it's a good thing I don't require my friends to agree with me on every issue! Actually I don't argue with people who try to tell me my queerness is immoral. I just say:
Fuck you, it's my body and I'll do what I want!
Anyway, if the past is any guide, Sorba's book is just a lot of word games designed to make hatred and ignorance seem respectable. But that's beside the point. Any attack on any public speaker, regardless of what they are saying, is an attack on the free speech rights of every member of the community. If anyone is shouted down into silence, then anyone who has anything to say is at risk of censorship. Always it is the speech we find most offensive that we must fight most vigorously to defend. That those values are not respected on today's college campuses, where the leaders of our future are being trained, is more than sad. It's frightening.
To its credit, the president of Smith College released a public statement expressing regret over the incident, which is more than UMass did over the Mike Adams affair in which the speaker was practically chased off the stage. But we obviously still have a ways to go to restore open thought and freedom of speech to our institutions of higher learning.
To see a detailed account, complete with amazing videos, of the unfortunate events at Smith, CLICK HERE.
Meanwhile, the Valley Press Club held it's annual roast in Springfield the other night. I didn't go to that either, but Bill Dusty did and filed a report on his website. Here is a picture he took of attendees Mike Dobbs, who keeps a foot in both old and new media with his gig with The Reminder and his multiple blogs, with Jim Polito, the former TV40 dude who now has a new gig in the Worcester area.
What was unique about this roast was that for the first time it was made known through the inter-media grapevine (more efficient in its own way than the Associated Press) that local bloggers would not be unwelcome if they attended. That's a far cry from the days of old, when the roasts were very elite affairs where only true insiders attended and Dave Starr always had a table in front for skits such as local reformers Bob and Karen Powell being ridiculed as "trailer trash."
