Let it never be said that Massachusettsians are not a generous and welcoming people, even if sometimes their generosity is compelled by law.
When Michael Dukakis was governor in 1983 he signed legislation guaranteeing well-equipped housing for families.
Forgive the rabbit trail already, but I cannot help but recall Gov. Dukakis, 1988 candidate for U.S. President, running against H.W. Bush, being driven around in an M1A2 Abrams Main Battle Tank. The photo shows him wearing the tank commander helmet, an over-large affair owing to the headphones a warfighter required to manage communications.
To civilians — most of us — the large helmet made him look simply ridiculous, like a wannabe pandering to the crowd while joy riding in a tank. Which voters concluded he was.
Bush’s people used footage of the ride super-imposed with scrolling words showing that Dukakis had opposed every national defense initiative on the table. The Governor’s ratings tanked (pun intended) and he lost the election by 7 million votes.
Anyway, that 41-yr-old statute remains on the books, and it requires that the state provide housing with, among other things, a kitchen and a fridge.
Fast forward to Open Borders America 2024, where sanctuary-city Boston, like a couple dozen other major cities, has been flooded with the new migrant population. Under the 1983 Massachusetts Right to Shelter law, they all deserve a taxpayer supported home.
Various venues have been pressed into service as housing locations, and many do not have refrigerators. It is understandable that recreation centers turned into spacious areas with steel cots would not have individual kitchens or refrigerators… but that violates the law.
The intent, of course, is that migrants be well fed. If they don’t have a kitchen with a refrigerator, then the logical step is to simply provide them a hot meal.
So those clever bureaucrats came up with a solution that would provide nutritious hot meals three times a day, using an existing infrastructure: Catered meals!
And, because the sudden influx of migrants took everyone by surprise (because literally NO ONE expected that millions of non-citizens would flood the U.S. when there is virtually no downside), the state executed an emergency contract with a caterer.
An emergency contract means a “no-bid” contract. There was no requirement to take competitive bids. In the interests of time and compassion, a contract was simply issued to a local commercial caterer.
This being Boston, the menu had to be appropriate to the culture.
That would mean, for breakfast, fluffy scrambled eggs, crisp bacon, bagel, juice and coffee. Lunch and dinner might include veal parmigiana or shrimp scampi.
The cost for the no-bid contract amounts to $64 per person per day. Given that the 6-month contract totals $10 million, that would mean about 900 migrants are being served what some of us might consider premium Italian fare.
Heck, for that price, you can keep the refrigerator. Just bring me the hot meal!
Number 4. The Blaze. Mother of Manhattan teen who died subway surfing files lawsuit.
Leave it to those irresponsible rapid transit moguls and those unscrupulous social media sites to place irresistible temptations before our teenagers. It’s killing them. Literally.
If they didn’t want you to experience the thrill of a 50 mph trip through the subway tunnels of the Big Apple from on top of the rail car, then why didn’t they build a barricade to keep you from climbing up there?
The excitement of breathing the asphalt-infested breeze as a gale-force wind tries to rip you off the rounded top of a train car is simply too much to resist. Subway surfing is all the rage!
When the latest 15-year-old boy raised his head a few inches at the wrong place, and an immovable steel beam scraped him off the top of the car and tossed him under the wheels of the subway train, it was time for the legal system to be prompted to place the punishment where it truly belongs: On the subway operators who failed to keep him off the car and the social media sites that egged him on.
One might ask whether there is ANY barricade that can keep a determined teenager from climbing on top of a rail car, but never mind about the practicality.
The loss of life is as deeply grievous as it is predictable.
Subway surfing. I have never even stuck my head out through an open sunroof. What a loser I must be.
Number 3. The Blaze. Googles Gemini creates racially diverse Nazis.
I’m pretty sure you have heard of this one by now. Google created their version of an Artificial Intelligence interface, which they initially named Bard, to compete in the same space as ChatGPT. They have since updated the name from Bard to Gemini and added some quite juicy secret sauce.
There is speculation, and some real evidence, of what Google is doing and why, but the result is that some simple queries to Gemini yield quite surprising results.
A request to see representative pictures of 1943 Nazi soldiers produces 4 images: one white male, one black male, one Asian female and one European female. These are shown dressed in 1940s-style German Army uniforms with helmets.
Given that Nazis were adherents of a philosophy that white Aryan men were the rightful rulers of the world, seeing a black male or a woman of any extraction portrayed as a Nazi soldier is… unlikely.
What is Google doing? We don’t exactly know, but it seems clear they intend to steer us clear of the idea that Nazis disrespected women and minorities.
“We are shocked at the negative feedback we have received,” proclaimed a Google spokesperson as he was having tiny decorative swastikas painted on his mails. “Persons of color, and girls, have just as much right to wear Nazi uniforms as white folks.”
When a reporter noted that they may have the right today, but they did not in 1943, the spokesperson muttered something about a Final Solution and asked for the reporter’s papers.
I would really like to do a story on this new use of miniaturized QR codes, but I don’t even understand the subject well enough to do a satire on the press release. Something about leaf-eating bugs, light absorption, brochosomes, energy emissions and infrared cameras.
I think maybe the upshot is that QR codes, those confusing postage-stamp size black-and-white prints that resemble a 4th-grade pencil maze gone wrong, are going to become microscopically small and appear — or rather, NOT appear — on almost everything. And do things, or something.
The technology is being developed in Pennsylvania by people named Sheng, Li, Wang, Wong, another Li and another Wang.
Click the link and read the article! Then tell me what it’s about!
Number 1. NBC News. Trump launches a sneaker line.
Here is one I understand.
Fresh from his sentencing in a New York court to pay half a billion dollars in fines for overstating his real estate values, which practice cost nobody anything, Donald Trump began taking orders for his new line of tennis shoes.
The “Never Surrender High Tops” go for $399 per pair, and when the article was published the first production run was already sold out. Given the size of the fine Trump faces, he will need to sell just over 1 million pairs of these to pay his debt to society.
With more that 70 million Americans voting for him in 2020 (maybe a lot more, but who knows) a million customers for a tennis shoe sure to be a collector’s item is not much of a stretch.
Predictably, Trump claimed, “I think it’s gonna be a big success!”
I wonder if he will wear the new shoes at the Republican National Convention?
And that is The Alligator News Roundup for Friday, March 8, 2024. Now that you have heard this, your weekend can only get better! If you have an acquaintance who despises you, share this with them by clicking the link below. They already don’t like you, so what have you got to lose? Have a good weekend!
The Alligator News Roundup