Live from Austin!

The US military is drawing up plans to keep insurgents from regaining control of this battle-scarred city, but returning residents may find that the measures make Fallujah look more like a police state than the democracy they have been promised.

Under the plans, troops would funnel Fallujans to so-called citizen processing centers on the outskirts of the city to compile a database of their identities through DNA testing and retina scans. Residents would receive badges displaying their home addresses that they must wear at all times.

—Boston Globe

Wow. It’s like a radical right-wing Republican’s wet dream. Oh, how they must wish things could be run the same way in the USA.

Crystal posts a link to a Boston Globe story about property prices in Massachusetts.

Houses here cost so much because there are too few of them for all the people who have been drawn to Boston because it’s such a great place for great minds to do great things. But that reputation, which has kept Boston competitive all these years, is beginning to buckle under the weight of absurd home prices. Even in a recession, Boston’s world-renowned hospitals, higher-education institutions, and biotech firms admit they are seeing their job offers turned down like never before, largely because of housing costs.

[...]

The Census Bureau says Cambridge is the city with the highest percentage of $1-million- plus single-family homes in the country. But this is a surprisingly recent phenomenon. Beaty has to go back only as far as 1986 to find Cambridge’s first million-dollar sale.

It’s the beginning of the end for Davis Square. Diesel only just survived being priced out, and there now appear to be two swanky upscale cocktail bars opening at once, each complete with chic frosted glass windows and ultra-modern designer furniture.

Meanwhile in Harvard Square, it’s so bad that the clothing chain stores like Abercrombie and Fitch are being priced out and replaced by boutiques selling Swiss watches.

An insightful comment from Robert Blatman, an obstetrician quoted in the Globe article:

“The crazy thing is, if I can’t afford to live in these areas, what about the teachers and the firemen? It really worries me that, at some point, this has to erode the quality of life that made the real estate around here so desirable in the first place.”

And that’s the problem. It’s not sustainable. As people making normal wages leave the state (10,000 a year on average), their homes go to developers and owner-speculators, not to another normal family. Ordinary businesses can’t get staff, because the only people within an hour’s commute who can survive on normal wages are the few still living with their parents. Which, in turn, means that everything from groceries to medical bills to utility bills gets jacked up 40% or more to compensate for the increased overheads.

So sooner or later, people start to look at their crummy 2 bedroom rented apartment with the rattling windows and chronic dust bunny infestation, and look at their bills, and then look at other parts of the country…and that’s why we’re leaving. Even if we had a million bucks, we wouldn’t be spending it to get a 2 bedroom house here. Cambridge is nice, but it’s not that nice.

Furthermore, it’s plain that the local powers-that-be aren’t going to do anything about the problem. If they’re lucky, the Boston metro area will turn into another Manhattan. If they’re unlucky, there will be a big crash. I don’t want to be around for either of those scenarios.

Boston Globe:

Neighborhood skunk treated like pet

By Associated Press, 6/9/2003

POPLAR BLUFF, Mo.—Residents on Willow Street in this southeast Missouri town find the skunk roaming their neighborhood charming and anything but a stinker.

This skunk apparently likes people, even following neighbors around and brushing against their legs like a cat.

Since making its presence known a couple of years ago, the olfactory-offending animal has become a fixture around Willow Street.

“He really took up with a woman who lived down the road,” said Margie Timmons. “He would wait for her at her mailbox at night when she would get home from work.”

From The Boston Globe:

Cut $9 billion from the Massachusetts budget and watch what happens: Doctors would make frequent and free house calls, the homeless would be sheltered by churches and private charities, and hundreds of thousands of jobs would be created.

Yeah, and winged monkeys would fly out of my butt, and Satan would start skating to work.

All this according to Carla Howell, a Libertarian gubernatorial candidate, who helped lead a successful drive to put a question on the Nov. 5 ballot asking voters if they want to do away with state income taxes.

You know, I kinda think they should do it. If it’s voted through, the politicians should call the voters’ bluff and shut down the schools, stop repairing the roads, stop collecting trash, shut down UMass, and so on. Leave it for six months and let people see what happens, then have a second referendum to let them vote on whether it’s an improvement.

Then we’d finally be able to say to the right wing libertarians “Look, we tried it, and it didn’t fucking work. Now shut up with your whining.”

Sure, it would be an unpleasant six months, but I think the end result would be worth it.

I’d like it even more if they did it in New Hampshire, though.

A woman who works for the IS team on the floor above me is married to an Iraqi aerospace engineer. Unfortunately, because of bigotry around the time of the Gulf War, he found he couldn’t get an engineering job—so he opened a pizza restaurant.

On Saturday, after several threats, an arsonist torched their restaurant.

Here’s the report from the Boston Globe:

PLYMOUTH - When an arsonist torched Salah El-Ehmeada’s pizza shop early Saturday, one of the first things to burn was a photograph of his two small children dressed as Santa’s elves.

The picture hung near the cash register, where El-Ehmeada often stood, chatting with customers and sending drivers out on deliveries.

El-Ehmeada is not a US citizen, but his life has many of the trappings of middle-class America. He and his wife, Shari, a Massachusetts native and security systems engineer at IBM, drive a minivan. They live in an apartment in Marshfield and are saving to buy a house. Their oldest son attends South Shore Head Start.

But whoever set fire to the Pizza Pie shop in a West Plymouth strip mall near the town airstrip didn’t see them as just another middle-class family, said El-Ehmeada, because they were blinded by prejudice.

“This is un-American. America was not built on this,” he said, standing in the blackened shell of his restaurant.

Early Saturday morning, someone broke into the closed shop through a back door and set fire to a stack of paper bags beneath the cash register. Before they left, they opened all the gas valves on the stove, El-Ehmeada said.

Fire spread up the walls, burning pictures, ceiling tiles, and insulation. Firefighters smashed a plate-glass window and cut holes in the roof to douse the blaze.

The State Police fire marshal’s office considers it an apparent arson, but investigators have not characterized it as a hate crime. Other than El-Ehmeada’s Middle-Eastern background, there was no evidence at the scene that suggested that he was targeted because of his ethnicity, said Lieutenant Paul Maloney, a State Police spokesman. He added, however, that investigators can’t rule that out.

El-Ehmeada - “Sal” to customers who know him - came from a town in Iraq called Mosul, 400 miles north of Baghdad on the Turkish border. His parents sent him to Britain in 1980 to get a Western education, he said, and he never returned. He studied aeronautical engineering in Canada but could not get work as an airline mechanic - a victim, he said, of discrimination during the Gulf War. He moved to the United States in 1997 and opened Pizza Pie in 1999.

Plymouth police and fire officials would not release information yesterday, referring questions to State Police.

El-Ehmeada said that he has no doubt that his business was set on fire by someone filled with ethnic rage after last week’s terrorist attacks. The day of the attacks, El-Ehmeada said, he received six or seven telephone calls from people spewing racial epithets and slurs. The next day, he called police after finding a spent shell casing, placed on end, outside the shop’s front door.

He received several more threatening calls but things seemed to quiet down until 5 a.m. Saturday, he said, when authorities called about the fire.

Watching on television from his shop Tuesday morning, El-Ehmeada said, he felt the same shock and revulsion as the rest of America, with an additional touch of shame that the terrorist acts may have been carried out in the name of Islam.

“I felt like a guy who comes from a good family, a great family,” he said, “and he wakes up one day and his brother is a serial killer on TV.”

Sandra McDonald of Carver expressed distrust of El-Ehmeada as she shopped at a nearby store, saying that she had heard that he had a flight simulator on his computer. Otherwise, the reaction from surrounding neighborhoods in Carver and Plymouth was supportive. A steady stream of customers and friends stopped by to express their concern as El-Ehmeada tried to clean up. One woman brought apple cobbler and cookies.

Linda Blankenship of Carver took her three children into the smoky ruins.

“This is what prejudice does to people. Look around here and learn,” she told them. “This is the ugliness of racism and hatred.”

“He didn’t do anything,” said her daughter, Marykate, 11. “He was making pizza.”