1. The actual vote and the positions.
A. The Project.
B. The position of two environmentally destructive Cambridge City Councilors.
2. Cambridge, MA, a pariah to the politically correct.
A. General.
(1) Monteiro.
(2) West Cambridge, especially but not solely Alewife.
(3) The Charles River.
(4) Manipulating of well meaning people under false pretenses by undisclosed agents of the city government.
(5) The non stop lying of sainthood by a really rotten city government, directly and through the undisclosed agents.
B. Summary.
1. The actual vote and the positions.
The item under review at the Cambridge, MA, City Council meeting on Monday evening, December 12, was itself innocuous. The problem with it was its place in the larger and very rotten scheme of things.
That rotten part was emphasized by Councilors Toomey and Davis who spoke in that order.
A. The Project.
I have gone into detail concerning the Grand Junction railroad and its great and very harmful potential value if you are concerned about the environment or about the environmental destructiveness of the City of Cambridge on the Charles River.
The matter under consideration can be slightly understood by looking at the Grand Junction Map, http://www.massdot.state.ma.us/Portals/17/Downloads/grandjunction/GrandJunctionmap.pdf, put out by the Massachusetts Department of Transportation.
The map very visibly shows a large brown area occupied by the Massachusetts Institution of Technology (MIT). It is directly above the Charles River. Directly above MIT is a swath of green which seems to be erroneously indicating open space. Directly above this area is a broken line which indicates the Grand Junction railroad line.
Following that line to the Charles River, you see a green area on both sides of the line which is the Destroyed Nesting Area of the Charles River White Geese. Moving east / right on that line, you see a green rectangle above the line which represents the Fort Washington Park which is at the corner of two streets. There is a no longer used railroad spur which runs off the Grand Junction near Fort Washington to the near side of the very large former NECCO (as in NECCO wafers) factory which is located on the south / near side of Massachusetts Avenue in the second block above the Grand Junction railroad line.
This siding was constructed to support the factory operations of the NECCO building when it was an industrial site.
The discussion was on the expenditure of $100,000 to plan the conversion of this no longer used siding into a highway for pedestrians and small vehicles.
It would connect to a comparable highway the City of Cambridge wants built on the Grand Junction right of way.
Responsible construction would have this highway terminate a little north of Memorial Drive, which is the highway paralleling the Charles River, and having users go to Memorial Drive on the ground.
The street immediately below the Grand Junction has a bend just before it reaches Memorial Drive. That is where a responsible government would make connections. It is unbuilt upon and could readily be used.
The irresponsible Cambridge proposal would have the highway go through the Destroyed Nesting Area of the Charles River White Geese with corresponding greater heartless animal abuse and environmental destruction.
B. The position of two environmentally destructive Cambridge City Councilors.
Toomey and Davis supported the destructive proposal on the Grand Junction with all its destructiveness.
The only other member of the Cambridge City Council to talk was Kelley who attempted to bring out of the Cambridge City Manager the exact location of the construction in question.
Planning for conversion of the siding to a small vehicle highway will run $100,000. That money was approved Monday night by a unanimous city council with Seidel not attending the meeting.
The next step of planning, for the destructive new highway to the Charles River on the Grand Junction, would cost $900,000. That has not been approved, YET.
2. Cambridge, MA, a pariah to the politically correct.
A. General.
Cambridge MA deserves to be a pariah among the Politically Correct.
I will try to be succinct. In particular, I will not go into the details of the very common lies, or, if you wish to be politically correct, the deliberate withholding of relevant information so as to cause the listener to do exactly the opposite of what the listener would otherwise do.
(1) Monteiro.
Cambridge has decisions of a trial judge and jury plus an appeals court panel indicating that the Cambridge City Manager has been guilty of malfeasance in office because he destroyed the life of a female department head in retaliation for her filing a civil rights complaint.
The Trial Judge said “reprehensible.” The Appeals Court said “ample evidence [of] outrageous actions.” The trial jury said $1.1 million real damages, $3.5 million penal damages. The check the City of Cambridge has paid said $8.3 million.
A very real, moderate, interpretation of the court messages is that the Cambridge City Manager has committed quite severe malfeasance in office.
A city government which non stop proclaims itself as a beacon to the politically correct should have no question as to how to handle the situation.
The city manager should be fired without golden parachute and without pension.
There has been exactly ZERO attempts to fire the Cambridge City Manager for Monteiro. ZERO.
(2) West Cambridge, especially but not solely Alewife.
The City of Cambridge, lying that it was providing flood protection for North Cambridge, has destroyed the magnificent core Alewife reservation with massive destruction of excellent trees and killings of massive numbers resident animals who could not get out of the way. Destruction runs over acres of land which were previously prides of people concerned about our world.
Directly across the street from this Cambridge created strip mine is a massive parking lot which, if taken by eminent domain could readily provide the claimed flood storage. The owner of the nearest part wants to build office buildings. Those office buildings could readily be built on air rights, but the owner could go forward at any time.
Boston.com has, pretty much non stop for many months published a photo of hawks nesting on an office building between the Alewife reservation and the Fresh Pond reservation. For a number of years now, Cambridge has been destroying the environment and animal habitat around Fresh Pond. The hawks are nesting on the office building because their habitat has been destroyed.
(3) The Charles River.
Outrageous and downright bizarre.
Magazine Beach is slightly west of the BU Bridge. It, for most of the last 30 years, has been the home and principle food of the magnificent Charles River White Geese, who had created a community centered on the BU Bridge. They lived at Magazine Beach most of the year and fed there.
During extremely bad weather and during nesting, they lived in the balanced animal sanctuary immediately east of the BU Bridge.
This was a balanced ecosystem in the middle of the city with a wide variety of resident animals.
This area has seen repeated destruction over the past ten years and heartless abuse of the Charles River White Geese, the very visible residents who were not capable of leaving.
Since the Charles River Conservancy became the “volunteer” environmental destroyer for the state in 2003, almost all ground vegetation has been destroyed in the green area on both sides of the Grand Junction including their primary nesting area next to the BU Bridge and a secondary mostly hilly area to the east.
Since their food was destroyed to them at Magazine Beach in 2004, this is the ghetto to which the Charles River White Geese have been confined.
This is the area that Toomey and Davis would run their small vehicle highway through.
The bizarre projects at Magazine Beach simply cannot be justified by any sane grounds.
Normal human beings looking at Magazine Beach agreed that it did not need improving.
For the better part of a century this has been playing fields with free animals having access from the Charles River. It was a haven in its wetlands for water fowl.
The wetlands have been replaced by a bizarre wall of introduced vegetation which keeps people and animal from moving between Magazine Beach and the Charles River. The only break in this bizarre wall is a former boat ramp which has been destroyed for boating use by the placing of obstacles preventing access to the ramp by boats and preventing access to the mainland by the Charles River White Geese.
The state brags that its work on the Charles emphasizes uses which need the water. Their original master plan for Magazine Beach called for a lawn to the water. They admitted their master plan to be a lie by changing the master plan after the dirty work was done.
Everywhere else on the Charles River Basin, protective vegetation is destroyed twice a year. The introduced stuff has been allowed to grow and grow. The manager has bragged it starves the Charles River White Geese.
Grass which grew in an environmentally responsible manner for the better part of a century has been destroyed and replaced by introduced sickly grass which will not survive without poisons.
To keep the poisons out of the Charles River, the playing fields have been significantly reduced in size to put in a massive drainage system to drain off poisons which should not even be used.
Plans exist for the destruction of between 449 and 660 healthy trees between Magazine Beach and the second bridge east of the BU Bridge, the Longfellow Bridge. The state agency, the Department of Conservation and Recreation, sought Obama moneys for this destruction, flatly lying that all the hundreds of trees they wanted to destroy were sickly. The sickly trees were destroyed years earlier, and the plans they filed with the Cambridge Conservation Commission so indicated.
Somebody, perhaps the governor, prevented this outrage.
Plans also exist to destroy the picnic area just west of the playing fields at the river end of Magazine Street by destroying their tiny parking area. Destruction of this parking would destroy a tiny picnic area used by little people. No reason has been given for the destruction.
(4) Manipulating of well meaning people under false pretenses by undisclosed agents of the city government.
Small groups of people run around Cambridge claiming sainthood and claiming that they are protecting Cambridge. These small groups work with each other and support each other. They have gotten together for zoning changes which all too frequently achieve the exact opposite of what they claim.
Key in the destruction of the Alewife reservation was a fake protective group which claimed to be defending Alewife but told people to look at everything other that what Cambridge was destroying, an irresponsible project which could not achieve its stated goals, stated goals which could be responsibly be achieved. But the fake group achieved its purpose. The core Alewife reservation has been destroyed and well meaning people do not know what hit them. After all, they were told they were protecting Alewife.
A comparable group in Cambridgeport supported the Alewife destructive organization, but now, after they have destroyed Alewife, claims that Alewife is too far away to be interested in.
This fake group has held public meeting on Magazine Beach in which they flat out censored the destructiveness of their friends in Cambridge and at the DCR. Now they claim to be “defending” Magazine Beach. In light of their record at Alewife, need I say more.
(5) The non stop lying of sainthood by a really rotten city government, directly and through the undisclosed agents.
The public relations of these people is outrageous and false, but it keeps a really rotten city government in place in a city which expects behavior exactly the opposite of what they are getting.
B. Summary.
I am sorry about the length of this analysis.
Of necessity, exact correctness on all issues is impossible. I, like a newspaper reporter, have attempted to communicate reality as simply as possible.
I realize that this has been anything but simple.
