Robert Frost Fountain

While in Lawrence today for the Bread & Roses Festival, I got my first look at the city’s Robert Frost Fountain, pictured above. This is what is written on the plaque alongside the fountain: Robert Lee Frost, born Mach 26, 1874 was raised here in Lawrence. His first published poem…

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Bread and Roses Festival

To commemorate Labor Day this year I decided to visit the 26th annual Bread & Roses Festival in Lawrence, an event that celebrates the gains made by workers as a result of their nationally significant strike in the city back in 1912. Even before I left Lowell, however, I was…

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“The mills weren’t made of marble”

Here is the lead editorial from the September 7, 1992 edition of the New York Times – A Labor Day piece about the recently opened Boott Cotton Mill Museum in Lowell, Massachusetts: Youngsters who are made to troop through America’s historic landmarks might reasonably conclude that in the past, rich…

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A Modest Proposal: Voluntary Fed Taxes in 2011 to Break the Back of the Great Recession

The following might sound like it came out of the movie “Dave,” in which a presidential look-alike who runs a temp agency (Kevin Kline) winds up being secretly installed as president after the real prez has a stroke. At first manipulated by an evil chief of staff (Frank Langella), “Dave”…

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Neighborhood Schools

Earlier this week I posted something on Facebook regarding the start of school which prompted a conservative friend to comment on the benefits of “neighborhood schools,” a term I haven’t heard in a few years. It might surprise readers to learn that I am a proponent of neighborhood schools only…

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The Pace of Climate Change

The above graph is a screenshot taken from An Inconvenient Truth. There are many versions of this graph available; I chose this one because the image in the movie was on such a large scale that the last few decades are actually visible. The graph shows temperatures and concentrations of…

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