We Reward the Rot

On the little lords presiding over the police city-state of Worcester, Massachusetts

What a crazy week. Erm, eight days. Damn. From last Monday to this Monday a real string of grim tidings. Talk about One Battle After Another. (Can’t wait to finally watch that movie, on my glorious First Day Off in a While, which starts as soon as this goes out.)

Spent the better part of my Saturday in the North High gymnasium observing the hand recount of the at-large race. It feels at once like the choreography of an advanced hivemind—straight out of that new show Pluribus if anyone’s watching that (you should)—and a massive exercise in cat herding. It’s also a crank safari. Every species, stripe, shade of Townie White was on display in that room. Every person I’ve ever said a bad thing about in this newsletter. One of them, Steve Sargent (yes that one), was a foot away from me for an hour straight as we both, for the opposing camps, looked at one ballot after another after another after another, giving the two poll workers seated in front of us stage fright as they marked an oversized paper spreadsheet and added numbers five ballots at a time.

Here’s a snippet from the open notebook post I was updating over the weekend throughout the process.

Hundreds of people drudging through a monotonous task in weirdly choreographed unison. Pretty interesting. I didn’t personally catch any ballots that were in error in any way, but in looking at individual ballot after individual ballot, I did witness a lot of strange, asymmetrical choices. One Mitra-Kamara-King-Rosen-Toomey combination, for instance. Davis-Colorio-Pepple-Bergman-Owura was another stunner. One for Cayden Davis only, but Joe Petty for mayor. One that was blank save for a “yes” on Mero-Carlson’s stupid ballot question on whether residents are in favor of the city doing something it can’t do.

People are all over the place with their votes, man. It doesn’t make a lick of sense. A nice reminder, as Jeuji Diamondstone and I were discussing at the lunch break, that the electorate is a hell of a lot more random than we might like to think of it. To even tack a political spectrum on top of it—crank vs. progressive, left vs. right, new vs. old—may be missing the forest for the trees. But I’ll stop myself before I go too far down that road.

More scene over in that post. But as it happens, the hand recount of the at-large race is maybe the third most interesting news item of the past week. Sheesh. Fun never stops, even when you want it to. The coffee machine is crying out for mercy. Please stop using me.

On the docket for this post: TWIW’s big scoop on ICE, Etel and Ashley head to a jury trial after a judge showed who she really works for, Heather and friends take to the School Committee to make sure Dianna B. doesn’t figure out how to get Monfredo back in the building. The recount, of course.

First I have to ask you for money because without money to do this, I’d have to have another job, which would in turn make it impossible for me to do this job. So if you think this newsletter benefits you in some way—makes you better able to follow our inscrutable local dramas or more connected to the place you live or maybe you just like the way we write on here—consider the absence if and when I need to get a “real job.” One with set hours, less responsibility, and no weekly humiliation ritual of begging for money as I’m doing now. It’s just five bucks man you got a lighter also buddy?

Imagine I’m your mailman or you hire me for electrical work or, god forbid, I’m making your dinner again or even worse your kid is in my class. And you see me and you wanna talk shit about the mayor and I go brother I don’t even know who the mayor is right now and I do not care.

Not as fun as the current situation, where I will happily and fluently shit talk the mayor with any one of you reading this for as long as you want. Grocery store, parking lot, bank ATM window. Bank of a river. Anywhere.

---

The Real Thin Blue Line

The recount over the weekend offered the glimmer of a notion that one good thing might happen. Then it didn’t. The 23-vote gap between Bergman and Kamara for sixth place in the at-large race was found to be a 32-vote gap, actually. Bergman inches over the finish line yet again.

As I schlepped into the North High gym Sunday evening to get my hands on the numbers, I had to walk right past Moe, both of us trying to take the same half of the double doors in opposite directions. He paused a little, looking at me, as if drawing a breath to say hello, but I kept my brisk pace past him. I’ll yuk it up with most people, even those I’ve had harsh words for in this newsletter. Hell, I was chuckling with Steve Sargent just a day prior. (Closest thing in Worcester politics to the Trump–Mamdani meeting?!) No such niceties for Moe. There are few people I hold in more complete contempt, whom I respect less. That I’d run into him on my last reporting trip of the election season is a cherry on the “fuck you” sundae Worcester served this year.

For those who think I’m being overly harsh, I’ll just quickly illustrate a scene from Tuesday’s council meeting. Keep in mind that I am a renter. I am constantly worried about being unable to afford to live here in this city or anywhere for that matter. The affordable housing crisis is something I feel directly.

Etel Haxhiaj had an order on the agenda pushing the city manager to prioritize an affordable housing zoning overlay that other cities have used in recent years to build more affordable stock quickly.

For no reason at all, Bergman took the opportunity to fire off a cheap shot, advancing yet again the mind-numbing conspiracy theory that she’s plotting to abolish single-family zoning.

I will say this, although the council did support the Now | Next plan and the housing production plan, I certainly did not support the notion of eliminating single-family zoning. I just didn’t.

Etel didn’t say that. And this is how the order reads: “Request City Manager provide City Council with a recommendation related to establishing a City-wide zoning Affordable Housing Overlay, which would provide density bonuses and streamlined permitting to developers of 100% affordable housing projects.”

An overlay does not eliminate the underlying zoning. Someone in city government should know that. A ZBA veteran especially. Bergman was either acting in bad faith or is too stupid to be a city councilor in good faith. Take your pick analyzing this next line:

… I just want to be on the record that the Now | Next plan and the housing production plan did not mention anything about eliminating single-family zoning. Had it done so, I wouldn’t have supported it.

How is this man an attorney? Let me turn your attention to Goal Three of the Now | Next Plan Moe Bergman voted for. It reads:

Initiate a citywide process to reform the land use, dimensional, and density requirements of Worcester’s existing base zoning to align with the Growth Framework and meet modern standards for accessible and user-friendly zoning.

Luckily for us viewers at home, Etel has evolved into Etel Unbothered since losing the D5 race to a complete moron who happens to share Bergman’s politics and voter base. She basically gave Bergman a swirly:

We need to be very careful about not conflating bogeyman rhetoric around what housing production needs to look like in the city, the tools that we need to use to make that happen. It creates unnecessary fear. It creates misinformation.

And as you heard, both through the city manager and through his chief economic development officer, who has probably the most experience out of anyone in this room in this field, the recommendation that I’m lifting up from the housing production plan and the Worcester Now | Next plan simply states that we need to consider thoughtfully and incrementally looking and expanding housing opportunities so residents at the lower income levels in the city have the right, they have the right to live in all areas of the city, including where Mr. Bergman lives, including where I live. Thank you.

It’s that kind of stuff that gets you a feature story in the New York Times, by the way. Has everyone read that yet? I suggest you do. It’s really great. (Watch out for a crucial “local podcast” reference and quote at the end. Guess which one lol.)

Bergman would never get written about like that. There’s nothing to say. Bergman’s politics are boring—like most low level apparatchiks of the FIRE industry’s municipal dominion, his politics are solely oriented around protecting himself from the rabble. Etel had it exactly right with “bogeyman rhetoric.” He’s animated equally by fear and resentment of those he considers beneath him. He sees, more acutely than most reactionaries, the real thin blue line of the municipality: the RS7. The single family zone. The protected use category dividing real Americans from the criminals. He’s never once in all my years observing him shown anything but contempt for anyone on the other side of that line. Worse, he defaults to sniveling self-victimization whenever he’s called out for it. He has no vision for a better society, only a fear of being made to personally feel the harm caused by the current one. He’s that guy in Titanic saying his first-class ticket guarantees his place on a life raft.

That’s the kind of guy that got everything he wanted this election. He won. He is the kind of person with the kind of politics our system is designed to produce and reproduce in perpetuity.

Newton Hill was first preserved as a fire buffer between worker housing downtown and the estates of the west side. Bergman’s there to keep it that way.

Related: here’s a good take on the founding fathers that reader extraordinaire Brian Keaney sent me.

Now over to our side, where the hits just keep on coming.

---

“Touching, However Slight”

The post-Eureka Haxhiaj and Sprint trial is set for February 10. We learned on Wednesday that the judge on the case, a former city solicitor, denied motions to dismiss charges against both of them. The memos she penned in support of that decision make it clear that justice isn’t the goal. That what actually happened is of little concern.

Facing supporters after her court appearance Wednesday morning, Haxhiaj said

I am profoundly disappointed by the judge’s decision to move the charges forward. And from the moment that these charges were filed, I have maintained my innocence. A few months ago, I rejected a deal that required me to admit to an action I did not commit. I will not trade truth for lies.

Across our nation, elected leaders vested with the public trust are courageously standing up to protect their immigrant neighbors from an inhumane regime.

It is the fundamental duty and moral duty of elected leaders like myself and others to stand as a safeguard against harm. I stood up alongside my neighbors and my community members to protect a constituent and her family, and stood to challenge the mistreatment of a 17-year-old child. And I will never regret that. Yes.

I want to be very clear, the charges brought against Ashley Spring and me have exposed a culture that we already knew existed, of bullying and retaliation against people who speak up. I am not deterred by the politically motivated rhetoric and actions of the Worcester Police Department union officials. So I’m gonna speak directly to them. Your tactics of intimidation have failed.

What you have done is to galvanize our community to love and fight harder than ever before.

The targeting of a Worcester city councilor protecting a mother from unlawful detainment has outraged people across this country. But for most of Worcester’s political leaders, they have chosen to remain completely silent, contrasting how the community has responded. And to them I say this: You’ve chosen your side. You have chosen to be idle in the face of injustice and abuse of power.

In a three-page memo responding to Haxhiaj’s motion, Judge Janet McGuiggan wrote, “The offense of assault and battery requires a touching, however slight. A touching may be direct as when a person strikes another, or it may be indirect as when a person sets in motion some force or instrumentality that strikes another. Assault and battery is a general intent crime and it does not require specific intent to injure the victim, but, as is relevant in this case, it requires an intentional touching that was not merely accidental or negligent. The touching must be either likely to cause bodily harm to the police officer or is offensive. A touching is offensive when it is done without consent.”

She encouraged people to track down and read the jury instructions for A+B on a police officer. They are a trip (ffo: rigged games). Also, for what it’s worth, Etel’s actions on May 8 fit any reasonable definition of “a public employee engaged in the performance of their duties.” And she was assaulted, by the definition being used to prosecute her, several times by multiple police officers.

Rather than put an end to the charade, McGuiggan said, “Close questions of intent are best resolved by the fact finder at trial.”

In other words, she punted.

McGuiggan spent almost a decade as Worcester’s assistant city solicitor, and clocked most of that time on the litigation side of things. For four years, she was head of litigation. Before that, the lead litigator. Most of the litigation work coming in for a city like Worcester is in the arena of police malfeasance. Brutality, excessive force, unlawful arrest, illegal search and seizure, etc., etc. These are cases the city almost always settles, and for healthy sums, adding up to millions of dollars in ancillary costs to the taxpayer.

A litigator for the city argues on behalf of the cops, downplaying, diminishing, obfuscating their myriad abuses. They sometimes spend years on individual cases, fighting them tooth and nail, despite knowing they’re in the wrong. A clear example: Natale Cosenza, a man who spent 16 years in prison for a crime he did not commit, on evidence knowingly fabricated by WPD detectives. (One of them, Kerry Hazelhurst, is still on the force). The suit he filed led to an $8 million judgment against the city.

With no formal or even informal mechanism for police oversight in Worcester, civil litigation is the first and last resort for people wronged by the WPD. McGuiggan spent most of her professional career fighting this accountability. I spent longer than I’d like to admit proving this. Friday was a PACER (the federal court document access system) rabbit hole kind of day.

Of the 45 cases on PACER in which Janet McGuiggan is listed as an attorney, she represented police officers as defendants in 36 of them. That’s stunning.

The 36 cases are not limited to McGuiggan’s time in the Worcester law office. In other capacities, she has represented police departments and officers in Lowell, New Bedford, Revere, Northampton, Freetown, Barnstable, Montague, Westfield, and Leominster. (Fun fact: She was also on the same legal team as Moe Bergman once, in 2009, when he was representing Sh-Booms and she was representing some cops who beat someone up at Sh-Booms.)

In one 2009 case, Muniz v. Worcester, McGuiggan defended the department in a brutality case that involved Thomas Duffy, though he was unnamed. (The practice of “John Doe”-ing police officers in civil suits is crazy.) In that case, Duffy was party to a no-knock raid that involved pistol whips to the head and strip searches over what ended up being a paltry 2.5 grams of heroin. (McGuiggan represented the other Thomas Duffy, “Thomas C. Duffy,” in the WPD several times. When I initially posted on Bluesky about it, I confused the two Duffys. My bad lol.) Tommy B. Duffy would go on to rack up many more lawsuits post-2010, when McGuiggan was pulled up from the city law department to a district court judge seat like a pitcher from the farm to the big show.

The way judges are put on cases in district court is confusing. There’s something called a “judge’s lobby” and a system that appears to have more to do with courtrooms than individual cases. In the three court appearances for Spring and Haxhiaj I’ve been present for, there’s been a different judge on the bench each time. But, some way somehow, the schemata of this ambiguous process allowed Janet McGuiggan—who basically worked for the WPD for more than a decade—to be the judge who got to decide, unilaterally, on a motion to dismiss a spurious and obviously political assault and battery on a police officer charge. I mean come fucking on.

Worse, in Haxhiaj’s case, we’re only in this situation because of the political capital spent by one Thomas B. Duffy. A police union president in Worcester, Duffy is the subject of reams of civil litigation, most from his time on the gang squad. He has cost the city millions. The assault and battery charge filed against Haxhiaj came weeks after the incident but, if you’ll remember, just days after Duffy threw a high-profile hissy fit in Chief Paul Saucier’s office.

The evidence for the assault is so scant as not to exist, despite there being some 30 angles of footage available. I’ve personally reviewed all of it, and can’t find a single frame that even looks like assault. The charge is ludicrous, obviously malicious. Left with nothing to work with, and lacking the moral fortitude to do the right thing, McGuiggan was put in the embarrassing position of focusing the contest on the matter of “touching, however lightly.”

In Spring’s case, the rhetoric becomes even more tortured. From the Telegram:

Williams said the officers knew the liquid was water but chose to characterize the contents as “unknown liquid,” anyway, adding, “Facts were presented to this court that were not true.”

McGuiggan disagreed with Williams in her Nov. 18 decision.

“The alleged distortion of the evidence – referring to the Defendant as spraying ‘an unknown liquid in a bottle’ at officers rather than spraying ‘water in a baby bottle’ – does not rise to the level of an unfair and misleading presentation of the evidence warranting dismissal of the charges,” McGuiggan wrote.

What, exactly, wasn’t misleading about calling water in a baby bottle something scary that allows the cops to file a felony charge?

How is she not embarrassed by this? When does basic self-respect kick in for the police union brass and their attendant web of bureaucrats?

Bleaker still, I have it on semi-decent authority that McGuiggan is the most reasonable of all the district court judges on matters concerning aggrieved police officers.

That doesn’t change the fact that Haxhiaj and Spring are effectively being judged by a former employee of the police department. Once a good soldier, always a good soldier. Luckily, the trial is a jury trial. If it were a bench trial, it would already be over. This is a thoroughly captured judge. But there’s no judge on offer who isn’t.

This is a case that has nothing at all to do with justice and everything to do with in-group punishment inflicted on a perceived out-group. It is wanton corruption happening right in front of us from people who don’t care and who are immune—politically, spiritually, cognitively—to any attempt so far to hold them to account for that corruption. They go on pretending the world outside the townie jobs cartel they manage does not exist. And, in this provincial political backwater of a city, they can. They just can. They run the place, after all. No one can touch the little lords presiding over the police city-state of Worcester, Massachusetts.

Why an outside district attorney would be party to this is beyond me. How did Joe Early convince Northwest District Attorney David E. Sullivan to send one of his guys—Steven Gagne, his number two starter, it looks like—down to Worcester as a special prosecutor on this revanchist, slimy abuse of the justice system? That’s a question I’d like an answer to. Why would David E. Sullivan—a district attorney who implemented a civilian review board on his own accord—want to roll around in this mud? McGuiggan is a lifer. Her self-abasement is understandable. It’s the folks outside The Dome who make me scratch my head.

Moreso when you consider Etel’s actions at Eureka Street are a source of inspiration around the country—hence her profile in the New York Times. A magazine-length, deeply reported story. There are hundreds of comments and the majority are messages of praise and solidarity.

Why would David E. Sullivan, who doesn’t have a dog in this fight—everyone who grew up here knows that Central Mass and Western Mass may as well be different states—tarnish his reputation and the reputation of his office by involving himself in this?

It’s totally understandable that he may not know how corrupted things are in the middle of the state, out there in the bucolic otherworldly west of it. But he should by now. The right thing to do would be to remove Gagne before the trial and make Joe Early find someone else to roll around in this provincial mud. If you agree, there are plenty of ways to let Sullivan and his office know. I don’t know if you’d accomplish anything other than shouting into the void. But maybe it’d help? There’s certainly no one in Worcester who has both the power to do something and the moral courage to do it. With Sullivan, there’s at least a chance.

Thus concludes the shouting into the void portion of the program...

---

Palate cleanser before heading into Sordid Townie Bullshit Missive #2. The good folks at the Clark Scarlet invited me to come to an e-board meeting Thursday night and talk shop. It was heartening to see a group of undergrads so invested in and passionate about journalism, and so eager to do impactful reporting on a local level. Look at this pic lol.

@clarkscarlet

The Scarlet on Instagram: "We had a great time talking with @bi…

I imagine this won’t be the last you hear of Scarlet X Worcester Sucks endeavors! Stay tuned.

If you have any ideas for collaborative projects, hit the comments or the chat.

And please subscribe so I can fund my laundry list of cool ideas!!

---

“I’m Finding Humor in It Personally”

At a recent meeting of the school committee’s finance and government operations subcommittee, Dianna Biancheria tried to get her friend John Monfredo, a pedophile rapist in the strict dictionary sense of both words, back into public school buildings. Biancheria, a woman who owes her career to Telegram columnist Ray Mariano—Monfredo’s close personal friend—said:

In the past, sometimes there’s been dancing around ... even though people have passed a CORI and other people weren’t happy with who was going to a school and so on. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen again because people who are volunteers are volunteers and if they pass the CORI, they pass the CORI.

Who’s dancing around what? Is it that you won’t say what you’re talking about or is it the guilt and shame that prevents the specifics from leaving your mouth, Dianna?

Member Jermaine Johnson said no, we should leave it up to the superintendent, a reference to the fact that former superintendent Rachel Monarrez banned John Monfredo from school buildings—a bare minimum move coming a few decades after it should have happened. To which Dianna replied, “That’s my point of what I said. It is exactly my point.”

It’s the opposite, but whatever. On a roll, Biancheria couldn’t help but say this next part in characteristically loud and dumb fashion...

If there are questions, we have a superintendent and let’s hope he’s thorough in what he’s doing and takes a look at the information he is receiving along with the fact that it’s not just something that, gee, was on Facebook 20... you know, it’s gotta be a little substantial to turn around and look to see what is going on. So I certainly appreciate what my colleague has brought up and I’m sorry it’s not a humorous piece, it’s just that I’m finding humor in it personally.

I’m leaving the above quote as-is to demonstrate that Biancheria is basically sub-verbal.

Whole moment’s worth a watch. Kudos to Aislinn for pulling the clip. Nov 10 FOG subcommittee meeting.

Translation: Heather Prunier’s story is a Facebook rumor and if the superintendent wanted to look into it, he’d quickly learn that. Far as chess moves go, it’s a lousy one. The more you look into Prunier’s story, the worse it gets. But it does betray that Facebook posts are as far as Biancheria has bothered to look into a situation that reveals her and everyone else in Mariano’s orbit to be monsters. And worse, it betrays that she doesn’t know anyone who has bothered to look further than that. To take her at her word, she thinks everyone is operating off a Facebook post because that’s how she operates.

For someone that isn’t going to look any deeper than whatever Facebook post momentarily got their attention, all the good reporting in the world (and there’s been so much of it between our work and This Week In Worcester) won’t make a dent. Whether they lack the media literacy or willfully ignore the reporting makes no functional difference. The banality of evil and all that.

This is the side that won the election, by the way. That’s the kind of person generally in power in this city. Moral rot, blind tribalism, and “what, you think you’re better than me?” townie anti-intellectualism rewarded every two years for decades. Talent and intelligence gets the fuck out of here as fast as it can (read: Monárrez). That’s how we end up with a political reality that affords a cruel and insipid person like Dianna Biancheria a seat at the proverbial table of success. We reward the rot.

The next school committee, Heather and friends showed up to speak truth to said rot. Heather’s comments are on the money as usual.

Those of you seated here know my story and you know my abuser. Some of you call him a friend, he used to sit where you’re sitting. Some of you knew him in 1996, when I first came forward, and in 1997, when DCF substantiated my report and he was placed on leave. He was never exonerated, as he claimed. If he believes that to be the case, he is mistaken.

The impact was such that Petty had to get down from the mayor’s chair to make a rare statement on the matter. He did his best to stay right on the fence. I imagine he must still be sore, the way he rode it. “We have to get this right,” he said. He didn’t say how.

---

TWIW Breaks Holiday ICE Raids Story

On Monday John Keough broke some national news of dire import for our local religious communities. “Exclusive: Trump DHS Plans Immigration Raids on Churches Over Holidays”

Agencies within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) intend to implement a comprehensive plan to target Spanish-speaking churches across the country during the upcoming holiday season between Thanksgiving, Nov. 27, and Christmas, Dec. 25.

What’s that I was saying about the banality of evil?

One of the attorneys said part of the operational plan involves undercover ICE and FBI agents attending and documenting church security plans.

On a reporting level, the piece is impressively sourced. You have to have pretty well developed contacts to get three employees from different DA offices all on background with some lightly identifying info to boot. Nice work, John.

It’s a reminder, as well, that the ways in which local police departments can and in fact do collaborate with ICE extend well beyond the scope of executing civil detainments—what people mean when they say that local departments in Mass cannot by law collaborate with ICE. Departments have these safety plans, as Keough notes, and ICE has a number of back channels to access information from police departments, who’re often eager to supply. I don’t think I’ve reported it out yet but a reader got their hands on some audio from the encrypted scanner channels during Eureka Street, and on the tape you can hear WPD officers discussing whether or not to hold ICE’s detainee, Rosanne Ferreira-De Oliveira, at WPD headquarters on ICE’s behalf. “He’s wondering if, can we hold her in one of our cells here for the time being?” one officer asks, the “he” most likely the lead ICE officer on scene, the one who called the cops in the first place and remained the key point of contact throughout the incident.

The WPD officer on the tape used the term “courtesy book.” Again, this was an encrypted channel and this exchange has not previously been made public. Little “news” for ya if that’s your thing.

The significance is in the tone of voice, the way it sounds like an assumed fact they’d do whatever they could to make life easier for the federal agents.

Rosanne Ferreira De Oliveira had an open asylum claim on May 8, making the deportation proceeding initiated by ICE illegal. There is a word for grabbing someone off the street for no reason, putting them in a car and driving them away from their family to keep them for months in a cage. It’s a kidnapping. The WPD has pressed charges against two people who tried to stop a kidnapping, while claiming they were somehow the injured party. The majority of the Worcester electorate seems to agree with them. Meanwhile, Rosanne got her asylum claim granted when she was finally able to get in front of a judge, and her assault charge—one that likely never should have been filed in the first place—dropped. But not before her family was ripped apart, and her young daughter’s information was entered into the security state’s dragnet for an unaccountable forced removal machine.

The pernicious part is that the WPD and the district attorney’s office help ICE in more significant ways than the reinforcements they sent to Eureka Street. Every day, with every criminal action they file against every resident, they send new data points into their various systems and databases, and each time they do, they essentially kick new information up into a vast unaccountable dragnet growing larger and more sinister by the day as Silicon Valley transitions fully to surveillance. Spencer Ackerman put it well in Forever Wars recently:

Then there are subtler mechanisms for collaboration. This spring, the NYPD started issuing criminal summonses for cyclists’ traffic violations, like not wearing a helmet, that used to result in tickets. The change put the delivery workforce in the city, many of whom are undocumented, in ICE’s crosshairs. “We know in this current political context that contact with the NYPD is a premise for the deportation pipeline,” City Councilwoman Alexa Avilés told Streetsblog. By July, cyclists’ summonses spiked to 6000, up from only 561 the quarter before Tisch’s change.

It’s hard to imagine they don’t know what they’re doing every time they file a name and address into their systems. At the same time, it’s easy to imagine they have no idea at all what their private partners like SoundThinking do with the information they feed into it to generate their predictive policing “hot spots.” No one does! Proprietary information. Same argument used by Flock, the license plate reader company, but as it happens that proprietary information finds its way into ICE’s hands all the time.

Chipper note to end on!

---

Odds and Ends

Writing this newsletter is the pride of my life and I will do it forever if you all let me. I might be bummed on the job at the moment but even in the worst moments I know that to be true.

Same day that Etel’s piece ran in the NYT I caught another story about The Stranger—an alt weekly in Seattle and an aspirational model for what I’m trying to build—and the fact it’s become a weird kingmaker in local elections. Obviously we’ve got work to do in that regard. But it’s a good read.

Read Keith Linhares’s op-ed wrap up on the District 1 race! It factors heavily in another piece I have 80 percent done but decided to hold for a bit. So more when that runs but for now: real good.

The shit in Webster with the cops right now is peak Central Mass. Their Facebook post about the ‘beating up a teenager’ incident has more than 500 comments, and there are a ton of real gems in there for fans of minute character observations on the nature of Central Mass Do Your Job fascism. I’ll leave you with this one.

Art. We live in a cursed and wretched land. I hate it here and there’s nowhere I’d rather be. <3

Have a good Thanksgiving everyone but Moe Bergman. Even Steve Sargent, you have a good one bud.

Something downright mystical about this song that clicked on a drive back from North High this weekend. Truly operating on a different plane.