BY DAN VALENTI

I’m a believer. Tom Brady, Greatest Player of all time.

I would be upset if I was “houseless” in Pittsfield and I had to live under a tree, while Matt Kerwood sits on a +$10 million slush fund that belongs in the pockets of the overtaxed local residents and small businesses. Matt Kerwood and the lovely Linda Tyer could use Pittsfield politics huge slush fund to help the homeless instead of screwing over Veterans, Senor Citizens, and other fixed and low income city taxpayers!

Just read ex-judge rutbergs opinion in the hate rag. He states again his one sided belief that of course Trump caused the insurrection and there was no voter fraud…even though it is documented that thousands of dead people voted among other things. I am glad I never went before him as a judge because it is obvious he is a very biased person

Ben Downing would make a great Governor of Massachusetts. I think it is cool that a Berkshire County politician may represent us in the Governor’s Office. Charlie Baker is a failed Governor. Baker’s Holyoke Soldiers Home debacle where 78 Veterans from around the Northeast died of COVID-19 demonstrated his failed management. I believe Baker’s failure of Veterans is the WORST debacle in the history of Massachusetts state government in over 400 years! Governor Baker recently oversaw the botched vaccination program. When my dad was a Berkshire County Commissioner from 1997 – mid-2000, Charlie Baker worked for the Weld and late-Cellucci administrations where Boston’s “Big Dig” was financially mismanaged with multibillion-dollar cost overruns. Then bureaucrat Charlie Baker was the financial official who oversaw the single most expensive public works project in U.S. history where innocent people were killed and millions of gallons of dirty water leaks each and everyday. Governor Baker’s latest budget proposal lowballed fiscal year 2022’s state budget by billions of dollars so he can blame the state Legislature when they (hypocritically) vote to raise state taxes to balance and fund the next state budget. Governor Baker is a political insider that has been part of the political establishment for decades. If Charlie Baker was just an average politician, he would not be in elected office. In closing, I hope Ben Downing will be elected next year as the next Governor of Massachusetts.

I see the city wants to screw the poor young families again with this garbage proposal. Why we aren’t making money from our garbage should be audited. Our garbage goes to be burned to create energy which is sold. It can’t be that costly. If they need to save $500,000 trim the school department and bring the scarafoni crew back to city hall

The Biden administration is allowing thousands of illegal immigrants to enter the country, untested for the virus, while they tell Americans to double mask.

Yes, yes, Gina, but you can’t actually say this.

“Carano came under fire on Wednesday as the hashtag #FireGinaCarano trended over an Instagram post comparing being Republican today to being Jewish during Nazi Germany”

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/gina-carano-dropped-mandalorian-abhorrent-023950226.html.

Great Barrington, dumb white peoples in search of racism. The only racist attack, was a scam perpetrated by a POC against herself and it wasted $300,000 in taxpayer money and shut down a college. Defund the police that are protecting you as you march.

Dumb white
WILLIAMSTOWN — The Zoom “bomb” that disrupted a classroom and shocked the Mount Greylock Regional School community Jan. 21 was instigated by two students in another school district. According to Superintendent Jason “Jake” McCandless, they were students of color.

Two students of color (black) pranked a school zoom meeting by playing rap songs with the N-word, written and performed by (black) artists, by using another student of color’s account (black). Any it was somehow a racial incident?

“Motive sometimes doesn’t matter,” McCandless said. “What does matter is the victim’s perception of the event. Our first concern is for the victim and the family. In addition, the students and staff, and community were shocked and hurt that day.”

Notice doesn’t matter? Intent doesn’t matter? What a bold thinker McCandless is.

Every serious moral philosophy, every decent legal system and every ethical organization cares deeply about intention.

It is the difference between murder and manslaughter. It is an aggravating or extenuating factor in judicial settings. It is a cardinal consideration in pardons (or at least it was until Donald Trump got in on the act). It’s an elementary aspect of parenting, friendship, courtship and marriage.

A hallmark of injustice is indifference to intention. Most of what is cruel, intolerant, stupid and misjudged in life stems from that indifference. Read accounts about life in repressive societies — I’d recommend Vaclav Havel’s “Power of the Powerless” and Nien Cheng’s “Life and Death in Shanghai” — and what strikes you first is how deeply the regimes care about outward conformity, and how little for personal intention.

I’ve been thinking about these questions in an unexpected connection. Late last week, Donald G. McNeil Jr., a veteran science reporter for The Times, abruptly departed from his job following the revelation that he had uttered a racial slur while on a New York Times trip to Peru for high school students. In the course of a dinner discussion, he was asked by a student whether a 12-year-old should have been suspended by her school for making a video in which she had used a racial slur.

In a written apology to staff, McNeil explained what happened next: “To understand what was in the video, I asked if she had called someone else the slur or whether she was rapping or quoting a book title. In asking the question, I used the slur itself.”

In an initial note to staff, editor-in-chief Dean Baquet noted that, after conducting an investigation, he was satisfied that McNeil had not used the slur maliciously and that it was not a firing offense. In response, more than 150 Times staffers signed a protest letter. A few days later, Baquet and managing editor Joe Kahn reached a different decision.

“We do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent,” they wrote on Friday afternoon. They added to this unambiguous judgment that the paper would “work with urgency to create clearer guidelines and enforcement about conduct in the workplace, including red-line issues on racist language.”

Donald McNeil Jr., the former science reporter who stepped down at the New York Times.
Donald McNeil Jr., the former science reporter who stepped down at the New York Times
C-SPAN
This is not a column about the particulars of McNeil’s case. Nor is it an argument that the racial slur in question doesn’t have a uniquely ugly history and an extraordinary capacity to wound.

This is an argument about three words: “Regardless of intent.” Should intent be the only thing that counts in judgment? Obviously not. Can people do painful, harmful, stupid or objectionable things regardless of intent? Obviously.

Do any of us want to live in a world, or work in a field, where intent is categorically ruled out as a mitigating factor? I hope not.

President Trump said in his speech on January 6th that if the Democrats had lost this election, there would be violence across the country, but we are not that way. He then said let’s march peacefully to the White House. When he said “fight” in the speech, he was referring to winning primary challenges, but that part was conveniently cut off by the Democrats. The Democrats were planning for even more violence if they lost the presidential election.

President Trump is acquitted again from impeachment. The Democrats wanted to call witnesses until Republicans threatened to call some 100 witnesses including Kamala Harris and Nancy Pelosi, both of whom wouldn’t do well under intensive grilling since they have so much to hide.