Star Simpson's first interview on the Boston airport LED sweatshirt scare

Following up on A little reality intruding on the spin: The Star Simpson Incident: I recently came across this video on BoingBoing. A few commercials come before the interview ...







... which is memorable. Let's take a good look at the "lump of putty" the Massachussetts state police reported seeing in Ms. Simpson's hands, one which she says they refused to return until fairly recently. It's a flower, made out of what Star describes as oven hardened clay. In other words, unglazed ceramics.






A view from a different angle






leaving us with no rational way to avoid a simple conclusion: Pare's career needs to be over. His report to the press, one which so inflamed local sentiments as to deny Ms.Simpson the possibility of a fair jury trial, was fraudulent. A ceramic flower is not a lump of putty. It can not honestly be mistaken for a lump of putty. There is no room for a judgement call on this one - Pare and the police deliberately deceived the public, and the fact that the public was eager to be deceived does not excuse such an action. Not that one had to be in the police to join in on the fun, if one lived in Beantown, as those scanning the increasingly ignorant and outrageous blog reactions during the trial probably would have guessed.

"STAR: I've become very turned off to living in Boston. I'm taking time off to travel, because that seems like a much better plan than continuing to live in that state. The reaction of people in Boston has been -- based on news reports containing any number of lies by the police, and little embellishments by writers, people have -- any number of reactions towards me. While biking one day, some complete stranger spit on me, spit on my bicycle, and shouted that I should have done time. I know he doesn't know anything about what actually happened.

XENI: Does that happen often, hostile reactions from people on the street?

STAR: Yeah. Every time I'd go out, I'd meet some person who had something to say, and had formed strong opinions and decided to take that opportunity to take them out on me.

I will agree with some of the comments that I skimmed that Boston should pay a real price for this outrage, and given the heavy dependence of that second rung metropolitan area on tourism, an obvious means of extracting the needed pound of flesh presents itself. My hope is that people will simply elect to not travel to Boston, not even with the thought that they're going to be part of some kind of organized boycott or attempt to reform Boston in spite of itself, but because the town simply looks like a nasty, crazy, unfriendly and unwholesome place to visit; who needs to deal with people who think like this? Especially when there are so many far more pleasant vacation choices. Like, say, Hawaii. Or is that Hawai'i?

Enough would-be tourists exercise that kind of prudence, and the long fading city of Boston is going to be in for some well deserved economic misery. May it never end.