I won't be the only one who misses the football season when it is finally over. Mio finds the little men below his perch intriguing.
Actually, I won't miss football this year. Every team I was interested in was eliminated over the last weekend. The season is so long it breaks the best of them. Will I even watch the finale?
Aaron Rupar is an independent journalist, the pillar of the news site Public Notice. He also happens to live in Minneapolis.
He writes that yesterday he had other plans for his newsletter, but, as so often is the case, our blubbering bully of a pseudo-president managed to command his attention for his antics. This brief commentary is worth reading in full but here are some summarizing tidbits.
American embarrassment. Global pariah.
... Donald Trump sounded like a fascist dictator suffering from a brain bleed during his speech yesterday at Davos. It was a national embarrassment even by the lowly standards of modern American politics.
... Put it all together and what we have here is of an out of control wannabe autocrat who’s cognitively impaired, openly racist, and more eager than ever to use force against his perceived foes both at home and abroad. It’s complete madness that this guy has the nuke codes and yet, with the exception of people like [Canadian prime minister] Mark Carney, too few leaders are willing to grapple with it.... At campaign rallies throughout his political career, Trump has regularly read “The Snake,” a poem about people being taken advantage of because of their credulity.
“‘Oh shut up, silly woman,’ said the reptile with a grin, ‘You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in,” it goes.
America knew — or should have known — that Trump was a snake before voters committed the world historical blunder of letting him into the White House for a second time. But that’s water under the bridge. Now we have to hope we’re able to survive the venom and endure the unending global humiliation.
... That Trump backed down hours after his Davos speech is a promising sign that financial markets and diplomatic pressure (not to mention the grassroots organizing that’s taking place in the occupied Twin Cities) can still provide something of a check on his desire to carve up the world between strongmen like himself, Putin, and President Xi. But make no mistake — one year in, he and his regime are getting worse.
That’s evident in the streets of Minneapolis, the oil fields of Venezuela, and yesterday on that stage in Davos, which will go down as the site of one of if not the most pathetic presidential speech in history — so far.
• • •
A friend in the Twin Cities writes from within the occupation:
It’s really impossible to explain to people outside the Cities how dense and aggressive the ICE presence is, in comparison to the metro population. The scale of the violence.I should add that I suspect the people of Maine are made of just as tough stuff as the Minnesotans.
There’s no denying that the cruelty is the point, and that how you feel about what’s happening depends utterly on how you respond to bullying and intimidation. The reason it’s not working here is because Minnesotans really REALLY fucking hate bullies. There is a cultural unity around that, and it may lay dormant most of the time but it sure as hell has been activated now.
We are resisting and obstructing, but it’s awful and scary and heartbreaking and infuriating, and they are targeting our most vulnerable people on purpose. Please make sure that everyone you know knows that.
Here's what I know about how the rest of us can help occupied Minnesotans, though there are certainly many other ways. On mutual aid for the people of Minnesota
Says O'Brien:
The importance of the US changing sides stretches far beyond the Russo-Ukraine War. It is a challenge to the survival of liberal democracy and the rule of law itself around the world. It has left other democratic states leaderless and divided. It has emboldened Russia and China and it has made working with them far more attractive a prospect for others. It has upended the world order more than anything else since 1945, with the possible exception of the collapse of the USSR.
Of course not all is lost. Democratic forces have a chance to fight back. As I wrote in this Foreign Affairs piece published in September, the remaining democratic forces that do not want to go down the dark road that the US is now on, can act now to preserve themselves. They still have important reservoirs of strengths. However, before they can use this strength, they must acknowledge the reality of the new world.
The US has changed sides, is not their friend and in many ways is out to subvert their futures as the US becomes an ally of authoritarians and dictators.
Acknowledging the reality of the new world is the only way to fight it. For this reason there really is only one story that defines 2025. The USA has changed sides. How the rest of the world reacts to that will define the future.
Let the Europeans do better than we do. Greenland from the Greenlanders!
Some years ago, when I was walking all the streets of San Francisco, I encountered this window full of small nods to the life and teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (Click to enlarge.) Some are familiar: at far left, a small photo of the pastor and leader exhorting attendees at the 1963 March on Washington; in the center, a head shot of King labeled "Dream."
But others, all words from Dr. King harder to make out, are less familiar and more challenging:
Dr. King was not a comforting prophet. Few prophets are.
Dr. King, his words but even more the freedom movement of which he was the public face, was a presence in my late childhood and early adulthood. I realized this year how few of us still remember Dr. King as a living figure in the landscape of our lives rather than an icon of some vague, possibly better, historical America.
That time didn't seem so good as lived; after all, its leader was murdered as a consequence of his struggle for justice. As were a lot of other people killed working for a different America.
Looking back, King is enveloped in a warm haze. That's bullshit. To the powers that were, he was a dangerous rebellious terrorist.
Yesterday, in honor of the MLK holiday, my little parish sang the freedom lyric "We shall overcome ..." Do we believe that? It was probably even harder to believe in that in King's day than it is today.
As singers did in the heyday of that song, we adapted the lyrics to our own moment:
"We shall melt the ICE someday ... "
In honor of Dr. King, let's get to work.
This is what Donald Trump will find he's up against if he insists on invading Greenland. The land of rock and ice has its defenders. In addition to Denmark and NATO.
Thanks to Paul Krugman from whom I grabbed this.
When the structures of a complex society break down, we are forced to recall that we are dependent on each other.
Donald and the MAGAts want to return us to a 19th century society when government was solely a force of occasional repression and people were on their own to try to navigate a harsh and chaotic world. They think their imagined big white men will be fine and all the other scum will live under the thumb of the big men.
Such a world actually generated Mutual Aid as a deeply theorized response to the cruelty of the emerging capitalist society. DJT and Stephen Miller are trying to take us back to such a society. Are we going to let 'em?
I think they are glad we are back in town. Not that they don't love A. who cares for them in our absence. But besides opening cans, we also let them sleep on the bed with us. They do actually sleep.
It's hard to stop feeling shattered amid both fear and fury watching what is happening in Minneapolis right now. Americans are finding out what it is like to be occupied by an invading army of unconstrained goons -- sent by our own government. All over social media, you can see the thugs in their pretend military garb, roughing up people who question their authority. They sure seem to like being the Big Guys with Guns.
And you can see your fellow citizens rejecting the invaders, at known risk.
I’m seeing lots of people on here misunderstand the purpose of ICE watch. It’s de-escalation. And it’s grounded in the social science of violence.
Among perpetrators of violence, there is a very small share who are independently motivated to violence. But the vast majority of perpetrators commit violence to seek approval and status from others. This is particularly true among men who use violence to affirm their masculinity.
The goal of ICE watch is to surround that second type of perpetrator with people who *disapprove* of their actions. It will make them less likely to be violent and we’ve seen that, in some cases, that includes rethinking their original plan to tear a family apart too.
The success of ICE watch interfering with ICE’s mission is almost certainly why DHS keeps sending more agents to Minneapolis. They used to execute their raids with just a few agents. Now they need 6-12 to even begin to disrupt the social pressure to be nonviolent.
I’m just echoing others who have already said this, but it’s a good thing that it takes so many ICE agents to make a single arrest. It makes the whole operation slower and more resource-intensive.
It can be hard to see the success of prevention efforts because we can’t see inside the minds of the people who changed their behavior because of those efforts. But there are a lot of reasons to believe ICE watch is working. And it’s also part of why ICE watch is generally safer than it sounds.
Let's hope she's right. My city is full of people who are determined to protect our neighbors when/if the goons arrive.
Everybody go get those whistles!
Nobody loves the electric company. We usually only notice it when we pay the bill or, more acutely, when something goes wrong. The power is just supposed to flow.
These days, Eversource is completing a much anticipated project to bring a high capacity cable from the Cape to the Island, ending use of diesel for electric generation. It's a big deal.
After Donald Trump's attempted insurrection on January 6, 2021, a lot of big companies swore off contributing to members of Congress who voted against certifying the 2020 vote for Biden. Most of them have gone back on their promises.
But a few have held out. Judd Legum assembled an honor role of promise keepers that stuck to their word. And Eversource was among them:
On January 13, 2021, Eversource Energy, a large electricity provider in the Northeast, announced that it would not donate to any of the members of Congress who voted against certifying the 2020 election results. In a statement, Eversource’s Chief Communications Officer Jim Hunt said, “at Eversource, we were deeply disturbed by the intentional disruption of our democratic process and the violence that occurred at the Capitol last week.”
Eversource has kept its promise not to donate to any election deniers and has made few political contributions in general. NRG Energy, a competing electricity provider serving some of the same states as Eversource, also promised not to donate to any election deniers, but has since reneged.
Other promise keepers include AirBnB, Expedia, Nike, and Lyft. Read all about the good guys!
Erudite Partner's latest essay for TomDispatch looks back on "a low dishonest decade." It's her 99th piece for this lively opinion site which brings experts to attempt “a regular antidote to the mainstream media.” She first came on as someone equipped to write engagingly and informatively about torture and abuse by the American government. What a vocation!
Her title comes from a phrase in the poem by W.H. Auden: September 1, 1939. Given that analogy, her reflections on the last 20 years of American hubris are pretty dire.
But she's still kicking.
... A few months after the 2016 election had disproved my Peak Trump theory, I wrote about waking up terrified, imagining what might be coming. “I’m an old dyke,” I said, “a little ragged around the edges, and prone to the occasional night terror.” I added, though, that while I might quake occasionally at two in the morning, “I’m too old and too stubborn to cede my country to the forces of hatred and a nihilistic desire to blow the whole thing up just to see where the pieces come down.”I wasn’t done then and nine years later and all that much older, I don’t consider myself done yet. As I put it at the time, “I’ve fought, and organized, and loved too long to give up now. And Trump and the people who run him can’t shove me — or any of us — back in that bottle.”
I believed that then and I still do today. I’ve watched ordinary people insist on fighting back, organizing, and loving each other and this country for too long to give up now. They can’t shove all of us back in any genie’s bottle. ...
You can read it all here.
Nice to see Northern Californians doing something we do well: taking to a cold Ocean Beach yesterday to assert our opinions.
Brad Newsham deserves credit for pioneering this local artform.
The San Francisco Chronicle has surprisingly good coverage of protests around the Bay. Coverage always becomes better when the local powers know they are up against the sentiment of the people.
