From Ocean Beach: Abolish ICE

Thanks to Brad Newsham -- performance art maestro, travel writer, and once upon a time cab driver -- we've been creating these beach protests for over 20 years here in the San Francisco Bay when events warranted. We've denounced the country's wars and sought the impeachment of two Republican presidents. Thousands of us have been willing to arrange ourselves to spell out the message of the moment under volunteer direction. The vibe is determined but happy, a pleasant echo of simpler days when San Francisco catered more to hip young adventurers than to earnest aspiring techies. 

 

We made protest art again Saturday; here is the official overhead image. Drones sure make the project easier; I remember a time when the small plane with the photographer was late and we stood in formation, and stood, and stood.

 

Today I was down there in the area of the period in the exclamation point [!]. Here are some images of people I met. Click on any to enlarge.

 Down the ramp we go ...

A beach protest allows for bringing the dog and for meeting new friends.

Once we'd formed up in our letters, the photographic drone flew over head and we shouted our messages.

The ocean seems to join our cries against the horror of this moment ...

In this protest, there's space for the whole family -- as there should be.

St. Paul voters defy risks to send a message

Something remarkable just happened in St. Paul, Minnesota. If you don't know, St. Paul is the twin city to Minneapolis, the other side of the upper Mississippi River. These are two jurisdictions, yet one city.

The miraculous thing that happened was that on last Tuesday, Meg Luger-Nikolai won a special election to the state legislature. Yes, she's a Democrat. Democrats win here.

I have more than once spent short bits of time in the Twin Cities on various organizing jobs. I've seen a little of this very Democratic city; I've even seen what kind of people show up to the political party nominating caucuses. Here's what some of them looked like in 2006; I doubt Luger-Nikolai's new constituents look much different now: a little cold with a lot of opinions.

But, as David Nir of the Downballot -- a site that analyzes local elections -- writes, St. Paul voters came out in the middle of violent federal repression that might have been expected to reduce turnout. Not so.

On Tuesday night, Meg Luger-Nikolai, a labor lawyer and Democrat, won a special election for her state legislature with 95.3% of the vote.

Like I said, that could never really happen, right? ... what matters above all else is where the race took place: St. Paul, Minnesota.

Like its sibling on the western bank of the Mississippi, the state capital of St. Paul has been just as much a victim of another would-be dictator, Donald Trump.

The smaller of the Twin Cities has been under siege by ICE for months, its new mayor, Kaohly Her, told The Guardian last week. And the savagery unleashed in Minneapolis, which has reverberated throughout the country and worldwide, has been felt especially keenly in its closest of sister cities.

It was Her’s former seat in the state House that Luger-Nikolai ran for and won, a supersized victory that helps answer a grim and difficult question on many minds: What would happen if Trump tried to send troops into cities right before Election Day?

It turns out, as election law expert Justin Levitt put it, voters will “crawl over broken glass to punish the street gangs gassing and disappearing children.” Despite Trump’s terror campaign, the regime’s opponents overcame whatever fears they might have had to turn out en masse—even though, thanks to ICE’s penchant for smashing car windows, the broken glass is all too literal. Its supporters, meanwhile, seem to have stayed home.

It was by no means easy. In fact, Democrats had to toss the usual campaign trail playbook.
“This election took place while our neighbors were, and still are, being terrorized by ICE agents during this federal occupation,” Luger-Nikolai said in a statement to The Downballot. 

“It made it impossible to run a normal campaign. People were afraid to open their doors or talk to someone they didn’t know, and we pulled back from those typical strategies out of respect and care for our neighbors.”

“Yet in the conversations we did have, voters raised the same concern: deep disgust with what they are seeing and fear for families, schools, and small businesses in their communities,” she continued. “Families have been destabilized, students pushed into uncertainty, and livelihoods disrupted.”

But, said Luger-Nikolai, the end result was “not only a win at the ballot box, but a powerful affirmation of community resilience in the face of extraordinary circumstances.” Luger-Nikolai’s new district has long been a deep shade of blue, but that backdrop only heightens her achievement.

In the 2024 presidential election, Kamala Harris carried it 84-13, offering little room to improve on those numbers. ... Though Harris won by 71 percentage points, Luger-Nikolai won by 91. That 20-point overperformance would be stellar anywhere. In a district like this? Astonishing hardly covers it.

... Recently, my good friend G. Elliott Morris from Strength In Numbers asked me that same question I posed earlier during a livestream: What would happen if Trump deployed troops to intimidate voters just ahead of an election?

It’s a scary thought, made much scarier by ICE’s blithe killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. But as I told Elliott, such an attempt could backfire badly, generating even hotter anger with Trump and firing up voters as never before. 

Tuesday’s experience in the Twin Cities is the most vivid evidence we’ve seen of precisely that sort of ballot box backlash. Just as we’ve seen Minnesotans bravely confront Trump’s goon squad despite the grave dangers, they’re not hesitating to make their feelings known at the polling place, too.

If Trump was expecting ordinary Americans to cower at home while his thugs roam the streets, he’s already been proven wrong. And if he imagines that that same army of thugs might save him from electoral catastrophe, voters in St. Paul likewise just showed how very wrong that calculation may be. 

It's gonna be a long year. Meanwhile, let's push Dems to prove that the risks we may have to take to elect them are worth it.

Interesting exchange on organizing against Trump's goons

Juliette Kayyem who worked the disaster management portfolio in the Obama administration (her book here) offered an observation on Blue Sky about how Minneapolis is achieving its level of organized resistance.

Kayyem: I have begun to think that Minnesota pushback to ICE was unique and a model because it gave people something to do. It wasn’t about just going out in streets for rallying purposes. People had a mission: videos, whistles, information and communication flow to communities. They had something to do.

Ezra Levin, cofounder of national Indivisible: 100%. I honestly believe political leaders ask too little of people. The thinking is you need an extraordinarily low bar - so ask people for money or to sign something. People want to be part of something and they're eager to do real meaningful work in defense of their community and their rights.

Levin: The political system largely treats people like small-dollar ATMs that vote every 2 years. Everybody gets deluged with emails asking for money. It feeds cynicism and burnout. Rarely do you get a "help me organize our community" email.

Sherrilyn Ifill: Correct.

Nassim: frankly a lot of politicians see active constituents as a burden rather than an opportunity

Levin: much of the entire party views engaged people as a problem to be solved. ...The smothering out of the obama grassroots energy is my roman empire - I think about it all the time. I was an idealistic recent college grad and I remember a massive celebration call for volunteers after the win with a promise to continue the momentum. Then...nothing. We got the Tea Party instead.

Lydy: There is nothing more bonding than a work party. Collating and stamping a fanzine, setting up chairs in an auditorium, cooking a large meal in a church kitchen ...

And much more ... 

Let's keep doing the work!

Friday cat blogging

  

How would you like to be confronted by that look in the morning? You might think Mio was ferocious, but in fact he's a big lover boy. Substantial for a cat, yes. But mostly rather sweet, if always hungry.

Culture for resistance to tyranny, now and then

Odds are, you have encountered Bruce Springteen's ode to the battle of Minnesota. After all, it's been written up even in the New York Times. But here it is, anyway:

... There were bloody footprints where mercy should have stood ... we'll take our stand for this land and the stranger in our midst ...we'll remember the names of those who died on the streets of Minneapolis ...

The song put me in mind of another season when the American state murdered its own. In May of 1970, National Guard soldiers killed four on the campus of Kent State University in Ohio followed shortly after by the killing of two protesting Black students at Jackson State in Mississippi. 

A significant difference between our current moment and that time: in 1970, state and national polls found that majorities of citizens thought the students got what they deserved. 

Polls today, now that nearly everyone has seen the videos of Alex Pritti's execution, run strong against the Trump/Miller occupation of Minneapolis. We've learned a thing or two over the last 55 years.

The popular touring folk singer Holly Near provided a ballad of the Kent and Jackson State era: It's refrain seems highly applicable to our moment: 

It could have been me, but instead it was you
So I'll keep doing the work you were doing as if I were too
I'll be a student of life, a singer of songs
A farmer of food and the righter of wrong
It could have been me, but instead it was you
And it may be me, dear sisters and brothers, before we are through
But if you can die for freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom
If you can die for freedom, I can too

. Seems right. I hope this is not what is demanded of us.

Confirmation they should be scared of their own workers

Last October, it looked as if the San Francisco Bay Area was to be next target of Donald Trump's Rambo/ICE thugs.

And then we weren't. And the thugs were redirected to such unfortunate locations as Memphis and eventually Minnesota's Twin Cities.

Why did Trump/Miller/Noem back off then? San Francisco's mayor, Daniel Lurie, whose promise is to eradicate any vestiges of the historically weird and anti-corporate character of the City by the Bay, claimed to have talked Trump out of it. It may have helped that the federal forces had located on an isolated Coast Guard island where they might have been expected to shoot their way out when protesters inevitably blocked their way.

But I've always suspected that the tech barons who support both Lurie and Trump were the deciders. They don't mind beating up on poor Central American and East Asian migrants, but they didn't want their work force seeing the carnage. And some of their companies depend on immigrants. Lots of tech jobs have moved on from the Bay, partially because the pandemic encouraged remote work, but there are still legions of ambitious, not-yet billionaire techies who locate here for the promise of natural beauty, each other, and hope for start-up riches. 

And if the Bay were a fascist target, these might be confronted by the ugly violence of the state for themselves. They are part of labor; their work still matters to their bosses -- hence our (momentary?) reprieve. 

WIRED has confirmed stirrings among the lower and mid-level tech workers and the response of their oligarch employers. Notably, the rustlings of dissent are within the company what seems to be the fascist Dark Star -- Peter Thiel's Palantir.

After federal agents shot and killed Minneapolis nurse Alex Pretti on Saturday, Palantir workers pressed for answers from leadership on the company’s work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—and many questioned whether Palantir should be involved with the agency at all. Leadership defended its work as in part improving “ICE’s operational effectiveness.” 

Internal Slack messages reviewed by WIRED reveal growing frustration within Palantir over its relationship with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and in particular, ICE’s enforcement and investigations teams. In response, Palantir’s privacy and civil liberties team published an update to the company’s internal wiki detailing its work on federal immigration enforcement, arguing that the “technology is making a difference in mitigating risks while enabling targeted outcomes.” 

In a Saturday thread on Slack discussing Pretti’s killing, Palantir workers questioned both the ethics and the business logic of continuing the company’s work with ICE. 

“Our involvement with ice has been internally swept under the rug under Trump2 too much. We need an understanding of our involvement here,” one person wrote. 

“Can Palantir put any pressure on ICE at all?” wrote another. “I’ve read stories of folks rounded up who were seeking asylum with no order to leave the country, no criminal record, and consistently check in with authorities. Literally no reason to be rounded up. Surely we aren’t helping do that?” 

The discussion was held in a company-wide Slack channel dedicated to general world news coverage. ... 

... [A corporate] wiki acknowledges “increasing reporting around U.S. Citizens being swept up in enforcement action and held, as well as reports of racial profiling allegedly applied as pretense for the detention of some U.S. Citizens,” but argues that Palantir’s customers at ICE “remain committed to avoiding the unlawful/unnecessary targeting, apprehension, and detention of U.S. Citizens wherever and however possible.”

Yeah -- and where's the evidence for that? Dead civilians?

Here too, among tech workers, is where resistance will rise and must be welcomed by those of us with a more skeptical response to their world. Working techies are people too and they don't like ugly.

We're in this together, trying to save the aspirations of the country from the monsters currently in power.

Even the statues cry out

We can thank COVID for something: during the pandemic, San Franciscans enjoyed the eastern mile and a half of JFK Drive in Golden Gate Park closed to cars so as to encourage recreation in fresh air. And we loved it; the wide street became a playground for cyclists, skaters, runners and walkers. In November 2022, over the objections of museums in the area, the voters gave 63 percent support to keeping this section of JFK car-free. And so it remains.

And then Recreation and Parks made JFK Drive a venue for public art. There are dragons and sea monsters and also pianos and pingpong tables.

And among this art stand two human-size bronze critters, a female rabbit and a male hound, dressed in human business attire, going about their bourgeois lives, driving to work and cooking a meal. 

Someone has dressed them for this moment:

Even the statues cry out for justice ... 

We have something MAGA lacks

Ben Lorber is a writer and researcher at Political Research Associates, a long time observer of hate movements in this USofA. To do his work, he reads online right wing and MAGA chat groups. The resistance and resilience of people in the Twin Cities is giving these keyboard fascists fits. From Facebook:

Yesterday a far-right journalist tweeted out screenshots from a public, unvetted ICE Watch Signal group in Minneapolis. It’s gone viral on the online Right. While thousands took the streets, reactionary keyboard warriors stared wide-eyed and aghast at images from chats showing neighbors organizing street-level mutual aid networks and ICE monitoring shifts.

Over and over I see the same refrain - ‘the Right is nowhere near as organized as this.’ They insist folks are getting paid by China or that it’s all coordinated by the deep state. They’re clearly unable to comprehend, or unwilling to admit the organic strength of grassroots movement-building.

The Right is prone, of course, to strategically amplifying the imagined threat of conspiratorial, all-powerful enemies lurking around every corner. Stuff like this is catnip for a movement eager to catch a forbidden glimpse into the hidden heart of Leftist power, whether it’s from Q Drops, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion or in this case a public, easily accessible Signal group.

But here they’re glimpsing something real, and it scares them. They can’t help but admit that their side could never pull this off. It reminds them that they don’t really have people power— the kind that makes neighbors show up for each other in the cold, again and again, over the long haul. And they never will, because their project is genuinely unpopular, and that makes it precarious and fragile.

So they cling as tight as they can to the levers of state and institutional power, and the massive funding streams that they do hold. But they can’t dream of the level of grassroots mobilization on display from just one public Signal chat in one city. It terrifies them- and it should.

It’s also hard to miss the note of envy. It reminds me that there’s always been a not-so-subtle thread of envy running through the history of conservatism. Whether it’s the French Revolution, 1917, the 1960s New Left or Minneapolis today, the Right is often jealous that the forces of human emancipation are more numerous and better organized than they are, and having more fun, with a more compelling vision of the future than they can ever dream of. 

... let us strive on to finish the work we are in ... A. Lincoln

Another murder in Minneapolis -- say a prayer and speak the truth

We gathered at the Embarcadero in San Francisco, memorializing Alex Pretti's murder in Minneapolis -- and finding comradeship with each other. The crowd was large, not so much militant as determined.

There was anger -- yes!

Apparently a good nurse, from the accounts of Pretti's life that are coming out. There were many in the San Francisco crowd who looked to be nurses themselves.

This crowd was determined ...

• • •

The Rev. Angela Denker pastors at an Evangelical Lutheran Church not far from the murder site in Minneapolis. She writes:

I write to you so sad - I feel like I cry every few hours - and also so, so mad. At the many who prepared the way for this gratuitous violence and hatred. At the Christians, Christian leaders, and politicians who stubbornly dig in their heels, who refuse to repent, who insist upon more and more bloodshed, sacrifices poured out to the gods of violence, war, and money.

Pray for Minneapolis, for Minnesota. For Alex’s loved ones. For the eyewitnesses. For the press who were teargassed and pepper sprayed. For the children who see it all and wonder, how they can ever possibly become adults in a world like this. For America. For our churches, embattled and exhausted. For neighborhood leaders who again host vigils and light candles. For brave observers. For the VA Hospital, where I served my chaplaincy internship, and where Alex worked in the ICU. For the woman whom Alex tried to help, who was being assaulted by ICE agents, who then turned their attention to Alex. For the ecosystem of lies and those who profit from them. For justice. For truth. For courage. For love.

Amen. 

Amen indeed on this third Sunday in the Christian season of Epiphany -- the season when we repeat stories of the Living God calling forth improbable followers from among the workers of his time and place to witness the Love he spoke.  

• • •

For a more secular reflection, here's the often lucid Jonathan V. Last at The Bulwark:

What Can We Do?

For starters, be grateful to the people of Minneapolis. Bearing witness today in America requires physical courage. Every single person who steps out their front door in Minneapolis to observe, document, and protest the actions of our government is taking their lives in their hands.

These men and women are the kind of patriots you would have seen at Lexington and Concord. I am in awe of their valor. They started this resistance to protect their neighbors, but what is happening in Minneapolis now is bigger than that. They are standing against the might of the Trump regime not just for themselves, but for all of us.

 Second, don’t look away. Don’t forget what is happening. Don’t give in to despair or exhaustion.

Third, do not tolerate false equivalence from responsible quarters. Anyone in public life who cannot call things by their right names here should be shamed, swept aside, and ultimately ignored.

Fourth, understand that this moment requires new structures and new thinking. The resistance in Minneapolis is unlike anything we’ve seen in recent American history. The political opposition must think anew as well. And any part of the political opposition that continues to act as though these are still ordinary times should be swept aside, too. ...

Fifth, as we identify ways to give material support to the Minneapolis resistance, be ready to offer whatever you can.

... They want us confused. They want us too exhausted to fight back. You don’t have to go into the streets of Minnesota to fight back. You can simply state plainly that our government is lying to us. Say it somewhere. Online. To a friend or family member. But do not let their lies go unanswered by truth.

Solidarity amid horror

 

Yesterday evening northern Californians marched in downtown San Francisco in support of the besieged people of Minnesota. We're fortunate -- it was more hot than cold!

We know which side we are on.

This was a union crowd with participants from SEIU, organized teachers and nurses, even retirees.

And some who are just forming their union.

 

These folks know which side they are on and it ain't ICE.

 

It was also a civic activist crowd. I saw lots of old friends from Bay Resistance, Indivisible, Swing Left and more. 

 

Like the people of Minnesota, we won't give up our immigrant friends without an organized struggle. 

Friday cat blogging

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.

Maybe he can swat them? Apparently not.

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?

A fascist with a brain bleed

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.

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.

I should add that I suspect the people of Maine are made of just as tough stuff as the Minnesotans. 

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 

There's no point in denying reality. And much harm.

With Donald Trump blustering about at Davos today, my thoughts return to the real international substance of our moment as described by Phillips P. O'Brien, historian and professor of strategic studies at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. The United States has changed sides in the long struggle for decency and democracy against exploitation and tyranny. We may not have been the pillar of righteousness we liked to think ourselves, but we were once not the declared enemies of humane flourishing for the peoples either.

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!

Marching on the MLK holiday

 

I found it notable that among the several thousand marchers in downtown San Francisco were so many children. Standing up of justice, for freedom, for the possibility of diverse community is too often a dangerous activity in Trump's dystopian America. But not this day. Today families could be together. Today parents could safely share with their children the values they hold.

 

Many marchers arrived from the Peninsula at the Caltrain station and made their way from up 3rd Street.

One of the larger labor contingents consisted of workers from the airport.

Young men finding their way in a tough world marched proudly.

  

This young woman was part of a Glide Church contingent. There were quite a few church groups and visible clergy. The short trek ended in Yerba Buena Gardens with music and festivities. I followed my usual course, attending either the march or the rally -- but not both, so this account stops here.

King's freedom struggle goes on

  

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: 

• Darkness cannot drive out darkness. Only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate. Only love can do that.
• Life's most persistent and urgent question is "What are you doing for others?"
• The time is always right to do what is right.
• A riot is the language of the unheard. 

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. 

Not to be missed

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.

On mutual aid for the people of Minnesota

If you, like me, cannot look away from accounts and videos of Donald Trump's assault on the people of Minneapolis/St Paul and beyond, there are several actions you can do:

1. You can let your federal officials -- senators and congresscritters, especially if you have Republican ones -- know that the behavior of the federal government, your government, is unacceptable and should end NOW. Yeah -- calling Congress is a drag, but many live in a Fox News media bubble and need to be jarred by their constituents.
2. If you have friends in Minnesota who have put out appeals for help for people and institutions they know, send money if you can. This is not a time for someone to be starting a full fledged non-profit. Under invasion, mutual aid between humans is the name of the game. 
3. If you don't have more personal connections, people I trust say Stand with Minnesota is the real thing. They offer options to get help directly to threatened immigrants and also to the lawyers who have to fight the good fight in the courts.

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?  

Friday cat blogging

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.

Janeway settled on my lap this morning. Friendly, if a little wary.

 

Meanwhile Mio keeps watch on the street. 

 

We're back in town, still a little unsettled by cross-country flights, but grateful for feline and human welcome.

Not a time to be quiet

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.

A sociologist who studies sexual violence, Nicole Bedera, has some thoughts about resisting if this invasion comes to your neighborhood.

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! 

Promise keepers

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.

Here on Martha's Vineyard, we get our electric from a company called Eversource. Some of our experiences with them have not been so good -- like the time they were upgrading the lines on a nearby road and blew out our power. Fortunately we only lost a bunch of surge protectors. Remember to use those surge protectors!

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!

Not going back!

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. 

Calling out the crimes

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.

Stay angry. It's good for your mental health.

The last week has been bad. ICE murdered Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis. Donald Trump raided Venezuela on shifting pretexts and apparently has no coherent plan for the aftermath. Oh yeah, and he's threatening more mischief in Greenland.

We're ruled by a dangerous sociopath. Of course that's depressing and disorienting. It's a lot worse than simply being ruled by bad politicians who start stupid wars and funnel the product of our land and labor to rich people.

Garrett Graff offers a cogent description of what it does to us: 

... unfortunately some communities and populations have long had reasons to fear government in various forms or question the “protection” of the police, but never have Americans collectively experienced anything like the accumulation of mental weight we have in this last year.

All that weight is piled upon all that we also accumulated in 2020, from Covid to George Floyd to January 6th — the last, also disastrous year of another Trump presidency — and all that other mental weight we’ve accumulated that comes from the rising fear and collective understanding that because of GOP policies, far-right culture and media, and a nation that has lost its collective mind, you cannot count on being safe in the places where we should feel safest — synagogues, churches, schools, universities, offices, and more — and that when you kiss your children and send them to school, you can’t guarantee that they will come home at the end of the day.

That heaviness you feel, that drag on your mental health, that drain on your emotional energy and lethargy in the face of world events, like yesterday, is real. We are all carrying a lot of new weight in the era of Trumpism....

But, dammit, let's remember who we are. We're the descendants and successors of a gritty, fractious bunch of migrants who defied a king, overthrew an enslaving oligarchy, fought 19th and 20th century capitalists, fought Nazis, and inspired colonized people all over the world to dump their overlords. (Even to dump us, sometimes.) The Trumpian crew are greedy second-raters who want to steal for themselves what a great people built together.

Resistance to tyranny is what people in this country have done, over and over. And don't forget it.

These women and the flag waver at the top of the post came out today even though the main local demonstration of disgust, defiance and determination happened on Thursday here. The population is small in January; the Indivisible lead volunteer organizer had already put on one good sized rally in Vineyard Haven this week. 

But she exhorted any who wished to get in sync with so many taking a stand this Saturday across the country: "Old School - Just Show Up!"

Some folks did. 

Friday cat blogging

 

Gremlin came to visit.

It was not long before she spread herself out to accept homage. But she's a playful creature, curious and even affectionate. We miss her.

Standing up against our aspiring king

At Five Corners intersection on Martha's Vineyard island in Massachusetts:

 

It was cold, but not that cold, and the sun shone a bit as year-round islanders stood in witness to a woman killed and a regime which steals from us all and murders because it thinks it may.

The island has had its own invasion by ICE.

The masked thugs were not popular. There are plenty of people here who've come from other countries to work. Many have made a life in this place -- legally or otherwise.

New Englanders know BS when a would-be tyrant tries to feed it to them. ICE shot that woman in Minnesota because they thought they could.

These folks have a proud tradition to uphold.