Many Germans look back with bafflement at how the country that produced Bach and Goethe succumbed to rule by Hitler and his enabling thugs. Americans may someday look back with bafflement at how the country that produced Washington and Lincoln surrendered to Trump and his enabling thugs.
Nine Things I Learned in Ninety Years. By Edward Packard, writer, whose work includes the prototype Choose Your Own Adventure book and many other books in that series, and native son of Huntington, NY, where I grew up.
Chicago apartment ICE raid: Tenants detained for hours and American kids separated from parents
Rebekah Riess and Bill Kirkos at CNN:
Adults and children alike were pulled from their Chicago apartments, crying and screaming, during a large overnight raid that has left tenants and neighbors shaken.
“I’ve been on military bases for a good portion of my life,” said Darrell Ballard, who lives in the building next door. “And the activity I saw – it was an invasion.”
Ballard recalled seeing residents detained outside the building for hours, after seeing a Black Hawk helicopter flying over the five-story building in the city’s South Shore neighborhood and military-sized vehicles and agents filling the parking lot early Tuesday morning.
…
…. Eboni Watson, said she and others ducked for cover when hearing several flash bangs go off.
“They was terrified. The kids was crying. People was screaming. They looked very distraught. I was out there crying when I seen the little girl come around the corner, because they was bringing the kids down, too, had them zip tied to each other,” Watson told WLS, recalling trucks and military-style vans were used to separate adults from their children.
If ICE doesn’t want to be compared to the Gestapo, they could maybe try not acting like terrorists.
We had a great meeting of the La Mesa-Foothills Democratic Club yesterday. It was wonderful to get together with people doing the work of preserving democracy against fascism.
Microsoft is giving away Crocs decorated with a montage of the Windows XP wallpaper and logos
Microsoft confirms it found a way to make Crocs even uglier – with Windows XP and Clippy
I discovered Crocs a few weeks ago and I love them and want to wear them 24x7 and be buried in them when I die. They are very fashionable and I look great in them.
“It’s a war from within.” Trump prepares the generals for what comes next.
Jonathan V. Last at The Bulwark:
If you were expecting Triumph of the Will, you were disappointed because what you got instead was fat, disoriented Elvis stumbling through his set. Except that it wasn’t funny. It was dangerous.
I promise you that the flag officers in attendance were more alarmed than amused. And you should be, too.
1. “The Enemy from Within”
President Trump did not have many bad things to say about America’s foreign adversaries. He spoke about Vladimir Putin in largely neutral terms (only saying he was “disappointed” in him) and barely mentioned China.
He did, however, speak with great moral clarity about certain classes of Americans whom he views as a grave threat:
The American left: “They’re really bad. They’re bad people.” Again, he’s talking about Americans here.
His own domestic political opponents: “They’re vicious people that we have to fight, just like you have to fight vicious people. Mine are a different kind of vicious.”
American journalists: “sleazebags.”
Residents of American inner cities: “animals.”
I fit three out of four of those categories. I also support LGBTQ rights and DEI, which Trump and his supporters have declared war on.
“I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.”
— General William Tecumseh Sherman
Trump's and Hegseth's speeches today were disgraceful even by the standards of this administration
They have declared war on 1/3 to 1/2 of the American population: Three of our largest cities plus San Francisco, the residents of America’s inner cities in particular, LGBTQ people, women, nonwhite people, the American Left and all Trump’s political opponents.
I'm not a superhero fan but I do love Superman
He’s 100% hero, lives by the Scout oath (trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent1), loves his fellow humans and is never even tempted by evil.
I’ve never liked Batman, because he seems to me to be on the edge of being a supervillain himself. On the other hand, a friend who is a deep comics fan once said I was doing Batman a disservice. Batman, he said, has all those qualities I love in Superman, but Batman is in a bad mood about it. Superman loves humanity because of our capacity for good, while Batman sees the capacity for good and is angry that so many of us choose evil.
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Maybe not the thrifty part. The Fortress of Solitude seems like it would be expensive real estate. ↩︎
Looking at online reviews of this year’s “Superman” movie, I’m surprised that many people say they’d never seen a good Superman movie before, or that this was the first good Superman movie they’d seen. I guess the Christopher Reeve Superman is lost to the mists of prehistory.
A Perpetual Reichstag Fire For The 24-Hour News Cycle
Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day:
The MAGA movement needs violence and intimidation to function, both online and off. Without its central bundle of grievances and universe of enemies — LGBT people, people of color, leftists, Democrats — Trump’s supporters might notice that he’s ransacking the country’s institutions and making their lives worse. So they can’t acknowledge that a decade inside the pressure cooker of political violence has turned Trump supporters in spree shooters in waiting.
I've been through four recessions in my adult lifetime, and did OK through all of them, but the coming bust looks like it will be bigger than anything we've seen since the Great Depression.
And the U.S. will have to weather that storm under the most inept and corrupt national government we’ve known.
How should I prepare for that? I have no answers, and have been continuing along as we always have been.
I hope that living in California will provide protection.
This is something that keeps me awake staring wide-eyed at the ceiling at 4 am in the dark.
Here’s something I saw walking the dog, giving a Lincoln Lawyer vibe. I have not seen this car or license plate before. It was parked about a half-dozen houses away from us on our street.
