Middle-aged white lady Country Mouse moved to the City Chicago Southside Abolitionist Anti-War
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I’ve been trying to explain the visceral gut-punch I felt when I read this story to people who haven’t lived in a wildfire region… and it’s clear that I’m not managing to really communicate the scale of my horror. Also, the sheer… obliviousness? it takes to run into a fire zone for no reason.
“It will have to extend outside the bounds of its container as the container is only taking up 70% of the page's width.”
Very Queen of Hearts ‘Off with their heads!’ energy.
It gets tricky having a podcast that is booked through the end of the year when you need to regroup and figure out how to address real-time disasters, like your city facing a military occupation.
New "How to Report ICE" zines up today for free printable download! California (by county/area) Chicago Colorado DC Metro Area (DMV) Massachusetts North Carolina Triangle Area NYC Philly Pittsburgh Portland, OR St. Louis Metro Area Washington State Please share! drive.google.com/drive/folder...
It is extremely not fun.
"Community organizing is both a science and an art — a science because it is grounded in a systematic understanding of power and oppression, an art because it demands creativity, empathy, and adaptability in order to build relationships and trust." - James Forman
This is an excellent way of putting this. I’m feeling unsurprised by the bigger picture and also unprepared for the details.
Apropos of some things I’ve heard said both on this place and out in the real world: Don’t put your info on a digital list! Once you’ve told a company your phone number and that you’re gonna be with a whole bunch of other activists, you’re on that list forever.
It also captured information that could be used by federal immigration agents or police in another state to track pregnant people coming to IL for abortions. Just to catch .2% of vehicles. Is it really worth it?
God but this man and his team understand power!
‘The federal gov’t is coming to illegally and violently arrest your neighbors for no reason. Please remain calm and maintain order while you’re being loud for America. Thank you for your attention to this matter.’
The Mayor of Broadview issued a statement yesterday highlighting the village's plan to deal with the impending ICE surge. The processing/de facto detention center will operate *7 days a week for ~45 days.* Also notes potential for "assaults on law enforcement," coordination with local police.
The hardest thing about the past few weeks was not being able to tell every single person I spoke to about my new position as the Women & Girls Reporter for Free Press Indiana. But now I can 😊
fuck this guy in particular
I’m aware. Yell at the feds. Not people who don’t want to deal with lice. You keep getting angry at us. Get mad at the feds. Period. End of. Have a nice day. I don’t have time for this shit.
Yes, it absolutely is a reason for kids to not be physically present at school. We proved during covid that students can be taught at home. Again, your issue is with the feds and their refusal to fund schools such that appropriate measures like e-learning can be put in place.
Kids w/ lice should be sent home with the proper materials for treating the condition and stay until complete. School nurses should check everyone, including adult staff. We can’t afford any of that. Your beef is with the feds and funding. Not with ppl that want to kill lice.
I enjoyed this. And what an infectious laugh. ❤️ "Reporter left speechless after witnessing Japan's new $70 million Maglev train in action at 310 mph"
Read/print my latest zine containing 19 voices on “antifascist grief”: “The Heart Is a Muscle” Big thx to @igd.bsky.social for kindly sharing the zine and PDFs! itsgoingdown.org/the-heart-is...
I know we have a chip on our shoulders sometimes but national media (lack of) coverage of Chicago is beyond egregious. we talk a lot about the death of local news but national news is useless for us. we're the third largest city in the country! nine million people metro area!!!!!!!!!!!
he's absolutely hitting the right notes rhetorically and i appreciate that, but right now a few dozen protestors outside the immigration court have done more to directly protect residents of this state than he has, and i don't think that bodes well
The president is sending the military to control American cities and if you're a reporter who's framing that illegal power grab as "pushing the boundaries of constitutionality" or "acting boldly to fight crime" or whatever, please go find another line of work where you won't get us all killed.
I’m at the invasion of Venezuela. I’m at the invasion of Illinois. I’m at the combination invasion of Venezuela and Illinois.
Illinois and Chicago have some of the nation’s strongest laws aimed at protecting immigrants by prohibiting state and local agencies from cooperating with ICE. But Valentina Galvis' detention at a Sonesta hotel shows the limits of the state’s efforts to block ICE detention.
They still don’t even know who the dead man is and everyone who was anywhere near him is gone, as is the crime scene. So, yes?
Chicago has the most lead pipes in the nation. We mapped them all. Here's what the data reveals about who's most at risk. grist.org/accountabili... #Maps #Chicago #Toxic #Health #Lead #Pipes #Policy #Politics #Illinois
Omg it works!!! I'm posting from BlackSky y'all! 🤠 @support.bsky.team blocked my DMs but @rudyfraser.com and BlackSky let me access them! Appreciate it so much. 🖤
Having read and enjoyed (most of) The Ghost Map, would love to learn more about the story being used as propaganda.
I’m guessing that the mayor has said that CPD won’t help. They’ve by and large stayed out of immigration stuff as far as I’m aware. Except for the big kerfuffle in June where they ran interference for ICE and the city got *pissed*. Who knows what CPD does if Nat’l guard does show, though.
Great Lakes conveniently has a Metra station for all your protesting needs
The op would focus on “downtown Chicago,” but a formal request still needed DefSec Pete Hegseth's OK, per the email. “These operations are similar to what occurred in Los Angeles earlier this summer. Same DHS team. ... Not many details on this right now. Mainly a lot of concerns and questions.”
The Chicago City Council doesn’t like their constituents very much.
I have POTS and I take public transit. I have to have water and electrolytes with me at all times. So they’re preventing me from attending a public meeting because I’m disabled. I’m getting to the point where I want to start a lawsuit to test their commitment to the bag policy.
For folks not in DC: - There are full-on police checkpoints most nights - Gangs of 30+ federal agents roam DC - National Guard folks w/ guns patrolling a Harris Teeter - Every day, multiple friends see ICE kidnapping ppl - Daycares are scared to have kids go on walks due to ICE
Has the city council updated its bag policy at meetings? Or are they still barring disabled people who take transit from attending?
Forgive me, I can no longer endure or stay alive. They are among the cruelest people history has ever known. I am exhausted. Just i want you to not forget my family donate to them Good buy 😩
There is ALWAYS a CPD van with k-9’s at the 79th St red line stop. Blocking the bus lane and making a confusing set of intersections even more confusing and dangerous. I always think of the improvements we could make to CTA (like functional elevators) if we weren’t paying for cops.
This is astonishing, a particularly vicious tactic to break unions and get them to kowtow to administrations, but also, such self-sabotage. How does any university recover from this being widely known?
Folks in suburban communities would do well to speak with people in urban areas about this. You probably have had a different life experience driving around than someone on Chicago's West Side, where it's just expected the cops will hunt you in your car, at random, all the time. It's pervasive.
I just know I’m going to regret running into something like this eventually. I’d have to find out what happens if you just refuse.
I am so sick of this crap. Newsom is yet another empty suit of a white man who is useful to the wealthy so the news won’t shut up about him. Time for a new party.
"With more than 100,000 ALPRs across the U.S. collecting tens of billions of plate scans per month, the net effect begins to resemble [an] AI Big Brother. The Illinois State Police ALPR network alone captured over 2.2 billion vehicles—200x the number of registered cars in the state"
Hundreds of thousands of people have been out in the streets literally for years at this point. Weekly, if not daily. It’s about damned time politicians started acting like we live in the authoritarian society that we live in.
Being a legislator is a life or death position. The lives of their constituents are literally on the line. You’re saying it’s acceptable to let Trump continue to murder people because these folks didn’t understand the job they signed up for - to protect their people.
I’m sorry, what? I hate it when I get to learn about the obscure evil laws still on the books.
You just don’t care about poor people.
No. There is no trade off between service and price. Tax people. Pay for services. Stop humiliating people. Like, have you not ever been humiliated because you didn’t have enough cash on hand for something? Can you imagine going through that for absolutely everything? Just stop it.
I don’t care what you think if you’ve never had to live as a poor person who was forced to buy a car you can’t afford because that’s the only way to have a job in this country. Or if you’ve never had to fill out paperwork to prove that you’re poor. Or been told that you aren’t poor enough.
People *who can afford to pay* will happily pay that provided they don’t see it as a second transportation tax when they already own a car that could get them there for cheaper than taking the whole family. People who can’t afford it will be forced to jump through humiliating hoops all the time.
This! I’m disabled likely due to an infection I had as a teenager. Which could have been prevented if we’d known better. Now we know and we’re still disabling people on purpose.
injecting it further than the whole “only the vulnerable need to worry about covid anymore” propaganda already has, anyway.
Just fund transit. This isn’t a trade off we even need to be discussing. Fund it with taxes on cars or billionaires or whatever. Fight to fund transit instead of scrabbling for the crumbs billionaires think we should have.
This thing where people like to make poor folks jump through hoops to do a thing they do w/o thinking about it is infuriating. ‘Poor people can still ride free! They just need to fill out a bunch of paperwork that nobody else does and provide a bunch of documentation that nobody else does.’
They love to sue the Green party to make sure they don’t have the money to compete. So yeah, I expect shenanigans.
If we want people out of car and into transit, which is a thing we MUST do if we want to continue living on this planet, then fares need to be free. Transit should be funded. Period. This is about the planet, not giving people free things. This should never have been a choice they had to make.
The picture is from Charlottesville, VA, and this robotics company that does autonomous vehicles has an office in the building. So you’re probably right. Looks like a promotional car.
Cameras. Roving surveillance that they don’t have to staff.
This is exactly what was said about Covid. ‘It’s only killing people w/ pre-existing conditions.’
Good lord, then stop trying to be calm. This is not a situation in which one *should* remain calm.
New— Nazis with giant swastika flags marched in downtown Indianapolis on Saturday with two police escorts. They shouted “white power” and said to the woman who took this video (reshared here with her permission) “fuck you, n***** bitch.” Police did not intervene. I cannot find local news coverage.
I lost one of my cats in a hotel room one time. I hadn’t left the room, so obviously neither had she. Took me forever to find her. She’d crawled into the box spring on the bed through a tear in the fabric. Getting her out was a nightmare - had to take the bed half apart.
Dude, my point is that you’re being racist and blaming Palestinians for Trump.
It’s the other way around. Our leaders don’t want to face the fact that we’re living under an authoritarian, so they call it all an act. That way they don’t have to call it what it is.
That entirely ignores the exceptional voter suppression we have in this country. Not every non-voter did so out of apathy. A fuck ton of people don’t vote because we make it as hard as possible, especially for Black people in the south. That’s if we haven’t taken their right to vote away already.
That’s what permission is.
The entire left? All of us?
Could you please be specific about who didn’t vote or voted for Stein? If not Dems or Libs, then who?
Of course it’s their job. Why do people think that the only job congress has is to show up 9 to 5 Monday through Thursday and vote on bills? It’s a 24/7/365 job. People’s lives literally hinge on whether or not their congress critter is paying attention and advocating for them.
Getting "greedy landlords" printed in the NY Post is surreal. Never thought I'd be in the tabloids.
Why do you think they don’t have the approval from the states? I’m pretty sure they do.
while smiling! Gavin Newsom literally dressed up in his best Bad Boy™️ attire, invited the press, and smiled as he destroyed everything these constituents had in the world. Gavin Newsom is not a bad candidate; Gavin Newsom is truly, at his core, a bad and despicable human being.
Seances were so much cooler. So much theatrical fun.
My queer and queer adjacent friends are all winding up here or in Detroit. Which works for me except that I have to go through Indiana to get to Michigan. Michigan Lake car ferry when?
I don't know why this lad is building a subterranean city for cats, but I'm all for it.
Ok, but let’s not forget that Pritzker is both a Zionist and a billionaire. He’s just quieter and smarter than Newsom.
I fought wildfires as part of a fed BLM crew for several seasons. No masks, no protection other than a shitty bandana over our faces. After every rotation we were coughing up black shit and it was considered just normal. It is incredible how little care or funding wildland firefighters get.
It’s a fascist police state. Have the guts to name it.
Cis person here loudly saying that I, too, wish ill on JK Rowling. I no longer tell people to join @bsky.app - because their moderation ‘rules’ are garbage. They suspend anyone who says something that catches the eye of and annoys the Zionist transphobes who fund and run this nonsense.
Fuck that.
Asshole.
No, you don’t. You don’t understand what support looks like. It looks like listening to trans people who say don’t fucking vote for people who don’t support trans people. It’s really simple if you aren’t willing to compromise your values when you vote.
Chicago does not have a crime problem. Chicago has never had a crime problem. Chicago has a racist distribution of resources problem. Chicago has a food deserts problem. Chicago has a racist allocation of revenues problem. Chicago has an overcriminalization problem.
People who feel comfortable doing so, should flip these fuckers off every time they see one of these absurd vehicles of war rolling through their cities. The people driving them are cowards.
This is not a massive decision or any kind of change. Costco has never carried mifepristone in its pharmacies. An anti-abortion group is taking credit for something that didn't happen, possibly to generate disingenuous left-wing ire against one of the few corporations that hasn't gone MAGA.
I’d appreciate if you all used this form to ask for the things we asked for in the open letter regarding Palestinians on here
First semester freshman year I took an honors course on the History of the Sun King. I always talk about how we were taught that even all the research in the world won’t necessarily tell you what happened in the past. Just an approximation of it.
My latest investigation! A story about some wild things that happened at a UIC forensics lab and how inadequate crime lab oversight is in our state. In the course of reporting I: -filed 45+ FOIA requests -did 100+ interviews -reviewed 8000+ pages of records www.injusticewatch.org/project/fore...
Beshear is tailor made for Kentucky, lol. Trying to explain how he manages to get most of the state to listen to him is … complicated.
If y’all could stop planning your rallies in unhoused spaces while we’re under military occupation that would be super fucking cool
My prediction is that LA police will keep staff and volunteers from interfering w/ whatever the feds want to do. The extra eyes might keep ICE from pulling guns on kids, but it won’t stop kidnappings.
I know 99% of the people responding to the posts about Dexter Reed are deeply unserious people but for the 1% who may be sincere: - plain clothes officers surrounding a car with guns drawn unnecessarily escalated this situation. - 1 shot does not warrant officers firing 96.
Conservatives think that all lgbt+ material is designed for sexual gratification. They think our literal existence is sexual, always. The goal the whole time was to ban queer people. It never had anything to do with porn. You’ve been had.
My preferred way to remember Sinead is this. Sinead lived her truth in a way that was so authentic and uncompromising. The world needs more like people like her.
Chicagoland transit is already difficult to navigate as a disabled person much of the time. This will be catastrophic. Pritzker was all excited about the ‘balanced budget.’ But you cannot have a balanced budget if transit fails. You just have a failed budget.
If you're in the Chicago area and you think you might know a federal agent with the initials BK and a fondness for flowery prose in the group chat, please send us a message 📨
The Illinois Attorney General has to do something about this ASAP. This has got to be against the TRUST Act. Some reporters really need to bring this up with JB Pritzker, too, at his next press conference.
Learn to punch up and let go. We do NOT have time for this shit.
It’s always been tremendously important but I’d argue that, in the era of ChatGPT, the value of being able to actually write well will be even greater. Clarity of thought and clarity of argument are different but related, and often the best physicists are also among the best explainers of physics.