Greensboro, represent! (My hometown, already on it. Raleigh, where you at?)

https://goodtroubleliveson.org/

«“Masked ICE agents just violently arrested a US citizen —and elected official — for simply asking to see a judicial warrant,” Levine wrote in his X post. “This is authoritarianism. Comptroller Lander must be released immediately.”»

https://www.amny.com/news/brad-lander-arrested-ice-court-hearing-06172025/

He was released. Eventually.

Even if all those agents didn’t know who some man (with a NYPD escort detail) was, arresting somebody simply for asking for a judicial warrant (which they evidently didn’t have) is way beyond the pale.

https://www.pennlive.com/news/2025/06/central-pa-sheriff-criticized-over-facebook-meme-showing-blood-covered-truck-protester-edition.html

Honestly, who thinks this sort of thing is ok or even funny?

“Let’s kill people, oh, just kidding, ha ha.”

Trump’s major accomplishment. What a weenie.

«“We had the parade the other day. They said 100 percent chance of rain. It didn’t rain,” Trump told Mark Carney as the Canadian prime minister smiled politely.»

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-reamed-out-hegseth-for-flop-birthday-parade-author/

«Then, on Sunday night, Trump made a post on his Truth Social account that he said amounted to an order for ICE officials “to do all in their power to achieve the very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History,” which he said would require them to “expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities.”»

https://wapo.st/43PPwus (gift)

I was at the No Kings protest Saturday and somebody driving past called us “clowns”.

I think they may have been clown-blind.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/06/15/robert-kennedy-vaccines-public-health/

«So if it’s a choice whether to trust my health to experts who might recommend a somewhat suboptimal vaccination schedule to score political points[*], or to experts selected by a guy who has casually suggested that the polio vaccine has killed more people than polio, well, that’s not a hard decision. And it shouldn’t have been hard for Republicans to spare us that decision, either. Instead they made the same mistake as that ACIP committee, only more so [emphasis mine]: They let politics get in the way of the job they’d been given by the American public.»

\*Not sure I’d use the phrase “political points” here; smacks of false balance. And there’s a lot that goes into deciding an entire society’s vaccine schedule. I wonder if ethicists were present at that meeting, and, if not, what they would say. Anyway, there were other factors than saving lives that went into that decision, and it did not come out popular or easily explainable.

And after all that: anti-vaxxers are still scared of needles.

Not much of a report, but: my poster attempt was a miserable failure, so I swallowed my disappointment and shame and went without a poster. North Raleigh. I had my doubts about the venue but it turned out to be pretty good, because a LOT of traffic got to see us, and and there was a LOT of support.

And there were A LOT of people protesting. And that’s with protests also in Morrisville, Cary, Knightdale, Durham, Chapel Hill, …. (Looks like the nokings.org site is no longer showing locations, so I can’t look up sites any more.)

Somebody gave me a little US flag, and somebody else gave me a little “No Kings” sign on 8.5×11″ paper, and somebody else gave me a little rainbow US flag sticker which I put on my black T, and suddenly, I had stuff to wave.

The whole thing was a lot of fun. I recommend it, if anybody wants to go but has trepidations.

(And I’m glad my poster didn’t work out. Humor is more the order of the day and my idea was too serious.)

The Middle Ages formerly known as the Dark Ages:

«At the Council of Chalcedon, held in Byzantium in 451, there was an attempt to force monks to live in monasteries and quit wandering, but this had little long-lasting effect.9 For one thing it was practically very difficult to police individual piety. And for another, global cultural networks in the early Middle Ages were already wide and strong enough [emphasis mine] to mean that men and women were living monastic lives far beyond the discipline of Constantinople: by the fifth century Christian hermits could already be found as far afield as Ireland and Persia. Wherever there was Christianity, there were monks and hermits, and for a long time there seemed to be very little way to impose any sort of order or discipline on their spontaneous, vigorous, and localized subcultures.»

Powers and Thrones (Dan Jones) https://bookshop.org/ebooks/quotes/2b5fd5b7-0a08-4a45-9054-9bec407de262