my favorite Minnesota curmudgeon

I've mentioned before that I like some of the thoughts that come from a University of Minnesota professor named P. Z. Myers.

This is a great example.

In short, they support our right to engage in lawful civic expression, but you better not participate in this one unless you’ve consulted your dean and filled out all the paperwork and you have a good excuse! Too bad. I’ve emailed all my students and told them to join in the protest. I haven’t consulted my dean or filled out any paperwork, but my excuse is that the entire country has been seized by an incompetent fascist cabal, and a brief work stoppage is the least we can do. We ought to have a nationwide general strike for a period of time sufficient to let the ruling junta know that we mean business. I wish my university had the conviction and the moral courage to speak out, rather than sending out long weasely excuses for doing nothing. - https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2026/01/22/the-least-we-can-do-do-better-university-of-minnesota/

I'm not looking forward to the bitter cold for the march and protest. I'm typing this post on my phone, awake at 3am after a bad dream woke me up, lying in a warm bed with electric blanket at maximum setting, but it's currently -29C/-20F outside, ignoring any windchill factor.

Edit: 5:30am. Woken again by another bad dream. Twice in one night. It is not a restful night.

Edit: 10am. I woke up a few minutes before 9am, so I finally got a good block of sleep accomplished. I woke up to the sound of a helicopter. There's another as I type this, nearly 10am. I keep checking FlightRadar24.com, where I usually do, but it's not identifying these sounds. All I see is higher altitude plane flights. The federal government is afoot. Meanwhile, I'm assembling my clothing for this afternoon. It took a while to find my balaclava. I wish I had some footwarmers and handwarmers. I know that good people intend to hand some out today, but I doubt they'll have enough for everyone.

the scale of the Minneapolis protest

We live in historic times.

I'm back home. I skipped the indoor part of the event that was scheduled. I got home in time to watch the 5pm local news (KSTP 5), 5:30pm national news (ABC World News Tonight), and 6pm PBS. None of them impress upon their viewers the actual scale of what just happened.

Minneapolis is geographically small. When it expanded and encountered other cities, it didn't annex them but just stopped expanding. This page explains some of that history. We have not quite 500,000 residents in an area of only 153 square kilometers (59 square miles) in total area, with 6% of that area being water. That's significantly smaller than someplace like Austin TX, where I lived before moving to the Twin Cities about 30 years ago. The size of home lots is smaller than most places in the suburbs, so we have a lot of people in less space.

I showed up at 2pm in the face-freezing cold weather. I was mostly prepared for it after decades of accumulating appropriate layers of gear, but I still needed chemical handwarmers, which kind people were handing out freely. I hung around for a full hour before asking someone near me about 3:05pm, "Do you know when the march is supposed to be?" They said, "Oh, it started at 2pm. There's just that many people here." What a wonderful reason to be feel frustrated. I waited a while longer before realizing that the arthritis in my back wouldn't allow much more of this inactivity. For inexplicable reasons, standing still is worse on my back than moving. I finally moved to join what appeared, maybe, to be an end of the line, and I started walking. And kept walking, slowly, for more than an hour across not-so-many blocks of downtown to the destination on the west side. Other arthritic parts were complaining by then, and my surgical mask had long since given up any semblance of function in the bitter cold (I pushed it aside because it kept freezing, leading to fogged-up eye glasses), so I headed back to the bus for the ride back home. Even at my home neighborhood, people would see me carrying an "ICE OUT" poster and honked their support at me as I walked home.

The general strike was approved even at the state-level AFL-CIO. I made sure to thank my bus drivers both going downtown and coming back home, so they knew I appreciated their enabling me to protest, which is a great form of solidarity. They're absolutely not scabs for working during an approved general strike.

CNN published the headline "Hundreds brave freezing temperatures at downtown Minneapolis rally and march". So now we know that CNN airs propaganda for the administration. The organizers claim 50,000 people attended. I don't know for sure. It easily could have been that many. Nobody could capture a single image, because our path on the march wound between different skyscrapers. You can get a sense of the scale in these photos, and this video. I was there for over 2 hours and never saw the whole of it.

My own recording in video and photograph is lame in comparison to those links. Even early at the event, my fingers stopped working well whenever I took them out of the gloves, so I just couldn't fumble with my phone easily to record the many wonderful things I saw. I really like the loon Star Wars poster and the magnificent loon flag. The various Liam (the bunny child) posters were heartbreaking, of course. I'll leave this link to a folder with what small things I did manage to capture. I'm sorry, but it was just too cold for me to operate my smartphone skillfully.

My faith in humanity is restored for at least the next 24 hours. Until the next inhumane Republican thing happens, whatever it is.

We live in historic times.