I forgot to mention it last week, but we passed Minnesota's annual virtue signaling spectacle again. We call it "Give To The Max" day. I forgot about it entirely until I saw it on the evening news last week. I just hastily copied my donation chart from last year and used the same pattern of giving this year.

I encourage donating time if you can (and money if you can't) to the charities that matter most to you. I expect the needs to increase again, since that trend isn't changing. Locally, there was increased need last year and again this year.

I just got back from my first physical therapy session at the hospital. The therapist was brilliant, showing me the suspected cause of my left leg troubles in a way that was very easy to understand. There's a nerve that wraps around a vein in the back of the leg near the surface. It's at the same spot where I have my troubles.

They gave me some exercises to "floss" that nerve and improve lubrication in that area. I'm supposed to see them for therapy sessions for a few weeks on Thursday afternoons. I easily walked (very slight limp) the 2-3 blocks from my house to the bus stop and back, so this schedule is reasonable.

After Saturday, I start my new work week. My new schedule is Sun-Thu 10am-7pm Eastern. I'll already have to start using sick time on Thursdays in my new schedule, so I can go to physical therapy sessions. Which is fine. I've probably maxed out my accrued time anyway.

Continuing the annual tradition of virtue signaling spectacle, today is Minnesota's famous Give To The Max day for charitable fundraising statewide.

My own money is coming in slower than I'd like, but at least I can increase my donations this year compared to last year. Over the course of decades, I have generally grouped my donations into one of 3 broad categories: help people now (immediate services), help people in the future (education, sociopolitical change), and help the non-humans in the broader web of our environment. This year, however, I'm continuing my more localized version instead. I'm sending $1,000 to these charities, in either $50 or $100 donations:

See the table of groups I'm supporting in 2023...

Help within my small portion of the warzone
Youth Farm MN	I've mentioned them before
Good in the Hood	I've mentioned them before too
Pillsbury United Communities	They fund local groups, including My North News
Jordan Area Community Council	my local neighborhood of north Minneapolis
Help the nearby people and their environment
Autism Society of MN	help autistics in MN
OutFront MN	help queer folk in MN
Quatrefoil Library	preserve queer history in a library
Migizi	help native people in MN
Minnesota Renewable Energy Society	encourage MN to migrate to renewable energy
Metro Blooms	encourage MN to migrate from grass yards to native prairie
MN350	encourage MN to reduce CO2 to 350ppm
Animal Humane Society	help domesticated animals when their former owners cannot
Repowered	provides training, employment, and tech to local people, formerly known as Tech Dump
Sources of truth in a culture of lies and misdirections
Unicorn Riot	They show on-the-ground interviews with locals
Minnesota Public Radio	local non-commercialized news
My North News.org	Jordan neighborhood and Minneapolis city news
Insight News.com	Jordan neighborhood and Minneapolis city news
Minnesota Post	MN news
Washington Post	USA and world news

I'll have to resubscribe to those non-hyperlinked news organizations mentioned above. There are also other donation sites that I've used in the past, such as this one to help the local homeless acquire land of their own for safe encampments.  Other services I approve, but I don't have the money to throw at all of them this year:

Clare Housing, Rainbow Health, Urban Roots, YouthLink, Minnesota Zoo, Science Museum of Minnesota, archive.org, wikipedia, Snopes, LibreOffice, VLC, Linux Mint

Please consider getting involved (donating time, money, or other resources) to help in your area of the world.

Not many people knew of it, but anything you could buy at Amazon.com could also be bought at Smile.Amazon.com, with a portion of the sale money being donated to the charity you selected. At work, I always tried to direct products to that url when people asked me for tech items. Well, I just saw the email from Amazon that they are shutting down this charity service. Why it was a separate service instead of baked-in to the main corporate webpage, I don't know.

Media this morning report that people are surprised, like me.

The news has been met with a mix of disbelief, anger, and confusion from charities and consumers. For example, the SquirrelWoord Enquine Sanctuary tweeted a copy of the announcement along with the comment "What???? Seriously @amazon." One reply points out that AmazonSmile was a way to support small charities who are "innovative and creative," while another says they made purchases through Amazon because of the donation and that will not be the case in the future. https://www.pcmag.com/news/amazon-is-closing-down-amazonsmile-on-feb-20

The slow collapse continues, I guess. Exponential-growth capitalism must be fed at all costs. (Or such is the inevitability, we're sternly told. ("The beginning is near."))

The Nature Conservancy had a booth at Twin Cities Pride last weekend. It's a natural convergence of values, since diversity is essential in healthy ecosystems. I stopped working there earlier this month, but I helped at the booth as a volunteer.  I took the Saturday morning shift, since there would be fewer people.  Sadly, though, very few visitors wore masks like I did for this event.  I heard afterward that it was a success.  We signed up almost a 1/4-thousand people to receive legislative alerts, so we can get some community help to convince legislators when it's time to prioritize a bill under consideration to protect water, land, and biodiversity in Minnesota.

Conveniently, ducks decided to rest directly behind our booth.  Occasionally, we also had geese and pigeons join them.  Strangely, we were located between two religious organizations.  One I'd never heard of, the Disciples of Christ ("a movement for wholeness in a fragmented world"), but the other I've known about for decades, Dignity ("Celebrating the wholeness and holiness of LGBTQI Catholics"). 



There was no violence at Pride itself, but there was a mass shooting nearby at night. No mention in reports I've seen of a machine gun.

Animal Humane Society, another former employer of mine, received a record $6 million donation as an estate bequest.  They are using it to build a new facility in St. Paul.  The old one in that city definitely needs replacement.  I think it was the oldest and smallest of all of them here in the Twin Cities.  It's also where I encountered Hope.  She is now my 12-year-old cat, after I first fostered her until she was large enough for spay surgery.

I don't get rich working for non-profits, especially at part-time jobs.  I do, however, feel pretty good about half my life spent at non-profits and a government agency.  I was pleased with the efforts pursued at each place, and I'm glad to exchange a portion of my life to advance their work in this world.

The Minnesota state senate has introduced a law to protect trans kids needing asylum to escape prosecution for seeking gender-affirming medical care. Our bill SF4525 would protect them and their family from warrants and extradition. It has not yet passed. It is merely proposed at this time.  I don't know how this legislation works in relation to Article 4 of the U.S. Constitution.

If you're a trans kid, or if you're a parent of one, please consider moving now to a safe state. Leave Texas.
If you're a gay kid, or if you're a parent of one, please consider moving now to a safe state. Leave Florida.
I know from Twitter and news that many of you are doing it, but I'm encouraging more to escape before crisis arrives.

I expect conditions to get worse before they get better. Conservative voters and governments are banning books, threatening journalists, restricting voting, threatening teachers, threatening businesses, and putting bounties on women. I've been warning about the latent fascism for a long time. It is no longer latent. If you are young or vulnerable, please get out now.

Adults, here's a message for you. If you live in one of these conservative states, consider staying, organizing, and voting to change your state government to protect all of the vulnerable people there. It's a hard thing, I know. Or make plans to leave. Just make a deliberate choice. Don't sleepwalk through these times. Everyone, please do the following:

1. Find local organizations that shelter and protect vulnerable youth and families.
2. Assume they will see an increase of people seeking help. Send them resources.
3. Use your social media to broadcast those resources.

Here are the results of my Twin Cities search:

• The Trevor Project, crisis line available anywhere for life-saving counseling
• Face2Face, can provide help with basic needs, showering, even housing (donate)
• The Bridge For Youth, can provide support for youth in crisis or homeless (donate)
• YouthLink, a single location in Minneapolis where you can get help for many concerns (donate)
• Avenues For Youth, where you can find a bed to sleep (donate)

There are many more local resources. Check here, here, and here. I've sent those 5 organizations what money I can afford right now (sorry, wish it was a lot more) to help ensure they can continue to receive the refugees needing help. These are tough times, and I don't see it getting easier in the near future.

A decade ago at the Occupy camp, it was illegal to set up a tent anywhere for any reason, even in your own backyard.  I can't find evidence that the law was ever changed.  Since then, tents have been the only option available for too many people, and it's been true for too many years.  The city keeps trying to simply erase them, and that tactic keeps failing because the community wants an actual solution instead of a whitewashing.

I wrote about my visit to the North Loop encampment earlier this week.  Sadly, arson destroyed a portion of the camp about 2.5 days later.  It appears that gasoline(?) was used on a lot of stuff to burn it quickly.

In a Twitter thread about the encampments, the Minneapolis Ward 2 representative notes that the city is updating its official documents on the subject.  It's not yet clear to me if something has already changed, or if a change currently is being discussed.

People with the Near North encampment issued a call for help.

If you're a Minneapolis city resident, please consider following their advice.  They provide a lot of details at that webpage that you can use. 

I called Mayor Jacob Fry and Senior Policy Advisor Peter Ebnet and left voice messages for both.  I also individually emailed every address mentioned on that webpage.  Here is the script that I wrote for myself:


I threw some additional money their way earlier this weekend, but now I have to figure out whether there's a way for me to join them early tomorrow morning and still get to work, without my car getting towed by police as thanks for my effort.  I'm not thinking of creative solutions yet.  :(

Edit: 2022 January 11 Tuesday 16:50
The city of Minneapolis didn't show up to evict today.  Yay!  Instead, they switched the eviction/demolition to a secret time/date for "the week of" this week.  Even the adjoining Neighborhood Association for that area supports the encampment, so why is the mayor so adamant in demolishing it?

Several years ago, I learned about the importance of virtue signaling in promoting cultural change. I think of it as the valuable counterpoint to dog whistling, which subtly promotes something that needs to remain hidden. If you ride your bicycle to a restaurant, don't take off your helmet until after you've walked past other diners to reach your own seat. Put the idea into people's heads that the desired behavior is possible, even if it's far back in the recesses of their subconscious peripheral awareness. At least it's there, and it's a practice that is returning (free archive copy).

So, in planning for the upcoming Give To The Max day in Minnesota which brings virtue signaling to the statewide level, I'm arranging my thoughts now for groups that I'll support.  ( Read more... )
Does anyone know if there's an equivalent to The New Yorker for life here in Minnesota?  Beyond the fictional Prairie Home Companion, I mean.

I was getting nothing accomplished for work, so I took the day off instead.  There are 3,000 military troops in our streets, and I think this insane detail is being missed by national media.  Scrolling through the photos and videos in the Twitter feed on this topic, it's obvious that people are as ruffled as I am.

• If you're looking for ways to stay aware, I recommend the Unicorn Riot live feed.  When they broadcast, you see and hear unvarnished (but also unvetted) news.
• If you're looking for ways to help the community here, this list (archive copy) is a great resource.  I had already donated to several of them, earlier this winter.  I'm glad that they're actively involved in this crisis too.

I drove out to the site of the memorial for Daunte Wright (63rd Ave N & Kathrene Dr). It is a nice tribute. It's natural to look at it and wonder, "Why doesn't anything change?" There were still reporters out there. One pair for video and one pair for print media. I spoke to them and to a black man who was there from elsewhere in the USA to represent a Christian missionary effort. We've reached that point where megachurches aren't sending their representatives to war-torn 3rd-world countries. They send them across the USA now.

Then I drove out to the site of the protests, at the Brooklyn Center police department (67th Ave N & N Humboldt Ave). In the middle of the day, it was mostly just reporters who were there. I gawked at the absurd amount of military who were there guarding a building in the USA. It's just ridiculous. Why can't we start over and imagine something new? Why spend so much effort to preserve something that's clearly broken?

I drove home and doomscrolled through social media. The call went out for another protest there at night. I drove back for the 7pm rally. There was also a notice that curfew would begin again at 8pm, so I planned to not be there long. (After the fact, I learned that Brooklyn Center curfew did not begin until 10pm on April 14th.)

There was a good sized crowd, about 500 people maybe? It was different, though. It wasn't like the Occupy style of events that we've seen for Jamar Clark in my neighborhood and George Floyd in south Minneapolis. This had a vibe more like a flash mob with several different protests happening at the same time. Uncoordinated is fine and expected, but the clash of messaging was... jarring.  So was seeing the military out there walking the roof of the police building and poking their heads out from the top hatch of armored vehicles.



It was obvious who the main "hosts" were, and they tried to keep the message on Daunte Wright and the injustice of his death. They had several speakers that I agreed with wholeheartedly. There were also distractions, though. Like the intense racism (anti-white in this case) and equally intense sexism (male dominance), both of which some of our black female leaders were vocal about challenging. We don't change a system by just picking new despots to be in charge of the unjust machinery of authority. The sexism was familiar and tired, exactly the same as I have heard from old white men. I was just disappointed to hear it from any of the younger black male leaders that I was hoping would help us change everything.

I left soon after the sexism was challenged. I sat down in my car at 7:58pm, and I was out of Brooklyn Center around the time that I had expected the curfew would begin.

Our Minnesota governor Tim Walz (a Democrat) announced that apparently there is, in fact, an appropriate amount of chemical weapon that can be used against citizens. I'm just appalled at what the USA has become. We told you from the Occupy camps that this militarization needed to end. Clearly, it didn't.

I woke up this morning, walked downstairs, passed my computer desk, and I noticed the full glass of water sitting there that I was intending to take to bedside with me last night.  That was before the gunshots.

( Some pictures and text... )

It's not just me being pessimistic, either.  A local student wrote an opinion piece in the local newspaper that made a big splash.

https://www.startribune.com/i-live-in-a-cemetery-called-north-minneapolis/600029485/

Thankfully, some people have enough money to spare to help send him to college to further that writing skill.