the mellow tigger's musings

I don't know if Minnesota is entering your news feed stories recently, but news and social here are filled with incidents involving either ICE or the financial thefts from charities. There are claims and counter-claims from different government entities, there are videos of incidents, and there are claims of government lies and AI-manufactured content. It's hard to know what to believe as fact. Reddit threads for Minneapolis and the Twin Cities have become a home for ICE reports instead of traditional community topics. A few days ago, there was this ICE raid about 2 blocks from my house. I can offer only my good thoughts to the thousands of people who showed up at a recent protest.

I don't have the mental stamina to sort through it all.

I will say, though, that a week or two ago, during my Christmas walk (too much walking) through the snow, I finally visited the offices of the Nonviolent Peaceforce, where I donated during GiveToTheMax day. I chatted with a nice young man there at their front desk. A significant part of their funding was federal money that ended with the defunding of USAID fiasco (a terrible thing, even according to Harvard). Their office in Minneapolis will shut down. I'm not sure how much longer they'll still keep their spot a few blocks northwest of me, but they may be keeping an office in California as their only USA location.

The cruelty is the point. The banned word list from this Republican-controlled government is meant to erase compassion, community, and true justice from our thoughts, our actions, and especially our standards for holding leaders accountable.

Normally, my team working on 40-50 tickets per hour is a respectable pace. About 2.5 years ago, during the semester start of the worst semester of workload at my job, we crossed 100 tickets per hour a few times. That experience was awful.

Today, I saw 85 tickets per hour once, and 70+ tickets per hour at 2 other times. That, plus we had about 1/3 of our full-time staff out for vacation or sick leave, so the workload was higher for those of us who remained. It was a very busy day.

I had other topics planned for Moody Monday discussion, but I don't have the mental bandwidth for it now. If I had any booze in the house, I'd be drinking it. I may still dress warm and walk to the store to buy some. Despite marijuana being legal in Minnesota for 3 years already, there's still no widespread deployment yet. Too bad, since if I had any edibles in the house, I'd be eating that too. This article talks about the slow rollout here, and it even mentions firefighters as another group of workers needing edibles to make their brains stop rehearsing the stressors of the day.

As always for Moody Monday, there are so many topics but so little time.

1) I'm glad I brought the two historians to your attention a few days ago. Their most recent video is a real gem, with several moments of memorable quotes.

2) The money crisis, with so very many Americans ("richest country on the planet") unable to afford food, is a lot even to try to comprehend.

3) The one single issue I want to explore more thoroughly, though, is a problem demonstrating itself here in Minnesota. I offer anti-capitalism rants occasionally, and here's another one. As many people have said before, "private equity ruins everything it touches".

Minnesota Rusco is the company that I used, once in 2019 and again in 2024, to install new windows in my century-old home. This company was in operation since 1955 (famous locally for this musical jingle in their television advertisements), but they closed suddenly in 2025 a few days ago. Even people in the company didn't know it was going to happen. This YouTube video, from roofers here in the Twin Cities, describes the situation from a local industry perspective. As this news page from University of Minnesota explains, they were bought out from the former owners in 2022, sold to Renovo Home Partners in Dallas TX... which itself became owned in 2024 by BlackRock TCP Capital Corp of New York.

Yes, that BlackRock. It sure seems like all of those companies with the "BlackRock" name are in a financially incestuous relationship with each other, everything some subsidiary of the original, with this story getting into tedious details of the financial dealings of the company. BlackRock is also now a majority owner of a power company here in Minnesota. Our legislature approved that sale, as if nothing could go wrong with that arrangement. Ugh.

You already know how opposed I am to the concept of making wealth the point of living. With everything else going sour in the USA, we still idly watch as capitalists extend control into every part of daily life, from home repairs to power infrastructure. I really need to buy solar panels. Between Trump tariffs driving up costs of Minnesota electricity to whatever capitalists are about to do to force additional scarcity (which drives up value for investors), I just need my own independent power source. I feel like we can't have a nice society, because we bow to the gods of wealth.