apple juice

It was a beautiful day for a protest. We took public transit (the new B-Line BRT Bus) over to one of the rally points, and then marched from there to the capitol. It took over 45 minutes before we even started walking in earnest towards the capitol. When we arrived, the entire green space in front of the building was rapidly filling in, and by the time the speakers had started it was completely filled in. I greatly enjoyed reading all the clever (“For the Epsteinth Time…”), and not so clever signs that were brought to the rally.

I can’t find any estimates of the crowd size other than the organizers saying it was 200,000 people, and MPR having reported that at least 80,000 were expected. It was quite a bit larger than the previous rallies we had attended.

Being amongst 100,000 of your neighbors cheering and singing and chanting is exciting enough but the lineup of speakers and performers was extra special today, including some big names like Bruce Springsteen, Maggie Rogers, Joan Baez, Tom Morello, Bernie Sanders and Jane Fonda. I’m not sure I’ll ever see anything quite like it again.

There is a popular theory that for a mass resistance movement to affect the government it needs to mobilize 3.5% of the population. In the last presidential election in Minnesota there were about 3.2 million votes cast. If a conservative estimate of the crowd size today was 100,000 people, we’re getting pretty close to that 3.5% number.

3.5% of Minnesota’s 18+ population is 157,500. We’ve got a ways to go until the next election, but everyone needs to get out to vote!

You should be reading Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American¹ every day. Especially if you need help sorting through the daily onslaught of insanity from this administration.

From March 22, 2026:

Yesterday Julie K. Brown of The Epstein Files, whose work digging into the cover-up of the Epstein story for the Miami Herald has been instrumental in bringing the scandal to light, and her colleague Claire Healy reported that after sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in his prison cell on August 10, 2019, a corrections officer called the FBI’s Threat Operations Center saying the officer “found it suspicious that an after-action team charged with investigation would be shredding huge amounts of paperwork” while FBI agents were in the building.

And

In a conversation with Anne McElvoy of Politico on Thursday, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres noted that attacks on civilian energy infrastructure are war crimes.

And

On Meet the Press today, Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) said: “We’re gonna give Iran $14 billion to fund this war with the United States? We’re gonna give Russia billions of dollars to fund their war with Ukraine? We’re literally putting money into the pockets of the very nations that we are fighting right now. We’ve never seen this level of incompetence in war-making in this country’s history.”

Many americans believe that vaccines are unsafe, but will jab themselves full of performance enhancers. They think seed oils cause chronic disease, but beef tallow is healthy. They’ll say you can’t trust federally insured banks, but you can trust the millionaires who want you to invest in their volatile vaporware crypto tokens. They think food additives are toxic but support an administration removing all restrictions on pumping pollutants into the air and water. They’ll insist that you can’t trust scientists, because they’re part of the conspiracy. The podcaster selling you his special creatine gummies, though? He seems trustworthy.

Link: The Cynical, Gullible American Man – The Atlantic

via: kottke.org

Just doing my research…

Great title, scary article. Is this happening out there in the real world?

How to survive the broligarchy

Uff dah, as we say up here.

I’ve resisted posting anything about the election because I’m not sure I have organized my thoughts in any particular way that makes sense. I read and liked this piece though, and I hope to see more thinking, writing, planning, and action like this proposal from Matthew Yglesias.

I don’t know that I agree with all of it, but I want to amplify the point: The democrats need to rebuild the platform and also learn how to talk about it again.

A Common Sense Democrat manifesto – by Matthew Yglesias:

Nine principles for Common Sense Democrats

My goal here is to write these principles down at an adequate level of abstraction such that they don’t become a policy laundry list. They’re also not supposed to be a straitjacket. Different people have different views and different priorities, and principles need to be loose enough to accommodate some differences.

Anyway, it’s worth a read.

Letters from an American, January 19, 2024

Great post here. I recommend subscribing to this newsletter if you haven’t already.

I wonder if we’ll ever get a new political party out of all the current mess.

Fetterman is an interesting case:

Fetterman, Breaking With the Left on Israel, Rejects ‘Progressive’ Label

“Can’t it be possible that it’s really appropriate to stand for both?”

That quote is out out of context – but the sentiment is there… all of this stuff is more complex than most of our public discourse has time for.