This is just so sad.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was in Chicago this morning for a Christmas event at Navy Pier. The Elgin Area Rapid Response team meanwhile reported this morning that immigration agents are active in the suburb of Elgin.

This really is grotesque: they went through years-long citizenship processes and are now being denied simply because if the country they are from. It’s formalized bigotry.

It might be easy to find things like this merely petty or superficial, but that would be a mistake. Demeaning, erasing or eliminating celebrations or acknowledgments of Black America is straight from Redemption playbook, and is intended to reinforce the racial hierarchy and signal its reinstatement.

What does it smell like? Wrong answers only. (thoughts in alt text, link in reply)📖🐋

MONTH OF DICK READERS: Here is the chapter allotment from the Month of Dick 2024, with a page count taken from a recent edition. I'm leaning towards keeping it, but I wanted to check with you all if this seems like a doomed march towards an immense downfall docs.google.com/spreadsheets... 📖🐋

Omg I am such a dingbat, I went to look up news articles about foxes, to see if there were any funny examples of foxes doing things in urban environments, so I googled "Fox News", and obviously it gave me fox news, and I was like "What the hell!" then realized that no, this one's on me.

🏹 Wrapped up The Age of Innocence--the undercurrents of that dinner party, wow! Thanks to @sarahabein.bsky.social for organizing this one for a great bsbookclub read. I have enjoyed being exasperated with Newland with you all :)

Happy consumerism bonanza day! Throw tomatoes at target/Walmart/Amazon! Get some freaky little presents from artists! Big corps make the wealthy wealthier & artists are trying to buy wet food for their cats. Artists, drop your shops! For a start, check out SquidFacts.net More of my faves below

This. Whenever local government reviews the library budget and asks, "Why should we give you money?" We want the library to be able to say, "Because we provide a valuable service used by many people!" Libraries are like muscles, using them more makes them stronger. 💪

New #poetry from Mary Grace Mangano: "Blood Work".

Periodic reminder: the vaccine efficacy of the pertussis vaccine drops below 50% at 4.5 years. You should be getting a Tdap booster every 5 years, not every 10. It is especially vital if you have contact with pregnant people or infants too young to be vaccinated.

The poem is sitting opposite you, watching while you read it through... roguestrands.blogspot.com/2025/11/the-...

The problem with ICE is not that it's targeting people who aren't criminals. The problem with ICE is that it's an unaccountable secret deportation police. It cannot be reformed under a better president. It can be made less terrible, but the instrument of repression remains for the next tyrant.

New #poetry from Edith Krone: "at work, the new guy asks".

🏹 Ch 30, 31: "not that he disliked the sound of his own voice", lolol, yes Newland, we all knew that about you. The reference to the gold of her wedding ring was interesting too; May's usually been associated with silver and blue, and gold/yellow more with Ellen, Beaufort, wordliness, the golden...

Today, after months of requests, I toured the Broadview ICE Processing Facility. I want to share what I saw. The facility has no food vendor, no medical care, and detainees have to use toilets in the middle of shared cells. These are in no way suitable conditions to be holding anyone — period.

i’m not crying you’re crying xkcd: Fifteen Years

“Once, after the group bought out a tamale vendor’s cart, that man found them days later to say immigration agents were spotted on his block just hours after. ‘You saved my life,’ Rosales said the man told them.” apnews.com/article/chic...

🏹 ch 27, May pronounces Ellen's name, "with a peculiar clearness, as if she had tapped on two silver bells"; ch 28, as she starts to lightly probe into Newland's patent case lies, "Her voice was clear as a bell." I don't like May that much, but I feel for her; she clearly knows what's up.

Contact info for trusted indie media in New Orleans prepping for Border Patrol:

Thanks to @rustandmoth.bsky.social for publishing this poem! I found the concerto so evocative that I needed to write in response to it. It's available online, and I encourage you to listen to it. rustandmoth.com/work/ghost-b...

If you use GMail, AI (Gemini) was turned on yesterday by default and now scans all of your content for machine learning. To turn off, go to Settings>General and scroll down. Uncheck the box for "Smart features." There's other "Smart" add-ons as well, but that's the one that reads your content.

Good. This kind of shit should get repudiated decisively.

saturation with Tolkien spinoffs has somehow not prepared our culture for the arrival of dark lords bearing a gift that everyone becomes convinced they can wield to accomplish great things but just makes them dependent and start whispering about preciouses if you suggest just throwing it away

Autocorrect has become our worst enema.

i try not to get too upset about the way the attention economy moves because i know i do it too but the federal goons never left. they went from 10 raids a day to 1-2 because they don’t have the capacity to do this shock and awe campaign nationwide. but they’re still here

this, all day right now (unmute, it’s a bop)

This New Orleans operation is going to closely resemble what we just went through in Chicago.

My first piece for @theguardian.com on MBS’s visit to the U.S., seven years after Jamal Khashoggi’s murder. Trump’s America is beginning to look like MBS’s Saudi Arabia— which Jamal warned me about. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

New #poetry from Kate Reider Collins: "Elegy as a Letter to My Dead".

With just one race left to call (ballots are still being cured), of 222 races up on 11/4, @runforsomething.net had 142 winners, 10 candidates moving to run offs, and 42 (!!!) red to blue flips.

615 of the estimated 3,000+ detained immigrants who were kidnapped in Chicagoland during Midway Blitz are expected to be eligible for bond this week. The Midwest Immigration Bond Fund shows up for people in detention who need bond, but it costs, at minimum, $1,500 per person. Pls help them.

I spent October traveling to schools throughout the South talking to students about American history. What I found were young people who understand we can tell a story that includes both the positive and the negative. As one 8th grader in Memphis said, “Doesn’t seem that hard, just say both things.”

🏹 ch 22: lololol the secondhand embarrassment of newland building up this moment with a parasol in his mind, and then it being punctured. I have to facepalm when Mrs. Welland worries for people's levels of actvity, like half these people's lives is complaining about/managing how bored they are 1/2

a big runoff last night, in New Orleans: Calvin Duncan was exonerated after spending *28 years* in prison; he tried to get his own case records from the New Orleans city clerk—but the office dragged its feet. So Duncan ran to become city clerk himself, and yesterday ousted the incumbent.

"blending governance and family business" for the love of

They are planning to do to us what they did to L.A. and Chicago. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/14/n...

So many vulnerable people were hurt, harassed and raped by these ghouls and now—I’m worried—it’s gonna become hehe haha lurid internet circus instead of a long overdue moral reckoning. I’m scared of who we all are becoming. That man has brought us ALL low.

If you observe anything in Charlotte today

Even in this tough moment for journalism, Capital B is pushing forward. Our new three-year plan lays out how we’ll keep serving Black communities with reporting that informs, connects, and creates change. https://capitalbnews.fundjournalism.org/donate/?campaign=701VM00000e9Ok4YAE

Need a whistle? Take a whistle! All we ask is don't blow it near us. They're very shrill! 🤪

It is past time to draw negative inferences from the destruction of evidence.

This little man is out of control. I feel like I’m saying that all the time.

Beautiful!

DOGE ATE MY HOMEWORK

Got turned down on a piece about ICE in Chicago for an international news org because they believed I couldn’t be objective about my neighbors getting kidnapped. And well, guilty as charged I guess.