Joan Baez! Bruce Springsteen! Jane Fonda! Tom Morello! That was some of the entertainment at the massive St Paul No Kings protest yesterday. I’ve heard estimates as high as 100,000 in attendance. Unfortunately, Ted Nugent couldn’t make it. We couldn’t make it either, that was a 3 hour drive away from us.
I attended the rally in Morris. (Forgive the terrible photo.)
It wasn’t organized in a way that lends itself to grand panoramic photos. We didn’t march — we we were spread out around a couple of major intersections in town. About 150 people showed up, a good number for our small town.
I then drove out to an even smaller town: Cyrus, Minnesota, population 300.
Between 30 and 40 people were waving signs at that one.
Our numbers look tiny compared to the huge crowds in the big cities, but what was most heartening was the response. Cars were driving by, and I did see one guy flip us off, but mostly we got positive affirmations, with drivers waving at us or honking their horns. At times it was just one long continuous ‘beep beep’ as car after car saluted us.
I think maybe most of the country is fed up with Mr Trump and his idiot lackeys.
We did have some conversations about the point of all this, since it wasn’t going to lead to direct change. People had different answers: one was to show other people that they aren’t alone, another was to foster organization, another was to just piss off MAGA. All good answers, I think, so we’ll have to keep it up. I also learned that there is a weekly demonstration in Morris, every Tuesday at 4:30 on 5th and Atlantic…so I’ll have to try to make it to some of those.
Saw a pic of a protest in Barrow Alaska! They said it was a “balmy” 16o.
I see you have traffic lights! It must be a much bigger town than the one I grew up in.
It’s easier to go to a big crowd protest. To go to a small one in your home town, that takes courage!
We have TWO traffic lights!
barrow’s mostly native, so them being pissed at the racist in chief isn’t too surprising, rural as they are.
Well over 100k people turned up for the St. Paul protest, and it was nice in a tragic way to be the flagship event. The murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti really motivated many white suburbanites into actively fighting against the Icestapo regime.
It is just about planting season in rural Minnesota, and those big diesel machines are going to cost them double in fuel costs directly due to the orange Lumps war.
Higher prices for fuel actually will hurt everyone, and the only benefit is that maga is now shambling towards the dustbin of history.
Yeah, anything is better than doing fuck all. A protest might not change anything, but that’s just the first step.
Does a stop sign with solar powered flashing lights outlining it count as a traffic light?
If so, we have two.
I used to have a traffic light in my cellar. I’ve long since moved house but it might still be there, guiding either no traffic at all or rats on tiny motorbikes (if their technology has advanced that far).
600+ showed in Cheyenne. Not a bad turnout. The resistance group I’m a part of is doing other stuff, too, like working on a podcast and getting a newsletter out in Spanish. We are also working on reaching the 30,000 people in the county who didn’t vote at all last election and trying to kick the State Democratic Party into gear! I’ve called the Laramie County Democrats and the State Democrats to ask about poll watching in November and both voicemails are full! I guess I could look to see what’s available for email, but if no one’s checking the phones, I don’t have much confidence they’re checking emails, either.
Over eight million Americans took to the streets today, which makes No Kings 3 the biggest single day of protest in the history of our country.
Reginald, claim is false. The usual numbers game, no accounting for proportion of population.
Fact is that ~8 million participants represents approximately 2.3% of the 2026 U.S. population (roughly 349 million).
First Earth Day (1970): https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/04/how-earth-day-moved-environmentalism-front-and-center/
10% > 2.3% — four times bigger
I like birgerjohansson’s comment #279 here :
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2025/12/30/infinite-thread-xxxviii/comment-page-7/#comment-2296706
Seems all too likely.
[meta]
StevoR, seems so to you. Not to me. But then, I think about things.
Stupid.
Gotta love how you post a link to the content (here) but not the actual content.
(Why post a link to that comment here? Post it there. Go fucking stroke him there)
—
FWIW, since you bring it up, I don’t like his comment there:
That’s his usual clickbait belief; posts headlines (like Reginald) without actually assessing the content or even checking its merit.
Fact: https://www.airandspaceforces.com/f-35a-lands-after-taking-fire-over-iran-pilot-stable/
(the radar thing is also bullshit, but I can’t be arsed to link to how)
I went to a No Kings protest in Queens, and there were people there recruiting protesters to sign up for other action campaigns. The DSA was telling people to contact their state legislators and press them to support a set of Tax the Rich bills that are pending in Albany. There were also people collecting food for a local food bank.
If it gets people who weren’t previously active in politics to get involved with stuff like this, it helps. It’s more than just waving signs and yelling. (Although a little yelling makes me feel better too.)
Morales:
“StevoR, don’t point out something from another thread here. Point it out there.”
X-D
(Also, “downed” apparently doesn’t mean “severely damaged” and “forced to land”.)
[Two people have been enjoyned to neither talk to or about each other.
So I’m not doing that, since one of them complies]
Point being, the alleged video is:
Iran Used 1960s Radar to Down a $350M Stealth Jet — The Flaw Was There From Day One.
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=FlEzKA4_Zr4
I quote the first bit of the blurb:
My understanding is that stealth aircraft are not invisible to radar but the shape and materials of which they are made return a weak echo. A sufficiently powerful radar can still detect them at long range and they are visible to less powerful radars a short range.
seversky, the radar thing is pure speculation.
FWIW (and this is a credible source — Ibidem):
This trick was used in fiction back when stealth technology was still only part of top secret research projects. The Craig Thomas novel ‘Firefox’ was published a few months before the first flight of Lockheed’s prototype for what would go on to become the F-117 (which did also have a reduced IR signature).
America does not depend on Iranian oil for cars etc, but does rely on Iranian oil for sources of agricultural fertilizer. Which will as a result will cause fertilizer costs for American farmers to sky rocket. Just in time to cripple American agriculture this planting season. Combined with problems for agriculture with ICE crippling agricultural work force, and high costs of diesel fuel running up supply chain costs, Food prices will rapidly rise just in time for the off year elections. Not to mention Trump’s deeply stupid tariffs.Wheeeeeee! Hundreds of millions of angry voters going to the voting booth.
Attempting detection of aeroplanes using infra red dates back to the 1930s at least. Former US Navy Paul H Commander came to London to try to interest our Air Ministry and when his detecting element broke he contacted R V Jones who was working on these things at the Clarendon Laboratory in Oxford. A B Wood working for the Admiralty had tried in 1927 but found that the piston engine could be screened and cloud would absorb anything that remained. The Germans developed the ‘Kiel Gerät’ as a detector for their night fighters using Lead sulphide but didn’t do much with it because it gave only direction, not range though Jones did work on an idea of using pulsed infra red search light, which I suppose would have been LIDAR. Details from R V Jones ‘Most Secret War’.
Attempting detection of aeroplanes using infra red dates back to the 1930s at least. Former US Navy Paul H Commander came to London to try to interest our Air Ministry and when his detecting element broke he contacted R V Jones who was working on these things at the Clarendon Laboratory in Oxford. A B Wood working for the Admiralty had tried in 1927 but found that the piston engine could be screened and cloud would absorb anything that remained. The Germans developed the ‘Kiel Gerät’ as a detector for their night fighters using Lead sulphide but didn’t do much with it because it gave only direction, not range though Jones did work on an idea of using pulsed infra red search light, which I suppose would have been LIDAR. Details from R V Jones ‘Most Secret War’.
I’ve no idea why that posted twice. Sorry!
I will give you a clickbaity headline that stands up to scrutiny
From A Different Bias:
“Iran Calls Shots for Investors Now, Not Trump”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=uQzlLkyDWzs
If you are in Washington state, see April of Action. It has a list of actions you can take during April, in preparation for a one day strike on May 1st (see May Day Strong ). The strike is a day of no work, no school, no shopping. The immediate goal is to raise interest and awareness, and to start organizing for an open-ended strike when we need one.
And if you are not in Washington state, maybe see if anything similar is happening in your state.
Social change: https://www.vox.com/politics/483983/immigration-ice-changed-america-economy-tsa-chicago-charlotte-arizona-enforcement-immigrant-life
↓ pullquote ↓
The defining image of resistance during Trump’s first term was the mass protest: The Women’s March at its start, the March for Our Lives in the middle, and finally Black Lives Matter protests at the end. In his second term, it has become more about individual action: Recording federal agents with a smartphone or sounding a car horn to alert a street to their presence.
The Minneapolis uprising that forced ICE to pull out in January — and eventually led to the firing of DHS secretary Kristi Noem — confirmed the ascendance of a new type of activist movement that had already established itself around the country: Small, nimble, local, and constantly adopting new tactics to protect neighbors from harassment, detention, or deportation.
I don’t remember any uprising in Minneapolis when we were literally invaded by ICE and CBP. Calling the peaceful community response to groups of heavily armed thugs brutalizing people an ‘uprising’ makes it sound as if we had a slave revolt.
There were massive protests and public outrage after they murdered Renee Good, but the community organization has been in place since George Floyd was murdered. It’s not a surprise that the local citizens would fight back against kidnappers and cold blooded murderers with official government badges.
We the people of Minnesota have a long tradition of fighting against injustice.