A Venn diagram illustrating the overlap between MAGA, Second Amendment Fetishists, and cowards as revealed by recent events in Minnesota...

I live here. You (presumably) live here.  We stand in line at the grocery store with city workers, teachers, dishwashers, kids in hoodies and retirees counting coupons. Kansas City isn’t a slogan or a headline to us—it’s a functioning organism.

And lately, that organism has shown a pulse. A spine. A refusal.

That matters, because the federal machinery has been circling again—quiet walkthroughs, coded language about “capacity,” the familiar smell of logistics masquerading as policy. We’ve seen what that prelude leads to. Minneapolis heard the same music before the volume got turned up and the neighborhood soundscape changed forever.

Here’s the difference—and it’s not small: Kansas City area leaders didn’t sit on their hands.

They moved.

KCMO’s city council didn’t wait for a ribbon-cutting or a press release. They slammed the permitting door and passed a ban on non-municipal detention facilities—five years of legal friction where ICE expected a smooth glide path. That’s not symbolism. That’s municipal muscle. Zoning, permits, land use—the boring tools that actually stop things from happening.

You cannot build or operate a detention center in this city without local approvals. City leaders used that leverage immediately. That’s what resistance looks like when you understand how power actually flows.

And it didn’t stop at city hall.

County officials across the metro—burned before by federal overreach and private prison shell games—have been louder, sharper, and more precise than they were a decade ago. They’ve demanded clarity. They’ve asked who pays, who oversees, who answers when something goes wrong. They’ve refused to treat “federal” as synonymous with “untouchable.”

This is the lesson Minneapolis paid for in advance: If you don’t force the questions early, you live with the consequences late.

Leavenworth learned it the hard way and then did something rare—it adapted. City officials there dragged a private detention operator into the daylight and into court, insisting on permits, hearings, public accountability. The result wasn’t a dramatic moral victory. It was better than that: a delay, a slowdown, a requirement that detention justify itself under local law instead of swaggering in under federal cover.

That fight matters. It sets precedent. It tells ICE and its contractors that the Midwest is no longer an open floor plan for human warehousing. Local governments can’t abolish ICE. But they can make expansion expensive, slow, and politically radioactive.

And that’s exactly what’s happening now.

Let’s not romanticize this. Some sycophantic state-level actors are still feeding the beast—deploying resources, signing cooperation agreements, lending legitimacy to an enforcement regime that thrives on proximity to local power. That tension is real. But it makes the city and county pushback even more important, not less.

Because when ICE expands, it does so through cracks: bureaucratic indifference, jurisdictional confusion, leaders afraid of looking “soft.” Kansas City’s leaders—at least for now—have chosen a different posture. They’ve chosen friction.

And friction can be the enemy of mass detention.

This isn’t hysteria. It’s memory. Minneapolis didn’t fall because people didn’t care; it fell because too many officials waited for certainty while the machinery was still warming up. Kansas City’s leaders appear to have learned that lesson. They’re acting while the doors are still unlocked, while the blueprints are still proposals, while the language is still evasive enough to challenge.

That deserves acknowledgment—and public backing.

Because resistance doesn’t always look like protest signs and megaphones. Sometimes it looks like a denied permit, a zoning code, a judge insisting on process, a council vote taken before dawn. Sometimes it looks like adults in public office deciding that this city will not quietly become a node in someone else’s detention network.

We should be proud of that. Cautiously. Vigilantly.

And we should keep watching—because the only thing ICE respects more than authority is persistence.

Minneapolis is watching the machine do what it always does after it kills: it tightens its tie, straightens the paperwork, and tries to make the blood look like “process.” And in the last five days the pattern has become unmistakable.

First, they pushed new video into the bloodstream of the news cycle—an administration-approved angle, conveniently framed as the great exonerator. 

But when grown-ups with stopwatches and professional skepticism got their hands on the visuals, the story didn’t magically become clean. Reuters’ reconstruction points to a grim, almost clinical detail: the officer’s first shots came as the vehicle was moving past him. 

That’s not a verdict. It’s something worse for the people selling “obvious self-defense” as gospel: it’s doubt you can measure.

Then came the institutional tell—the part where the state’s credibility is dragged behind a truck because it’s inconvenient.

Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, the outfit locals expect to investigate deadly force with at least some baseline public legitimacy, says it was cut off from evidence and interviews—effectively pushed out—when the federal apparatus decided the FBI would run the whole show. PBS and CBS local reporting, along with official statements, describe a reversal that left the BCA unable to meet its standards or the public’s expectations. 

Translation: the people who fired the shots get to manage the room where the facts are sorted.

And when career lawyers inside the Justice Department’s civil-rights machinery reportedly offered to dig in—do the hard work, run down the facts, test the claim of justification—they were told, in essence, No, thank you. CBS reports the Civil Rights Division prosecutors were told they would not play a role. Then the resignations started stacking up like a flare gun going off in the fog.

That’s not “normal.” That’s a system coughing smoke.

Renee Good’s family—left to stand in the crater—has now hired Romanucci & Blandin, the same firm known for representing George Floyd’s family, to investigate and publish findings because the official channels have not inspired confidence. When a family has to rent its own truth because the government won’t reliably provide it, the legitimacy meter is already pinned in the red.

Meanwhile, the city is trapped in the cruel logic of escalation. A second incident: a federal officer shoots another person in Minneapolis, this time reported as a man wounded in the leg amid a disputed encounter. And the response from the top isn’t humility, transparency, restraint—it’s the old authoritarian jukebox selection: threaten the Insurrection Act, hint at troops, dare the city to flinch. AP and Reuters both report the President floating that option as unrest spreads.

• We have a killing still argued as “self-defense,” but increasingly litigated in public through video analysis and contested investigative control. 

• We have state investigators sidelined, civil-rights prosecutors reportedly shut out, and resignations that read like a warning flare from inside the hull. 

• We have another shooting, more street tension, and a White House response that leans toward force and threats, not accountability. 

• And we have a community and state leadership trying—through courts, through counsel, through public pressure—to keep Minneapolis from becoming a live-fire demonstration of federal impunity. 

If the federal government wants trust, it knows the price: independent access, full disclosure, and an investigation that doesn’t look like the suspect running the lab. What it’s offering instead—more secrecy, more spin, more muscle—is not reassurance.

It’s a posture.

And Minneapolis, painfully experienced, recognizes it on sight.

 Well, here we are. A few years older and none the more wiser. 

I thought we were pretty much over this shit, but I've come to realize that people who say "things can't possibly get worse," simply suffer from a lack of imagination. 

So, I've got a few things to get off my mind and no real place to vent. I left Twitter ages ago for obvious reasons. I've been skulking around Bluesky for a while, but that platform isn't conducive to long-form kvetching (i.e., more than 300 characters... talk about your baseline shifts), and Facebook is a bit too "let's make money for Techbros" for my taste (although, I get that Blogger isn't much better in that regard).

But, to quote Frank Costanza, I got a lot of problems with you people! And now you're gonna hear about it! (I mean, not YOU specifically, I'm talking about those OTHER people). 

So, stay tuned for some deep-fried, solid gold bullshit. 

No matter how great (or ungreat) you are, ultimately, NOTHING you do can change the fate of the universe (but everything you do will bring the universe closer to it's fate :). Hamlet himself, the author of "Shakspeare" (the box office hit) once said, 'Ya know, Caesar himself could be this brick in my wall...' (well something like that; I don't remember the exact wording).

The point is this: Whether the universe decides to collapse into a spec of ultra extremely gigantically ludicrously dense material, or spill out over the voids until the last solid body (and brain) evaporates into cold nothingness, you will be able to do exactly nothing to stop it, no matter how great a person you are. 

Archeologists have learned that the whole "Pharaoh is a living god" thing was just a big pyramid scheme.

What kind of crazy-ass Project Team was this? 

I mean, I had been on some crazy-ass Project Teams in my time, such as one where the drip had something in it that made hearing music exquisite, and hence when some Shostakovich was piped in actual bats seemed to circle my Domain, or the one where my legs became totally numb and yet I found I could still stand fifteen straight hours at a fake cash register, miraculously suddenly able to do extremely hard long-division problems in my mind. 

But of all my crazy-ass Project Teams this was by far the most crazy-assed. I could not help but wonder what tomorrow would bring.

• Woman dies from brain-eating amoeba after using neti pot with filtered tap water
  I heard that one time a brain-eating amoeba tried to attack Meesha, but it starved to death. #sickburn
  Also, follow Nancy Reagan's advice and stop putting bugs up your nose.
   
• Kona Community Hospital shuts down due to scabies outbreak
  "Kona Community Hospital shut down today due to a severe outbreak of scabies, a highly contagious skin condition caused by tiny burrowing mites…"
  
  Dudes. These are tiny mites… burrowing into your SKIN! This sort of thing is how the Justinian Plague started, right?
  
• Asian beetles disguised as ladybugs burrow into your dog's mouth
  
  
  I mean there's just way too much burrowing going on lately, amirite? I guess this might be localized to the North Carolina region, but still... I see those beetles all over during the late fall.
  
  If I see them trying to migrate into my house this winter, I'll be sure collect them and feed them to my neighbor's crazy barking dogs (I'm kidding! I would never! I'm a dog person!).
  
• Man coughs up bizarre blood clot shaped exactly like part of a lung
  
  
  But perhaps the most GYAAHHH! story of the week comes from the New England Journal of Medicine, which reports that a dude recently died shortly after he LITERALLY COUGHED UP A LUNG!!!
  
  Okay, it was a blood clot that looked like a piece of his lung... because it had been lodged in his bronchial tree and become a cast IN BLOOD of the inside of his fricken' LUNG!