FAFO IN MINNEAPOLIS
this asshole had the entire city scared he was going to lead some kind of klan march and rampage through an immigrant neighborhood. he showed up yesterday with about 5 people and "marched" less than one city block before counter protestors super-soakered his ass in 10⁰ weather, pushed him back to his hotel, and ran him out of town. so so so proud of my city
I know I haven't posted regularly on this blog in years but I'm not seeing a whole lot of posts on this site about what's happening in Minneapolis right now. And the posts I am seeing are not covering the scope of it. I'm genuinely surprised because tumblr is usually where I find out about things organically through my feed. So I'm making a post about it.
A brief summary of events, from someone who pays attention and also lives here, best taken with a grain of salt and some fact checking:
2020: George Floyd is murdered by Minneapolis police. There are weeks of protests about it. It makes national news. Protests happen in DC. The infamous Trump and his bible photo shoot happens.
2024: Gov. Tim Walz is Kamala Harris' running mate in the presidential election. He starts the "they're just weird" thing. Is folksy, Trump personally hates him.
November 2025: ICE starts showing up to "crack down" on "illegal immigrants" in our Somali community. I may remember the numbers wrong, but something like 90% of our Somali neighbors are either naturalized or were born here. People distribute ICE whistles and are on high alert. Localized to the twin cities.
December 2025: Nick Shirley is paid by a bunch of MN Republicans to do an exposé on daycare fraud. I didn't hear much about this. All I really know is this was an ongoing investigation that MN officials were already taking care of and some of the guilty parties have already gone to court from a COVID era food assistance program. Mostly, if not all, legal US citizens. He did a really bad job at doing journalism and just showed up to day cares with a camera crew and went "YUP nobody's here" as if they weren't in lock-down procedure because some fuck ass white men showed up with camera equipment that could easily be mistaken for guns. I believe. I will fact check all of this and will correct myself in a reblog if necessary. (source but not all the details that I remember hearing about but they said there was no recorded evidence of fraud)
Conservative internet explodes. Kristi Noem sends a mess of agents. I know it's more than a thousand more. They call it Operation Metro Surge. They are going everywhere. There are protests. People try to interrupt the arrests. It's a lot.
1/7/2026: Renee Nicole Good is shot by an ICE agent in the middle of a protest. A few blocks away from where George Floyd was killed. Broad daylight. In front of a crowd. While she was following instructions to turn her vehicle around. Jonathan Ross, the piece of shit Nazi who did it, was recording on his phone the whole time, switched his phone to his non dominant hand so he could more effectively shoot her in the face from 2 feet away. Claims self defense, several angles immediately disprove him. He releases his video, he calls her a "fucking bitch" as her corpse drives away. Does not help him at all. (source) He has not been seen since. Some photos/reports exist of a bunch of agents showing up to his house and taking some tubs and art away. His wife is an immigrant. (source but it's the daily mail so grain of salt.)
Not hours later they go raid a school and tear gas a bunch of kids. (source). Minneapolis has switched to distance learning. I'm not sure about St. Paul.
The last week: There are up to 3,000 ICE agents here. Keep in mind Minneapolis and St. Paul only have 600 or fewer police officers each. So these dudes are roaming in packs. It's 2-4 dudes to a car and 2-5 cars per pack. People are "commuting with" ICE agents to honk and alert people that they're there. People are going on patrols with their neighbors.
ICE is no longer asking "are you a citizen." They are simply walking up to you and taking you into custody. They are going door to door. They have started just breaking the door down if you don't comply. They are driving recklessly to just grab pedestrians and drivers alike (source). People are afraid to go get groceries. It's all over the state. I am learning names of cities in places I thought were just factory farm land and I've lived here my whole life because they're doing raids there. I had to text my family in the suburbs because I saw reports of my small little hometown an hour away getting door knocks today.
It's insane and I am not doing it justice. There are thousands of masked federal agents roaming around all of Minnesota with no warrant or specific goal. They are just trolling around looking for people. They are detaining anyone and everyone. They are beating people. They are pepper spraying people. They are kidnapping people. They are acting unconstitutionally, aggressively, and unpredictably. They are creating situations that are dangerous so that they can try to justify beating or shooting their way out. I will run an errand and then get fed a tiktok that was shot from the Cub Foods that I just left and there's 20+ ICE vehicles parked there now. They're taking people from work, from day care, from schools, from shopping centers.
Iceout.org tracks ice sightings. This is a screen shot with the date set to 12/1/2025.
And from today.
They have cut off SNAP and WIC benefits. Just for us. Not any other state, just Minnesota. They're saying it's because of fraud but I think it's because they hate that we use federal funds to give free breakfast and lunch to every public school student.
And this is breaking just now, 1/13/2026: the DOJ is trying to investigate Renee Good's widow. 4 people have resigned about it. (source). I don't even want to read the article to see what they're saying.
So that's a brief history.
Unicorn Riot is doing a lot of good reporting and they don't seem to have the spin that a lot of local news stations will have where they downplay everything. This article specifically goes into a lot of the specific instances of brutality.
It's also a rumor on TikTok that all of the videos of ICE and protests and the such and the like are being geo locked. So my feed is all footage of people being detained and talking about the "commuting" they're doing and what they're seeing but people outside of the state are not seeing it. So if you're also on that infernal app, try searching for Minneapolis or Minnesota and see what you see. I'm kind of curious if this is true. Because I've been living and breathing ICE and doomsday prepping content for a week. I'm sure those two topics aren't connected.
I don't really know what my goal with this post is. I'm tired. I'm in the first ring of suburbs, so it's been pretty quiet. But I have friends in south Minneapolis. And I'm worried for them. And I know it's a matter of time before my quiet pocket is affected. Because they're coming door to door.
Pay attention to Minnesota, I think an example is being made of us.
I've been monitoring this closely because I have friends in the area, and because I think every city in the country is at risk of having the feds come to do what they're doing in Minnesota, and we all need to get ready.
There are some Twin Cities activists who have been very clearly laying out what they're doing, and why it's effective at slowing down ICE. It sounds like all you really need, is neighborhood group chats where people can let one another know when and where ICE is present, and then people show up, start recording, and blowing whistles, and then ICE will leave again more often than not. This VERY SHORT thread by a Twin Cities activist outlines what to do and how it works.
Also: Minnesota Public Radio has been doing great coverage of what's happening, and the local NBC affiliate has some excellent interviews with activists who were arrested and detained for hours.
And finally, some good news: the courts restored SNAP funding.
HAPPY 25TH BIRTHDAY TO THE WORLDS FREE ENCYCLOPEDIA!!!
I just spent and hour researching this so I think I would like to add my two cents and actually explain what this means for the future of Wikipedia-
FIRSTLY: Wikipedia's AI policy still stands. If an article is suspected to be written with AI, it can be nominated for speedy deletion.(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence_in_Wikimedia_projects) Generative AI content is not supported on Wikipedia. AI bots have been used for years to do things like detect vandalism or translate content.
Now what the above article is referring too is that the Wikimedia Foundation has signed a deal with AI companies which means that the companies will pay Wikimedia to use their data for training. In my opinion (feel free to disagree) this isn't a bad thing, primarily because AI developers have already been using Wikipedia content to train their large language models, like A LOT, this increases Wikipedia's site traffic and thus increases server operating fees. Even worse, Wikipedia has seen a drop in human readers because many are instead reading AI responses (Which are literally using data from the site that they are taking readership from WTF)
The future of Wikipedia and AI isn't certain, obviously if you've read the above article you'll know that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has ideas on how to incorporate AI into the site, I personally despise that, it undermines the millions of human contributions to the site. Many editors to Wikipedia feel similarly and thus far, Wikimedia foundation has actually listened to its user-base: in Summer 2025, Wikipedia started testing out AI summaries for articles- this was met with deservedly massive backlash from editors. Pretty soon after, this project was put on pause.
Many Websites are still having their data scraped and aren't being compensated like Wikipedia is. It sucks that we live in a world where websites that are providing free information are being exploited by AI companies. Fuck AI corporations.
I don't think it's fair at this point in time to say 'fuck Wikipedia'; If you do that's your opinion. Wikipedia continues to be built by human volunteers who are working to make knowledge freely accessible. Keep clicking Wikipedia links
"it's not that I hate kids it's just that I don't think they should be allowed in most places!!" Imagine saying that about any other group of people.
Imagine if someone said "it's not that I hate disabled people it's just that I don't think they should be allowed in most places!"
That sounds horrible, doesn't it? So why is it ok to say that about children?
it's actually really valuable to make this specific comparison because the exclusion of young people and the exclusion of disabled people function in similar ways and on similar principles. we build spaces that don't accommodate them because society thinks they don't "need" to be anywhere except the specific spaces designated for them, we justify that exclusion based on abled adults' comfort, and when we look around and don't see them we let ourselves believe it's because there's no reason for them to be there and not because the entire social and built environment is hostile to their presence.
Something that I first applied to working with children, and have applied in a limited form to working with adults: you don't need to tell someone when they read your instructions wrong. Sometimes it's enough to point out what they did right and then whatever they didn't do? You ask them to do it in more precise words, and you make it sound like it's a new request. Remarkable how fast things get done this way.
This is also a habit I built up from emergency response training. If I say "I need you to bring me a first aid kit and an accident report" and you bring me just a first aid kit, it's so much more efficient to say "thanks now can you bring me an accident report" than "I asked you to bring an accident report why didn't you bring me one".
Once you've internalized "a person bleeding out is one of the worst times to start an argument" you start to wonder what other tasks could get accomplished without arguing
hey it’s ok if you lost your ai virginity back when you were uneducated. a lot of posts go like “reblog if you have never ever used generative ai and never ever will!!!” but it’s ok if you have used gen ai before and it’s even ok if you used to think it was cool, back before you understood what it really was and how it worked, either because no one had taught you about it and you discovered it on your own or because the only education you had received about it was from the tech bros. you’re not a burger with a bite out of it for having used ai. ok
It is 100 percent okay to stop using it today and join the "boo AI" club.
This isn't a purity thing. This is a "everyone stand with us against destroying the environment and giving asthma to poor people" thing.
Did you know that when one community says no to an AI data center, they specifically search out communities with fewer resources? Communities that can't defend themselves? And the pollution 100 percent affects their health and wellbeing, in addition to burning through our already scarce drinking water.
You can stop using character.ai today. You can say "I listened to the facts and stopped." And another thing: don't you think it's a bit more impactful to have used it, stopped, and then you're in a position to say how little it helped? How doing things for yourself improved your life?
also posts in the spirit of "if you've used AI even ONCE your soul is tainted!!!!" can't be great to those with OCD
For over two centuries, the Portuguese man o’ war (Physalia spp) was considered a single, cosmopolitan species, drifting across the world’s oceans and stinging unsuspecting swimmers. But new genomic research has overturned this long-held view, revealing that Physalia is not one species, but at least four: P. physalis, P. megalista, P. utriculus, and a newly described species, P. minuta. Researchers sequenced the genomes of 151 specimens from around the globe and found strong reproductive isolation between genetic lineages, even when their distributions overlap. This evidence aligns with historical descriptions from the 18th and 19th centuries, which proposed several species that were later dismissed due to limited data.
Crucially, the study integrated over 4,000 photographs from iNaturalist, using citizen science to match distinct morphologies with genetic lineages. These images, contributed by amateur naturalists, swimmers, and lifeguards, allowed researchers to confirm physical differences that earlier taxonomists could not consistently observe due to preservation challenges. The result is a rare success story in which modern genomics, historical records, and participatory science come together to clarify the taxonomy of one of the ocean’s most recognisable creatures.
The discovery not only rewrites the story of Physalia but also challenges assumptions about biodiversity in the open ocean, reminding us that even the most visible marine life can hold hidden complexity, and that everyone, from sailors of the past to today’s citizen scientists, has a role to play in uncovering it.
Have you guys noticed how much the internet/technology just does not listen to you anymore? I click “don’t show this artist” on Spotify and I get recommended a music video by them on the front page. I click “skip this update” on a pop up every time I open a file organization app and it’s right back there every time. I click unsubscribe on a newsletter and it keeps showing up in my inbox!! I click “delete my account” and the next time I open the website they suggest I “reactivate”.
This is Sahar's ( @reallyoptimisticface ) daughter, Diana. Her campaign is new, but Sahar has been verified here, and you can see that the stories line up. This is a legitimate family in need, so please help them out if you can.
I believe this campaign is vetted
This campaign seems to be vetted by association, and I'll show the proof below
Summary
Amjad (@/hersublimetale), who is vetted is a relative of Sakhr and was the one to refer me to them
Amjad is vetted by association here
They are also the daughter of Sahar (@/reallyoptimisticface), who is also vetted
Here is a post from me showing how Sahar is vetted
And here is another post showing how Sahar is vetted
(I am not a vetter, I am just passing on the information I have found)
(All vetting information is in my reblog chain)
Please help me on family
😭🍉😭
