Category: Miscellany

The first in a (hopefully) weekly series of posts with miscellaneous interesting reading / viewing material.

Attorney General Phil Weiser announced an update to the Colorado Department of Law’s public complaint filing system, adding a new section for Coloradans to report federal agent misconduct. Could come in handy, what with ICE skulking around.

If you’re feeling down, take heart! Ruth Ben-Ghiat feels we’re living in a global wave of protest — take a few minutes to read her essay on this.

Speaking of protests, have you ever heard the story of the one mass public demonstration by Germans in the Third Reich against the deportation of Jews? It’s called the Rosenstrasse protest, and it led to the release of 1,800 Berlin Jews, many of whom survived the war.

Do you like numbers? FactCheck.org has published a look at the statistics of Trump’s second term (so far).

The current administration recently completed the process of extracting the U.S. from the World Health Organization. Morgan McSweeney, PhD (a.k.a. “Dr. Noc”) explains the consequences of this decision, and why they won’t show up until they’re really impactful.

Trump: What’s the Deal? A full (82 minutes long) documentary on the man, commissioned in 1988 by Leonard Stern, and released in 1991. Trump threatened to sue any broadcaster or distributor that took on the film — so it was screened only twice & subsequently suppressed.

It’s well worth spending half an hour to watch Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Meanwhile, Paul Krugman has a few things to say on Trump’s behavior at Davos.

Fascism! A fact sheet produced by the U. S. Army in 1945, it’s still a very good summary of the subject.

If you’re as upset as I am with recent ICE actions in Minneapolis, it’s time for us all to Stand With Minnesota.

That is, if you have a few million dollars to spend.

While everybody’s been distracted by Trump’s record-length falsehood-stuffed speech to Congress, most of the national media has missed some recent reporting by Wired. The bottom line is that Trump is hosting (or, at least, starring at) fund raising events — not that these are campaign fund raisers, obviously. No, the money’s supposedly being raised for his future presidential library — that, for a man who famously does not read.

The price of admission is a bit steep, though. If you want a private dinner with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, it’ll set you back a cool $5 million. But maybe you’re a wanna-be tycoon of more-limited means — a “group setting” dinner will set you back a mere $1 million.

Not that this is influence peddling, of course.

The original Wired article is here (behind paywall), or here (via 12ft.io).