The severe cold front headed this way has been heralded and warned about for days now, but it still hasn’t arrived. Overnight, we’re told. Definitely Friday. I got out my flannel-lined pants and longjanes, put them on, and feel right toasty, but it’s still a mere 21 degrees, and I’m indoors. Wore the Parka of Tribulation out for errands today, and it’s stiffly occupying a dining-room chair, so I guess, all in all, I’m Ready.
This is normal, despite what the weather terrorists are telling us. But that’t the thing about weather in general — three mild winters erases all memory of bad ones forever. The AM radio idiots report wind chills, which are pretty sketchy to begin with, as though they are the actual temperatures. It’ll be 20 below tomorrow, the dumbest one reported when I was out and about. Well, yeah. If you’re walking around naked.
Alan will set the faucets to drip overnight. Unless the power or furnace goes out, we’ll be fine.
The other thing the AM radio idiots were talking about today was the 4D chess their brilliant leader played to get a deal on Greenland, when it seems to me he got what we could have had all along if we’d just acted like a normal country and not a speeding truck driven by a drunk. But that’s why they’re idiots.
Now we await the next insane twist in the news. My decluttering project continues. Found this in a case of cassette tapes, which I no longer have the means to play:
Yes, it’s one of Jeff Borden’s hand-crafted mixtapes from the legendary series of Halloween parties he and two other guys hosted in the ’80s. It’s labeled “Hostbusters #2.” I don’t know if that means it’s the second tape of the evening, or the second party in the series. I just punched “Earl Klugh” in the search engine here and got no hits, so I will tell this story that I suspect I’ve shared before, but oh well:
Borden paid a near-scientific level of attention to his mixtapes. (Note the two colors of ink in the track listing.) Like Rob in “High Fidelity,” he gave great thought to how each one should kick off, rise in excitement, offer occasional breaks, etc. Given that these parties went for hours, it required multiple tapes, and each one needed to be considered as part of the arc. One year, a guy who came as someone’s plus-one approached him with a tape of his own, an album by the jazz guitarist Earl Klugh.
“Can you play this?” the guy asked.
Borden put him off, explaining the energy of the party was driven by the music, etc., and he didn’t think it would really work with the vibe. The guy persisted, and Borden finally said, “Let me think of a spot to fit it in,” and they both wandered off. Midnight came and went, and suddenly it was 3 a.m. and the place was still rockin’. Shit, thought Borden. I’m going to be here past sunrise if I can’t get this wrapped soon. He wasn’t the type to turn the lights on and start kicking people out — too rude. But then he spotted the guy with the Earl Klugh tape. “Let’s put on Earl,” he suggested.
The party emptied out in 15 minutes.
I should make a Spotify playlist of these tracks. Something to do when I’m confined to quarters this weekend. Stay warm, everybody.
Mark P said on January 23, 2026 at 1:33 am
I went to the grocery store around 9 tonight and noticed the bare shelves. Then it hit me — SNOW! ICE! ( not that ICE). Little milk, cereal, or canned chili, and no bread at all. We may get up to a quarter inch of ice, which will wreak havoc with trees and power lines. But we’ll see on Saturday night.
I’m commenting late because I’m sitting in the ER with my wife, who fell and hit her head *hard*. She’s getting a little combative between being drunk and early dementia. Plus a blow to the head.
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basset said on January 23, 2026 at 2:13 am
Mark, so sorry to hear that! How did it happen?
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Mark P said on January 23, 2026 at 2:26 am
She just fell over. She has a balance problem under the best of circumstances, but it gets really bad when mixed with alcohol. I was watching but I was too far away to help. It’s not the first time she’s fallen, but it’s the worst. I’m hoping she will agree to a mental health consult this time around. She has actually talked about getting help but never follows through.
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Mark P said on January 23, 2026 at 2:57 am
No mental health consult, but ICU because of bleeding inside the skull on both sides and the back.
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Jeff Gill said on January 23, 2026 at 8:16 am
Mark P, thinking of you. Hope some steps forward come out of all this.
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Julie Robinson said on January 23, 2026 at 9:40 am
Oh, Mark, I’m so sorry, brain bleeds are serious. You may be in for a long haul.
D had an appointment that was half an hour away at the ass crack of dawn, so we’re heading back home at the time I’m usually just getting ready for the day. In retirement it seems I’ve reverted to college student hours. Oh wait, I can’t stay up late anymore either!
Sunny and 78 today, I’m really sorry for those of you caught in the latest snow/ice/freeze storm. I’d be in despair.
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Mark P said on January 23, 2026 at 9:43 am
The neurosurgeon say my wife’s brain bleeds are minor, so surgery is not needed. She will be in the hospital another night, at least. Her cognitive state is much improved, but she remembers nothing about her fall.
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Deborah said on January 23, 2026 at 10:10 am
I’m glad it was minor bleeding Mark P, I hope things are back to normal soon.
Not as cold as much of the northern US but snow expected here in Santa Fe and Abiquiu today and tomorrow. My husband is going out to the cabin, I’m not going because the stairs up to the sleeping loft are outside and they get icy slick when it’s wet and cold. Now I’ll just worry from afar about him falling.
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alex said on January 23, 2026 at 10:21 am
So sorry to hear about that, Mark.
As for Earl Klugh clearing out a party, he’s somebody whose music I just happened to add this week to my Amazon Unlimited Music playlist. I should probably get out my old cassettes and CDs because my brain is turning to mush and I can’t remember artists and songs off the top of my head like I used to. And Amazon, for all of its supposed vastness, doesn’t have certain songs that I want, like Michael Paulo’s rendition of Gato Barbieri’s “Last Tango in Paris.”
I’m trying to get a playlist lengthy enough so that it doesn’t get repetitive and boring. About 1,000 titles should do it.
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Suzanne said on January 23, 2026 at 12:35 pm
Columnist Eric Zorn’s father’s obit. Amazing life.
https://www.niefuneralhomes.com/memorials/jens-zorn/5673812/
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alex said on January 23, 2026 at 3:22 pm
We wouldn’t ordinarily travel when the weather’s this sucky, but my hubby’s employer is throwing a party at a casino and putting us up in a free hotel room, doling out hundreds in cash to gamble with (or pocket) and providing free dinner and an open bar. It has become an annual thing, and much as I loathe casinos, it’s not like we have anything else going on this weekend. We’ll be hitting the road shortly.
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Julie Robinson said on January 23, 2026 at 3:31 pm
What a life Jens Zorn had; scientist, musician, and sculptor. That kind of Renaissance man was not unusual for his generation because of the belief in well-rounded education. What kid today is getting that? It seems they all have to specialize starting in grade school, often with sports.
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Jeff Gill said on January 23, 2026 at 4:21 pm
Julie, I rely on your forgiving nature to excuse me for ranting just a wee bit, off of your entirely appropriate appreciation of Eric Zorn’s father.
I worry I may have posted this particular observation too often here, and it’s a column I try not to write annually, but this is making me think it’s time again. My grandfather was a teacher, principal, and from 1947 to 1968 a superintendent. He taught over 50 years, 41 in that district; on his retirement he was honored in the rural town’s Homecoming Parade, and I got to ride in the convertible with him & my mom, his only child, and sat on the platform as he was honored. They gave him a plaque which I still have, and I remember what his successor said about him: his success was remarkable, in that he had regularly graduated 50% or more of his students in his last decade as superintendent.
A few years back, I mentioned this around my mother. She angrily retorted “that’s not right. Everyone I went to school with graduated (in 1953). Graduation rates today are much lower than they used to be.”
I pulled out the yearbooks, which I inherited with that plaque. Year after year, plain as day: 75 some children in the grade school for each class year; after eighth grade, 34-36 in each grade, and the graduating class was usually 22-25. The class before my mother’s graduation, her own, and the next two years: all four showed of the students who started in school, the high school graduates were just under a third year in, year out.
If you look up solid data for the U.S., it’s much worse than rural Illinois, and if you factor in the generally uncounted minority population, it’s quite horrible, but in general of all children who could have graduated our HS diploma rate was in the 3% neighborhood in the 1890s, crept up to the 20’s during the push between the wars for general high school and mandatory attendance to age 18, but was around 30-33% just before and after World War II. My mother was certain everyone graduated from her “class” but as we looked at the yearbooks, you could hear the “well, yes, but” factor, as it was assumed country kids and those who went into factory work or the service left, etc.
As a country, we didn’t get to 50% nationwide until well into the 1980s if you count male AND female, and all ethnicities. My grandfather earned his plaque and honors, but it was by getting to (not much past) 50% in the 1960s when that was rare, and everyone knew it.
Today, people across the political spectrum have just internalized the narrative that once, in golden memory, we educated everyone, and all of them well. The idea that developmentally or otherwise disabled kids get an education? That was done in some areas, God bless ’em, but it wasn’t legally required until after 1983. We had a long hard fight to get to 84%, it has plateaued, and in Ohio it’s stuck at around 87%.
Meanwhile, my grandfather got a plaque in 1968 for graduating 50% of his first grade cohort with high school diplomas. Today he’d get fired. Our problem, if I may close with this, is that my grandfather might need help with the technology, but he’d recognize almost the entire educational model we’re still using. But we’re trying to get to 94, 95% grad rates (that’s what the Statehouse and voters all say they want) with a system that was designed to educate about half or less of all children. Our K-12, school day, curriculum designed, no tracking educational system is still very much the one Eldred Walton strained to make work in rural Illinois for more kids than people expected. It just doesn’t hold up to educate everyone. I don’t know what it needs to look like, but it can’t be the one we used to teach Kansas (IL) Bulldogs how to learn and thrive in.
Sorry — I hear allusions all the time to how education used to be better. We just used to educate fewer, and we all were fine with that. I got cards from both my grandmothers at the end of 8th grade, and it took me years to understand why. But they still thought it meant something to keep going into 9th grade, let alone to finish and get a diploma.
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Julie Robinson said on January 23, 2026 at 4:52 pm
Oh, I wasn’t saying that at all. Mom (rural Iowa) and Dad (rural Illinois) had many classmates who didn’t go beyond 8th grade, if they even got that far. A couple of years of high school was probably way more than their own parents, notably my grandpa, who had to stop his schooling after 6th grade and go hire out as a farm worker because his folks couldn’t feed him anymore. And of course there was nothing for anyone with learning challenges, much less physical issues.
But schools covered more subject areas and didn’t stress specialization. They valued being knowledgable in many areas, not just STEM or sports. Are kids learning to read for fun? Are they getting music class? Art class? Are they even getting recess, to reset their bodies and solidify physical skills that assist in learning?
Or was it just my folks that were both renaissance people.
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Sherri said on January 23, 2026 at 5:05 pm
In my town in 1968, the school system was just beginning to actually integrate. My graduating class still primarily consisted of native born, English speaking Black and white kids.
My daughter’s school experience was different. Fewer Black kids, but many more immigrant kids, speaking a variety of languages. Or the kids were American born, but the parents were immigrant, and English was not spoken at home. Some of the immigrant population was stable, others moved in and out depending on what rents were doing.
Educating special needs? As Jeff points out, wasn’t required until the 80s, and even now, varies significantly from district to district, because it’s resource intensive.
There are far more and broader curricular requirements to meet to graduate high school than when we did, plus more high stakes testing. And there’s always a constant demand for the latest idea that’s going to fix everything.
Our schools have many problems. Our teachers are a mixed bag. But the demands on the system are tremendously larger than they were a generation ago.
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Peter said on January 23, 2026 at 5:10 pm
Mark, I am so sorry to hear about your wife. It must be very rough for you right now. Hoping that it gets better soon.
Had to take my wife to the hospital today – but it was for scheduled tests. I also have a project that has a tight deadline, and I had to be at the site this morning to go over recent changes. It was so windy on the drive out to the site that I had a hard time keeping the car in the lane; I was happy that the wind died down on the way back.
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Peter said on January 23, 2026 at 5:14 pm
I was on a local school board 30 years ago. In my opinion, at a school council meeting, you could get drunk if you took a shot every time someone in the audience would say “when I went to school there were 30 (or 40, or 50, or 90) kids in each class and we didn’t have art or music classes and we turned out just fine!”
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Sherri said on January 23, 2026 at 6:16 pm
Peter, I served on a community truancy board about 10 years ago, which was intended to provide an alternative path for kids at the point of being turned over to court system for truancy. A couple of men about 10 years older than me also were on the board, and it was clear that they were expecting to deal with kids who’d rather stay home and play video games than go to school, instead of the kids facing a plethora of family dysfunction, mental health, and substance abuse issues that we saw.
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alex said on January 23, 2026 at 6:48 pm
When I was in school, children in grade school were put into “lanes,” a practice that came to be seen as elitist. I imagine it continues but disguised so as not to make anyone feel snubbed. (Although we hear a lot of right-wingers claim they’ve been “guilt-tripped “ for being white.)
Those with “renaissance” potential were prepped to absorb the “Western canon” as college undergrads and then go on to get professional degrees in law, medicine or science. Everyone else was laned into home ec and skilled trades.
To me it looks like the whole system has been watered (read “dumbed”) down and that explains the higher graduation rates, not to mention the abjectly stupid people I’ve encountered professionally in law, medicine and science.
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Suzanne said on January 23, 2026 at 7:14 pm
My paternal grandfather didn’t even go to high school; he farmed. Several of my dad’s siblings joined the military and never finished high school and all worked in factories. My 90 year old mother spent her elementary school years in a one room church run school. She claims that she had no trouble moving from there to the public high school but we found her old report cards when we cleaned out her house and they tell a very different story as her grades were mostly Cs & Ds. Her parents both went to high school at something called the Luther Institute in Fort Wayne, which I think was a two year school. Special needs kids, behavioral problem kids, immigrant kids even in my childhood were basically ignored or worse.
I don’t know if education is better or worse than when I was a kid. I do know that it’s nearly impossible to teach someone who doesn’t want to learn, who isn’t curious about the world. Mr Zorn clearly had a thirst for knowledge and a curiosity about life, but I am not sure that can be taught.
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Colleen said on January 23, 2026 at 7:19 pm
I agree with you Alex. There’s very little value placed upon being intellectually well rounded. And I dare say part of the reason our country is in the pickle it’s in can be attributed to our societal ignorance about political science, history,and sociology….all of those “soft sciences” we liberal arts grads studied on our way to our “useless” degrees.
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Julie Robinson said on January 23, 2026 at 7:36 pm
Colleen, you’ve precisely summed up what I was trying to say.
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Deborah said on January 23, 2026 at 7:55 pm
My mother was the only one in her family who got to go to at least one year of high school. She lived on a farm and she and her siblings went to a lutheran grade school at the local church, they spoke German throughout. She had to live with a widow in town to go to high school and they could barely afford that. After that one year they couldn’t send her back and her younger sister and brother didn’t even get to do that. My sister and I didn’t know that our mother didn’t get to graduate from high school until a few years after she died, our aunt told us and we were shocked. She read voraciously which was her way of trying to educate herself.
My grandmother on my father’s side actually went to college, she had 9 kids and all of the girls (6) went to college eventually, except for the one that died in her teens. My dad graduated from high school, and worked on farms until he went into the Navy during WW2. I’m not sure why only the girls in his family went to college but they ended up being teachers or nurses, that was all that was available to them.
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Jim G said on January 23, 2026 at 11:18 pm
My ex had a friend who would signal that a party was over by putting on Pink Floyd’s “The Wall.” Worked a charm, I’m told.
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Brandon said on January 24, 2026 at 12:01 am
Overnight and into the early morning here, it goes into the mid-60s, but warms up to the high seventies by late morning. I hope all those in the path of the storm can stay safe.
Edit: On tracking:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracking_(education)
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nancy said on January 24, 2026 at 9:31 am
As one who remembers the Ad Council PSAs on the hazards of dropping out of high school, Jeff is absolutely correct. They wouldn’t have bothered producing them if they weren’t needed.
P.S. The Amish all quit school after 8th grade. I like to drop this on people who think of them as gentle organic farmers who seek only to live in harmony with the land, not as people who can be as ignorant as any poorly educated population.
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basset said on January 24, 2026 at 10:34 am
Another stay-in-school message, this one from 1964 more or less: https://www.ebay.com/itm/365771932193?
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dull_old_man said on January 24, 2026 at 11:48 am
Twenty-five years ago I was in a used record store with my 15-year-old son. He picked up a record by the Plastic Ono Band because the name caught his eye. I said I thought that Don’t Worry, Kyoko, Mommy’s only Searching for her Hand in the Snow was the worst song I’d ever heard. The bored clerk came to life and said when he was tending bar sometimes he’d put that one on 15 minutes before closing time. It always worked. That raised my status with my kid.
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alex said on January 24, 2026 at 12:49 pm
Speaking of secondary education, the local paper ran a piece about a week ago celebrating several local high schools that had 100 percent graduation rates. These included South Adams, Bluffton, Southern Wells and East Allen University (a college prep school where students gain two years of college credit while in high school). Bluffton and East Allen have achieved 100 percent for three consecutive years. Several others scored in the high 90s while the state overall achieved 92 percent in 2025, a new state record.
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Heather said on January 24, 2026 at 1:00 pm
So ICE just straight-up executed a legal observer on the street in Minneapolis today. I saw a stat that said 66% of the murders there this year are by ICE. DHS says the man had a gun, which I do not believe without proof, and anyway it’s legal to carry a gun there.
Nevertheless people are still out there protesting and our leaders are doing nothing but telling people to remain calm. While they shoot us in the street.
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Brandon said on January 24, 2026 at 1:00 pm
Judge for yourself. I just finished listening to it, and it’s unmistakably her song.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Opqr200XoMo
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Mark P said on January 24, 2026 at 1:53 pm
I really appreciate everyone’s concern about my wife. She had a bad night yesterday. The doctor said it was alcohol withdrawal. She’s much better today, but still confused.
I think Google is going downhill. It’s not just the ads that come at the top of the results, or the AI crap. I tried to find the obits for my father and mother-in-law, which I have found before, and couldn’t. Then I tried DuckDuckGo and they were right there.
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David C said on January 24, 2026 at 2:16 pm
I graduated in 1977 and about half the boys in my class who had fathers working at one of the GM plants in town quit at sixteen. They knew their dads could get them a job in the factory when they turned eighteen. It worked for about ten or fifteen years until they got laid off. The other half had parents who said no way was their kid going to work in a factory all their lives and made sure they went to college. The first group had snowmobiles. The second group had savings.
I agree with what Julie said earlier. Is anything for kids just for fun anymore? It seems like every activity has to be some sort of college entrance exam padding or clutching at straws for a sports scholarship.
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Sherri said on January 24, 2026 at 2:21 pm
Whether the man had a gun or not, he wasn’t threatening anyone with it, because he was restrained on the ground when the ICE goon starts shooting.
I’m definitely closer to the ACAB end of the spectrum than Blue Lives Matter, but at least during the George Floyd protests, for as badly as police acted, I don’t recall any cop just straight up pulling a gun and executing a restrained man. Probably because they know that as hard as it is to prosecute a cop, that would likely result in a prosecution. And a civil rights law suit.
It’s much harder to file a civil rights suit against a federal officer. Section 1983 of the US Code is the basis of civil rights suits against cops, and it doesn’t apply to federal law enforcement. A SCOTUS case in the 70s, Bivens, created a way of bringing civil rights suits against federal, but unsurprisingly, the current SCOTUS has sharply limited Bivens actions.
DOJ isn’t going to restrain this paramilitary, there’s very little way for civil actions to restrain the paramilitary, and unlike the real military, it doesn’t have a culture or means of policing itself.
Selecting from the bottom of the barrel, covering their faces, and giving them carte blanche to ignore the law and the constitution without consequences: they won’t stop at murdering two people in public. (We don’t really know how many people they’ve murdered in detention.)
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Deborah said on January 24, 2026 at 2:31 pm
What worries me now is that Minneapolis is going to explode and then Trump will send in the troops and there will be more murders, it seems inevitable to me, at this point. None of any of this had to happen, it was all incitement to violence by the Feds from the very start.
The lady in the pink jacket has a better video of the scene, it shouldn’t be terribly hard for the New York Times to do a frame by frame of the situation like they did of Renee Good’s murder.
Concentration camps and ethnic cleansing, that’s what’s going on here.
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susan said on January 24, 2026 at 2:48 pm
Herr Commander Greg Bovine, of the USKKK Border Patrol, which border now extends throughout the country.
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Deborah said on January 24, 2026 at 5:08 pm
Bovine is tiny and his voice sounds like an elf. He’s been overcompensating for a lot all of his life no doubt.
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Colleen said on January 24, 2026 at 5:59 pm
It’s about time to employ my “don’t read the comments” policy. The ones regarding today’s shooting are disgusting. All of the gun nuts asking why he had a gun at a peaceful protest. The 2nd amendment, for one. You know, the one they love so much…the people who want to carry while ordering a sandwich at Subway are questioning the victim’s motivation.
It’s sickening.
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Deborah said on January 24, 2026 at 6:53 pm
OK, this is bothering me and I get it and then I don’t get it. We have a situation in this country right now where people desperately need real information and it’s serious. It bugs me that people with platforms to give that real information have pay walls. I am impressed that the Minneapolis Star Tribune took their paywall down for information regarding this situation, shouldn’t that be more prevalent? Especially for people who are on the side of justice right now? I get that people need to get paid for their work, I really do and newspapers need to pay for reporters to get the truth but aren’t there exceptions? Where people need to see and hear what is going on when it’s this important? Am I the asshole here?
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tajalli said on January 24, 2026 at 7:27 pm
Deborah, I think it’s the Minnesota Star Tribune https://www.startribune.com/ that is not paywalled. Just put a notice on my social media so others can spread the word.
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Sherri said on January 24, 2026 at 7:58 pm
People who made a hero out of Kyle Rittenhouse claiming Alex Pretti shouldn’t have brought a gun to a protest. Wilhoit’s Law in action.
Trump could start publicly executing protestors on the White House lawn, and Congressional Republicans and white evangelicals would be there cheering him on. Hang the infidel and pass the offering plate.
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Peter said on January 24, 2026 at 9:11 pm
Brandon, thanks for the link. I heard the song, and you know, after the absolute horror of a day, I really needed that song. She’s screaming how I’m feeling right now.
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Sherri said on January 24, 2026 at 10:10 pm
You know, stormtroopers snatching people off our streets and straight out murdering protesters in the name of the “immigration problem”, and I still don’t know what the immigration problem is.
It’s not terrorism. There’s just no connection between illegal immigration and terrorist attacks.
It’s not jobs. The undocumented immigrants are being exploited, but nobody in government cares about that, or the focus would be on employers, not employees.
It’s not crime or drugs, because immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than people born here.
It’s not benefits and services, because undocumented immigrants don’t receive benefits and services, despite paying taxes.
It’s not that they didn’t do it the right way, because ICE is picking up people who have been doing it the right way, including people about to become citizens.
I’ve been hearing for decades, from both Dems and the GOP, that we need immigration reform. I do know that the immigration process is absurdly arcane and makes no sense, but I don’t get the sense that simplifying the process is what politicians are talking about. But I don’t know what they are talking about.
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Deborah said on January 24, 2026 at 10:34 pm
LB and I took candles out at 6pm mountain time to correspond to 7pm Central and of course we didn’t see anyone else out with candles, the same thing happened after 9/11 we went out on the street with our candles, our building was on a busy street in St. Louis then and some cars gave us the high sign as they passed but no one else was on the street. I get that the word wasn’t out about the candles today at 7pm and we expected it not to be a thing here. It felt like we were doing something though, for no one else but ourselves. Our candles kept blowing out in the wind and it’s cold and unusually damp in Santa Fe which is normal for Chicago but not around here. When we came back inside we sat around eating guacamole and chips with only candles for light. Did it make us feel better? A little.
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Jeff Gill said on January 25, 2026 at 9:42 am
Pam Bondi shows the game by telling Gov. Walz that ICE will leave the state if he hands over the state voter rolls. Election control on the federal level at gunpoint… unless Tim hangs tough. But that takes hardball to a completely new level: “Give us the ability to manipulate your midterm voting inputs (by scrubbing voter rolls aggressively) or we will keep shooting your citizens on hard to challenge pretexts.”
Meanwhile, Republican officials from the president on down are saying average citizens shouldn’t be carrying firearms on the street, certainly not concealed weapons, and if they do they’re criminals. Let this former GOPer say that’s not what they used to say, in public or in private. In fact, the standard line was how widespread civilian armament was our only protection against (checks notes) masked government goons running amok against citizens standing on their rights. I mean, that’s exactly how it was explained to me as to why gun restrictions couldn’t even be considered, for decades.
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Mark P said on January 25, 2026 at 10:36 am
Canadian communities are recruiting American healthcare workers. The longer the reign of the demented orange blob, the poorer we will become.
On a personal note, my wife continues to become agitated and require restraints in the evening. If this is her new normal, I am having trouble seeing how I will be able to handle it at home. And she’s asking for beer.
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Icarus said on January 25, 2026 at 1:47 pm
Mark P sorry for your struggles. Does the beer help or hurt?
also, It saddens me that people can look at the same thing and see two different versions of what happened. But then I remember that there have always been holocaust deniers out there.
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Julie Robinson said on January 25, 2026 at 1:54 pm
Mark, I’m so sorry. Is there a social worker at the hospital who could help you strategize? Is rehab a possibility?
We began our worship this morning with a corporate lament, and ended by gathering around our organist and praying for his protection. He’s from Brazil and has his green card, but we all know how much that’s worth. Afterwards, another member told me he fears federal agents will look at his name on property records and break in on himself, their three year old, and his pregnant wife. He’s 3rd generation Italian with a Hispanic sounding name.
No one is safe. Our daughter and other pastors have been gathering at the ICE hearing center to minister to those going in, and will be there tomorrow. Yesterday protestors were there with a large police presence and one was arrested. She is concerned the police tomorrow will not differentiate that they are there for ministry work.
I asked her what to do if she’s arrested and she gave me the name of a pro-bono immigration attorney. I sure hope I don’t have to make that call.
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Sherri said on January 25, 2026 at 2:53 pm
Mark, so sorry about your wife.
Jeff, I remember even earlier when the sainted Ronnie Reagan was all in favor of gun restrictions, because Black people were carrying guns. We like to tell ourselves the 2nd Amendment is all about protecting us from tyranny, but it’s inseparable from fear of slave rebellion.
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