What’s happening in Minnesota is Science

My state is impressing the world with its communal cooperation and altruism. It turns out we’re just responding in a normal human way.

In sociology, there’s a term to describe this phenomenon: “bounded solidarity.” Alejandro Portes, a prominent sociologist at Princeton University, first introduced the term in a paper published in The Annual Review of Sociology in 1998. It’s used to describe when a community is bound by a crisis, and during this time, it can lead to extreme acts of altruism and kindness that aren’t usually seen in non-crisis times.

OK, nice of sociologists to provide a name for the phenomenon.

We are seeing this in Minnesota right now. Multiple media reports have highlighted the ways in which the community has come together. Volunteers are delivering groceries so immigrants can hide at home. People are raising money to help Minnesotans cover rent because they haven’t felt safe to go to work. People are taking each other’s kids to school, organizing shifts for people to stand guard and protect immigrants in their neighborhoods. As NPR recently reported, when a preteen got her period for the first time — a preteen who hadn’t felt safe enough to leave the house to go to school — a community rallied together and launched an underground operation to get her pads. Minnesotans have been braving the below-freezing cold to show up for protests and denounce the violence in their communities for weeks.

These acts of kindness and solidarity matter because it’s exactly what people need to move through a crisis, build resilience, and transform a community for the better. Daniel Aldrich, a professor at Northeastern University teaching disaster resilience, and a survivor of Hurricane Katrina, once told me that when it comes to a disaster, his research found that community-based responses are more successful than individual-based ones.

You mean like mutual aid? The antithesis of the rugged individualism this country usually promotes? We’ve been talking about that for a century or so.

When conspiracy theorists try too hard to find a conspiracy

It’s cold across much of the country. There’s snow and ice on the ground.

IT’S A CONSPIRACY!

At least, some stupid people are trying to imagine alien weirdness going on, including this desperate ignorance from Candace Owens, who thinks it’s artificial because it doesn’t melt at 30°F.

I looked at some of the comments. Many are trying to explain to her that the freezing point of water is 32°F, and that 30 is less than 32, and some mention that the temperature in Connecticut when she was horrified by frozen water was actually 25°F. Others are agreeing that yes, it’s a government or alien conspiracy.

Remember this when Candace Owens trots out another bizarre conspiracy theory. I think the lawsuit by Brigitte Macron against her is going to go well.

A resilient Minnesotan

An ugly old white man (I can say it, I’m one of them) took a seat in the front row of an Ilhan Omar speech, and then jumped up, shouted something unintelligible, whipped out a syringe, and sprayed something unpleasant and bad smelling on her. Then he was promptly tackled.

That’s a metaphor for something — ineffectual, horrible person making a stink and trying to disrupt a democratic event. Even more appropriate is the response by Omar.

Omar continued to talk after the disturbance, commenting: “We will continue. These f****** a**holes are not going to get away with it.”

Exactly right. Say it!

“We’re going to keep talking … just give me 10 minutes. Just give me 10 minutes. I beg you,” Omar told a man, who appeared to be security. “Please don’t let them have the show.”

“Here is the reality that people like this ugly man don’t understand. We are Minnesota strong, and we will stay resilient in the face of whatever they might throw at us,” she continued.

“Everybody settle down. I’m going to finish my remarks. It is important for me to continue to lead my Democratic colleagues in demanding her (DHS Secretary Kristi Noem) resignation. And like I said, if she does not resign, we are going to introduce articles of impeachment.”

I like representatives who have a clear idea of what needs to be done, and Ilhan Omar has that power.

Waiting for another creepy old man to die

Daniel Phelps, who tracks attendance at Ken Ham’s cheesy roadside attractions in Kentucky, tells me that they’re in decline.

According to my monthly Kentucky Open Records Act (KORA) request, December Ark ticket sales were the lowest ever (with the exception of 2020 – during the Covid pandemic). In December 2025, the Ark sold 35,223 tickets, about 4,000 less than December of 2024. Of course, these ticket sales numbers don’t include lifetime pass members or children under 10. My summary of all available ticket sales numbers can be found below.

The December ticket sales number means that the Ark sold 652,342 tickets in 2025. These numbers indicate that the Ark will never come close to the 1.4 to 2.2 million attendees per year projected when the Ark was begging/shaking down Grant County, Williamstown, and Kentucky Tourism for perks including 100 acres of land for $2, $200K cash, reduced taxes, a $62 million bond, and $1.825 million dollars/year in sales tax rebates.

Because of massive donations, AiG and its shell companies are not in danger of collapse. They, however, aren’t doing as good as in previous years.

Yeah, no likelihood of imminent demise, unfortunately — I’m sure the leadership is living comfortably for the duration, and has no major concerns for the future, but they’re in a cult that demands the conversion of everyone in the country (the world!) to their weird apocalyptic doomsday religion. They must be hoping for some magical miracle, and it isn’t happening right now.

Perhaps of greater concern is that their cult of personality is led by a personality that isn’t propagating.

If you look at AiG’s website https://answersingenesis.org, more and more of the content is exclusively coming from Ken Ham himself. Most notably, no one appears to be a replacement for Mr. Ham if he ever retires. His onetime appointed successor, Martyn Iles somehow ended his employment with AiG and returned to Australia to form his own conservative ministry. There have been no official reasons given for this departure by either AiG or Martyn Iles himself (if you know, let us hear about it).

That’s a problem with authoritarian cults. They are ruled for life by unpleasant, weird people who alienate everyone around them, and maybe instill in them the ambition to be in charge on their own. I hope I outlive Ken Ham, because I’d really like to see the chaos that will follow on his death.

Kickin’ Thomas Chatterton Williams and The Atlantic? Yes, please

Thomas Chatterton Williams has written up another piece sucking up to the powers-that-be, blaming the “super-woke” for the fact that he’s only on the board of The Atlantic and gets published in The Atlantic and has many peers and colleagues reading The Atlantic and is good buddies with the wise conservatives who steer The Atlantic. It’s as obliviously hypocritical as my short summary sounds, but don’t read The Atlantic to verify — just listen to Thought Slime who quotes bits of the article and also checks the statistics that Thomas Chatterton Williams didn’t bother to read.

Charming. It reminded me of an era when pretentious conservative twits like Williams were everywhere and didn’t have any real power, yet, and we’d point out how insane and ridiculous their claims were, and we didn’t have to worry that they and their friends were going to march up and shoot us. The good old days.

Gruppenführer Bovino slinks away

We’ve gotten very familiar with Greg Bovino, the short stormtrooper who dresses in Hugo Boss and struts around the streets of Minneapolis surrounded by masked thugs — he’s almost comically chickenshit.

The Bovino gang of pathetic dumbshits

He’s going away. Apparently, we’ve finally gotten through to Trump’s narcissistic brain, and he’s become aware of the colossal PR catastrophe that is his Minnesota invasion, has chosen Bovino as his scapegoat, and is sending him back to California.

Sorry, California.

This is the way. Mock the executors of his policies to such a degree that even Trump begins to feel a faint hint of embarrassment, and TACO will look for a way to put the blame on someone. He’s even talking about a concept of a plan to maybe reduce the number of ICE goons in the state.

We should increase the pressure, not by getting any one else shot, but by making it clear that his anti-immigrant policies are failing and making him look weak. The next target: keep up the ridicule on Kristi Noem. I’d like to see her lose her status in this administration and go limping back to South Dakota.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, Bovino is being replaced by Tom Homan, a slobbering lunk who talks like he has a mouthful of marbles — or something — and is going to be equally easy to caricature. Isn’t it remarkable how so many of the Trump acolytes are like goofy comic book villains, with their ready suite of silly features? It’s Dick Tracy or Batman all over again.

Perfection.

Every time I try to feel sympathy for a church, they push me away

I had no idea what Cities Church was like. This is the church in St Paul were protesters disrupted a service, horrified at the fact that one of the pastors was also an ICE field agent. Several people have been arrested, and Bondi’s Department of Justice promises a full investigation of the affair.

I think it is rightful to protest a church that takes advantage of the separation of church and state to get tax exemptions, but then hosts a clergy that preaches against secular government. Don’t burn them down, but at the very least the people should have the right to alert the community that one of the pastors is a hypocrite, on the one hand preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ and on the other hand arresting and deporting and bullying the poor and needy. Let everyone know what a lying fraud he is.

But now I learn about Cities Church’s long-running reputation. One protest is not enough.

“[T]hey are insecure little sexist and racist power-mongers who desire to be God,” wrote Rick Pidcock, a former fundamentalist and worship music expert, in a lengthy exposé for Baptist News Global. According to Pidcock, Cities Church is rooted in a network of far-right churches that teach “male headship and female submission” so extreme that their thought leader, John Piper, has argued that women shouldn’t even occupy management positions where men might have to answer to them.

Parnell himself has written extensively about how men “are given a charge to lead.” Under his leadership, female parishioners teach courses on learning to submit to your husband even when it’s “overwhelming, frustrating, or maybe even impossible,” as it seemed to be for a former church member who told Pidcock that the pastors pressured her to stay in a marriage with an emotionally abusive man who bankrupted his family by spending money on online sex workers.

Among Cities Church’s pastors is Joe Rigney, who has recently become a MAGA media darling because he, along with podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey, has been pushing the idea that empathy is a sin. Rigney has partnered with Doug Wilson, a pastor who has praised race relations under slavery and denounced women’s suffrage, to argue that people are “being manipulated by empathy.” Rigney’s misogyny is never far from the surface, including when he denounced empathy as evidence that “feminism is a cancer” because it allows women to move beyond just being “life-givers and nurturers” and into public spaces, where their allegedly toxic compassion is a “curse.”

“Cities Church is part of the Southern Baptist Convention, which was founded in 1845 over the right to own slaves,” Tim Whitaker, a former Christian nationalist who now works to expose the movement on his YouTube channel, told Salon. “This church should be disrupted. As far as I’m concerned, Jesus would’ve been right with those protesters.”

Whitaker’s view illuminates what the MAGA freakout over this protest is ignoring: that freedom of religion is not a shield against criticism of a church’s teachings, especially when those teachings are impacting the lives of other people. Cities Church, he said, “is home to a pastor that works for a federal agency kidnapping brown-skinned immigrants and killing unarmed citizens.” The anti-empathy and bigoted views taught inside the church are directly affecting people outside of it.

This is the Church of Doug Wilson, not the Church of Jesus, and it’s nothing but a sheltered little pocket of poison infesting the body politic. We have a system in which you are not even allowed to criticize the most evil, odious views if they are said by a man wearing a clerical collar, and it has to stop.

I don’t agree that empathy is a sin, but that’s OK because I feel no empathy for a nest of vipers in my state.

It’s all lies

It’s hard to get going in the morning, because we’re all just swimming in lies. The administration lies non-stop — they’re repeating obvious lies over and over, despite the fact that we have multiple videos that allow us to see with our own eyes how false they are.

The echo is repeated over and over again by the media. Fox News only lies, and the lies are expanding into CBS News with the corruption named “Bari Weiss”. But occasionally they slip up.

Pam Bondi has delivered an ultimatum to Minnesota. They will pull ICE out of the state (they say…don’t believe them) IF we do just three things:

“You and your office must restore the rule of law, support ICE officers, and bring an end to the chaos in Minnesota,” Bondi wrote in the letter, which was published by The New York Times and other outlets. “Fortunately, there are common sense solutions to these problems that I hope we can accomplish together.”

To stop the crisis, Bondi directed Walz to repeal Minnesota’s “sanctuary policies” for migrants and share information on its welfare programs, which have been under scrutiny over alleged fraud in government-supported child care centers and million of dollars in funds stolen through a food aid program dating back to the pandemic.

She also requested access to the state’s voter registration records “to confirm that Minnesota’s voter registration practices comply with federal law.”

So she wants an end to policies that protect immigrants, and she wants unfettered access to all the state information on welfare and … voter registration? Donald Trump wants to be able to learn as much as possible about how our citizens vote. You know, our mostly Democratic citizens. This is a crude attempt to undermine democracy.

The state has told her no, flatly, which is good. I’d rather not have ICE knocking on my door because my record shows I’m a reliable, consistent Democratic voter and they want to intimidate people like me.

Impeach Pam Bondi. It would be a good start.