The play: Use the crime trope to handcuff DC while burying the factors that contribute to American crime, with an option to go nationwide. The Smithsonian museum is flanked out wide.
On two.
You know the play that your opponent is about to throw at you. Your favorite half backs throughout NFL history have run the sweep, with massive blockers in front of them.
Walter Payton was the greatest, most jazz poet on the sweep, The most usual sweep runner though was Greg Pruitt, the scat back who finished career with the radars but became All-Pro with the 1970s Browns. Pruitt was squat and fast and he benefited from the now-astonishing tear-away jerseys of the 1970s. On the sweep he could be unstoppable.
Picture a Greg Pruitt sweep coming at you. They no longer have the element of surprise, and you’ve got that going for ya.
Hiiiike… HIKE!
“Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others.” —Aristotle
The sweep is a power play. The power of this iteration lies in the racialized shorthand of crime as an issue. The play punches above its weight. Yet, you know how to stop the sweep because you have seen it not work countless times. Packaged highlights only make it seem like Greg Pruitt went for a 60-yard score every single time.
In fact, you have seen sweeps in which he got tackled for losses, tear-away jersey be damned. Maybe he fumbled once, because of a missed blocking assignment? You wanna say that the stripped ball was returned for a touchdown, though you cannot say for sure.
Your side is forced to play small, with so many more big guys having joined the other side. So at the snap you must go local, keeping your mayor accountable. It won’t be enough to finally learning the names of your City Council members, Supervisors, and state legislators. You’re going to pre-empt their compromises, loudly.
Your cousin who opposes the Whites House but is waiting for God to sort it all out? They’re going to need a talking-to. Possibly two talking-to’s. And if your defense is tenacious, you might get them and your local politician dialoguing about the gap between America’s hostile response to the crack cocaine crisis and that of fentanyl, the habit that became pretext for altering trade on Earth.
That would be the equivalent of a stripped ball was returned for a touchdown. It doesn’t happen often, but it can’t happen at all if you don’t play defense like you mean it.
The way you stop the sweep is to string out the play, giving the offense as little room to operate as possible. We can’t stop fascism on this down. We can only hope to contain it.
Sustain.
One needs 12 asks to get an AI Black woman…
Click through for one blonde woman’s investigation of AI White privilege.
10 years ago Bojack Horseman was my jam
Us entertaining ourselves to death.
Ever since Ronald Reagan got October Surprised into the White House this dynamic has been surface-level visible in the text of This American Life. The tragicomedy of our toxic fascination has been such that we can’t help but laugh, to survive.
In 2014 we began sad-laughing differently and deeper, as Bojack Horseman debuted. Ostensibly show about Hollywood, the six-season Netflix series used the insanely specific to illuminate an emerging national aesthetic. A sensibility of sadness. Eleven years after the series’ debut, we are living in the consequence of the resignation.
Netflix
Back in the 90s, the six-season series’ closing theme song reminds, our eponymous lead character was in a very big TV show. Bojack’s Los Angeles is filled with both anthropomorphized characters and regular humans and exponentially more animal wordplay than The Flintstones.
Above all of the meta, inside showbiz jokes, the world-class character development, and unpredictable plotting, always looking out at us is our unhealthy relationship with fame, be we fans or enablers or even stars.
Last weekend I had my first infused preroll in ages. After the second hit I exhaled and said, “That’s too much, man!”
Lil Hit
Salem-Keizer school board director Satya Chandragiri has a long record of spouting Trump-inspired lunacy. In a late-night Facebook post, this week he referred to his board colleagues as “a cabal.”
Salem-Keizer Proletiariat
Find yourself thinking about the ideas, personalities, and information that you’ve gleaned from West Coast Sojourn? It would be nice if you were to “Buy Me a Coffee.” Still cooler modes of appreciation can be delivered via Venmo or GoFundMe.
9 Who birthed those Newsom Tweets? Viva Zapata!
The ALL CAPS style. The pitch-perfect mimicry. A Democrat has made waves in political media, and the shock is very real. The abrupt changes in social media style for Gov Gav Newsom style hit the world last week and, and his digital director, Camile Harper Zapata, is getting the bulk of credit.
Mítu / Politico
On X, Zapata extended credit to the entire Newsom press office team.
I have to believe there are a hundred women like Zapata out there, ready to make non-fascists pols more effective.
A Politico poll says that 25 percent of Californians would like Gov Gav to run for POTUS in 2028. Ten percent prefer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Lil Hit
Tomorrow night’s credible-sounding downtown rave is sponsored by The City of San Francisco’s Transbay Joint Powers Authority, and I don’t quite know what to think about that.
48 Hills
8 Righteous Eddie Glaude has grown ready to strike, so it’s definitely time
I appreciate a well-written, slow burning post, which makes me an anomaly among 2025 humanity. Not only are we a nation of dim readers, we’re a harried lot: Responsibilities call us, as do the next TikTok and that Tubi documentary we’re trying to finish.
Which is why writers to the left of Satan’s minions must commit to deep-sixing long buildups when dealing with issues of great immediacy. Were it not for dude’s compelling title, what he’s going on about would have been unclear.
“I know folks have bills to pay. Responsibilities are what they are. I know people cannot afford to lose their jobs in this employment environment. Uncertainty makes us cling to the security of safe and cautious choices. But, I believe, a general strike is needed. Let’s coordinate our sick days, our vacation time, let’s teach in, let’s figure out together how to shut this country down for a day or two. And for what end? To show them OUR power.”
We wish Mother Glaude the most comfortable journey.
Lil Hit
The Department of Fish and Wildlife executed 21 search warrants around Laytonville and Ukiah last week, leading to tens of thousands of pounds of processed cannabis being discovered. The government then destroyed the weed, because our cannabis logic still has some ridiculous kinks in it.
KRON
Open talk of diversity and other transgressions
Marc Weidenbaum, Wendy Zeng, Keith Knight, Hannah Smith, Intisar Abioto, Ngaio Bealum, Madison Margolin, John Yoo, Rian Dundon, Chef Maverick, Lloyd Francis, and a whole lotta Lev Anderson.
Cable news polling distortions
Without a doubt, the percentage of all Americans who can speak one coherent sentence about Ukraine’s war is under 50 percent. Cable news producers: If you want the polling content to be something more than entertainment or propaganda, your numbers must have context. Factor in the “don’t knows.”
The full Herb Caen
There’s no truth to the rumor that Sydney Sweeney is laying low in South Africa until she can see which way things will break stateside…
The George Floyd mural on the corner of 136th and Powell got painted over last weekend…
That is how things are going stateside…
Hollywood won’t fully commit to resistance until the men’s hair restoration protocols get interrupted…
I’ve known since my Ohio adolescence that a small chunk of America hates niggers on sight. They told me themselves, at keggers…
Never imagined these fools would be running the show, unfettered…
Every day that there’s no campaign to explain the probability of 2026 election shenanigans is a day of MAGA empowerment…
7 Homelessness apocalypse to arrive right on schedule
It takes hella effort not to recognize that America’s poor are poised to go into free fall. For a few million unhoused, a trip to for-profit prison is on the itinerary. Others face disease, ugly street death, and other outcomes as yet unimagined.
Too grim? Sorry. Let me work more on my bedside mannner.
Government funding for housing has dried up, right? If you were fully evil, what would you pair with the end of federally funded housing? Why, criminalization of homelessness, of course.
If you were truly evil you would know this.
Spokane Spokesman Review
The Whites House aims to relax judicial precedent and other government “obstacles” that restrict the involuntary commitment of homeless people who pose a risk or who “cannot care for themselves,” “in appropriate facilities for appropriate periods of time.” One person’s obstacle is another one’s safeguard.
Weird, unassuming sentence near the Spokesman story’s bottom: “Former Mayor Nadine Woodward on Sunday, for instance, suggested that the scourge of overdose deaths could justify the deployment of the National Guard to Spokane, akin to the Trump administration’s recent actions in D.C.”
Lil Hit
You are swimming in the primordial soup of machine cognition. There are bound to be growing pains and collateral damage.” That doesn’t mean you’re wrong to be feeling that twinge of insanity.
The Atlantic
‘There goes the aunt with corn-husk hair’
Video of the year. “Sabado” is so funny and musical and full insight. All of the Brown MAGA types are at this party. In case you don’t speak Spanish, here is the translation. Here is the full song. The artist’s album hits next week.
6 The systematic killing of Palestinian athletes. Don’t look away
Recorded right after the targeted killing of Al Jazeera’s Palestine coverage team, this consideration of Israel’s sustained terror campaign against Palestinian jocks might end up the most disturbing piece of media you consume today. Guest Leyla Hamed, a UK-based journalist, weighs in on how Israel is weaponizing the immense potential of athletics.
The End of Sport
“For decades, Israel has been targeting its policy in sports. Bombing stadiums, arresting and harassing players, restricting of movement so athletes can train or compete,” Hamed says.
Lil Hit
LA creator Emily Goss has followed up her seven-minute abortion short, A Little House in Aberdeen with Breakroom, a remarkable 45-second film. Goss thinks you ought to make a short short, too.
MovieMaker
5 James Dobson, avatar of the under-scrutinized Christian right
That you may not recognized the name of this top-tier power-broker—and board member of our times’ architectural design team—testifies to the unity and organization of America’s conservative Christians. They waited patiently for more than four decades, incrementally takning control of the GOP.
Dobson, founder of the highly influential Focus on the Family, died on Wednesday at 89. The minister was that specific kind of turd whose passing inspires remarks of horror and wonder.
Daily KOS / Defector
Writes Albert Burneko: “James Dobson was a nasty dude. He liked to beat children and dogs with a belt and to rain misery and punishment on the vulnerable; we know all of this about him because he said as much in public, repeatedly, over a long and rancid public life. He enlisted a whole bunch of Ideology—patriarchy, social conservatism, utterly fake upside-down Christianity—in service of those basic motivations, not only to justify his own appetite for and personal acts of sadism and domination, but to cast punishment and predation as far out into the world as he could manage.”
I’m not beating that. Are you?
Lil Hit
Five days after fighting Jake Paul in Anaheim, former world champion Julio Caesar Chavez, Jr., 39, was picked up by ICE in Studio City, put on a plane to Mexico City, and arrested at the airport for allegedly being a henchman for Sinoloa cartel. Ouch.
BBC
Caen of corn
People online are still buzzing about the Black man found hanging on a bike trail tree in Oakland’s Dimond District…
In the minutes after Putin and Trump met in Alaska, Sara Smith of the BBC’s Americast described Trump as ‘happy, or at least that’s his outward countenance”…
That phrase would be lovely if much more frequently used to describe POTUS’ mind state…
Here that 60 Minutes Australia Epstein piece that managed to get removed from YouTube...
Michael Franti fans are looking for refunds after the SF-identified artist was caught adhering to pre-2015 American music industry norms…
In the music and film biopics they always elide the blowies.
4 The San Diego Padres’ other nickname is the Friars
That’s just a fun fact about my new favorite baseball team, which in a few hours at Petco Field will be taking on the West-leading Los Angeles Dodgers—a team owned by ICE collaborators. Let us pray.
Looks to be a good time in San Diego. After an up-and-down series against a bad Colorado Rockies team, the most expensive team in baseball history plays its second-straight series against the team that’s trailing them. Let us wish the Dodgers leaden bats, tired arms, and drunken strategy.
MLB.com
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