The pedestrian perspective is awesome at providing a granular sense of the stress immigrants from Latin America are experiencing right now. Seen it in Sacramento faces, felt the vibe-shift here in Portland.
You see the trauma in an early-morning worker’s face, one of the persons who prepares your city for you. In Sactown they hit 7-11 at sunrise. America circa 2025 means they will glance at you furtively. No more unspoken early-morning camaraderie at the coffee station—that privilege is a casualty of race war.
Inside of their yellow “Caution” tape, two construction workers on a modest Northwest Portland job steal peeks at bystanders, as if ready to take off should you be here to snatch. Down in LA bus ridership is depressed, as my persecuted old neighbors hide in their homes. It doesn’t take an empath to worry about wages lost and the pressure that’s added to these humans’ increasingly stir-crazy households.
Pressure that spills over into classrooms and onto school playgrounds.
In my beloved downtown Los Angeles, businesses are failing, to fund a hate that’s making rich White men back East still richer.
Government-funded larceny—that’s how history will describe the wild and impactful Term Two gambit. Future generations will talk about the moral bereftness of America’s Christian community.
Last month my sister me asked when I gave up on the evangelical faith that we were raised in. I told her that in the moment I first released marijuana from my lungs I was done with religious belief. The truth, however, is I was merely done being a Jehovah’s Witness.
Jesus and the gang are just fine by me.
More than okay. My first favorite book was the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society’s banger youth volume Listening to the Great Teacher, a piece of writing far bigger for me than James Baldwin’s essays or Beverly Cleary’s body of work. The J-Dubs got to me first.
In young adulthood my father would teach me bits about the Koran, but the essence of my ethos is something like Psychedelic Christianity.
Colloquially, J-dubs call their faith The Truth. Being an evangelical Christian isn’t a thing I could renounce; the teachings of Jesus Christ shaped me, and I was raised proselytizing door-to-door. The Truth never stopped being my calling; only the religious text has been adapted.
The 2025 truth is that all of us with Christian upbringings ought to be reclaiming and loudly repping the parts of it that we can stand, to discredit the phonies and to better engage with all who might recognize the evils of mass deportation. The lives of trans people already have been upheaved and a heavy patriarchal hand—the likes of which you’ve never seen—is poised to push women’s rights back a century. But the ripping apart of families is where the essentially or lapsed Christians ought to first throw their strategic energy and conversation.
Flyover Country Wypipo may never become able to wrap their minds around gender equality or sexuality as a spectrum or the all-around utility of Black history. But a few clearly shared immigrant facts can persuade the necessary few, tilting the opinion polls that are the DC power brokers’ true god.
My over-under on Trump girl rapes is 17.
Ours is a fractured nation being called on promises it could not keep. Here’s the thing though: White supremacists like Seattle’s Christopher Ruffo, former Silicon Valley CEO Elon Musk, Santa Monica native Stephen Miller, Office of Management and Budget villain Russell Vought, Steve Bannon, JD Vance, and the Queens klansman’s son himself—they all pervert Christianity in ways that are actually reversible, for some who observe.
For you to reach back is a radical ask, but we’re not going to teach their pawns Audre Lorde. For our emergency purposes, Judith Butler takes too long. The backwards-looking folks who have a love affair with fear ought to be met on their terms, or the most vulnerable of us are in for a shitty future.
And your shitty future will feel worse, because deep down you’re likely Christian.
By my junior year at Sandusky High School it was clear that the West Coast was my destination. (Though I had no real means of making that happen) This week’s events would have thrilled me, had I been privy to our impossible stakes.
10 West Coast Health Alliance: The Super Friends of sane medicine
On Wednesday, Florida became the first state to do away with vaccine mandates. Hours later, California, Oregon and Washington responded to this harbinger of Covid hell by forming the West Coast Health Alliance. Florida being Florida in itself was not the reason the three states are teaming up so much as it is the general dismantling of American public health via the dismissal of respected leaders.
Yesterday, Hawaii joined what might one day be called The Coalition of the Breathing. Bobby Kennedy, Jr won’t be the death of us.
Honolulu Star-Advertiser
“As an island state, we understand how critical it is to protect our communities from preventable disease,” said Hawaii governor Josh Green, a former emergency room doctor. “By joining the West Coast Health Alliance, we’re giving Hawaii’s people the same consistent, evidence-based guidance they can trust to keep their families and neighbors safe.”
Lil Hit
Pretty Gritty Tours co-founder Chris Staudinger is out with Secret Tacoma, a book that offers insights into 177 of the city’s disproportionate number of strange places and landmarks.
Tacoma Weekly
An East Bay surprise
Fijiana is from Richmond and can rap her ass off. It’s infrequent to hear Richmond props go viral online, and even more rare to hear a celebration of Fijian roots in rap.
9 Harry Ford’s finally on the big club, but when will he get to play?
He’s a top-40 league prospect and the Mariners’ organization’s most anticipated call-up, but Ford hasn’t sniffed the field since being joining the team on Monday. Fan belief that the steady-hitting catcher could have helped Seattle avoid being swept by Tampa Bay is bolstered by the two hitless at-bats given to struggling backup backstop Mitch Garver.
Sodo Mojo
In 2023, Ford—whose parents are British—was the first player to hit two home runs in World Baseball Classic play before their 21st birthday.
With Cal Raleigh playing at an MVP level, playing time looks to be a long-term issue for 2021’s 12th overall pick, who hit .283/.408/.460 in 97 games for the Rainers, along with 16 home runs, 18 doubles, seven stolen bases, 68 runs and 74 RBI.
Lil Hit
“gsw vs sac” is the opening track on Earl Sweatshirt’s mesmerizing new wrekkit, one of the most highly-anticipated releases in a surprisingly strong year for hip hop albums.
Live Laugh Life
The Full Herb Caen
Regular WCS readers know about the Central Valley farmers’ terrible rat problem...
Don’t get so numb to the spectacle of our present political crisis that you don’t take in some parts of this week’s RFK, Jr Senate grilling. I’ve seen little like it, ever…
Dude is the comeuppance for America’s overwrought love affair with the Kennedy name…
Seems like the demand to change the Washington Commanders’ name evaporated into the media ether…
Just another intentionally racist outburst that manages to take the heat off in this topsy turvy reality…
That the federal level is disproportionately made up of Black women is a prime reason the government-deconstruction crowd has underestimated how critical that work is…
The producers of Project 2025 have studies indicating our reaction to their various upcoming oppression. Our job is to surprise them…
8 It’s low-key important that the Import Price Indice isn’t dropping
If you’re like me, you have heard DC’s orange bankruptcy king throw out an insanely big range of insanely big revenue numbers that are the supposed result of his tariffs. When I heard a few days ago that the Import Price Indice is telling of a dark goods cost future, I had to look that shit up.
The shit just sounded important.
Now I know that if import prices were declining, it might indicate that at some of new tariffs are being “absorbed by foreign producers in the form of lower producer prices.” That’s not what’s happening.
Yale Budget Lab
According to the report released Tuesday: “[I]mport prices are essentially close to where they would have been expected pre-2025. Point estimates are, if anything, higher not lower year-to-date. Since January, non-petroleum import prices — which omit volatile, dollar-denominated oil prices — are up 0.3%. Even judged against pre-2025 trend, import prices are still 0.2% higher. This outcome is exactly the opposite of what we would expect if foreigner producers were absorbing some of the tariff costs.”
Lil Hit
The hidden histories of queer cannabis pioneers such as Dennis Peron and Brownie Mary were highlighted at West Hollywood’s The Abbey late last month.
Los Angeles Blade
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7 If you understand the NBA salary cap, PTFO’s exposé blew you away
This week we learned that LA Clippers owner Steve Balmer got all-time great forward Kawhi Leonard a four-year, $28 million endorsement gig for which dude did absolutely nothing.
The biggest story in sports is best comprehended if you understand the significance of the National Basketball Association salary cap. Because player salaries are strictly limited based on the league’s collective bargaining agreement, the critical game-within-a-game is building a roster that conforms to mandated limits.
Seven million bucks a season in this sport can buy you another quality wing player. Which the Clippers did.
Pablo Torre Finds Out / The Athletic
No other American pro league’s success hinges on such a tightly-regulated pay structure.
The Athletic also reported that Leonard’s management team asked for an extra—and improper—$15 million in endorsements upon joining the Toronto Raptors in 2019.
One cannot help but wonder how many circumventing deals of this nature are hiding around the league.
Lil Hit
In 1944, FDR suggested that Vice President Henry Wallace author an article about the looming threat of American fascism. It appeared in the New York Times and offered that, “the American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact.”
Carnegie Mellon University
If you aren’t planning for this, you are supporting MAGA
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6 As well as health security, Cali’s got unions!
One of the pure joys of cutting loose from the United States would be ditching widespread anti-union practices. Lord knows we have enough inclination to be our own worst enemies. (See sex app promiscuity and over-imbibing in strong weed) Having to carry opposition to labor organizing is a bridge too far.
Capital & Main
In fact, American public support for unions is at 70 percent, almost the highest mark in 60 years. But the national membership numbers are slightly down, the continuation of a long, steady decline.
“In California, the union labor movement is pretty robust,” said Enrique Lopezlira, director of the UC Berkeley Labor Center, a low-wage work program and one of the authors of the report. “It’s a testament to the continuing efforts of unions here to organize workers and to really get engaged in state-level policy to provide better opportunities for those workers.”
Lil Hit
After a harrowing summer of budget cuts and layoffs, 97 percent of employees at Sequoia, Yosemite and Kings Canyon—park rangers, scientists, biologists, photographers, geographers, among other federal employees—have voted to unionize.
Mother Jones
One Caen scarcely believe
There’s a scenario in the new reality of NFL ownership where Mina Kimes gets promoted to an executive position…
Or commissioner…
One game into the NFL season and I am wondering how these mwn are going to keep talking over minutiae of minimal consequence through February…
As part of my planned Truth and Reconciliation Celebration Weekend any comedian who said that there was something wrong with you for not tolerating racists jokes can offer their apologies…
Bonus apology points if for reformed “free speech advocates” who volunteer to be can be kicked in the nuts…
5 LA Taco’s heroic third-act twist
I have been to Taco Madness and reasonably concluded that it was the best LA Taco would ever do. Proud to say that I was so very wrong about the 19-year-old brand. With the formerly street food-centric website’s hard summer pivot to ICE invasion coverage, the site has shown that local savvy cuts across reporting genres.
Comprehensive coverage is of premium value when so many workplace and small business issues have been shoved into the shadows
Huffington Post / Capital & Main
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