Signal boosts

A couple of things you probably haven't seen reposted a zillion times already:

Campaign Zero has been collecting the research on what works and what doesn't to reduce police violence. Whether you want to demilitarize the police, fix their training, or replace them with some other people entirely for non-life-threatening situations, Campaign Zero has the details on how.

"Pride, Policing, and the Conservative Politics of My Hero Academia" at Anime Feminist picks apart a worldview you may recognize from a fair amount of Western media.

(Also, My Hero Academia is terrible for other reasons too, please stop helping promote it, sf fans. If you want to encourage people to watch a foreign show using Western superhero tropes, then here are a couple of recommendations: Tiger & Bunny, where the guy who wants to outright execute all criminals is a secondary antagonist and the heroes include an extravagantly non-tragic nonbinary person; and Concrete Revolutio, which is about the messy intersection of freedom, justice, and truth set against a background of 1960s turmoil.)

149 days to go (Week 12)

I've stopped counting distancing time and started counting down the days to the election. Yes, there are many people I can listen supportively to and organizations I can send money to and so forth, but I want to do something too, and the one thing I can do myself to directly change things is vote.

I spoke too soon last week when I said that there hadn't been much action to report in Portland. It emerged that someone did have a big window-smashing party downtown last weekend, and the local police have been using tear gas. Still, things are quite mild compared to many big cities around the US. Nothing's been burned down, the police haven't shot anyone, and the governor refused to send in the National Guard. Yeah, okay, a pretty low bar there.

On the homefront, my table arrived on Thursday. I moved some more books into the garage this morning, then spent the afternoon assembling the table under the watchful gaze of the ferals looking in through the back window. This was a matter of getting a total of 40 self-tapping screws firmly embedded into the particle-board top. My hands feel raw in places, my back and my arms are probably going to hurt like hell tomorrow morning, but I now have a sturdy place to put my laptop and monitors that isn't awkwardly stuck in the middle of the house.