What law is

First the black, white & blue anti-Black Lives Matter flag flew outside of Trump rallies, then on stage, next to the US flag; in Wisconsin last week it replaced the US flag behind Trump; now the American flag, with all its complications, is just gone, & a fascist banner waves. Growing dominance of “Blue Lives Matter” flag [within] Trumpism suggests a formation close to but not identical with both white nationalism & police state: I’ll call it “police nationalism.” Identity founded on fetishization of an explicitly brutal & implicitly racist idea of policing. Police nationalists…are mostly not law enforcement. Rather, they’re people who form an identity, a sense of themselves, through fantasizing punishment for others…Police nationalism allows them to fetishize force as “law” and relieves them of having to think about what law is.

We have a president who has openly said he might not respect the outcome of our election. We have to be ready if he claims victory before votes are counted, tries to stop counting, or refuses to accept a loss…[We are] prepping people for the possibility of a coup while keeping people focused on a strong, robust election process. After all, the best way to stop a coup is to not have one.

Most of us aren’t taught how to respond when someone shares with us a really heavy piece of information…here are a number of potential failure modes: we try and problem-solve for our teammate, we make this about ourselves/our similar experiences, our worry about hurting this person keeps us from responding, sometimes we don’t set effective boundaries. So what can—or should—we do instead?

[This is] a message to white people in organizations which are failing on inclusion: we have to speak up, and keep speaking up; to use pester power even if we have no other power. Yes, you might feel like a jerk. That’s fine! This isn’t about you! Do what you can do. And if there is limited space and resources, you may have to get out of the way. You’re not losing out yourself; it’s sharing as it always should have been shared.

At first, [the ghost pepper donut] tastes pretty much like a regular strawberry frosted donut, too, which is to say it is alarmingly sweet. Then, after the sweetness fades, the spice emerges. It’s not an aftertaste exactly. It’s more like a second, separate taste. There is no real synergy between the two flavors. It’s just one … and then the other. Imagine a Dropkick Murphys song that ends with a flamenco breakdown. (The Dropkick Murphys, by the way, are also from Boston. That’s actually the moral of Martin Scorsese’s 2006 film The Departed.)