I’ll be heading over to the action at Unthank shortly. right now, @cremebruleepdx is running the Laurelhurst Resist-Dance party. There’s been Fergie. There has been shaking of booties. And loads of cute short-shorts outfits instead of all black, for once. It’s real cute y’all
This is the kind of dance party where the DJ understands the importance of letting the baseline from ginuwine’s Pony carry through for like 10 minutes, and then slide right into WAP, and it is exactly the jam I am here for.
Also I have just been informed that @cremebruleepdx has been hosting these things weekly (except for during the Fire Times) for like a while. And I just don’t know what I’ve been doing with my life that I’ve been missing it this whole time.
@Jahdi_ just did a truly incredible set. I’ll try to post some more of it on the Insta. And then, it being Laurelhurst, a very nice park ranger told the party that neighbors had called the cops with a noise complaint. At 8 pm.
So now the dance party is headed to N Mississippi.
And there’s another party up at the Red House on N Missisippi. This house is a fixture of the neighborhood, and this party is in support of the family here who is facing foreclosure.
while a very chill and very supportive crowd is assembled for this eviction-resistance-cum-block-party, someone up on this balcony has now thrown about a half-dozen glass bottles down toward the crowd. The bottles have hit the street, and the neighboring property’s front lawn.
“Space Walk”- the current jam, offered by the BIPOC family fighting foreclosure “to all our relations”
The speaker describes how sketchy lending practices have led to her family facing eviction, despite multiple generations living in the house, and holding the only deed to the land.
The cash app, venmo, and go fund me for the Red House. they now anticipate a 2-year appeal process to try to remain in their family home. N Missisippi was formerly redlined, and was at the heart of the Black community in North Portland, and has now been heavily gentrified.
Update on the balcony: folks from the block party were given access to the building and have hung a banner reading “eviction is violence” from the railing. Presumably building management wasn’t thrilled that one of their residents was throwing glass bottles at neighbors.
The family has invited people to camp out on their lot tonight in support. Folks are settling in for the evening.
And several more glass bottles from the balcony, most of which appeared to hit the roof of the neighboring house. It appears to be a shared balcony, and lots of people on the ground are now keeping an eye on it.
And some supportive folks up on the balcony just came to the railing and waved, and informed the crowd of the apartment they believed was the source of the glass bottle throwing.
DJ No BS from the Laurelhurst dance party is back on, as is WAP, and this person has a cool-ass fiber optic whip thing.
An enterprising individual has decided to use their vape pen as a smoke machine.
So this is, objectively speaking,
Chill As Hell. I’m gonna head out, but gosh it’s nice to see this crowd get to dance around in smoke intended to make their dancing look cooler, and not smoke intended to hurt their lungs and eyes.
Like I said: objectively chill as hell. @PDocumentarians is on scene now as well.
Doesn’t take much imagination to figure out why two white dudes are running to unseat Hardesty- she’s the only Black lady to ever serve on city council, and the only PPB critic of the bunch.
So save your imagination for the question of “what is Vadim hiding in his mouth?”
look at those eyes. That’s not a smile. That’s not what he’s doing with those teeth.
He might be trapping a small, feebly struggling rodent in there, but he’s definitely not smiling.
Could be worse: he could have zero public experience and the enthusiastic endorsement of the Portland Police Association wweek.com/news/city/2022…
As school starts in a few days, it’s easy to get mad at PPS for their safety protocols, because they are BAD.
However the bigger problems are the directives from the Oregon Health Authority (OHA) and the Oregon Department of Education (ODE). So let’s take a look:🧵
First, we have the PPS “Swiss Cheese Model,” which PPS diagrams as shown. It’s a system that relies on a series of nested and hopefully redundant layers. But if only a few layers are holding up the whole mess, then it’s going to fall apart, and there’s going to be outbreaks. 1/
The big thing to know about the PPS Swiss cheese model is that, however insufficient each layer of protection is in this plan, ODE has also removed a bunch of allowed layers, & PPS’s covid plan is bad precisely because it only meets the state’s minimum covid safety standards. 2/
Once upon a time, Perdue Pharma spent decades convincing doctors that the best medical science supported getting the whole country hooked on opiates.
Anyway now people don’t trust doctors when they say “this new vaccine is the only thing that helps covid, don’t take horse paste.”
Weird how a Byzantine medical system of grotesquely unethical for-profit firms, with wildly unequal access & outcomes, where life-saving care is regularly and arbitrarily withheld, would engender this kind of mistrust in the midst of a devastatingly mismanaged pandemic.
It sure doesn’t help that the main website that the Horse Paste People are getting their info from looks as legit as the Mayo Clinic or WebMD, or that it links to a bunch of seemingly legitimate medical studies that are difficult to parse or evaluate without a medical degree.
Apparently Ted would like to address the multitude of problems facing Portland by asking residents to “Choose love”. I’m not shitting you. That’s his opening speech.
Just to be clear: 1 year after George Floyd's murder & the burning of the 3rd Precinct, after the mayor vowed to permanently preserve George Floyd Square as a memorial & city council voted to disband MPD, the city cleared George Floyd Square & shot someone dead on the same day.