1/ Let's do this.

The news out of Portland 2023 is grim. The murder rate quadrupled in five years. Drug overdoses doubled between 2019 and 2022, with the state ranking second in the nation for opioid addiction and last in drug treatment. 2/ Robberies were up 50% in 2022 alone, and after having guns pulled on its baristas multiple times, a downtown coffee roastery closed in April, telling the public, “We cannot continue operation here as we cannot ensure the safety of our team and customers."

Reading about theft of instruments from Brian Jonestown Massacre, I learn they were recovered by PDX police "at a homeless encampment by the I-405 onramp near North Kerby Avenue [where] there had also been a homicide." This is the corner of my former house
kgw.com/article/news/l… I had a conversation yesterday about cities dying. I believe in rejuvenation, and human capital, and my middle name is Pollyanna. However, terrible things have have happened to Portland, things done in the sometimes vicious spirit of good intentions

A friend tagged me so here's my 2-cents: Those in predominantly non-Native world can encounter activists and their sometimes interesting/can be cockamamie demands. I'm not full-time in Native world, but I am adjacent, with a half-Creek daughter and 30+ years among her family/1

https://twitter.com/axios/status/1595386799534350343

As for the ideas proposed in @axios article, I have not heard one peep. In fact, there's this send-up, from @RezDogsFX, on which my daughter works and which is filmed in the hometown - Okmulgee - where her father grew up and his family lives still

Oh my god I am going to be sick. I lived with D - or rather, he lived in a school bus in my yard in West Hollywood in 1987/1988. I have many billions of stories to tell you about D, but let's start with he called me "Sis" because that is what we became, brother and sister

https://twitter.com/DeadKennedys/status/1586433597325512704

My brother worked the door of a big club at the time, Power Tools, and knew everyone. I'm not sure how or even if he'd ever DH and his friend Mark, who showed up and we had an empty lot and sure, they could stay. The house was theirs, I cooked; we all hung out every night

I have been disturbed all week by the news out of Portland. The smashing of bus stops, the street racing (illegal) and gunplay that spills from Columbia Blvd. on weekends into the city...

https://twitter.com/wtfportland1/status/1564321009888788480?s=21&t=dD5SrSb26gIyxXvbt3z2Qw

...the 9 shootings/4 deaths over the weekend, the DMs that warn, look out for major chaos on the mayor's birthday...

Short Portland thread. This scene, which happens weekends down on Columbia Blvd in NE Portland has been the site of street racing for a few years, obviously getting rowdier/more dangerous

https://twitter.com/wtfportland1/status/1564323978185175040

I stayed near there during some summer 2020 protest reporting and damn, it was loud, if not with gunshots. I take it things have changed in Portland, with regards to gunplay and, unfortunately, murder

"Recent activity in downtown Portland is just 42% of what it was in 2019." This is absolutely unsurprising. The violence perpetrated on downtown in 2020/2021 was sustained and severe. For months residents were subjected to noise, smoke; sometimes teargas/1
oregonlive.com/business/2022/… We are not going to forget this was during the pandemic, when downtown businesses were struggling terribly. Add to this having their windows bashed and stores tagged "ACAB" et al, sometimes nightly. There's no way to survive/2

My daughter texted me this photo twenty minutes ago. "What’s the feeling there? Pleased?" I texted back. "Oklahoma has about the strictest abortion laws in the country." My phone rang a few minutes later. "So I had to drive to Shawnee," she said, from her car. She said she was hungry and there was nothing but this one diner, which she went on. "Fox News is on and there's a photo of Trump on the wall, the people all know each other and they're all incredibly nice."

As the air raid sirens were sounding this morning, my friend Oksana in Lviv sent me a parable she wrote. You will forgive the translating from Cyrillic; Google and I have done our best:
THE MAJORS, SIMPLE, CUNNING OR ROUGH: Who Will Win the Neighborhood War?/1 A dude nicknamed Cunning lives next door to a stupid but strong neighbor named Rough. They haven't liked each other for a long time. Other neighbors don't like either of them, but they themselves never worry, no matter how many windows they break or how many houses they burn./2

1/ On July 18, 2020, @Jacob__Siegel of @tabletmag, @MattWelch of @reason and I were having drinks in Matt’s yard in Brooklyn.

“Nancy,” Jake said, in his signature gravel voice. “What the fuck is going on in Portland?”

Matt looked at me. 2/ “You have to go,” he said, meaning back to Portland, where I had until recently lived and which was currently under siege each night.

I texted @kmanguward at Reason the next morning and told her, I wanted to go to Portland. Go, she said. I was on the plane that day.

Portland homicides 2022 as of last night: 22. As of this morning: 24. Last year there were 92. At this rate we will surpass that in June. @PortlandPolice presser 1pm PST Correction: no presser. PPB is making a PIO available at 1pm. This all seems very slow to me

I was talking the other day with @MattWelch, about how, when I first wanted to be a journalist, I would write articles and fax (!) them cold to various Los Angeles publications. I never received a response but for once, from Cathy Seipp/1 "Of course it was Cathy," Matt said, of our late dear friend, as barbed as she was courteous./2

I was having a perfectly nice night last night, watching the founders of @innocence receive a well-deserved Milton Friedman Award for Advancing Liberty, when a friend texted me the following, with the message, "You'll love this." vice.com/en/article/88n… I did not read it right away. I was watching/hearing about what the Innocence Project has accomplished, freeing people from wrongful convictions after 15, 25, sometimes more than 40 years. It was heartbreaking and uplifting, making you want to very much fight for freedom

I deleted a tweet that I need to make stronger. For 15 months, I have been explaining that black bloc protesters in Portland are the MAIN source of violence. Proud Boys and right-wing groups rolled through four times in 2020. Then who tf was committing the violence every night? .@mtaibbi links video to what happened in Portland this weekend. THIS HAPPENED ALL THE TIME WHEN I WAS ON THE GROUND! Taibbi is right to write, "It’s time the wider press took more notice, because this is not an aberration with this type of activist" but what took so f*king long?

A little Amazon publishing primer for the hell of it. You publish traditionally, your sales figures are likely opaque, and how/when outlets are pushing your book? Well, they’re not, not after the honeymoon period. If you publish with an Amazon imprint - I’m with Little A - they need not deal with shelfspace or buybacks, which means it makes sense for them to keep pushing your book whenever. My book came out in 2018 and i just received this, and far from the first time they’ve run a special

I had an interesting conversation with a chef friend from Portland, Oregon. As is unsurprising in our current moment, there are those in Portland’s food community engaged in an intramural game of, “You can’t cancel me if I cancel you first.” Sometimes people can hear in advance the knives being sharpened. My friend did, and contacted the key knife sharpener, demanding to know what evidence the sharpener had.

So I'm reading this and seeing, more than I previously have, how people--pretty much always the same types of people--fall for the idea of becoming revolutionaries and begin trajectories identical to those who came before. Call it the ideologues' do-si-do amazon.com/Tonight-Bombed… You know how this dance goes: protests, violence, breakdown of traditional units, give over the kids to be raised by the group (gotta show commitment!), poisonings (hey, Rajneeshees!), "communism didn't work bc they didn't do it right," Stalin, that old softie...

No time like the present! Tonight, my daughter Tafv Sampson , storied the following on Instagram So yes, that's her grandpa, Will Sampson. He died in 1987; I was with him when he died; I was also with Tafv's dad when he died, in 2019; this is all a little too much but some back story here nytimes.com/2017/09/29/sty…

To the people creeping onto my posts saying, “Everyone *I* know in Portland says this is all overblown, damage is to a few square blocks”: I don’t believe you. The people you know may *like* the direction the city is taking, but it is not normal, and it is not a few square blocks The blocks around the federal building and Justice Center have incurred the most damage. This will never change. The movement, such as it is, needs enemies, needs rage calories, and the police, whether good or ill, will perennially supply these.

“Do you want to see it? Do you have time?” D asks. It’s the start of the Derek Chauvin trial and D, who works in finance in downtown Minneapolis, drives to the area around Lake Street, scene of the riots following the death of George Floyd. “So the first one happens on Wednesday. On Thursday, Mayor Frey holds a press conference and says, ‘I understand your pain. Everything you do is probably justified’ – I’m paraphrasing – ‘and by the way… we’re pulling the cops.’ All hell’s gonna break loose, right?

This is adapted from last week's Substack; go ahead and subscribe, nancyrommelmann.substack.com. Some of us have been writing and podcasting for a week about Donald McNeil, who left the New York Times today, after 45 years and a week of outrage from some of his colleagues, for using the n-word in context during a student trip to Peru in 2019.