Auchtoon!

As I write this, it has only been a day since an ICE agent in Minneapolis shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother of three. And already it feels like the news cycle has moved past the stunningly brutal summary execution for what amounted to a traffic violation and has moved on to speculation on how this might affect the mid-terms. By the time this is shared Friday it may be off the radar — there is, after all, an excellent chance that a new violation of international law will have caught our attention.

But I’m stuck on sadness and bitterness for now and expect to remain there for a while. Sadness because of the loss of life. Not just Ms. Good but for all the people who have suffered (and will suffer) because a wannabe dictator needs to keep his base frothing with fear and anger. Bitterness because it’s so unnecessary. As Detroit and other cities and towns have proved, real improvements in public safety don’t come from armed thugs set loose upon the citizenry. Real improvements come from coordinated community efforts.

A gentle reminder (especially to myself) that just because Christmas is over doesn’t mean it’s over. The story continues.

Happy holidays, a very Merry Christmas, and peace to all in the New Year!

I’ve seen where right-wing folks have been opining and conjecturing and outright accusing Governor Whitmer of corruption. That she’s on the take from big tech and their billionaires to build their data centers. There doesn’t seem to be actual evidence of that. It’s projection. The Trump administration is absolutely grifting at every turn, and — right from the demagogue playbook — they accuse anybody not 100% with them of doing the very thing that they are actively doing.

But what I believe to be the cause of Whitmer’s increasingly blind passion for pushing data centers in Michigan is her politician instincts to land the big fish. Nothing better than a contract signing or ribbon cutting ceremony for a big facility. Jobs! Prosperity! And all because of me!

The truth is, those big fish often end up to be a big regret. Remember a few years ago and the Foxconn project that Wisconsin reeled in (or thought that they reeled in)? It started as a $10 billion plan for a massive display-panel factory promising 13,000 jobs, and then failed to materialize, leaving taxpayers on the hook. Michigan should be more focused on growing the smaller fish that we have.

I hate to be cynical. But sometimes there are pretty good reasons. Unfortunately, in these United States of America, efforts to resolve the gun violence epidemic offers one of those pretty good reasons.

After incidents at Oxford High School and Michigan State University, Governor Whitmer formed a task force to determine how to avoid future disasters. The recommendations were announced at the end of last month, and they barely made a blip on the news radar. And why would they? It will soon be 13 years since the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, and if that didn’t… well, currently firearm-related injuries are the leading cause of death in children and adolescents (ages 1–19) in the U.S., so obviously it didn’t.

It’s no secret what must be done — we must collectively admit that we have a problem and then pass, fund, and enforce meaningful laws. Not necessarily the exact same laws that, say, the UK passed after the Dunblane massacre in 1996, but certainly reasonable ones like many the Whitmer task force have presented.

Let me be clear: doing nothing is still the worst option. So I will continue to applaud and support efforts to reduce gun violence. But cynically speaking, joining Canada may just be the best option for Michigan.

I suppose I should have done a Thanksgiving Day cartoon. But in a way, this is one. I’m thankful that there are elected officials, leaders, and everyday people who continue to try to do the right thing. They are out there speaking truth to power at a time when it seems like it has never been more difficult to do so.

So maybe next year something with pardoning turkeys, pilgrim immigrants behaving badly, and whatnot. But this year, I’m just gonna focus on the grateful and support the courageous.

Last month, the Trump administration and its FBI director made a big show of arresting some folks in Dearborn, charging them with plotting a potential terrorist attack. Two, Mohmed Ali and Majed Mahmoud, have now been charged. Guilty or not, there is little doubt that the outsized attention came from the fact that these men are of Arab decent.

The MAGA crowd in general has long been suspicious of Michigan’s large Arab-American population, Dearborn in particular with its Arab-American majority and mayor. Some even like to go there and try to pick fights, as happened earlier this week.

This sort of behavior is embarrassing and dangerous. But it’s especially difficult to reconcile when the MAGA leader welcomes into the White House the ruler of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman (also known as MBS), fawns over him, excuses his brutal transgressions, and happily offers him premium military equipment for “deals.” It’s almost as if Trump would sell out his base for his own personal benefit.

It’s really weird to have achieved an age where I can feel both nostalgic and bitter about the past. But here we are.

Back in the tech boom of the late 1990s, I worked for a startup software company that got bought out by a West Coast dotcom, so I kind of had a front-row seat. And one of the true beliefs of the true believers was that this new era of work would be different.

They would derisively point to legacy companies like General Motors and say things like, “Our leaders aren’t like theirs — stogy old farts in three-piece suits and country club memberships. We like our workers, we care about our workers, and we care about the environment and doing good, positive work.”

And I guess in a sense they were right; these tech leaders turned out to be different from those old-style corporate bosses — they are exponentially worse. The Elon Musks, the Peter Thiels — they are somehow greedier, more irredeemably power hungry, and just plain more evil than the Roger Smiths and Lee Iacoccas of yore.

Michigan needs to be very careful about deals we make for data centers with these hyper-level robber barons.

Monday, November 10 is the 50th anniversary of the freighter SS Edmund Fitzgerald sinking in Lake Superior during a storm, with the loss of the entire crew of 29 men. It was a tragedy and treated as such at the time. I would hope it would be treated the same now, but I have some doubts about how long cable news could stay on topic before spinning off to pundit land.

It’s not that I’m nostalgic. I’d rather be a Great Lakes sailor today than in 1975. It’s much safer now, due in no small part to lessons learned. And weather forecasting has improved exponentially. Meteorologists now have much better tools for seeing storms like the one that sunk the Edmund Fitzgerald.

The Detroit Free Press had an excellent article about that this past Sunday. The storm was a “Panhandle Hook.” The article explains:

“A Panhandle Hook, a powerful, low-pressure winter storm system that develops in the Texas and Oklahoma Panhandle regions. After forming, the storm initially moves east and then sharply curves, or “hooks,” northeastward, often heading straight for the Great Lakes region. It picks up energy along the way, rapidly intensifying and often leading to blizzard conditions with strong winds and heavy snowfall, especially north of the low-pressure center.”

If you look closely at the news ticker on the TV in second panel, I make a crack about the President blaming a modern-day freighter-wrecking storm on Canada. It may be imagined, but Trump being confidently, incuriously wrong is always predictable.

There is so much going on in the country and the world right now. And, as you may have noticed, most of it not good. War, starvation, grift, economic turmoil, constitutional crisis, rising authoritarianism — well, you get it.

It’s awful. But it’s also compelling. Cable news and social media are a constant feed of train wrecks, one after the other (with an occasional cat video), and we can’t not look. Which is a problem because while we’re locked in on that stuff, we can miss the local stuff that we actually have degree of control over.

So the cartoon is a bit of a self-own. As much as I like to think of myself as above the fray, I most certainly am not. I just realized that we have an election next week! It’s all local stuff — city council members and school millage requests — but that’s important. It’s where I live.

Hopefully, you are not playing catch-up like me and have thought ahead about what’s on your ballot, done your due diligence, and are planning to make (or have already made) an informed vote. If you haven’t, there’s still time. Don’t worry — all that terrible news will be waiting for us when we get back to it.

It can be very difficult to understand why people would consistently vote against their own best interests — why they would support policies over and over that create financial hardships. What could possibly be the motivation?

President Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s, using the vernacular and best example of the time, explained it this way:

“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pockets. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”