Good Things Friday (364) and Link Love
February 20, 2026
1. My two crow friends haven’t been by in weeks but two ravens visited this week so I signaled treats to them, same as I do my crow friends, and they came over!
They are always braver than the local crows and showed it this time by hanging out by the food spot even after they’d cleaned up the offering, and let me come close enough to roll a few additional rounds of treats over to them.
The crows always require me to be a minimum distance away, and retreat as soon as they fill their beaks. They’ll come back for seconds and thirds but hanging out in the vicinity while I approach is still a solid no.
I can’t stop laughing at this, the last paragraph is priceless: Unalaska is the nation’s eagle attack capital. Why?
“Now, Ayures keeps an eagle figurine on his desk. When he’s re-stationed, it’s a piece of Unalaska he’ll hold on to — knowing that somewhere out there, an eagle with his cell phone is holding onto a piece of him, too.”
Helping folks: Carrie Mesrobian: “ICE is still here in Columbia Heights. People are still unable to work, feed their families, pay their rent. If you have a couple bucks to spare, please do. If not, just go please meet at least one neighbor. You will want to be ready if this ever comes to your community and that is the first step.” Link to GFM for this community in MN.
Greg Pak: Keep Minnesota Housed, friends!
Visit https://keepMNhoused.com today to adopt a rent or donate to a rent fund to help families affected by ICE stay in their homes.
#keepMNhoused
Agent investigated in Chicago woman’s shooting, her lawyer says. The attorney for Marimar Martinez said a prosecutor told him the Border Patrol agent who shot her five times is under criminal investigation.
I’m hugely skeptical it’s turned around that much but I HOPE it has.
From The Handbasket: “The day of accountability will come”: Rep. Delia Ramirez on abolishing and prosecuting DHS: “Yeah, and frankly, this moment and every moment requires us to do what is right. If we would have been doing what is right, this moment would not have come. If Democrats would have organized for comprehensive immigration reform to not just preserve our democracy but expand it to actually pass the most comprehensive voting rights in this country; to get big money out of politics; to eliminate Super PACs; to get pharma the hell off of Congress so that we have Medicare for All; to actually have prioritized housing; to stop funding wars at the expense of their people and then say it’s called diplomacy; had we been doing that, we wouldn’t be here.”
From Boltsmag: The Prison Next Door: How Arkansas’ secretive plan for a new state lockup angered people in a deep red corner of rural America—and changed how some see incarceration.
From The Handbasket: We won our FOIA lawsuit for body cam footage of DOGE raid on US Institute of Peace
An ‘astonishingly’ large new dinosaur species has been discovered in the Sahara
From the Minnesota Reformer: Lawyers filed over 1,000 lawsuits challenging immigrant detentions during Operation Metro Surge: “Most of the petitions were filed by a newly mobilized army of volunteer lawyers with little or no experience with immigration law.
They are corporate litigators, divorce lawyers, estate planners and criminal defense attorneys who are leveraging their bar admission to mount an unprecedented defense of immigrants against the Trump administration’s efforts to achieve mass deportations through a new legal theory that rejects decades of precedent on who can be detained pending immigration proceedings.
It’s part of a massive resistance across the Twin Cities to Trump’s incursion of thousands of immigration agents — parents guarding schools during pick-up and drop-off, churches and businesses serving as pop-up distribution centers for food and other necessities, and scores of residents carrying groceries to people too afraid to leave their homes.”
That story about all types of lawyers stepping up to file suit is so inspiring. Neighborhoods are organizing where I am; I hope it is wide-spread because we have a long time to go and can’t be complaisant.
That story gave me a little bit of hope amid all the terrible stuff. I hope the same <3 We are only at the start of terrible times.