I live in a city of around 500K. The raccoons around here love dry cat food and come to my back porch to get the stuff I leave out for the cats. Skunks love catfood too. But neither species are turning into pets, if I show my face they take off running. I often see “city deer” when I go out for walks in residential neighborhoods. A half dozen loitering on someone’s front lawn. The occasional lone buck chowing down on someone’s flower plantings. They’re tolerant of people and cars but very wary - definitely not becoming pets. I think we’ll see a lot more of the deer in coming months because a lot of their city-adjacent forest habitat has just burned down.

Comfort maybe, def not junk:

• Harper’s Magazine
• The Economist
• Granta

Your local library probably has a subscription to the first, maybe even to the $econd. Granta’s a quarterly and I can’t say I’ve ever seen it in a library but its been around a long time and back issues are readily available @used bookstores.

As an American of (partial) Nordic descent, I’ve always been proud of my link to those “more civilized” countries of the region. It’s shocking now to read what’s going on in Finland with its Nazi infestation, one that (apparently) reaches into the highest levels of government.

Ugh, such a shame. I’ve explored the length and breadth of MT (by car) several times . Western MT is such a beautiful place … the mountains, lakes, wilderness, groovy college towns &etc. It never really used to feel radical-conservative to me, but from what you say, sounds like the Christian Fascists have really gotten out of control.

I’m on the other side of that cesspool of Northern Idaho from you. N. ID is a lot like MT in the beauty sense, but it’s circling the drain in a “civil society” sense faster than anywhere else in the region. Billionaires got theirs - just watch all the private jet flights in/out of CdA and MSO and Kalispell on sites like flightradar24.com … they’ll be perfectly happy to have the local Poors getting dumb and dumber and at each others throats over manufactured culture-wars BS if it means they can eat and ski and screw around on the lakes at even less cost than now, all in (“elite”) privacy of course. And yeah, the ID Poors/fascists/conspiracy-types got nothing better to do than to try to export their sad, pathetic lot to anywhere that seems “better off” (i.e. somewhat civilized). Sorry ya’ll have to live through this shit.

cool-retro-term for all your old-school CRT needs. 1.8M executable.

Their local community college is about to lose accreditation (from the NWCCU) because the school’s board is controlled by right-wing nut-jobs:

The NWCCU investigation team found that donors pulled back more than $4 million in pledges and major gifts. Last December, credit rating agency Moody’s lowered NIC’s bond rating, which may make it more expensive for the school to take out loans.

In an e-mail exchange with a student, Banducci painted himself as an adversary fighting “liberal progressives” that were “deeply entrenched.” In the same e-mail, Banducci said he was “battling the NIC deep state."

You read that right, the old community college deep state.
https://www.spokanepublicradio.org/regional-news/2022-04-04/northwest-higher-ed-accreditation-agency-puts-north-idaho-college-on-warning-status

And now they’re importing this kind of QAnon lunacy into the public secondary school system. Those kids just don’t stand a chance.