Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

ROSE

@milkshakemotel.bsky.social

I got so mad at city council about the arts tax snafu that I invited all three of my councilors AND Dan Ryan to the benefit show and it sounds like at least two comms staffers might show up

February 11, 2026 at 4:54 AM

ROSE

@milkshakemotel.bsky.social

Anyway in case you also got mad as hell about the news that the city is SITTING ON NINE MILLION DOLLARS that could make an existential difference to our cherished small arts orgs, maybe come to this benefit show I am throwing!

An image of a show flier that reads: "We all love the IPRC so let's rock about it! DJ Liz Harris, readings by Corby and Kai, fancy cake by Rose Lewis. 2/27, 8:00 PM, 21+, $10-$10,000 come party. Turn! Turn! Turn! 8 NE Killinsgworth"

February 10, 2026 at 1:08 AM

ROSE

@milkshakemotel.bsky.social

The reason Dan Ryan specifically will never see heaven is that it is HIS OFFICE that took distribution of city arts funds away from RACC and HIS OFFICE that helped champion the policy that is giving a far larger share of arts revenues to large, well-established orgs with existing donor bases

February 9, 2026 at 7:13 PM

Reposted by ROSE

Dr Una McIlvenna

@unamcilvenna.bsky.social

Best sign yet at the Melbourne protest against the visit of the war criminal Isaac Herzog, president of Israel:

February 9, 2026 at 7:36 AM

ROSE

@milkshakemotel.bsky.social

My GOD the arts tax thing makes me HOPPING MAD!!!!!!!! So many amazing arts organizations have been suffering substantially from cuts in federal funding and it turns out the city has just been SITTING ON nine million dollars?????????????????????

February 9, 2026 at 5:51 PM

ROSE

@milkshakemotel.bsky.social

DAN RYAN YOU WILL NEVER SEE HEAVEN

Alex Zielinski @alexzee.bsky.social · 1d

While we're talking about surprise buckets of city funds: The Portland arts tax has been sitting on roughly $9 million in unallocated dollars for years.

How Portland’s arts tax let $9M go unused for years

As Portlanders gear up to once again pay their arts tax by April 15, even supporters say the voter-approved charge needs an overhaul.

www.opb.org

February 9, 2026 at 5:50 PM

Reposted by ROSE

petsitter

@petsitter.bsky.social

wow folks, it’s still bandcamp friday and we’re still a band. if anyone actually buys something from petsitter.bandcamp.com 2nite i will screenshot some embarrassing lyrics that never made it into a song and post them here. or post a random old demo or something. u will hate it

petsitter

petsitter is jules, katilyn, penny, and bo. we do this: 🎵🎤🎸🥁🎹🎵

petsitter.bandcamp.com

February 7, 2026 at 3:35 AM

ROSE

@milkshakemotel.bsky.social

I once had a pleasant phone convo with one of Wheeler's staffers wherein they revealed that, when it was their job to process complaints about private security in one of the ESDs, they never really knew to whom they should give the complaint forms and just let them sit in a pile on their desk

February 7, 2026 at 12:55 AM

ROSE

@milkshakemotel.bsky.social

Having a lot of thoughts about incompetence so severe as to be indistinguishable from malice upon receiving the news that the city has been sitting on a pile of housing money vast enough to pay my mortgage for almost 3000 years

February 7, 2026 at 12:51 AM

Reposted by ROSE

Jack Mirkinson

@jackmirkinson.bsky.social

Media coverage of Gaza has plummeted. So today on @thenation.com, we're doing something pretty special: we're only running pieces by people in and from Gaza.

We're calling it "A Day for Gaza." You can find links to all of the incredible pieces here. Please read! www.thenation.com/article/worl...

A Day for Gaza

Today, The Nation is turning over its website exclusively to stories from Gaza and its people. This is why.

www.thenation.com

February 3, 2026 at 2:54 PM

Reposted by ROSE

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein 🌌

@chanda.blacksky.app

Epstein’s economic power among academics was made possible by a capitalist system that makes higher education dependent on the charity economy rather than a public good supported by taxing the rich

February 1, 2026 at 2:33 PM

Reposted by ROSE

Mitch Green

@councilorgreen.bsky.social

If your children got tear gassed today I want to hear from you, even if you don’t live in my district. You can contact my office at councilor.green@portlandoregon.gov

February 1, 2026 at 6:06 AM

ROSE

@milkshakemotel.bsky.social

Holy SMOKES your chance to own an ORIGINAL New Flanland flier in all its white gel pen glory?!?!?!?

bufo bufo @fruitbat.bsky.social · 15d

I'm fundraising for families at the mpls high school where I teach. We've been hit really hard by ICE activity & are doing grocery runs every day and working towards rent relief. If you want any original art of mine, here is a great way to get it: flanland.com/fundraiser

fundraiser

flanland.com

January 27, 2026 at 4:52 PM

ROSE

@milkshakemotel.bsky.social

Tomata du Plenty Reenactment Society WHEN

January 27, 2026 at 6:21 AM

ROSE

@milkshakemotel.bsky.social

If the only document remaining of American civilization is Tomata du Plenty’s Population: 1, future alien historians are going to think we were so much cooler than we are

January 27, 2026 at 6:20 AM

ROSE

@milkshakemotel.bsky.social

Some good news shared in meeting this morning: one of the youth detainees our meeting has been supporting WASN’T given a massive unfair prison sentence this past week: afsc.org/newsroom/jus...

Justice for Shadi Khoury and all Palestinian children

afsc.org

January 25, 2026 at 11:57 PM

Reposted by ROSE

Liz Crash

@lizcrash.bsky.social

talk to your neighbours now. if you see someone moving into your street, introduce yourself. if you see someone walking a dog, compliment the dog. put a comfy seat on the verandah. put two comfy seats on the verandah. put a bowl of free lemons outside your gate. start planning for Halloween

Adam Sawyer @adamjst.bsky.social · 18d

If the admin's strategic goal was to break public resistance to immigration enforcement activities, it was a tactical mistake to go to the Twin Cities.

January 25, 2026 at 1:53 AM

Reposted by ROSE

MinnMax

@minnmax.com

In solidarity with today's ICE OUT OF MINNESOTA blackout, MinnMax is donating $1 to the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota for every share of this Bluesky post for the next hour.

January 23, 2026 at 4:01 PM

ROSE

@milkshakemotel.bsky.social

Lots to like about the movie but I have an apocalyptic premonition about the damage its indie rockified shaker spirituals are going to do to the musical landscape

January 20, 2026 at 5:40 AM

ROSE

@milkshakemotel.bsky.social

Atmospherically appropriate that the heat was broken in the main auditorium for today’s screening of The Testament of Ann Lee

January 20, 2026 at 5:36 AM

Reposted by ROSE

Tom Bubul

@tombubul.bsky.social

Attached in full & worth reading , alt text is across all four bsky.app/profile/cmon...

Renfrew Christie, a South African scholar whose undercover work for the African National Congress was critical in hobbling the apartheid government’s secret nuclear weapons program in the 1980s, died on Dec. 21 at his home in Cape Town. He was 76.

The cause of death was pneumonia, his daughter Camilla Christie said.

President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa paid tribute to Dr. Christie after his death, saying his “relentless and fearless commitment to our freedom demands our appreciation.”

The A.N.C., in a statement, called Dr. Christie’s role “in disrupting and exposing the apartheid state’s clandestine nuclear weapons program” an “act of profound revolutionary significance.”

From the doctoral dissertation he had written at the University of Oxford on the history of electricity in South Africa, Dr. Christie provided the research needed to blow up the Koeberg Nuclear Power Station; the Arnot coal-fired power station; the Sasol oil-from-coal facilities that produced the heavy water critical to producing nuclear weapons; and other critical sites.

The explosions set back South Africa’s nascent nuclear weapons program by years and cost the government more than $1 billion, Dr. Christie later estimated.

By the time the bombs began going off, planted by his colleagues in uMkhonto we Sizwe, the paramilitary wing of the A.N.C., Dr. Christie was already in prison. He was arrested by South African authorities in October 1979 on charges of “terrorism,” three months after completing his studies at Oxford, and spent the next seven years in prison, some of that time on death row and in solitary confinement.

“While I was in prison, everything I had ever researched was blown up,” he said in a speech in 2023.

Terrorism was a capital offense, and Dr. Christie narrowly escaped hanging. But as he later recounted, he was deliberately placed on the death row closest to the gallows at the Pretoria Maximum Security Prison.

For two and half years, he was forced to listen to the hangings of more than 300 prisoners.

“The whole prison would sing for two or three days before the hanging, to ease the terror of the victims,” Dr. Christie recalled at a 2013 conference at the University of the Western Cape on laws regarding torture.

Then he recited the lyrics of an anti‐apartheid folk song that reverberated in the penitentiary: “‘Senzeni-na? Senzeni-na? What have we done? What have we done?’ It was the most beautiful music on earth, sung in a vile place.”

“At zero dark hundred,” he continued, “the hanging party would come through the corridors to the gallows, slamming the gates behind them on the road to death. Once they were at the gallows there was a long pause. Then — crack! — the trapdoors would open, and the neck or necks of the condemned would snap. A bit later came the hammering, presumably of nails into the coffins.”

In an interview years later with the BBC, he said the “gruesome” experience affected him for the rest of his life.

Dr. Christie acquired his fierce antipathy to apartheid at a young age, growing up in an impoverished family in Johannesburg.

Many of his family members fought with the Allied forces against the Germans in World War II, and “I learned from them very early that what one does with Nazis is kill them,” he said at a 2023 conference on antinuclear activism in Johannesburg. “I am not a pacifist.”

At 17, he was drafted into the South African Army. A stint of guard duty at the Lenz ammunition dump south of Johannesburg confirmed his suspicions that the government was building nuclear weapons. “From the age of 17, I was hunting the South African bomb,” he said at the conference.

After attending the University of the Witwatersrand, he received a scholarship to Oxford, which enabled him to further his quest. For his doctoral dissertation, he chose to study South Africa’s history of electrification,

“so I could get into the electricity supply commission’s library and archives, and work out how much electricity they were using to enrich uranium,” he told the BBC.

From there, it was possible to calculate how many nuclear bombs could be produced. Six such bombs had reportedly been made by the end of apartheid in the early 1990s; the United States had initially aided the regime’s nuclear program. Thanks to the system of forced labor, South Africa “made the cheapest electricity in the world,” Dr. Christie said, which aided the process of uranium enrichment and made the country’s nuclear program a magnet for Western support. (South Africa also benefited from its status as a Cold War ally against the Soviet Union.)

Dr. Christie turned his findings over to the A.N.C. Instead of opting for the safety of England — there was the possibility of a lecturer position at Oxford — he returned home and was arrested by South Africa’s Security Police. He had been betrayed by Craig Williamson, a fellow student at Witwatersrand, who had become a spy for the security services and was later granted amnesty by South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

After 48 hours of torture, Dr. Christie wrote a forced confession — “the best thing I ever wrote,” he later told the BBC, noting that he had made sure the confession included “all my recommendations to the African National Congress” about the best way to sabotage Koeberg and other facilities.

The Koeberg Nuclear Power Station in Cape Town was one of the sites Dr. Christie helped sabotage, setting back apartheid South Africa’s nascent nuclear weapons program. Credit...Esa Alexander/Reuters
“And, gloriously, the judge read it out in court,” Dr. Christie added. “So my recommendations went from the judge’s mouth” straight to the A.N.C. Two years later, in December 1982, Koeberg was bombed by white A.N.C. operatives who had gotten jobs at the facility. They followed Dr. Christie’s instructions to the letter.

“Of all the achievements of the armed struggle, the bombing of Koeberg is there,” Dr. Christie said at the 2023 conference, emphasizing its importance. “Frankly, when I got to hearing of it, it made being in prison much, much easier to tolerate.”

[...]

He attended King Edward VII School in Johannesburg and was conscripted into the army immediately after graduating. After his discharge, he enrolled at Witwatersrand. He was twice arrested after illegally visiting Black students at the University of the North at Turfloop, and was also arrested during a march on a police station where he said the anti-apartheid activist Winnie Mandela was being tortured.

He didn’t finish the course at Witwatersrand, instead earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Cape Town in the mid-1970s before studying at Oxford. At Cape Town, he was a leader of the National Union of South African Students, an important anti-apartheid organization.

On June 6, 1980, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison under South Africa’s Terrorism Act, with four other sentences of five years each to run concurrently.

“I spent seven months in solitary,” Dr. Christie said in the 2023 speech. “Don’t let anybody kid you: No one comes out of solitary sane. My nightmares are awful.”

After his years in prison, he was granted amnesty in 1986 as the apartheid regime began to crumble. (It officially ended in 1994, when Nelson Mandela became the country’s first Black president.) He later had a long academic career at the University of the Western Cape, retiring in 2014 as dean of research and senior professor.

[...]

Asked by the BBC whether he was glad he had spied for the A.N.C., Dr. Christie didn’t hesitate.

“I was working for Nelson Mandela and uMkonto we Sizwe,” he said. “I’m very proud of that. We won. We got a democracy.”

January 19, 2026 at 10:20 PM

ROSE

@milkshakemotel.bsky.social

I do understand that the cynical train of thought exists which says that since we’re living in a system rigged towards the evildoers, we might as well placate them long enough to extract some resources for ourselves, but that is suuuuuuuch a deplorable bargain

January 14, 2026 at 2:50 AM

ROSE

@milkshakemotel.bsky.social

A nonzero number of people i know voted for Dan Ryan in the primaries because his spouse is known to the music community as a good egg, and I just wonder all the time how that person feels being married to someone who is willing to take policy advice from wealthy homophobes

January 14, 2026 at 2:45 AM

Reposted by ROSE

Matt McNally

@mattmcnally.bsky.social

As we condemn the disgusting racism and vitriol from these power players and note who they associate with, it’s also worth noting their influence on local media. For example, so much of @wweek.com criticism of Preschool for All is driven by these same racist actors and organizations.

Portland Mercury @portlandmercury.com · 28d

The Mercury has obtained a series of images of group messages that show racist, sexist, and homophobic tropes used by a local developer and other local conservative political activists during a council president election. Readers may find this content offensive.