NickB79
NickB79's JournalHis name was Alex Pretti
A young man working as an ICU nurse in Minneapolis, and had worked for the VA, serving our veterans.
He devoted his life to saving others. He wasn't a deranged leftist lunatic.
He was executed today.
RiP.
Update: a good friend of mine from college posted on Facebook that he was friends with him at the U of MN when he was doing grad work in the labs. Other friends of his also started chiming in. Confirmed what everyone is saying: he was a wonderful, kind man.
Military Police Troops Put on Alert for Possible Deployment to Minnesota
Source: New York Times
The Pentagon has ordered several hundred active-duty military police troops from Fort Bragg, N.C., to prepare for a possible deployment to Minnesota in the event that President Trump invokes the Insurrection Act, according to a senior U.S. official.
The alert, which was described as precautionary, comes on top of a similar order issued recently to 1,500 infantry soldiers from the Army’s 11th Airborne Division in Alaska and as many as 200 Texas National Guard troops.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/21/us/politics/military-police-alert-minneapolis.html
China's population falls again as birthrate drops 17% to record low
Source: Guardian
China’s population fell for a fourth consecutive year in 2025 as the birthrate plunged to another record low despite the introduction of polices aimed at encouraging people to have children.
Registered births dropped to 7.92 million in 2025 – or 5.63 for every 1,000 members of the population – down 17% from 9.54 million in 2024, and the lowest since records began in 1949.
The population dropped by 3.39 million to 1.405 billion, a faster fall than 2024, while deaths rose to 11.31 million from 10.93 million in 2024, figures from China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) revealed.
Yi Fuxian, a demographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said births in 2025 were “roughly the same level as in 1738, when China’s population was only about 150 million”.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/19/china-population-falls-again-birthrate-record-low
ICE dragged an old Asian man out of his home, almost naked, in below zero temps
https://www.reddit.com/r/minnesota/comments/1qh5e6m/ice_just_being_pure_evil/Twist: he's a US citizen and they eventually released him.
Unless you're white, you've got a target on your back.
ICE is now going door to door asking about Asian people in Minnesota
Minneapolis/St. Paul has the largest Hmong population in the US.
Hispanics. Somalis. Now Hmongs. Who's next?
https://www.kare11.com/article/news/local/ice-in-minnesota/st-paul-mayor-kaohly-her-reports-ice-agents-asking-where-the-asian-people-live/89-10880612-bb5f-4bd2-978b-786ae8760afb
Her said St. Paul residents have reported ICE agents using racial profiling tactics to make arrests.
"We've received reports of federal law enforcement officers going door-to-door asking people where the Asian people live right in our very own city," Her said. "I myself have received advice to carry my passport with me because they may try to target me based on what I look like as well."
The St. Paul mayor was born in Laos and is the first woman, Asian American and Hmong American to serve in the role.
As for living and working in St. Paul, Her said residents are scared. Business owners in the city have reportedly reached out for help after sales have dropped up to 60%, according to Her.
ICE is raiding apartments and mobile home parks in Minnesota this weekend
I used to live in St. Cloud, MN. A good friend of mine still in St. Cloud (1.5 hr north of Minneapolis) told me about them going door to door banging on doors in the apartment complex next to her home. She also posted a video of ICE agents being chased off by a crowd of Somail people a few blocks away. I used to shop at this strip mall.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DTV2ZSmDh6-/
And now I'm seeing another report from a local liberal Facebook group I'm on that they're raiding a trailer park 10 miles from me in Lakeville MN (30 min south of Minneapolis).
My wife is Puerto Rican but is so shaken by all this she's now too terrified to leave the house without me, a bearded MAGA-looking white man, except for work
U.S. Small Business Administration bans nearly 7,000 Minnesota borrowers from loan programs
Source: KTTC
WASHINGTON, D.C. (KTTC) – On Thursday, Administrator of the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) Kelly Loeffler announced on X that the SBA has banned nearly 7,000 Minnesota borrowers from all SBA loan programs.
In Loeffler’s X post, she says SBA has reviewed thousands of potentially fraudulent pandemic-era PPP and EIDL loans approved in the state of Minnesota, before stating the agency took action to suspend 6,900 Minnesota borrowers in the midst of suspected fraudulent activity.
In total, Loeffler says these borrowers were approved for 7,900 PPP and EIDL loans worth about $400 million. These individuals will now reportedly be banned from all SBA loan programs, which include disaster loans.
Read more: https://www.kttc.com/2026/01/02/us-small-business-administration-bans-nearly-7000-minnesota-borrowers-loan-programs/?outputType=amp
More revenge enforcement for my home state.
Photographers wiped out a population of endangered Galaxy frogs because they used them as props
Humans can really suck sometimes.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/dec/17/galaxy-frogs-disappear-photographers-habitat-kerala
One tracker told Rajkumar that two small galaxy frogs had died after being handled for too long by photographers.
“He said they would take the animal to some nice background or mossy log to take the photograph, relocating it from one place to another to get better photos. On that day they got five or six frogs and two of them died.”
Buckle up, farmers: Brazil is about to crash the global soybean market
https://www.farmprogress.com/marketing/brazil-s-record-soy-harvest-could-flood-global-markets-crush-prices“We’re growing at a scale that’s greater than demand,” said Thiago Facco, vice president of producers’ group Aprosoja Tocantins. He said that while output this year will fit the market’s needs well, “in a very near future we will have excess production.”
The situation threatens to intensify pressure across a market already rattled by fragile geopolitics. Trump is pressing Beijing to purchase more soybeans, even as China has spent years shifting purchases toward South America. If Brazil floods the market with even cheaper supplies, U.S. farmers could face sharper competition.
The most likely solution to the U.S. debt crisis is severe austerity triggered by a fiscal calamity, former White House
https://fortune.com/2025/12/06/us-debt-crisis-soution-severe-austerity-fiscal-calamity-default-rates-financial-repression/Publicly held debt is already at 99% of GDP and is on track to hit 107% by 2029, breaking the record set after the end of World War II. Debt service alone is more than $11 billion a week, or 15% of federal spending in the current fiscal year.
In a Project Syndicate op-ed last week, Frankel went down the list of possible debt solutions: faster economic growth, lower interest rates, default, inflation, financial repression, and fiscal austerity.
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Member since: 2002Number of posts: 20,278