Hello, friends and enemies. I’m sure all of you have been dying to know if I did manage to work out in my gym after doing all that work cleaning the garage. The good news is I did work out twice since I last wrote. It was a little too hot for me for most of last week, but it’s cooling down so I’m hoping to make it a more regular habit for a while.
Current Events
Is anyone else feeling insane that Dick Cheney endorsed Kamala Harris? And that Harris said she felt “honored” by his endorsement? Dick Cheney, the villain of the Bush era? War criminal Dick Cheney?? Am I insane? If Cheney endorsed me for anything, I’d tell him to fuck off. Sarah Kendzior explains this far better than I could:
It is obvious what happened even if some are reluctant to cop to it: Bush-era Republican operatives, unable to function in the chaos of MAGA, saw an opportunity to remake the Democratic Party, which had been lurching to the right since the 1990s, and took it. They left receipts: the conservative Lincoln Project is Harris’s fourth biggest donor. Change in Democratic Party policy is determined by donations — not only the Lincoln Project’s — and then rationalized with the Trump/Not-Trump binary.
Democrats are now told that Dick Cheney is “good” because he endorsed Harris and that they should see this as “unity” instead of contamination. Ironically, Dick Cheney had already unified America in loathing, leaving office with a 13% approval rating.
In her speech at the Democratic National Convention, Harris said, “As Commander-in-Chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.” What the fuck? Is “most lethal” really the goal? Haven’t we seen enough of this? We already spend more on the armed forces than the next nine countries combined. We have over 700 military bases in 80 countries. We’ve bankrolled Israel while they’ve killed, at “a conservative estimate … up to 186,000” or more (a figure from July, by the way). To be honored by the endorsement of the Iraq war guy, to commit to maintaining the most lethal fighting force in the world. Just … what? You want to do infinite war to make money for our weapons manufacturers? I guess this is all that this country is and having a woman president is not going to change that. It makes me feel sick that this is what our tax dollars go to: rampant destruction. This is not what I want to vote for but these are apparently the only choices in this system.
Just to be clear, I am not at all saying this to suggest Trump is a better option. Trump is unequivocally worse. That guy is obsessed with nuclear bombs. At a minimum, I don’t think President Harris would start a nuclear war. I’m trying to say we need more than two options. Maybe even an option that isn’t committed to endless military activity.
Books and Other Words
Alexandra Rowland’s Some by Virtue Fall and The Lights of Ystrac’s Wood are a pair of novellas set in the same world, although I wouldn’t say they are necessarily a series. Some by Virtue Fall was a lot of fun. It’s centered on a theater director in a sort-of Elizabethan environment who is in an extremely high-stakes rivalry with another theater. All the men have been banned from working the the theater by some kind of royal decree because they won’t stop brawling and causing problems, which means women are playing all the parts in a gender-flipped Shakespeare way. Everyone is fucking nuts in a fun way. The Lights of Ystrac’s Wood is a little more meditative and philosophical but still features a foppish bard who gets his lute magically blessed by the god of theater and poetry. Both were enjoyable to read and I am going to continue working my way through Rowland’s catalog (Running Close to the Wind is still my favorite so far).
I almost didn’t finish How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World by Deb Chachra because it had a bit of a slow start. Chachra spends the first few chapters of the book on making infrastructure visible to the reader because it’s something so firmly in the background of our lives that we are scarcely aware of it—like flipping a light switch. The rest of the book is about, well, Chachra doesn’t say it explicitly, but how capitalism is a major problem for infrastructure. Infrastructure is often a means to transport “resources for the benefit of whoever controls the networks, which means they get more power and wealth,” which “isn’t a side effect,” but the whole point of a lot of modern infrastructure. Chachra uses the example of the British Raj establishing trains throughout India. Ultimately, the trains are a good thing, but all the profits from the train system left the country and went to people in Britain thanks to a deal where investors got a fixed profit percentage! Lots of infrastructure in the US and the world is crumbling because we don’t like to invest in public works anymore, and what we need is maintenance of these systems. Maintenance, however, doesn’t have a nice, exciting profit margin for contractors like building something new does, so there is little (financial) incentive to do it. One interesting perspective I took from this book is that our approach to materials and energy is backwards; we actually have functionally unlimited energy in the form of solar, wind, and hydro power but we have a finite amount of material resources like copper or lithium. Recycling is often seen as not cost effective, but what we really mean is it uses too much energy to recover the materials. However, when we think about having lots of energy and not so much raw material, recycling suddenly becomes much more “profitable.” Chachra ends the book with some guidelines for how we can turn this ship around and start thinking about infrastructure as a form of care and a way to create agency (think about all the free time and choice we have because we don’t have to, say, haul water from somewhere to our houses then boil it to make sure it’s clean). I would love to see us take a more long-term view of infrastructure as our cultural inheritance but I’m not confident that this country will do it.
Meanwhile, on the internet:
- How the Media Sanitizes Trump’s Insanity via The New Republic. The media has essentially been laundering Trump’s intellectual abilities by selecting little pieces of his usual word salad to run in articles. The full text of what Trump says is usually completely incoherent. People didn’t want Biden to be president again because of his age and potential dementia, but the media in general is not raising these same concerns about Trump.
- Marshmallow Longtermism via Pluralistic. Here’s another very good analysis by Cory Doctorow about long-term planning, conservatism, and the famed (and, ultimately, not replicable) marshmallow test.
- The lost history of what Americans knew about climate change in the 1960s via Grist. Just a reminder that global warming is not new and Congress was talking about this stuff 50 years ago!
- Mexico’s Senate approves a contentious judicial overhaul after protesters storm the chamber via AP. This is major! Mexicans will now directly elect their supreme court justices. After the absolute shitshow of watching Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett get appointed, I would definitely prefer just voting for justices.
Rampant Consumerism
I like to use a paper planner. My preferred stationery company released their 2025 calendars and I got mine in the mail yesterday. I love planners because they feel full of potential. I also happened to have the perfect sticker (from https://claricetudor.com/) for the planner, so that brings me joy.
I am in shock that 2025 is fast approaching. Although I feel like nothing makes me sound older than exclaiming “[year], already!” every single year. Yet, here I am doing it again.
Wikipedia
I must have passed some kind of threshold on Wikipedia because in the last week it seems I’ve become a full citizen. I think it might be that I passed 500 total edits (I’ve made over 600 edits across multiple language versions of Wikipedia, and I’m over 400 on English Wikipedia). First, I got an invitation to use the Wikipedia Library. I didn’t even know this was a thing but I love to look things up so I am very excited about it! It’s a huge collection of databases and academic journals that is free to active Wikipedia users. The second thing was that I got to vote for the Wikimedia Foundation’s board members. My Wikipedia efforts are paying off. Not in the literal sense, of course, but there are some rewards it seems. Plus, I just like doing it. I wish Wikipedia was my job.
Corporeal Form
I’m still trying to figure out what is wrong with my body since my POTS hypothesis turned out to be wrong. I’ve been reading about joint hypermobility, which I didn’t even know about until I started taking ballet class and got instructed not to hyperextend my knees. Who knows how long I was doing that without even knowing about it. The “test” for hypermobility is called the Beighton score, and it just tallies up how many weird joints you have and asks if you have ever been able to put your hands flat on the ground with your knees straight or do the splits (yes and yes). Apparently anyone can learn flexibility but hypermobile people can do this without any effort so … cool? I already knew that autistic people are more likely to be hypermobile and both autism and hypermobility can be linked to gut issues (which I have). I started looking up what else hypermobility and autism might be connected to and this study said that hypermobile autistic women were more likely to report chronic ear infections than regular-mobile autistic women (I have had so many ear infections in this life). Hypermobile people are even more likely to have sleep apnea, which I have. I assume because the body just doesn’t want to hold itself up? I’m thinking some of my fatigue issues, like my famous three-hour afternoon naps or sometimes just feeling like standing up is asking too much of me, might be down to hypermobility. I was watching instagram videos by a physical therapist who specializes in hypermobility who mentioned that hypermobile people tend to get tired because we’re spending so much energy holding up the body. Even things you might think are not strenuous, like sitting at a desk, require a lot of muscle effort. So, maybe that’s something?
Before I move on, I also have to note that in my research travels I found an article stating that people with alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency are more likely to have sleep apnea (note: this article is pay walled). I did a test last year as part of the analysis for my liver issues that showed I have a genetic predisposition to alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency, which can predispose people to liver and lung issues (hello, fatty liver disease! Here’s the post I did about all that). Apparently this can also be linked to sleep apnea. I would like to give a hearty “honestly, fuck off!” to the doctor running the class I had to take at Kaiser when I got my CPAP who told me, without knowing a damn thing about me, that my sleep apnea would “probably go away” if I lost weight. Bite me!
Kitchen Witchery
I’ve been keeping it pretty easy in the kitchen and not trying anything new in the last two weeks. I revisited sheet pan noodles with glazed tofu and stuffed cheesy shells, which everyone was pleased about. I made a double-batch of the buttered walnut cake from the Snacking Cakes cookbook (doubled so I could make it in the bundt pan) and I was immensely satisfied to get it out of the pan cleanly.
I have refrained from starting fall baking, not the least because it is still summer! Frankly, it’s also still hot. Ushering in warming spices and pumpkin is not going to make the weather shift any faster. Kirk is a stickler about enjoying things in their season and he has, perhaps, rubbed off on me a little bit. Then again, maybe we are right about this issue in particular.
Cat Therapy
Fritz is being a menace to society and decided he needs to poop in my office, a place where there is not normally a litter box (though there was at one time). Defeated, I put a litter box in there. He is mostly using it but now he is also pooping next to the box in my office. I’m not sure what he’s trying to prove, but I’m not impressed.
Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.
