Hello, friends and enemies. First, the news you are all waiting for: the shower is finally, completely finished. They installed the doors last week and have been using it since. I hope I never have to remodel this shower again. Exhausting! It looks really nice though and somehow it feels like there is more room inside. I’m not sure how, but I’m willing to live with that mystery.
As much as I like the look of long hair and being able to style it in fun ways, it was long enough that it was making me insane so on Friday I went to have a bunch chopped off. It feels a lot better! It hasn’t been this short in a while—and it’s not really that short—but it feels a lot different. The only bummer is I won’t be able to do buns on top of my head with short hair, but I suppose I can do it with just the top half of the hair instead. It’s a necessary sacrifice.
Current Events
PSA: Social Security Is Your Money
The so-called Department of Government Efficiency is pushing big administrative cuts at the Social Security Administration and looking to cut half their staff. This could, as the former Social Security Commissioner stated, lead to “system collapse and an interruption of benefits … within the next 30 to 90 days.” This could be a precursor to cutting Social Security benefits, as the Center for American Progress notes, given that Musk has publicly stated that “Social Security is the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.” Fact check: it’s not. What makes me insane about this strain of thought is that we all pay into Social Security. It’s not a special gift from the government. When you get a paycheck, you pay 6.2% of it in Social Security taxes and your employer matches that, for 12.4% total. That’s it. So when government-hating conservatives talk about “cutting” Social Security, they are talking about stealing our money that we already earned and paid into the system.
I highly recommend that everyone sets up an account on the Social Security website, https://www.ssa.gov/onlineservices/, and downloads their Social Security Statement. It probably won’t save us, but you will at least have a record of what you’ve paid in to Social Security to date. The statement shows your earnings record (the amount of money your Social Security tax is based on) and an estimate of how much money you will get from Social Security when you retire. If Musk does successfully gut the Social Security Administration, you’ll have a record of how much of your money they stole and it will be easier to make a claim to what you’re owed (in theory). I hope this won’t be necessary but I’m not holding my breath.
Gavin Newsom, Shut Up!
California governor Gavin Newsom has the easiest job in the world right now. All he needs to do is say no to the things Trump wants and keep California on track. It’s that simple. I am certain he wants to run for president in 2028. He could emerge as a leader in sane governance by guiding us through the Trump shitshow.
And yet.
In the last two weeks this fucking idiot has squandered whatever remaining good will he had from liberals and leftists (which wasn’t too much to begin with I think, but still). He also pissed off the entire state workforce by unilaterally demanding that state employees work four days a week in the office instead of the current two (the union is taking a complaint to the Public Employee Relations Board). Gavin took to his new podcast (side note: does this man have nothing better to do right now??) to complain about trans women in sports. Trans people’s rights are under attack across the board, so why is Gavin taking time out of his busy schedule to be a shithead? Beyond the cruelty of this, like … why? So few transwomen are competing in high-level sports and it’s literally the last fucking issue I care about right now. Trump is firing half the Department of Education and Gavin wants to complain about 10 people playing sports? Dude, shut up! Also, what happened to the Mayor of San Francisco version of Gavin Newsom, the Newsom who decided to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples before it was technically legal? Where did he go?
Newsom’s new podcast is apparently specifically for talking to MAGA people that he ostensibly disagrees with, to “understand what the motivations are, the legitimacy of those motivations, and just really understand where people are coming from.” My guy, we are 10 years into Trump world. We know why people support him. You are not even a journalist, so just shut up and govern your state like we elected you to do. There is no need to have a discussion with Steve fucking Bannon. This is a guy throwing Nazi salutes in public and whose political strategy is to “flood the zone with shit” because “the real opposition is the media.” Giving Bannon a platform to “debate” him is just providing him with another opportunity to pretend to be legitimate while spewing more shit. Creating another venue for these people to share their unchecked views is not helping anyone, so: shut up, Gavin!
More News to Keep an Eye On
I can’t get into every insane thing that is happening, but here are some more important stories:
- The Department of Homeland Security arrested Mahmoud Khalil, “a Palestinian “a recent Columbia University graduate who helped lead the Gaza solidarity encampment.” This man has a green card and is a permanent resident, yet they have detained him. This is extremely troubling. From Al-Jazeera, “The Trump administration wants to criminalise any dissent of Israel’s genocide, any dissent of the US’s role in it, and they’re willing to roll back all of our rights to do that.” Later in the week, they arrested another Palestinian student involved in the Columbia University protests. This is really bad.
- Trump let Musk turn the White House lawn into a car dealership. As Parker Molloy of The Present Age explains, “The whole spectacle was exactly what you’d expect when a billionaire president with a long history of self-promotion teams up with his billionaire buddy who helped bankroll his campaign. It was cronyism in its purest form, taking place on the grounds of what’s supposed to be the people’s house.” The government isn’t supposed to be a money-making venture! That’s why government employees and contractors (like myself) have to take those trainings every year about not accepting bribes or dinner from anyone. It’s a whole thing! There are tons of rules!
- The recession is about to hit hard. I’m pretty sure it’s already started but we’re not deep into it yet. CNN reports this week that “Dollar General warns low-income Americans’ finances are getting worse.” Unfortunately, many people in this country shop a lot at discount stores like this so I think Dollar General does have its finger on the economic pulse. The article also notes that “Dollar General is seeing middle-income consumers trade down into shopping at stores in recent weeks,” which suggests that middle-income people are either anticipating less money and are tightening their budgets in anticipation, or they may already be losing money or losing ground against inflation.
Books and Other Words
Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956 by Anne Applebaum details how the USSR took over Eastern Europe, focusing on East Germany, Poland, and Hungary. The book is extensively researched and is based on interviews plus historical documents. I wanted to read it both as a student of history and for some perspective on what we’re living through (or, perhaps, about to live through). Applebaum starts by describing the devastation in Eastern Europe after World War II, and how the Red Army arriving to liberate people from the Nazis was something to feel grateful for. As one person noted, “everyone there had the same feeling, that the world would finally turn into a different one, and that it really had been worthwhile for us to be born,” which, oof. I feel like this is something that people in my generation might say too. Of course, the Red Army wasn’t there to help, they were there to further the USSR’s interests. Something I didn’t realize about this period was that, because everywhere was so thoroughly destroyed, after the concentration camps were emptied of Nazi prisoners, the Soviets turned right around and started using the same camps for other purposes because they were one of the only structures still standing. That must have been awful. Another “fun” fact was that lots of people were staying and partying (playing jazz records and dancing) at the YMCA, which eventually got shut down for being a “tool of bourgeois-fascism.” Jazz music and dressing colorfully and festively eventually became signs of resistance, but then, everything was a way to resist when the government was dictating from the top down how to think and act and behave.
The most interesting chapter to me was on “reluctant collaborators,” which refers to the “Millions of people [who] did not necessarily believe all of the slogans they read in the newspaper, but neither did they feel compelled to denounce those who were writing them. They did not necessarily believe that Stalin was an infalible leader, but they did not tear down his portraits.” Of course that made me think about what we’re living through. I think most people don’t want the federal government to be torn apart but a lot of people are perhaps shrugging and not really raging against it either. As Applebaum writes, “The extraordinary achievement of Soviet communism … was the system’s ability to get so many apolitical people in so many countries to play along without much protest.” I think that certainly applies to our time too. So many people aren’t “interested in politics” or are apathetic in one way or another. Perhaps people would feel less apathetic (more … pathetic?) if we could figure out how to invest in our shared reality. The internet and media have fully fractured our discourse; we have no monoculture and we don’t get our sense of reality from a shared source like the nightly news. The Soviets used the radio for propaganda and seemed to believe that there wasn’t anything propaganda couldn’t overcome. Yet, Radio Free Europe, a station broadcast by the Americans in West Germany, “ultimately proved effective not because it offered counterpropaganda but because it reliably reported the news of the day.” That’s what we need now. We need reliable information that from reporters who aren’t just acting as stenographers and who can explain why things are important. Applebaum concludes, “Before a nation can be rebuilt, its citizens need to understand how it was destroyed in the first place: how its institutions were undermined, how its language was twisted, how its people were manipulated.” The Eastern Bloc countries succeeded in this, but we in the United States of the 21st century aren’t ready.
Meanwhile, on the internet:
- Everything you say to your Echo will be sent to Amazon starting on March 28 via Ars Technica. If you have an Echo, beware. Amazon is changing its policy so that it now keeps all your recordings and uploads them to their servers, presumably to use in training AI. From the article, “Likely looking to get ahead of these concerns, Amazon said in its email today that by default, it will delete recordings of users’ Alexa requests after processing. However, anyone with their Echo device set to ‘Don’t save recordings’ will see their already-purchased devices’ Voice ID feature bricked.” Amazon said, let us keep all your data or get fucked!
- Meet the Feminist Resistance Fighter Who Created the Modern Kitchen via Gastro Obscura. Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky was an architect and was part of the resistance against the Nazis in Vienna and she sounds like a very cool lady. She designed the Frankfurt kitchen, which most modern kitchen designs are based on. Her architectural work centered women’s needs. I had never heard of her before! Another unsung hero of the modern age.
- Super Nintendo Hardware Is Running Faster as It Ages via 404 Media. I don’t claim to understand it but I do find this news fun and delightful.
Wikipedia
I am proud to report that I have now made over 1,000 edits on English Wikipedia, which puts me in the 0.1% of Wikipedians by edit count. I recently got a lot of edits in a short time because I started contributing to WikiProject Short descriptions, which is a project to make sure all the articles have a, well, short description (it’s the tiny summary that pops up under an article’s name in the search results). I can do a lot of them in not a lot of time and it’s moderately interesting and gives me something to click at, so I’ve done a whole bunch (literally hundreds haha).
Knitting and Crafts
We had a small tear in our fitted sheet, presumably the result of Fritz being a menace, and I bravely decided to mend it. It’s a very small job but I am proud of it so here it is. I used the mattress stitch, which I know how to do from knitting, but I figured it would be the same principle with a needle and thread.
Riding high on the victory from mending the sheet, I then patched up this stuffed animal that has been in need of repair for a long time. It’s easy to make that look neat when all its fluff covers up the stitching! Significant Otter is no longer at risk of losing his stuffing.
Kitchen Witchery
In the spirit of transparency, I am sharing a recipe I did not like. This is instant pot khichdi, which is made of rice and lentils and sounded good to me. Unfortunately, I did not think it tasted good. Perhaps the NY Times version of this recipe is to blame? I think this is the kind of food that every Indian household has their own version of, so maybe there’s one out there I would love. But for this one, I did not appreciate the little chunks of tomato (I thought they would cook down more than they did) and I think the coriander seed bits were bad for my guts. That’s on me though, not NYT Cooking; I should have known better. Anyway, I ate one bowl of it then gave up and discarded the leftovers.
I tried making another loaf from start to finish in the new bread machine and it came out better this time. I learned that I can tell the machine to go to the next part of the process and that I can save that as a setting for next time. The loaf shape looks a little weird to me, but I think that might be because you expect the top of the loaf to puff up in the oven, but in the machine, the sides of the loaf are still touching pan, so the result looks a little funny. However, the bread was just fine. Another loaf or two and I will have the system perfected—and just in time for summer.
Cat Therapy
Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. This guy just loves being inside of things.
