Hello, friends and enemies. Hey, on the off chance that whoever has been trying to brute-force log in to my blog is reading this: could you not. Starting about a week ago, I’ve been repeatedly locked out of WordPress for “bad login attempts” so someone out there is trying to access my blog. I have no idea why but I assume they are hoping for tasty credit cards or user data inside. Joke’s on them because there’s nothing like that here. One friend suggested someone might be targeting anyone posting from a leftist perspective. It seems a little unlikely but I suppose we can’t rule it out. Whatever the reason, I had to install a security plugin and take various measures like enabling two-factor authentication and switching to a different username to make sure no one gets into my site. My plugin has been blocking IP addresses and the attempts have slowed from their peak of over 1,000 blocked login attempts on Monday, but there are still quite a lot of attempts (over 100 on Thursday, for example). So, yeah, if that’s you, please fucking stop.
Public service announcement: go get your updated covid and flu vaccines while the getting is good. I got mine on Thursday! Your Local Epidemiologist reports that October is an ideal time to get the flu vaccine ahead of peak flu season. Please allow me to remind you that getting an annual flu shot reduces the risk of dementia, which seems like a very good reason to get it even if you’re not worried about the flu. Consider also making an account on the CDC site V-safe, which is used for logging reactions to vaccines (including reactions like “nothing happened and I was just a little sleepy” like I got after my shots). It take a few minutes but it’s good for sane people to do this so it’s not full of nutjobs telling the government that their kid got a vaccine and then turned autistic.
Current Events
This week, I published my voter guide in English and Spanish. The ballot is for just one statewide proposition: Proposition 50. I think the whole thing is obnoxious but I am voting yes even though it’s kind of stupid. Check the voter guide post for the full discussion! Please share it with your friends and family who are wondering why the hell we are voting on this.
I’m really thinking that the economy is about to crash (read: Trump and his allies have almost successfully crashed the U.S. economy) and I’m not the only one. The job market is bleak—the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that the U.S. lost 13,000 jobs in June, but added 73,000 jobs in July (the last time the U.S. market lost jobs was in 2020). Looking at the BLS database, this year’s job trends bear a certain resemblance to 2007 (you know, right before the last major recession not caused by a pandemic). Some banks are also warning about the possibility of an impending recession, and the role AI is currently playing in the economy. Futurism reports that “‘AI machines — in quite a literal sense — appear to be saving the US economy right now,’ Deutsche Bank head of FX Research George Saravelos wrote to clients. ‘In the absence of tech-related spending, the US would be close to, or in, recession this year.'” The article also notes that the management consultants at Bain & Company said that AI would need to make “$2 trillion in annual revenue to ‘fund computing power needed to meet anticipated AI demand by 2030.'” I’m not an expert but I don’t think AI is ever going to be useful enough to get them to break even! Finally, we have a bit of evidence for the upcoming recession in the form of google searches. As one X user noted, “US google searches for ‘bankruptcy lawyer’ are the highest they’ve ever been.” And this is to say nothing of the many “recession indicator” meme posts throughout the internet (I maintain that microbangs are a recession indicator). It’s not looking good!
I don’t really have any advice on getting through whatever happens to the economy next beyond the advice I have for everything lately, which is to connect with people in the real word (and maybe get some extra beans and rice for your pantry). I think things could get ugly and the administration knows it. The USDA website has announced that it will no longer be publishing Household Food Security Reports, which look like this and tell us how many households don’t have enough food to eat. As of 2023, 13.5 percent of US households were food insecure and 17.9 percent of households with children were food insecure. There is no reason to not report this data, unless you don’t want people to know how bad things are. This is a real dictatorship move. If we don’t have stats on how hungry the people are, they must not be hungry! Just so everyone knows that I’m an equal-opportunity hater, I remain mad that the CDC stopped reporting and monitoring covid data in 2023, and that was under Biden. The pandemic was very clearly still going in 2023, so what reason is there to stop collecting data? I would think that an honest regime would want to know the truth and behave accordingly, but that’s not the world we live in now.
Books and Other Words
Pink-Pilled: Women and the Far Right by Lois Shearing is a very interesting examination of how women become far-right extremists. We know a lot about how men get radicalized (often online through gaming and body building communities), but we don’t know as much about women, in part because of the benevolently sexist and untrue belief that women are inherently more liberal than men. Ultimately, many women align themselves with the far right because they are lonely and looking for sisterhood. They may also be impressed by the “divine feminine” concept and the idea of holding a position of honor as “gatekeepers of the race.” However, this is a bit of a Faustian bargain because most right-wing men, despite needing women to continue their movement (by making babies and providing a lot of free labor), deeply hate women. They’re also abusive. As Shearing writes, “the further right a group is, the more vile they treat their women,” which leads her to refer to the concept of being a tradwife as a kind of “social protection racket.” Women do get abused by men in the movement, but Shearing makes it clear that far-right women are both victims and perpetrators of violence; they are looking to get to carry out some oppression on the basis of their race and hopefully escape marginalization on the basis of sex or gender.
There were two concepts in the book that really stuck with me. First, in discussing how people are often searching for community, Shearing notes that many look to online spaces, including influencers, but “influencers position themselves as community builders despite creating monodirectional content.” This really blew my mind, and not just regarding right-wing radicalization. A lot of people look online for a place to belong, but someone making short videos or posting photos of their life isn’t really in a community with you at all, especially if they have a large audience. These are just people talking to their own reflections. It’s no wonder people feel so lonely when seeking connection online. The other quotation that I will not forget anytime soon is: “Despite often considering themselves anti-government,” the far right “never demands anything radical or liberating, or that goes against state interest.” I think I knew this intuitively but hadn’t really thought about it. For all their bluster, in the U.S. we don’t see right wing people opposing the status quo in a major way. Their beliefs and behavior are, just as the name suggests, conservative.
Shearing concludes that the only way we can really stop women from joining far-right groups is to “see women as people.” We may be dealing with this problem for some time yet.
Shadow Baron by Davinia Evans, is the sequel to Notorious Sorcerer, which I read earlier this year. I liked it! I am not sure what to say about it that won’t give away both this and the previous book, but in typical second-book-in-a-trilogy form, all the main characters are going through it and their problems don’t really get resolved (I look forward to book three). I will say my only complaint about this book is why is there a dragon? Why do perfectly good fantasy books feel the need to introduce a mysterious dragon in the second act? I think we could have done without it, not because I hate dragons but because I feel the story had plenty of good and interesting things going on without it. I guess I prefer to read about what people are doing in a magical world than with ancient magical creatures rising from the earth or whatever. Please stop writing gratuitous dragons into your fantasy stories.
Meanwhile, on the internet:
- What the $fight for the algorithms says about you via Saffana’s Voicenotes, a blog. This post discusses the sale of the TikTok algorithm, which some rich person or collection of rich people is about to pay billions for. Saffana concludes that our attention and imaginations must be incalculably valuable for oligarchs to be putting up so much cash to influence what we look at in our free time. On a related note: Israel is paying influencers around $7,000 per post. We don’t know exactly what the influencers have been asked to promote, but I think it’s safe to assume they are attempting to fight back in the war of public opinion.
- We Already Know How to Cover Trump’s Lies. So Why Aren’t Newsrooms Doing It? via The Present Age. This is a really interesting explanation of how to cover the news when known bad-faith operators are involved in a way that doesn’t merely amplify their garbage. I particularly like the strategies of “prebunk[ing] before going live” (explaining that someone who constantly lies is about to be shown) and using a paradigm called “fact-warn-explain-fact.” Basically, the goal is not to have a lie be the first thing that the audience comes into contact with; they need to be primed with knowing they’re about to hear something false so the misinformation doesn’t take hold without context.
Corporeal Form
I actually got some good health news this week. I had a check-in for my braces and learned that I only have about two months to go! I was originally informed that it would take 15 months, but I guess not! I’m relieved because these braces are fairly annoying over the last five months. I was also noticing that my teeth are looking quite straight so I wasn’t really sure what I was going to need all those other months for. The other good news is that I saw my optometrist and my glasses prescription has not changed. I’m glad to not have to spend a ton of money on expensive lenses that insurance won’t pay for.
Kitchen Witchery
Fall is the best season for food so I have been trying to take advantage of it. I do believe that soup can and should be consumed at any time of year, but it kind of does hit different in the fall, so I’ve decided to make a soup every week for the rest of the year. I recently made a sausage and lentil soup with harissa (recipe from Grist), which is a household favorite, with pumpkin knots. I always double the pumpkin knots recipe and throw some in the freezer for later because they are tasty and it’s barely more effort to double it. Then I made somewhat Tarascan bean soup, which is an odd name but it’s a good soup, with a delicata squash galette. The galette was extremely good and I definitely want to make it again. I did deviate just a little from the recipe and used berebere seasoning instead of Za’atar in the cheese blend because that’s what sounded good to me and I was right. Finally, I made pumpkin blondies! These have white and butterscotch chips in them and I thought they were great.
Cat Therapy
Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.
