Hello, friends and enemies. I know you’ll be surprised to hear this, but I am deeply against the very concept of a heat wave in March. On Friday, the temperature here in Elk Grove hit 90 degrees (32 Celsius), beating the record of 81 degrees (27 C). It’s upsetting for me, personally, as someone whose body is unwilling to participate in the task of temperature regulation. I’m now worried about how hot it’s going to be this summer (outlook: hot), and, you know, for the rest of our lives. Which brings me to my next point …
Current Events
World War III, I guess
The United States and Israel are at war with Iran and there are many reasons to be mad about this, not the least of which is that our country bombed a school during school hours. While this is shocking, I suppose it’s not surprising given that Israel has destroyed all the schools in Gaza. This war is needless and terrible for so many reasons, including environmental ones. Israel bombed Iran’s oil infrastructure which “will have major long-term environmental repercussions.” The local effects are bad, with the people of Tehran experiencing health impacts and the environment now being full of a bunch of “soot, smoke, oil particles, sulphur compounds, and likely heavy metals and inorganic materials.”
Of course, burning a whole bunch of oil really quickly is also the thing we’re supposed to be avoiding if we don’t want to heat the planet up to the point that we make living here a challenge. A while back, I wrote about how armed conflict is making us very unlikely to keep below the Paris Climate Accords warming limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius. I can only assume it’s worse now. A 2024 study showed that “The emissions from the first 120 days of the Israel-Gaza conflict exceeded the annual emissions of 26 individual countries.” And that’s just four months of one piece of what, I think, we can fairly safely refer to as World War III (although Wikipedia is holding the line by keeping the World War III page as one about a “hypothetical future global conflict.”). Even though some scientists have been working to quantify the carbon output of war, Scientific American wrote in 2024 that we don’t really know for sure how much the world’s militaries are contributing to global warming because a lot of military activity is necessarily secretive. Regardless, “A 2022 report by the Conflict and Environment Observatory suggested that militaries could account for around 5.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions — but that could be an underestimate.” Seems like it should be obvious that keeping the world habitable is more important than doing wars—especially wars that our own government hasn’t even bothered to articulate a justification for.
What the hell can we do about it
I wish I had some better ideas about what we can do to stop the war, but I really only have things to say about how to mitigate whatever the effects might be for us here. Unless you are personally in a position of some power (or around people who are), it’s hard to imagine what we can do to put a stop to this. The existential dread was upon me this week between the heat and the war and the pervasive feeling of doom that’s in the air. As usual, I try to find outlets for my anxiety, and for me that often turns into some form of disaster preparedness (as regular readers probably know by now). I don’t think Iran will physically attack the United States and I think countries like China are standing back and waiting for us to destroy ourselves (American century of humiliation, lol). That said, Iran is talking about targeting American tech firms and banking interests (if Iran manages to hack and wipe out Americans’ student loan debt, I would laugh and laugh for the rest of my life. Nothing would get Americans on their side more, I assure you). While I think the risk of physical injury is low, taking out major tech services could have a huge impact on daily life. Remember when there was that global tech outage in 2024 because of a “faulty update to computers running Microsoft Windows”? So, here’s the stuff I’m thinking about for broad emergency preparedness, keeping in mind that this is a group project!
- One thing I’m going to be reviewing is this Community Resilience Guide for a Cyber-Induced Infrastructure Collapse, which is a very detailed answer to the question “what happens if all the computers stop working?” I just found it via a cybersecurity person on Instagram, but it seems comprehensive.
- The woman who made that guide also has a primer on a tool called Meshtastic, which is something you can use to contact people even if phones aren’t working. I’m definitely going to look into setting this up and I will report back on the experience.
- Energy is about to get very expensive. Think about having things like solar chargers or a backup power source in case of power outages. For example, I have a really big battery that I can use to power my CPAP at night in case the power goes out. Energy being expensive is going to make everything else expensive because the price to transport things will go up. Hard to imagine that groceries could cost even more, but here we are. Maybe shopping at local farmers markets will be one way to get slightly cheaper food.
- Might I also direct you to the emergency kit post that I made last year? I have been slowly working on ours but I need to review and finish filling in some gaps for our group. If anyone wants help making an emergency kit, let me know!
- I also think I don’t have anything more to add to what I already said immediately after Trump won the 2024 election: keep your pantry stocked, pick a lane to participate in when it comes to supporting your community, read a dang book, and get offline once in a while!
Books and Other Words
Fearing the Black Body
Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia by Sabrina Strings is another book in my personal syllabus that I’ve been working through about our society’s attitudes about fat people. Books like What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat, The F*ck It Diet: Eating Should Be Easy, and You Have the Right to Remain Fat have absolutely redefined my relationship to fatness, in how I think about my own fat body and how I think about how fat people are treated and depicted in our culture. Fearing the Black Body adds another layer to this knowledge and really made me be like “this is really all fucking made-up garbage and always has been.”
Strings asserts that our ideas about being thin were affected by “two critical historical developments … the rise of the transatlantic slave trade and the spread of Protestantism.” As Europeans came into contact with African people, they had to find ways to maintain a social hierarchy, with white people on top. She writes, “the phobia about fatness and the preference for thinness have not, principally or historically, been about health. Instead, they have been one way the body has been used to craft and legitimate race, sex, and class hierarchies.” In fact, a few centuries ago, having some meat on your bones was “a sign of good health” and being thin was “a signal of poor health and hygiene.” Now I’m picturing 16th-century people reacting with horror to Ozempic-thin celebrities.
This began to change during the Enlightenment. Certain male philosophers decided that being thin and not eating was a way to signal your intellectual stature, and I guess a cool way to justify an eating disorder. A refusal of the needs of one’s physical being was a way to show that you were deeply invested in intellectual pursuits and that your mind was stronger than your body. At first, this standard was not applied to women because, obviously, women’s job is not to think big thoughts but to look pretty (or do domestic labor I suppose). Fatness was “evidence of vapidity,” and we all know it’s fine for ladies to be vapid. Eventually, European philosophers, mostly without having seen many Black people from Africa, determined that African’s supposedly fat bodies were evidence of their uncivilized ways. “[I]ndulging in food, once deemed by philosophers to be a lowbrow predilection of slow-witted persons, became evidence of actual low breeding. It bespoke an in born, race-specific propensity for laziness and ease.” Some even found ways to “claim that fatness was directly correlated with skin color.”
Over time, it “[became] part of the general zeitgeist that fatness was related to blackness. This, it was treated as evidence of barbarism, of a sort of nonwhite affectation.” Eating less and being thin “became evidence of refinement” and fatness eventually became “lowbrow” and “in women … comically unattractive.” Comically unattractive! This idea certainly continues to echo through our culture. A lot of men treat the idea of being romantically involved with fat women as a joke in and of itself.
Once these attitudes arrived in the United States, they fused with the extreme Christian beliefs that the country is known for and people “began to regard svelte forms as a superior aesthetic ideal for white Christian women.” Eventually, this belief combined with the eugenic ideals that “slim Nordic/Aryan Americans were indeed the only group ‘fit’ to reproduce.” These attitudes functioned as a way to police white women’s behavior, with “the image of fat black women … [being] used to both degrade black women and discipline white women.”
Today we talk about fat as a health issue, but it’s clear that doctors didn’t start saying that being fat was bad until after this association between fatness and blackness was solidified. In fact, based on some of the early medical publications on the subject that Strings cites, it seems that medical professionals in the early 20th century were looking scientific ways to justify existing attitudes about fatness being the purview of poor breeding.
Reading this book was really the last straw for me. I had been thinking a lot about what we learned from the Epstein documents, especially regarding Les Wexner—the man behind brands like Victoria’s Secret, the Limited, and Abercrombie & Fitch—and his high level of involvement with Epstein. I remember being relatively tall and sturdy for my age and wanting the kind of clothes they sold at Limited Too, which was targeted at tween and teen girls, and not being able to fit anything there. We now know that they engaged in a type of vanity sizing in which clothes would actually be smaller than the stated size, as in “a size 12 everywhere else would be a size 16 at Limited Too.” I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that men who were attracted to young girls promoted a culture in which girls and women were encouraged to be thinner and smaller. These men had immense resources at their disposal and used them to promote their preferences, regardless of what makes sense for adult women or what anyone else thinks is healthy or attractive.
The question is: why would I EVER contort my body to cater to racists and pedophiles? If the imperative to be thin was formed out of inventing ways to demonstrate white people’s alleged superiority over black people (especially white women over Black women), if the late 20th- and early 21st-century iteration of this imperative was promoted by wealthy pedophiles with a vested interest in keeping women and girls looking small and nubile, why the actual fuck would I want to conform to this so-called beauty standard? Who wants to see me thin? Who wants to see me weak and tired from starving myself to in pursuit of a completely made-up body ideal rooted in eugenics? Who decided that adult women should look no heavier than they did at the ripe age of 16? Nothing about that makes sense. These attitudes don’t serve us.
This book and the current discourse has completely freed me from the need to spin in my little weight loss hamster wheel. I was already most of the way out from the work I have been doing and learning from my own experience that the solution to binge eating disorder is to know all the way into your bones that you’re allowed to eat what you want when you want (ironically, you stop binge eating when you know you’re allowed to eat food). I will never again be shamed about my fat body. Oh, does someone think I should be thin? Why? Are they a racist or a pedophile (perhaps both!)? Get fucking lost. I have ascended. We are all allowed to just fucking live and, if you happen to be fat, it’s fine. It turns out, that was always allowed.
The Snow Queen
I’ve had a copy of The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge on my shelf for years and now I can finally say that I’ve read it. I bought a used copy online a long time ago when I was trying to read through all the books that have won the Hugo Award for best novel. I shouldn’t have slept on this book for so long because it is very good and there are three more books in the series that I’m looking forward to. The story focuses on Moon Dawntreader, a young woman of the Summer people who live simply off of the sea’s bounty. Moon, however, is a genetic clone (not a spoiler, this happens on the first page) of the Winter Queen who governs people who live in the city and mediates the planet’s relationship with the galactic Hegemony. The Queen’s plan is for Moon to take her place before the next Change, when Summer throws the Winter queen into the sea (not a euphemism) and rules the planet for the next 150 years. There’s a lot of intrigue, some galactic politics, smuggling, and aliens. I recommend it!
Collection Management
I recently pulled a bunch of books off my shelves to sell at the used bookstore, so I had a little more room to work with and decided to move things around. I used to have all the books in languages other than English together, then books about languages together. I decided to reorganize so all the books in and about a language are together, including dictionaries, which were previously all sequestered onto one shelf. I find it very satisfying to look at, so here is a picture for you to enjoy.
Meanwhile, on the internet
- Gen Z males twice as likely as baby boomers to believe wives should obey husbands via The Guardian. Yiiiiiiikes. Yikes, yikes, yikes. The dominant cultural beliefs from when I was growing up are starting to feel more and more like an historical aberration rather than the trend. That said, I know a large part of the reason for this is the relentless propaganda this generation is subject to. Kirk says he constantly gets ads for right-wing shit on YouTube. He reports them but, alas, he is just one man!
- AI “journalists” prove that media bosses don’t give a shit via Pluralistic. From the article: “‘We used an AI to do this'” is increasingly a way of saying, ‘We didn’t want to do this in the first place and we don’t care if it’s done well.’ That’s why DOGE replaced the call center reps at US Customs and Immigration with a chatbot that tells you to read a PDF and then disconnects the call.”
- What do “which is A.I.?” quizzes tell us? via Read Max. This is a very interesting article about what people’s stated preferences for texts by AI versus text written by humans. He writes:
As long as people want to prefer human-authored to L.L.M.-generated writing, we will place a premium on whatever style we associate with human authorship–even as that style changes. You can already see this process beginning from the other direction on social networks like Twitter, where em-dashes and not-x-but-y contrastive corrections–perfectly innocuous and useful writerly tools which not five years ago would likely have been highly correlated with “good prose”–are immediately treated with derision and suspicion. By that same token, certain kinds of “bad writing” should be seen as evidence of human authorship. How long before run-on sentences are preferred to em-dashes?
- Your AI Slop Bores Me. This is a funny little website that reminds us that the internet can still be fun! You can ask the “ai” questions or pretend to be the ai and answer the questions people submit. I’ve had some fun with it. Playing as the ai, I learned that many people love pokemon and many others just want someone to tell them what to cook for dinner.
- Rapper Afroman wins lawsuit against police over mocking their 2022 raid in viral music videos via AP News. This was truly the best thing online this week. After police raided his home in 2022, Afroman wrote diss tracks about the individual officers and put music videos online. The cops sued Afroman for defamation, but in a win for free speech, Afroman prevailed and was found innocent. Crazy that cops think there should be no consequences for wrongly breaking into a man’s home.
Doing Stuff
Last night, we went to see the Sacramento Ballet. They did a few shorter pieces, including Serenade by Balanchine (you can see a full recording of the New York City Ballet doing it in 1973 on YouTube). It was beautiful and seeing 15 or 20 dancers all doing the same movements at the same time is, indeed, mesmerizing. I also liked how the flowing skirts leave a sort of afterimage of the movement in the air. Now that I’ve seen a few Balanchine pieces, I’m starting to form some opinions about him. He’s really into doing weird arm-linking stuff, isn’t he? He also seems really fixated on having pieces where two or three women dancers are hanging off a male dancer, which I noted last year when we saw Sac Ballet do Apollo and then noticed it here too. It’s kinda weird as a recurring theme. This inspired me to look up whether Balanchine was a creep and, if the “Personal Life” section of his Wikipedia page is to be believed, yeah, at least a little.
The other piece that stood out to me was Love Me Anyway by the choreographer Caili Quan. I was surprised by it because I have actually seen Sac Ballet do this piece before! We’ve now been going to the ballet long enough to see repeats. I’m not upset though because I think this is a really fun piece. Its music starts with the “mah na mah na” song from the Muppets. Maybe more ballets should be set to Muppet music, I don’t know.
Moving It
I know the people want to see my stickers so here are the stickers from the last two weeks. I bought another batch of stickers from Stickii so I could get a little more variety and the results have been delightful. My mom said she also started giving herself stickers for going on a walk so I know I am a trend-setter.
As for the actual working out, I’m still going to water aerobics. Next week, the city starts offering an aqua jogging class so I’ll be giving that a try since it’s in the time slot immediately before the aerobics class. This week, I switched to a lighter band to support me on my bar hangs so I am proud of that. I thought it would take longer to make progress but it has been going fairly well. I also strict pressed over 80 pounds, so that is cool too!
Kitchen Witchery
I went for yet another variation on the peanut butter cookies recipe from 100 Cookies. This time, I used a chocolate-almond butter instead of regular peanut butter and I added chocolate chips instead of candied nuts. It was quite good and I would make it again. I make macaroni and cheese for lunch fairly often, but this week I tried a macaroni and beans (because of course I did). I used shell pasta and normal macaroni cheese but I mixed in some beans (I think it was butter beans but honestly I’ve forgotten by now). It was good! Finally, I made chili colorado with arroz rojo (from Mi Cocina), ayacote morado beans, and this corn cake, which I’m not sure has any real relationship to actual Mexican food beyond the fact that it’s corn but we like it. It all came out delicious.
Cat Therapy
Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.
