• sara reads the feed

    SRF #9: Rizz, illiterate rich people, and inhumanity

    Lately I’ve been reflecting on how many people are dying from covid and how cool we are with that (“we” being a nation). I’m in the group still masking because I’d rather not get any of the ambient illnesses, or spread them to people even more vulnerable than me, but people are really Done With It.

    Folks have *zero* interest in remembering the pandemic occurred, much less that the ongoing impact is a level of death and disability we should absolutely not accept, but the machine keeps going on.

    More blood for the blood god!

    Has it actually been like this my whole life? Like, this feeling that things are happening that should definitely make us stop and reflect as a nation, but everyone moved on willfully? And the difference now is that I didn’t get pulled along this time because I’m more aware, older, more vulnerable to long-term health impacts…?

    The news continues, anyway, and so do we.

    ~

    As a side note, there are a lot of Deals going on for Black Friday, and I’m repulsed by the whole thing so we’re not looking at sales. But I will remind you that any sale costs too much money if you don’t need the thing. Overwhelmingly, you do not need the thing. (I’m speaking to myself.)

    ~

    A major app (Engadget) using a word like “rizz” means that this probably died as slang six months ago.

    ~

    Variety: Timothée Chalamet: ‘If You Would’ve Told Me When I Was 12’ That I’d Be Starring in ‘Wonka,’ I Would’ve Said ‘You’re Lying’

    Sorry Tim, the world is not kind enough to lie about something this horrible.

    ~

    Psyche: What is it about film and TV antiheroes that’s so captivating?

    Our research seems to suggest that people want to know why immoral people do what they do. They want to know what makes bad people bad.

    I have so many thinky thoughts about this, it might be a post later.

    ~

    Immigration conditions in America appear to be inhumane in a new way.

    ~

    Starfield got a big update. I found it not-very-playable on launch day, so this is nice. I’m sure I’ll be playing it very heavily modded in a few months.

    ~

    On Lawyers Guns & Money, I learned that Peter Thiel fundamentally misunderstands Tolkien, Lord of the Rings, and elves.

    ~

    The New Yorker: The Next Power Plant is on the Roof and in the Basement

    ~

    Uhh. Are we still using the words “reverse harem”? Are we uh…committing to that one? Like, are we SURE?

    Here’s a read from Stitch about it, mentioning how orientalist the whole “harem” romance genre is

    And if we’re going to be honest: the harem genre in romance pulls from the harem romance in Japanese manga but also, the idea of ~the harem~ comes from orientalist fantasies about the ~Middle East~ that were popularized around the Victorian Era that built eroticism atop the harem in a super exotifying and definitely racist way.

    So a) this subgenre needs a name change, and b) this is all Queen Victoria’s fault.

    Obviously.

    The main thrust of the point is how hetero the genre manages to be, but as a queerbo, I don’t mind ignoring the hets. I do it all the time.

  • Diaries

    My love, the moving pictures

    I loved movies I watched as a kid way more than I’ll ever love a movie now, as an adult. But I love TV shows now way more as an adult.

    This is just a function of changing circumstances. When I was a kid, we had the movies we liked on VHS and DVD, and we could only afford some, so it wasn’t a huge library. Especially when we switched to DVD. Those first few years we had DVDs, I think we mostly watched the same five or six movies on endless repeat.

    I absorbed movies because they were always playing in the living room while I hung out, doing other things. Or because I was lying on the carpet in front of the TV, actively watching a box that could have killed me if the Hand of God managed to shove it off the plywood tv stand.

    Also, going to the theater was a major family ritual. It wasn’t (and still isn’t now) weird for us to watch movies we loved repeatedly in the theater.

    I just don’t do that anymore. The pandemic put me off theaters. I only watch a movie with my full attention if it manages to earn it while I’m crocheting and drawing. At least, that’s how it’s going right now. You can get a *lot* of movie by primarily listening to it. I’m always most interested in writing and structure, and you hear a lot of that.

    So I don’t love movies the way I used to, but it’s way easier to love TV now because it’s more accessible. The main TV show that was “My Show” was Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I managed to watch every single episode once, except the one with Cordelia and football Frankenstein, which I know existed because I also read books about the production of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Being able to see a TV show in its entirety was a feat back then. We absolutely did not own all the early seasons on DVD, so I had to catch up on reruns while watching every new episode as it aired.

    I recently went back to watch Buffy. I didn’t get into it at all, and I didn’t remember much of anything after the first couple seasons. This was My Show, something I put *so* much effort into watching, and I didn’t click at all.

    On the other hand, the streaming era means I’ve watched the TV show Community seven times in its entirety, Elementary four times, Voyager and DS9 twice apiece…

    It probably seems insane to watch that much TV in such a volume (it is), but it means getting a years-long overview of a television show, which is absolutely fascinating, and often the things that shape it *aren’t* in the writing. You can google to learn all about the horrible, toxic work environment that Community came out of, including details unlikely to be in a book about it, and you can grasp the whole thing (story and production) in a way that I never could have dreamed as a kid.

    I wonder how my relationship with visual media is going to change as I grow. There are whole formats I still don’t even touch, which means that the world is accruing more classics for me–somewhere in an entirely new realm, like soap operas, or YouTube, or *something*–and my life is going to change in some way that might bump me against them. I get excited thinking about what I don’t predict. Even if I’m completely over Buffy the Vampire Slayer now.

  • Rory Links

    Rory’s links #1

    It’s been a while, Egregious! Nice to see you again!

    Maybe you’ve been reading the Sara Reads the Feed series. If you haven’t, here’s Sara’s brief summary:

    I try to have an RSS feed reader that keeps me scrolling through hundreds of articles a day across many sites – that way I get a broad look at things and don’t get bogged down on Reddit. It seems it might be fun to read the feed “together” and round up some snippets of my commentary on the articles as we go.

    I don’t have a curated RSS feed (yet, it’s on the to-do list), but having a sporadic place to link and talk besides my Patreon (which has largely shifted toward review and criticism) makes sense. Maybe this’ll give me a reason to get more deliberate with my reading habits. Skimming my browser history and seeing the lack of diversity sure was depressing.


    Links

    1. A profile of a Taiwanese doctor addressing growing visual myopia. There’s a large focus on children here for many good reasons, but I’m inspired to get my eyes checked more frequently and get outside more. 120 minutes of daily outdoor activity is way above what I’m doing, and considering it’s Seasonal Depression Season, it’s a good time to push the number up.

    2. NPR’s Fresh Air did a long interview earlier this year with Siddartha Kara, “a fellow at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and at the Kennedy School”, about the “horror show” of cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo. (The link has both an audio interview, to which I have not listened, and a written summary, which I did read.) Cobalt is often used in rechargeable batteries that are vital for modern devices, including many that are part of the switch from fossil fuels, like rechargeable cars. One thing you can do now: read a guide on how to extend the life of lithium-ion batteries, like this one from University of Michigan, so your devices need replacing less often. Another way to help (this issue, and so many others) is to support right-to-repair laws, which are being enacted in a bunch of places, including California.

    Capitalism functions in a cycle of exploiting and/or enslaving some of the most vulnerable global populations and destroying natural resources. It’s been that way for centuries (see also: the history and formation of the United States, for just one example). I haven’t watched it yet, but in Last Week Tonight’s coverage of the chocolate industry, John Oliver says the following:

    So if we are serious about getting child labor out of our chocolate, we can’t keep relying on pinky promises and the honor system. We need tough legislation that requires companies do the right thing.

    And it’s not like this is the only industry where exploitation in other countries is the norm. I could just as easily have done this piece about coffee or palm oil. And we actually talked about trafficking and child labor in the US farm system this year. But experts themselves say of chocolate:

    “…in few industries…is the evidence of objectionable practices so clear…the industry’s pledges to reform so ambitious, and the breaching of those promises so obvious.”

    3. A nicer NPR link I’ve had open in my mobile browser for years now: Sewing your own clothes can be empowering. Here’s how to get started Yes, this has dark elements: the link references the initial COVID lockdowns and lack of available masks, and my personal motivations are related to exploitative labor practices/climate difficulties around fashion that aren’t unrelated to link two. But it’s also just really nice to have more control over something that’s a huge part of your life. I asked for a sewing machine for my last birthday and got one; maybe I’ll finally use it this spring!


    Newsletters

    Anne Helen Petersen’s Culture Study fills my TBR list with so many good nonfiction books. Some good, recent author interviews:

    1. A Different Way to Think About Student Success, an interview with Ana Homayoun about the book Erasing the Finish Line. As someone who was ground to dust by the pre-college grind about twenty years ago and still struggles with what crumbs of executive function I can grab, it’s validating to see someone’s book reflect my lived experience (probably; I haven’t read it yet, but the interview’s promising).

    2. Butts: A Backstory, an interview with Heather Radke about the book of the same name. Not only is this a great topic to cover for reasons listed in the interview, that the author has to state “I should specify that my book is about the cheeks, not the hole” at the beginning is so good.

    3. There is Nothing Magical About Forgiveness, an interview with Myisha Cherry about Failures of Forgiveness. Incredible how so short an interview can challenge tired cultural narratives. I know I’m tired of the “rush to forgiveness” without any repair or reckoning for damage done.


    Videos

    2023 has been a terrible year for Hollywood. While the WGA/SAG-AFTRA strikes are pointed to as a reason, I’d argue they were more major attempt at repair than direct cause. The signs of trouble have been there for years, and this year’s rot had set in long before the pickets had begun. And, as someone who follows a lot of film essayists on YouTube, it’s impossible to avoid the topic (unless you’re excellent channel Accented Cinema, which tends to focus on foreign cinema).

    Note: If you prefer to read over watching, most YouTube videos not only have subtitles, but transcripts as well! They often come from autogenerated subtitles, so readability will vary, but click “more” on the description, scroll down, and click “Show transcript” to get a box with text and timestamps.

    1. Who Killed Cinema by Patrick H Willems: A feature-length look at potential causes, shaped in a meta-comedic murder mystery style. You wanna blame terrible execs, Disney/Marvel’s business model, Netflix attacking theaters, and more? This one’s got ‘em.

    2. Are Film Critics a Dying Breed? by Broey Deschanel: I’ve always found film criticism to be a vital part of Hollywood’s artistic ecosystem—I was a kid who loved Roger Ebert, of course I’d think that—and this is an interesting look into criticism’s past and the differences between influencer and critic.

    3. The Marvelization of Cinema by Like Stories of Old: Patrick H Willems covers some of this, but Like Stories of Old builds a theory around entropy and builds an argument for meaning in storytelling, even in big-budget blockbusters.

    4. The Inevitable Failure of 2023 Blockbusters by Friendly Space Ninja: If you really want to see how badly the major studios are faring in terms of budget, here’s ten movies that financially bombed in spectacular fashion. And this was posted in August. I can’t get over how big a pile of money Disney burned when making and releasing Indiana Jones.

  • credit: Sony Pictures Entertainment
    movie reviews

    Review: My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997) *

    Dear Aunt Sara:

    I’ve got a real problem. My (27m) wedding to a beautiful woman (20f) is coming up in a few days. I wanted to give my best friend (27f) plenty of time to prepare herself for the wedding. Not because we’ve been in a nonmonogamous relationship for nine years and she deserves to know, but because I expect her to be happy for the loss of this intimate “friend” relationship with dirty talk, flirting, and dating.

    But BFF is here, and she acts like she’s into me when I flagrantly hit on her. I’ve told my Fiancee’s entire family that I’ve got like, the biggest boner for this lady, and so the family is teasing her and belittling Fiancee all the time. BFF is just being so weird about it!

    Now Fiancee is acting crazy too. I think she wants to give me a lucrative, stable job that would meet her needs as well as mine, the bitch. That’s not why I scooped up a girl in college and planned to rip her out of her life in order to completely service mine! We agreed she would never have needs. She would always be a doormat. But again, she’s acting weird about my hot BFF I’ve been having flirty phone sexy times with for the better part of a decade, and that’s just neurotic. Women, right?

    Anyway, the question: BFF kissed me right before the wedding and confessed she’s in love. Fiancee is shattered. I guess I just need to know, truly, girls crazy, right? I’m an absolute innocent in this. My therapist did mention something about how clear communication and appropriate boundaries from the start would have prevented the whole thing, but my therapist is a woman too so idk. How do I recover this whole thing where I deserve to have anything I want, all the time, without consequences, including a tender embrace with BFF at my own wedding?

    – Smoldering Without Boundaries

     

    Dear SWB,

    Die in a fire.

    ~Aunt Sara

     

    (image credit: Sony Pictures Studios)

  • image credit: Warner Bros Pictures
    movie reviews

    Review: Blue Beetle (2023) *****

    I could have given the exact same one-sentence review to this that I did to Elemental. “It feels like a really beautiful heartfelt iteration of a movie I have seen a whole lot.”

    In both cases, this is not a complaint or criticism, but the most honest way I can express the approach to the tropes of their format.

    Blue Beetle feels extremely familiar the way the worn carpet in your mom’s bedroom feels familiar, or the way it’s familiar to snuggle against her chest for a hug, even though you’re now six feet tall and must bend down halfway to reach her.

    This is the feeling of home: a comforting place where you have been since childhood.

    This is comic books.

    The way that Western comic books visit and revisit the same characters, superhero identities, and plot arcs repeatedly is akin to myth. We have made mythic stories out of their journeys that transcend the individual parts of media and invite everyone to reinterpret these myths in their own ways.

    What seems to differentiate Blue Beetle from comparables, like all the Spider-Man origin movies, is the fact that we’ve put a Latino family in the center of it. Blue Beetle is a family story; Jaime might be the recipient of this alien tech making him a superhero, but his entire family supports him on this adventure.

    The family felt familiar, too. If I had sat down with my husband (not Latino, but from a sprawling Italian American family) to riff on how they might react to seeing him overtaken by some insectlike superhero powers, I would have come up with some of the jokes in this movie. I couldn’t have come up with all of them because I’m not that funny. I love the physical comedy!

    It’s as though someone took a big ol’ paint-by-numbers kit for Superhero Origin Stories, then threw out whatever paint came with it, and made it into a gorgeous collage of Jaime Reyes’s family history in the style of your family, my neighbor’s family, the families in my neighborhood growing up.

    Though a lot of Blue Beetle is giddyingly, childishly funny, the heightened comic book emotions also cover grief (it’s a hero cycle, after all) and action, spending amounts of time in each emotion that feel wholly unnecessary to me, but are wholly appropriate for the format. Again: This *is* indeed the comic books of your childhood, with lots of peril, action, and drama.

    It’s fun to see such a sterling example of It’s Not Concept but Execution, which I think all the actors understood. They put their whole guts into their performances. Even Susan Sarandon knows she’s just here to play an evil Karen comic book villain, and she goes whole-hog on the cackling one-dimensional cruelty, which is perfect.

    You probably know if you enjoy this level of stylization; I’d say this movie has most value if you’ve got kids the right age to watch along with them

    It’s a shame that DCU’s choices means that we can’t get more beautiful pieces of cinema that *loves* their characters as deeply as Blue Beetle loves its central family. I’d be delighted to have a whole movie about Nana gunning down imperials. If Alfred can get a show, why not Nana?

    (Banner image credit: Warner Bros Pictures)

  • sara reads the feed

    SRF #8: Good labor, bad labor; stupid hair; dunking on Millennials

    Apple updated my iPad and suddenly my bluetooth keyboard isn’t working on it. Nooooo. That’s how I’ve been writing while sitting down lately, so I guess I need to dust off my laptop and actually use it as a laptop? Argh.

    I had wanted to try blogging from there this morning, and yet.

    So here we are again, at my standing desk.

    I’m thinking of using my VR headset to function as a sitting monitor when I hurt too much to stand, without having to convert my desk back to a sitting desk, but it’s an older unit and the resolution isn’t great for text. Not that it extremely bothers me; it’s just an aesthetic for cyberpunk more than writing fantasy.

    I’ve got options I GUESS.

    ~

    Truly it amazes me that the reason I can do so much crochet, movie-watching, and drawing is because I normally do *absolutely nothing* with my day. Spending a weekend chatting with family, going to an art museum, playing games with my kiddo, and all the usual Actually Living Life stuff takes so?? much?? time???

    I mean, normally I do spend substantial time with my kids every day. …sometimes in the form of sitting near them and talking while I crochet and draw.

    And I do chores too! Usually while listening to material for me to blog about (or stories in general, just to inspire me).

    Why is there so little time? Does it *feel* like there’s so little time because I’m just always stoned so that the hours melt pleasantly into one another, and I never really feel the need to look at the clock, and the rhythm of the days is the pulsing heartbeat of my life?

    Maybe it’s just being in my thirties now.

    ~

    Who wants to read the feed?

    ~

    NPR describes a dream job, which is cheese tasting. I bet my kids could do this with a little training. They have extremely sensitive palates, and we haven’t done much to discourage them from being selective. They can reject food that is only very slightly off at the slightest whiff. It would be nice if they could make money off their ability to tell me what’s wrong with every bite.

    ~

    Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns, & Money talks about the intersection of labor and colonization.

    One thing we that underemphasize when we talk about the connections between colonization and race is that it was really all about labor. As I always tell my students, while today we focus on slavery and its legacies as about racism, the reality is that the entire point was to create a stable labor force and that continued well after slavery ended, at least in the American South. […] From New York down to Argentina, the singular point of colonization was to force labor to work in order to make Europeans rich.

    ~

    Psyche: As a psychiatrist, I’ve seen how chasing happiness leads to misery

    Normally I enjoy the writing on Psyche articles a lot more. This one focuses on a couple of cases by the author, a retired psychiatrist and author.

    But this is a subject I’ve been thinking about a bit anyway.

    It seems paradoxical that the pursuit of happiness should generate sadness, but happiness is a ghost, and chasing a ghost can never be a satisfying experience.

    I have a few Mom Sayings that I like to pull out to broadly explain why life is the way life is, and the most useful recent addition has been, “All the good stuff and bad stuff happens at the same time.” Meaning, no matter how bad things get, there are still going to be kittens chasing jingleballs. And no matter how good things get, you might also have diarrhea at Disneyland.

    The kid-friendly examples are unnecessarily cute, but maybe you get my drift. We must simply accept that good and bad stuff happens all the time. We’re going to experience all of it. We have to be present for everything so we don’t miss it.

    That is much easier said than done, of course. Presence is a moving target.

    ~

    I suppose then that it’s worth discussing The Morality of Having Kids in a Burning, Drowning World (New Yorker).

    For my part, I just think you can’t ever predict where life is going. Remember how good and bad happens all at the same time? Even as we battle climate change, good things will happen.

    Great people with meaningful lives are born in terrible situations all the time. Sometimes good meaningful lives are brief. That isn’t without value. The moments we spend together have value.

    If you want kids, have kids. If you don’t want kids, do your best to avoid it.

    ~

    Huffpost: Far-Right Populist Javier Milei Wins Argentina’s Pesidential Runoff Election

    If it tells you anything, the man was praised by Trump and also has stupid hair.

    I’m not insulting him for having stupid hair, to be clear; I’m saying that the modern fascist movement often has leaders with hair that differs from what is considered business appropriate. Trump’s hair is a distinctive feature, as was Boris Johnson’s.

    This is one way that far-right leaders shoot for populist appeal. They aren’t like the guys in the system, so they’ll be able to change it. You can trust them! They have stupid hair!

    This stupid-haired man wants to screw with education and abortion, so my sympathies to Argentinians. We’re in this together, huh?

    ~

    Cyanide & Happiness often feels like it’s throwing nonsense spaghetti at the wall to see if anyone might think it’s funny, but this one is actually funny.

  • sara reads the feed

    SRF #7: Theoretical currency, radical love, and dying presidents

    Sometimes I just kinda don’t sleep. I’m more of a Wake Up, Stay Awake person than a Never Fall Asleep person, which is what I’d prefer anyway. It’s not great to be awake at 3:30am because my hips hurt and I can feel my body working on digestion, but I really love passing the eff out because my eyes won’t stay open at 9pm. I don’t know, I just really love it.

    I’m tired but Not Tired Enough so I’m sure I’ll do a morning nap in a couple hours.

    Meanwhile I’m at my standing desk again, and if I keep writing these posts from my standing desk, they will invariably have intros about my hip/back pain.

    Maintenance of this site is a big part of its appeal for me, because I really just love internet puttering. Doing updates is fun. Honing the UI is fun. I’ve had opportunities to launch quite a few personal sites over my life now and I just don’t get tired of it.

    Yesterday I noticed that I kept getting fraudulent account signups. I locked comments to accounts only in order to limit my reliance on comment spam filters, and because I’d rather not talk with people than moderate a comment section. But fake emails, I hadn’t done anything to prevent. I nearly broke the whole thing yesterday installing plugins on a live site (lol) but we made it through. So far the new CAPTCHA is stopping bot signups. My obscurity is stopping human signups, but human interaction isn’t always desirable anyway.

    ~

    A fascinating read about currency from Noema. The opening salvo about childhood commerce is hilariously relatable, but from the perspective of a world-builder, accounts of historical currency habits is my favorite.

    Lydia, a kingdom in modern-day Turkey, created what many historians consider the first coins: lumps of blended gold and silver stamped with a lion. The idea spread to Greece, where people started exchanging their goods for coins in public spaces called agoras. Money soon created alternatives to traditional labor systems. Now, instead of working on a wealthy landowner’s farm for a year in return for food, lodging and clothes, a person could be paid for short-term work. This gave people the freedom to leave a bad job, but also the insecurity of finding employment when they needed it.

    Aristotle, for one, wasn’t convinced. He worried that Greeks were losing something important in their pursuit of coins. Suddenly, a person’s wealth wasn’t determined by their labor and ideas but also by their cunning. […]

    He wasn’t alone in his distrust of commerce. In mythology, Hermes is both the god of merchants and of thieves. Meanwhile, the Bible tells the story of Jesus overturning the tables of moneychangers and merchants in a Jerusalem temple. In the early days, as is true today, commerce implied exploitation — of natural resources and of other people. (The Incans, on the other hand, built an entire civilization with no money at all, just a complex system of tributes and structured specialization of work.)

    I love history framed to affirm my preexisting worldviews. Living in a currency-free post-scarcity society is currently not an issue of resource availability, but politics and logistics. We could handle the latter. The former remains an issue.

    That’s also why we can’t have money which expires, but this suggestion from a 19th century economy autodidact did seem to have a clever idea.

    Silvio Gesell proposed a radical reformation of the monetary system as we know it. He wanted to make money that decays over time. […] “Only money that goes out of date like a newspaper, rots like potatoes, rusts like iron, evaporates like ether,” Gesell wrote in his seminal work, “The Natural Economic Order,” published in 1915, “is capable of standing the test as an instrument for the exchange of potatoes, newspapers, iron and ether.” […]

    In 1898, the Argentine government embarked on a deflationary policy to try to treat its economic ills. As a result, unemployment rose and uncertainty made people hoard their money. The economy ground to a halt. There was plenty of money to go around, Gesell realized. The problem was, it wasn’t going around. He argued that the properties of money — its durability and hoardability — impede its circulation: “When confidence exists, there is money in the market; when confidence is wanting, money withdraws.”

    Money hoarding is absolutely an issue. In a fantasy society I developed, I removed any ability to pass wealth between generations of family, which is almost like expiring money on a longer scale. It wouldn’t be as economically stimulating on a short scale. It’s mostly meant to limit the growth of families with more power than others.

    I like the expiry thought. You’d have to pair expiration of currency with vigorous regulations to ensure it doesn’t just mean poor people lose their money after a while, as rich people navigate laws required to easily refresh it (like spending money within the family to just circulate it). Money laundering would be so tempting, and it favors those with preexisting connections.

    I’m not familiar with the magazine this article comes from, and I like to search for slant when I’m reading something new. Especially if I like it so much. This comes from the Berggruen Institute. Although I’m not going to be going through that wall of text right now, there are a lot of nonsense buzzwords on their Wiki article, and the apparent wealth of the organization makes me super skeptical of their influence. That doesn’t mean the article and/or magazine itself are entirely incredible; I’m just suspicious of any organization involving so much money. I’d take these conjectures more seriously from people who didn’t succeed at our current system.

    ~

    Paywalled article here on Washington Post (but if you come across an eight foot wall, you should just search for a 12ft ladder) about the impact of losing affirmative action on two young students’ Ivy hopes: a boy who is white, and a boy who is Black.

    ~

    NPR: One woman’s controversial fight to make America accept drug users for who they are

    Harm reduction is a big deal and this is a wonderful cause to fight. Addicts are not Just Addicts; they are humans, our neighbors, the person writing this blog post, family members, friends. Although I have never gotten into hard drugs, my fight against alcohol and involvement in mental healthcare has given me nothing but love for addicts.

    It is controversial, and I get why. The propaganda surrounding drugs in America is very strong. More than that, America has an incredibly punitive culture. Lots of the country thinks you may as well die if you can’t bootstrap.

    Plus, drugs are scary. Losing people to drugs is a horrible tragedy. People aren’t prepared to handle it, much less approach it with open-hearted love, but that’s what we need: radical love for our neighbors. All of them.

    ~

    Also NPR: As Democrats stay divided on Israel, Jewish voters face politically uncertain future

    What about registered Democrats who believe that all the civilians involved in a conflict on both sides are being absolutely wrecked by a couple awful rich dudes in power? And absolutely nobody can possibly win in this war except for arms dealers and power brokers, which does not mean a win for people anywhere? So we have to start by stopping the war, period, and sorting out our fn priorities as a species? Please put me down as pro-human, anti-war, in every single conflict, no matter how glib it sounds.

    Nobody dying in this has chosen the no-win scenario these groups have been locked in for generations. There are a couple people who could choose to stop the killing right now. Normal Folks versus Cruel Tiny Ruling Class are the sides I care about. The Democratic Party is such a massive institution that they couldn’t possibly care what I care about.

    (Yesterday I wrote “speaking loudly against such asymmetric warfare seems obvious from where I stand” like symmetric warfare would be any better. Today I’m feeling spicier.)

    A ceasefire does not look likely right now.

    ~

    I guess I’m only rehashing NPR this morning: As Biden celebrates his birthday, candles on the cake are adding to the problem

    I predict that they will replace Kamala Harris as his VP for the second term, but still lean on Joe Biden, and very quietly run on the idea that the VP could take over as president if Biden doesn’t see his 86th birthday. There hasn’t been public talk about the Dem VP, afaik, so I can’t begin to guess who they’d vet; I’m never good at guessing these things. Dreamy philosopher, yes. Smart analyst, no.

    I kinda don’t care how old Biden is at this point because it feels like everyone in Washington is as old as he is and it doesn’t matter, they really don’t care about what people want, the system is not designed to give us what we need. I’m just slowly going crazy, don’t mind me.

    I’ve been watching Old Animals die the last few years and I notice that natural death has a prodromal period of months or years. Dying of age is a PROCESS. Biden doesn’t look like he’s in prodromal death (falling over is a risk for everyone at this age) so if the doctors give his guts the all-clear, I’d reckon he’s fine. My great-grandma was great until a fall when she was ninety-two years old; my kids’ great-grandparents are still kicking through their nineties and have only started showing the age since maybe 2020.

    Is anyone morbidly curious to see what it would look like to have a president die of age in office? What’s the funeral like for that?