Sam (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
l33tminion) wrote2026-01-10 01:04 pm
l33tminion) wrote2026-01-10 01:04 pm
Past Americana
Winter break with family was good. Very relaxing. I am locking back in to my health goals in the new year, though, after a few weeks of little exercise and lot beer and cake.
I read There Is No Antimemetics Division (a great piece of sci-fi psychological horror by Sam Hughes / qntm, all of his stuff is great) and started watching Severance (also great sci-fi suspense psychological horror, but the sort of existential mystery where I really, really hope there's a coherent core to the mystery and a complete plot arc for the characters). I reread Redwall, which Erica also read recently. I continued reading The Chronicles of Narnia to Erica, now on The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. I also read John Green's Everything Is Tuberculosis, one of the most interesting pieces of nonfiction I've read in recent years.
I've been enjoying watching the speedrun streams this week from AGDQ.
And my surprise favorite of the week Brown Sugar Clementine Polar seltzer, one of their winter special-edition flavors. It tastes like how you'd expect from that description, which is a very strange thing for seltzer to taste like.
And now for some tonal whiplash because there are a few more serious things I want to talk about, and apparently when I don't write for a few weeks these days, America makes meaningful steps towards both Civil War 2 and World War 3.
The US military kidnapped Venezuela's head of state, and while I acknowledge the Venezualans would be better off rid of Maduro, it's not so clear to what extent they are. It seems to be less "regime change" and more "bump off the top guy and hope the next up will give you a cut". Right-wingers brayed about how this means America can "just do things" now, it's a big "mission accomplished" moment. All very familiar. Axing the whole international order just for this seems questionable to me, though. And maybe it will work out, but if so, the Trump administration seems to be lining up a whole series of similar things to do until one of them very much doesn't.
Additional oil in Venezuela resources will take a lot of time and investment to unlock, but maybe some big buyers of Trump Coin will profit along the way, even under this sort of policy environment. Trump claims the newly-promoted number two will be handing over 30-50M barrels of oil to be sold, with proceeds spent at Trump's sole discretion. Seems like a crazy thing to happen, if he's even telling the truth about that in the first place.
On the domestic front, Minneapolis is again in the news as a panicky (at best) ICE agent Jonathan Ross killed Renee Good, a poet and mom who was, as far as I can tell, trying to obey the possibly-contradictory orders of masked goons who surrounded her for no good reason. Of course, Trump's base is quick to smear Good as a would-be murderer. Being opposed to ICE or liberal generally is motive enough. The Vice President of the US then smeared the victim as a terrorist and would-be murderer. Even taking VP Vance's word for it, ICE was there to do "door-to-door" immigration raids. That's not how law enforcement in the US is done. If Fourth Amendment protections mean anything, it includes requiring law enforcement act on specific cause. Door to door "show me your papers" because some crime is happening somewhere is deeply anti-American. And the penalty for in any way inconveniencing or even annoying the thugs carrying out those anti-American actions is apparently, in their view, not just death, but death followed by being publicly slandered by the Vice President. The FBI is jumping in to confiscate the evidence and preclude the state enforcing their own protections of their citizens' rights. "Abolish ICE" is the moderate position.
The one bit of good news globally, it seems, is from Iran, it seems there is some chance the people there will actually overthrow their government of murderous terrorist-supporting theocrats. That really would be a big change to the global order. I'm inclined to be pessimistic about everything these days, but the people suffering under that certainly deserve better.
I read There Is No Antimemetics Division (a great piece of sci-fi psychological horror by Sam Hughes / qntm, all of his stuff is great) and started watching Severance (also great sci-fi suspense psychological horror, but the sort of existential mystery where I really, really hope there's a coherent core to the mystery and a complete plot arc for the characters). I reread Redwall, which Erica also read recently. I continued reading The Chronicles of Narnia to Erica, now on The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. I also read John Green's Everything Is Tuberculosis, one of the most interesting pieces of nonfiction I've read in recent years.
I've been enjoying watching the speedrun streams this week from AGDQ.
And my surprise favorite of the week Brown Sugar Clementine Polar seltzer, one of their winter special-edition flavors. It tastes like how you'd expect from that description, which is a very strange thing for seltzer to taste like.
And now for some tonal whiplash because there are a few more serious things I want to talk about, and apparently when I don't write for a few weeks these days, America makes meaningful steps towards both Civil War 2 and World War 3.
The US military kidnapped Venezuela's head of state, and while I acknowledge the Venezualans would be better off rid of Maduro, it's not so clear to what extent they are. It seems to be less "regime change" and more "bump off the top guy and hope the next up will give you a cut". Right-wingers brayed about how this means America can "just do things" now, it's a big "mission accomplished" moment. All very familiar. Axing the whole international order just for this seems questionable to me, though. And maybe it will work out, but if so, the Trump administration seems to be lining up a whole series of similar things to do until one of them very much doesn't.
Additional oil in Venezuela resources will take a lot of time and investment to unlock, but maybe some big buyers of Trump Coin will profit along the way, even under this sort of policy environment. Trump claims the newly-promoted number two will be handing over 30-50M barrels of oil to be sold, with proceeds spent at Trump's sole discretion. Seems like a crazy thing to happen, if he's even telling the truth about that in the first place.
On the domestic front, Minneapolis is again in the news as a panicky (at best) ICE agent Jonathan Ross killed Renee Good, a poet and mom who was, as far as I can tell, trying to obey the possibly-contradictory orders of masked goons who surrounded her for no good reason. Of course, Trump's base is quick to smear Good as a would-be murderer. Being opposed to ICE or liberal generally is motive enough. The Vice President of the US then smeared the victim as a terrorist and would-be murderer. Even taking VP Vance's word for it, ICE was there to do "door-to-door" immigration raids. That's not how law enforcement in the US is done. If Fourth Amendment protections mean anything, it includes requiring law enforcement act on specific cause. Door to door "show me your papers" because some crime is happening somewhere is deeply anti-American. And the penalty for in any way inconveniencing or even annoying the thugs carrying out those anti-American actions is apparently, in their view, not just death, but death followed by being publicly slandered by the Vice President. The FBI is jumping in to confiscate the evidence and preclude the state enforcing their own protections of their citizens' rights. "Abolish ICE" is the moderate position.
The one bit of good news globally, it seems, is from Iran, it seems there is some chance the people there will actually overthrow their government of murderous terrorist-supporting theocrats. That really would be a big change to the global order. I'm inclined to be pessimistic about everything these days, but the people suffering under that certainly deserve better.