As I finish writing this post, late Saturday afternoon, the outside air temperature is about 6° Fahrenheit. That makes it about 20 degrees warmer than when I got out of bed this morning, a little after 5:00 am, when I stuck my head out the door just to experience probably the coldest air to ever touch my face.
I didn’t like it.
Twenty years ago I would have gone for a walk so I would know what a warm day in the Siberian gulags was like. But older me is less resilient to extreme temperatures, though the possibility of gulags gets closer every day.
In Minneapolis, ICE is ramping up its murder of American citizens in the streets, which is exactly what every Trump voter intended. ICE is Trump’s gestapo, and every single one of them needs to be prosecuted, incarcerated for life, and all of their worldly wealth and possessions confiscated, so that neither they nor their families ever have any companionship, success or comfort, ever again. Let all ICE agents be cold, lonely, desperate, immiserated, and afraid until the end of their days.
Fuck ICE.
Fuck everyone who supports ICE in any capacity.
Fuck the entire power structure which enables ICE.
There. That’s my political thought for the day.
Reading
I finished The Age of Addiction, which was informative but lighter than I had hoped. I am indebted to the author, Dan Davies, for introducing me to the concept of “limbic capitalism,” which I will most certainly explore in the days to come.
And yesterday morning I finished Devouring Time, Todd Goddard’s superb biography of Jim Harrison.
Writing
The current level of insanity has left me little time or energy to write anything creative outside of a rough draft of a poem here and there. And by “rough” I mean a line or two on which I might some day hang a stanza, which might be the seed of an actual poem one day.
Weekly Writing Prompt
Subject: Evolution, Politics
Setting: Frontier
Genre: Solarpunk
Listening
Rage Against the Machine, “Killing in the Name Of.”
Interesting Links
- “Weaponized Interdependence: How Global Economic Networks Shape State Coercion” (Henry Farrell, Abraham L. Newman, International Security 44.1 )
- “The Great AI Displacement: Fracturing Tomorrow’s Labor Market” (Goran Lazarevski, Naked Capitalism)