It’s the kind of morning where you forget to put the paper filter in the AeroPress.
Excellent analysis in Vlast today on Kazakh political economy.
Monday, December 9, 2024
If you read Russian, I highly recommend you read. Два года ожидания социальной справедливости Токаева - Аналитический интернет-журнал Власть Here’s a quote from Dosym Satpaev “«Протестность в Казахстане никуда не делась. Она просто не аккумулирована в рамках политических оппозиционных партий и движений. Вся история локальных протестов – в Жанаозене, Шаныраке или во время земельных митингов – показывала, что власть не владеет ситуацией и замкнулась в мыльном пузыре, пока страна жила в другом измерении.
Spill by Cory Doctorow
Tuesday, December 3, 2024
Finished reading: Spill by Cory Doctorow 📚 This short story is part of Cory Doctorow’s excellent Little Brother series. There’s a million things I like about these books, but one of my favorite things is how Doctorow sneaks in basic digital security practices, especially for activists, as an exciting part of the plot. Spill is no exception. Sometimes, I just want to hand the entire Little Brother series to my colleagues as assigned reading.
Tell me about it
Friends don’t let friends send emails on Monday morning.
All that I’m going to say is that the failure to include a GIF-picker in the Signal desktop app on Windows is a gross omission.
First sub-freezing (25 F / -4 C) ride of the year. Fortunately, it was just the two miles to the metro station, as I don’t know if I’m emotionally prepared prepared for this yet.
#biketooter
Absolutely, but this article also doesn’t mention that electric bikes and mopeds require far fewer critical minerals for their batteries, which have their own grave externalities.
This video does a great job summarizing the problems and challenges facing the MARC train in Maryland. I second the author’s call for regular weekend service on the Brunswick and Camden lines.
Between travel, deadlines, being sick, and the elections, November just felt like I was trying to survive. Here’s to creating my own conditions to thrive in December.
Finished reading: 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson; 📚
While not quite as thought provoking as the Mars Trilogy or Ministry of the Future, which may have shifted some of my own politics, Kim Stanley Robinson still impressed me with his world building and his ability to combine science with politics.
In this book, I particularly enjoyed his descriptions of the terraria, or hollowed out asteroids spun to simulate gravity on their hollowed-out insides, and each populated with its own complete biome, complete with flora and fauna. Many were a love note to different biomes on earth.
Maybe if I switch notes apps just one more time I will finally be productive, organized, and happy.
Maybe I will be unstoppable.
At that point in the year where I’m unmoored in time, unsure what year it is.
Is it 2024? 2025? 2023? Am I still enduring 2020? Who knows? Let’s pick one at random to put on this document and find out.
Finished reading: Villa and Zapata by Frank McLynn 📚
I’d previously listened to the excellent Revolutions Podcast series on the Mexican Revolution, which peaked my interest in learning more.
I was fascinated to learn more about the conditions during the Porfiriato that lead to the Mexican Revolution. Both the role the Haciendas played as a conservative, planter-class aristocracy, as well as the destructive role American and British oil investments played in capturing the state. I can’t point to any contemporary parallels at all.
Anyways, the sticker I have of Emiliano Zapata riding a bike on my own bike finally feels earned. I read his biography.
The Strange Reason Nearly Every Film Ends by Saying It’s Fiction (You Guessed It: Rasputin!)
Virtually every film in modern memory ends with some variation of the same disclaimer: “This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.” The cut-and-paste legal rider must be the most boring thing in every movie that features it. Who knew its origins were so lurid?
For that bit of boilerplate, we can indirectly thank none other than Grigori Rasputin, the famously hard-to-assassinate Russian mystic and intimate of the last, doomed Romanovs. It all started when an exiled Russian prince sued MGM in 1933 over the studio’s Rasputin biopic, claiming that the American production did not accurately depict Rasputin’s murder. And the prince ought to have known, having murdered him.
I had no idea this traced back to a specific historical event.
I watched The Soul of a Cyclist on my flight home today. It’s a very lovely documentary about people who like to ride vintage bikes, shot in Portugal and England. Recommendended for bike lovers just looking for something charming to watch.
Coming to Germany certainly hasn’t done anything to make me covet a fancy German mid-drive cargo bike any less.
I had a free day because of the way my flights worked out, so I took the train from Frankfurt to check out rainy Heidelberg.
But in Gilded Ages — such as the one that dominated the turn of the 20th century and the one we’re now in — the ultra-rich abandon such humility. The linkages between wealth and power becomes apparent for all to see. Conspicuous consumption becomes the handmaiden of conspicuous clout.
In such times, the wealthy brag about their access to politicians, talk openly about how many tens of millions of dollars they’ve donated to campaigns and about the “return” on these “investments,” and want everyone to know how they’ve turned their affluence into influence and their influence into even more affluence.
Ultimately, these insults to democracy — delivered by the new oligarchs shamelessly, openly, and arrogantly — go too far. They invite a backlash.