Per Trans News Network, there are currently 10 bills on Gavin Newsom's desk that support LBGQT+ rights:
Trans Rights Bills
AB 82 / SB 497– These privacy-focused bills provide needed confidentiality for patients, providers, and volunteers involved with trans healthcare. AB 82 offers important protections for reproductive healthcare, and prevents prescription data about drugs like testosterone and mifepristone from being stored in databases that could be accessible by other states.
AB 1084 / SB 59– This pair of legal name change bills includes one that streamlines the process of updating legal name and gender, and another to ensure that older court records of name changes can’t be used to out or dox trans people.
SB 418 – Bolsters nondiscrimination protections for health insurance plans and requires the plans to cover up to a 12-month supply of prescription hormones.
LGBTQ+ Rights Bills
AB 554 – Requires insurance coverage of all FDA-approved medications that prevent HIV such as PreP, without prior authorization.
AB 727 – Mandates that schools and universities must provide all youth suicide hotline information, including numbers for LGBTQ+ hotlines in the wake of Trump’s defunding of the Trevor Project hotline.
AB 678 – Requires state housing programs to coordinate with LGBTQ+ communities to ensure homelessness programs remain inclusive and nondiscriminatory for queer people experiencing homelessness, directly combatting federal efforts to force homeless shelters to ban trans people.
SB 590 – Expands paid family leave protections to include the diverse caregiving needs of queer families.
SB 450 – Clarifies California adoption law to allow for LGBTQ+ couples who live outside of California to adopt children born in the state through California proceedings, which are more inclusive than many other states.
Call him at (916) 445-2841 to ask him to sign these bills into law.
I woke up this morning and didn't want to go to work because I was scared. My body was scared, after yesterday.
I am so used to this feeling from previous jobs and stuff: the physical way the anxiety settles into my arms and legs and chest and head, my skin and muscles and eyes and everywhere, it gets everywhere. But I don't remember if I'd ever felt it in this job -- or if I have, it's been in recognition of a high-stakes day (an important person I need to impress, a big deadline) or something unpleasant (a meeting I don't want to chair).
Today looked perfectly innocuous according to my calendar and my to-do list. But then so did yesterday, and that didn't protect me.
When I finally got out of bed, I would've been late for the usual morning meeting, and we were supposed to have a team meeting today too, but luckily my manager was working elsewhere all morning so neither happened. It was such a gift, this nice gentle start to the day and a few hours that were free of the possibility of such scariness.
And I did have a meeting that included my manager this afternoon so we interacted normally. That helped my body and brain a little too.
I had counseling after work, and of course I had lots to talk about. Sometimes I feel like I just talk too much and don't get enough of my counselor's perspective that I'm paying so much for: I am happy to pay for some thoughts that aren't already in my own head, and then I hardly let her get a word in edgewise while I babble about how the struggles in politics, my workplace and even my baseball fandom are all leaving me struggling under hypernormalization.
Anyway, at the end she was able to make the point that my nervous system has been activated a lot, and it shuts down the frontal lobe where stuff like communication happens, leaving you only with fight-or-flight type shit (or freeze or fawn, my usual two). She wasn't surprised that I was unable to speak a few times yesterday. So that was reassuring, because as the world's most talkative person, who doesn't know what I'm thinking/feeling if I can't talk (or write here) about it, it's so rare and uncomfortable to end up unable to speak! It does feel like a goddam Racacoonie situation so I'm also soothed by the fact that the internet seems to call this "amygdala hijack." Hijack is the exactly right word for it!
Anyway my counselor also told me that connection with other people is a great way to address this. I had told her about listening to the old friend telling me about life in one of the cities where Trump has sent the National Guard, the Jewish guy we made friends with on Sunday... She said this is great, and that was a perspective that I wouldn't have otherwise that's useful and good for me now. But of course it's not just about such worthy connections: spending Saturday with some of my favorite people was also good for me, catching them up on the goofy details of my almost-accidental hookup since I hadn't seen them since it happened a couple of months ago -- even reminding myself of that day enough to tell them about how it came about left me in a noticeably better mood for a couple hours after.
These are long-term mitigations of course; in the short term she talked about breathing and how exhaling for longer than you inhale can help. This amused the hell out of me just because it was only last night that D was talking about recognizing the breathing count (one or two beats longer on the exhale than the inhale) from our yoga instructor being present in what he was doing at the time, which was the Guided Meditation event in Fallout 76, of all things.
The next time some well-meaning person asks "Have you tried yoga?" you should ask them "Have you tried the Mothman Cult?"
Rogan: In my post about a physical newsletter, I forgot another thing we’ve been considering doing to circumvent the bans: make our digital work free and run it on donations like LiberaPay.
Rogan: Well, this is something I have been keeping a secret for the past year, but it looks like I might have finally finished my personal memory work. Since September 2024, I have had only a few episodes, all triggered under extremely specific, unusual circumstances and all fairly easy to deal with. As I've waited to see if I'm truly done, I've come to find a lot of discussions about trauma lacking. As one therapist of mine once called it, there's a lot of talk of traumatic injury, and barely any about traumatic growth.
In an idyllic suburb, BB strolls through a pumpkin harvest festival. In place of jack-o’-lanterns, human gore is heaped on tabletop displays. Mutilated corpses nag BB to marry the corporate-approved Greg from High School while a woman’s severed head likens pumpkins to “corpses squeezed from shallow graves, as if the earth were too choked with flesh for further entry and the living were consigned to a narrowing circle within the legions of the dead, the numberless murdered of the history of the world.”
BB replies, “I get it, already!! Greg from High School!! Jesus!!”
This scene occurs in “Heart of the Killer.” It is the eighth installment of Anthology of the Killer, a series of comedy-horror cartoon adventure games released from 2020 to 2024 by Space Funeral (2003) creator Stephen Gillmurphy. The player controls BB, a college student in XX City who reports on mysteries in her Strange Town zine, wandering through environments dense with scripted dialogue (even the chase scenes stay wordy). Invariably, BB discovers that another aspect of the city’s culture and civil society has been corrupted into an irrational murder conspiracy under the influence of a bird-headed arsonist known only as the Killer.
Though XX City is full of sinister knife-brandishing villains, only the Killer is spared mockery and pratfalls, looming alone as unvarnished horror. However, it is usually remote from the action. In “Heart of the Killer,” for example, the Killer never appears, but nonetheless the data the antagonists collect about sexual death fantasies is data about the Killer. It is not only a physical bird-monster but also an abstract force rendering other people its heart, its hands, its eyes, and other organs suggested in the episode titles. But what is the Killer?
Literally, the Killer turns out to be a prototype drinky bird automaton. Its official bio in the bonus materials states it is “possessed by an evil metaphor for history.” But this raises the question of what this metaphor means.
History is the series’ thematic axis. The second episode, “Hands of the Killer,” features BB introducing the history of XX City as transformations of an increasingly incomprehensible economy. “There was an Industrial period, a Retail period, a Service period, et cetera, until gradually the things it manufactured became too abstract and indecipherable to easily be summarized in any way.” Later, a college of the titular Hands of the Killer—under the tutelage of the Killer’s self-appointed acolyte Dr. Zoo—abduct BB for their hands-on murder labs, during which they give a more macabre perspective: history is a process of murder.
“Creating history is the duty of all murderers and in the tools they hack with we see the reflection of a new age that is to come. To perfect murder we must create a new universe devoted exclusively towards that purpose. We must also consider the possibility that we live in it already.”
On social media, Gillmurphy has pitched the Anthology as “Courage the Cowardly Dog meets the Angel of History,” referencing the ninth thesis of Walter Benjamin’s 1940 text “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” I will quote the version published by Schocken Books in Illuminations (1968), translated by Harry Zohn.
“Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage,” Benjamin writes, each explosion hurtling the angel backward too quickly for him to turn and see what happens next or to stop and “make whole what has been smashed” (257–258). The Killer is not Benjamin’s compassionate angel, but the explosions of murder that depopulate XX City demonstrate this history-as-catastrophe image.
History is replete with massacre, torture, and widespread cruelty, and history is far from over. “Voice of the Killer” introduces how normalized mass death is in XX City. Seeing a news report about thousands dead, BB says, “Same as always.” Considering the wars of aggression and continuing genocides of the twenty-first century alone, this banalization of atrocity is not an exaggeration. In “Blood of the Killer,” the patriotic Concerned Citizen describes his experience reading a zine that, apparently, gives a frank account of his country’s history. He froths with rage to find not the mythologized civic religion he was taught about the past but “a bad dream and a horror story in which all the names and faces [he] reveres from books and statues reappear instead as torturers and killers as toadies and functionaries of a charnel house … the beautiful history [he] adores and worships has been replaced by a lake of blood that has no bottom.” His gory efforts to deny this history cause him to join his forebearers as another functionary of a charnel house.
Like the Concerned Citizen, many deny, downplay, or even justify the horrors committed by names and faces from books and statues. History is made by murderers: Qin Shihuang, Julius Caesar, Christopher Columbus, Napoleon. Dr. Zoo calls classical sculptures “brilliant monuments, to kill people in the shadow of.” In the seventh thesis, Benjamin urges a view of traditional historical narratives as tacitly siding against the oppressed. The quote has become almost cliché:
“[T]he spoils [of the conquered] are carried along in the procession [of history]. They are called cultural treasures, and a historical materialist views them with cautious detachment. For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. … There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism” (256).
The Anthology foregrounds history as horror, “[a]ll those squashed peasant revolts, interminable centuries of torture, beheadings,” a parade of murderers more extreme and gratuitous than the slasher villains who hound BB. As in the Concerned Citizen’s ramblings, Gillmurphy repeatedly likens history to oceans, rivers, or waves of blood, the drink for the drinky-bird Killer. An avatar of the Killer promises that one day “we will…be at the end of the calendar, and the streets shall be red with the blood of the calendar.” The end of history is less Dr. Zoo’s “utopia of murder” and more a final apocalyptic slaughter.
Bosso, a director at the Immersive Theater, is a Hand of the Killer who wields power through her access to the City Owners, a caste of blue bloods who “like prisons, mirrors, [and] violent death.” For her, history has become safely remote, a sprawling nightmare play straddling reality, kept up to amuse the Owners at a terrible cost of life (just not hers). Given the Hands’ widespread influence and that the Anthology frames each episode as a show in the theater, the whole series might be read as Bosso’s skewed theatrical take on history. But like the semi-fictional Count Masko she condemns to death in “Eyes of the Killer,” Bosso fails to recognize that her power is historically contingent, not a given. Never really controlling the reactionary forces she empowers, Bosso instead dies horribly in explosions of violence she assumed were part of her theater.
In apostmortem of the Anthology, Gillmurphy suggests a perspective in which apparent masters of history like Bosso, Cool Policeman (that is his name), and the City Owners “are not those who have dominated the world through their own strength and cunning but those who have allowed themselves to be remade completely in the image of forces they neither control nor understand.” In the Anthology, what propels history is not a dialectical progress, such as Hegel’s World-Spirit, but forces of totalizing violence neither controlled nor understood. These forces are the Killer, history as a serial killer.
Utilizing art, religion, philosophy, study, civics, and violence, characters try and inevitably fail to escape, understand, cope with, and control history. Many become murderers, symbolized by masks and red eyes. Some attempt to join forces with the Killer itself, but instead it kills them, their homes or offices burnt down.
In the final episode, “Face of the Killer,” although she is too late to save XX City or (apparently) her friends, BB defeats the Killer. Its body falls apart and the colors of the world invert, creating a literal negative of the former historical epoch. But BB is outraged that this is all thousands of deaths have purchased: “you remade the world and the only thing you wanted to change about it was the COLOUR SCHEME?” No less than Dr. Zoo chides her, “Look, it’s not good to be TOO critical.” The world might have already been his utopia of murder.
The other changes are trivial. The slasher villains who ran XX City are replaced with similar slasher villains, such as Strangleman, a different Bosso, and Tsar Nicholas II. Nonetheless hoping that the worst of history is over, BB fails to notice the new era’s Killer leering behind her, no longer avian in shape, knives already bloodied. Outside the Immersive Theater, where it seems to be helping the police perpetuate the endless massacre, this new Killer implies the process is cyclical, telling the player, “the next time I die I’ll come back as a bird.” In this history, the only transformation is the particular shape the Killer assumes. The change appears dialectical, but there is no genuine antithesis.
In the Anthology, BB’s confusion and frequent passivity offer no positive alternative to this “world of perpetual mass death.” But it is notable that the Killer does not arise by natural law. People create it. The Concerned Citizen never accepts that his bourgeois father built the Killer, matching his factories’ industrial runoff that stained River Town’s water red, a metaphorical river of blood, with a literal river of blood. The new era’s Killer is also a constructed product, cosplay of the Hands’ horror films and shaped by an unaware BB. If each Killer is manufactured, some other history might be created instead.
After the disappointment of the color negative, BB, a chronicler of history, closes her final zine wandering suburbia. Donning their murderer masks, the affluent locals are already sizing her up as their next victim. BB gazes longingly through the gaps in one of the fences around her and writes that alternate futures might exist, but these archetypal symbols of private property deny access to them.
“The back yards are fenced away, but at bits you can look through and glimpse some new place, open and uncertain, in the chance intersection of a wall, a roof, a vacant lot[.] As though still folded up inside the world there was a different kind of negative[.]”
The ubiquitous invitation to laugh at the bottomless lake of blood also means the conclusion can’t really be despair. This straight-faced analysis might obscure that Gillmurphy’s writing is hilarious: “TAMMY was granted a vision of the new economy. Political scientists refer to this as, ‘ECONOMY 2.’” In the fourth thesis on history, Benjamin writes about the “refined and spiritual things” that oppressed people already possess before winning their struggle. Humor is one of these refined and spiritual values that “constantly call in question every victory, past and present, of the rulers” (255). BB finds her own ways of coping: “Weary of my travels [… I] spent the day playing videogames, instead.”
Had a fun afternoon celebrating (belatedly) the birthdays of a couple who are both among my favorite people. One asked for sourdough pizza and a wander around the market at Manchester Leather Weekend.
I bought a trans-pride earring at the market and was delighted to see, but didn't manage to determine if available in appropriate size, a t-shirt with a lot of Care-Bear-looking colorful cartoon bears with symbols on their tummies, including a rainbow which is canon in one of the bears I remember from my childhood, but this time the other bears have trans/leather/bear/pup symbols or flags. It seems the absolutely perfect thing for someone like me or A who had to live through being a girl in the 80s but are now cautiously leaning into our bear-y selves. (Like I told the other birthday boy, I, this week when he lamented Fat Bear Week coming to an end: hey, some of us are here all year!)
D bought himself a leather waistcoat too which he looks amazing in, so that's fun. I tried on one like it was that technically my size but made me feel unusually dysphoric. I'm glad the market included vendors with explicitly trans stuff but it also had a lot of very normative bodies. Or, diversity of some kinds but not others. I guess it's why I've always steered clear of such things, despite my long-term yearnings...which I used to think were (just) yearning to be with rather than (also) to be -- lots of queers have this problem.
It was great to hang out with our friends and be silly together for an afternoon/evening.
Tomorrow will be busy in a really different way so I'm going to try to get some sleep.
As many of you know, within the past three months, we've been dealing with a lot of crackdowns on our work online. Our blog is unviewable in Mississippi and our #1 bestseller, All in the Family, got kicked off itch.io. This has nothing to do with the works themselves (oh no, a minor might read our very adult essay about TAXES and BUSINESS EXPENSES!) but wealthy, powerful people trying to control others.
As annoyed as we are by this, we are not surprised. We've seen this coming for years, we have a plan, and we want to hear how YOU feel about it, fans and readers!
Though I don't think I'll be telling our clients about it any time soon, Lance mused. Somehow I don't think they'd be interested in hiring a man with forty-odd alters and a nanobot hive living inside him.
Blurb: The Company, a cyborg security specialist with MPD and a sentient nanobot hive, has escaped their abusive father and built a productive, if not necessarily happy life for themselves. But when your father is richer than God, sometimes it's not easy to escape the past...
Why is it worth your time?: This one was solidly entertaining! The author alternates chapters between the Company's present as an adult and their past as a child. Each time period merges to climax at the same time, both dealing with their abusive father, who is a kind of terrifying that is hard to write well, but we found the depiction credible and scary. (What if YOUR abuser was as rich as Elon Musk and as spiteful and powerful as Donald Trump?) The climax was especially satisfying. This is very much a '90s MPD book, and the Company is definitely a type we have seen many times before, but there are worse things than to do that well! If you want a cyborg multi revenge fantasy, give it a try!
Plural Tags: abuse high focus (mind the content warnings!), closeting, cofronting, fusion/integration, identityblending, children, nonhumans (AI), family, enmity, and teamwork relationships, medical (MPD) type, switching, voices
Getting double vaxxed means we spent yesterday on our ass, reading all our backed up library books. So, what’d we read? (Combining with other books we finished a week or so ago.)
Basically, we have to explain not only that water is wet but that if foster parents are allowed to dunk a trans kid into the tank of their transphobia the kid can drown in there. The Globe's editorial board termed this a matter of "personal views" and of DCF demanding foster parents be "perfect", which is glaringly disingenuous but needs to be spelled out to hopefully influence public opinion.
Miranda: I was hoping to make a proper post about all this, but I am freshly vaccinated and rapidly losing my ability to think. So instead I will just post the notes because this interlibrary loan book must be returned to Utah and we need these notes somewhere for later.
Around the time of those touch workshops, Rogan took an interest in trying to study touch more. The two books we've read on the subject are Touch by Tiffany Fields, and now the Power of Touch, by Phyllis K. Davis.
If you only get to read one, choose Fields; her book is definitely stronger, dealing in study data on the therapeutic uses of touch for various ailments and situations. However, Davis does engage with something Fields doesn't: "vicarious touch" and "internal touch"... things that are extremely relevant to us multi-wise, as people who overwhelmingly meet our touch needs through noncorporeal means.
Hey everybody, it's that time again: time to vote for which stuff gets the LiberaPay/Patreon money this month!
As always, anyone can vote (please do!), but LiberaPay and Patreon patrons get double weight for their votes. (Due to Patreon's porn purges, I really encourage you to use LiberaPay, if you get a choice.) If you want to see the blurbs for any of these works, those are here! (You can also leave your requests there; requesting a story or essay is always free!) If you don't have a DW and so can't do the poll, that's okay; just leave your vote in the comments below; anon comments are turned on.
Which works gets the money, and thus posted this month? YOU CHOOSE, readers!
I enjoyed the sunset function last night -- after some faffing I managed to get the right amount of light to start from (fairly bright?) and a sound I like (crickets! I really miss crickets, they sound like summer to me and remind me of being a kid).
I fell asleep before the thing went totally dark, which to be fair could be because of the melatonin I treated myself to last night...but I haven't had great success with them lately.
Maybe it was just how tired I was, after a busy day at work, straight in to counseling, then eating dinner, then off to the local queer club where I'd agreed to turn up early and help set up, and by the time we left, about half past 9, I was so tired that I was yawning uncontrollably on the short ride home (and very glad that D had driven me, so that I didn't have to walk or try to get the bus home.
Today felt similarly intense: work, then an important and positive but also exhausting and anxiety-inducing conversation about U.S. politics, then I made dinner, and by the time I'd eaten my parents were ready to talk. I've missed them like three Sundays in a row so couldn't dodge it too much longer.
And that was a mental and emotional marathon of a conversation too: my grandma's house will be sold in two weeks, the upshot of which is my mom's horrible sister was saying horrible things about my mom at an extended-family event and when my mom asked if I wanted my share of the money from the house sale I said "Absolutely not," and she said "I knew you'd say that, but you're going to have some anyway, and I want you to use some of it to get yourself something nice..." Well okay then, I'll be a tax haven or whatever for my parents this one time.
And they talked about politics at me a bit (which again we don't disagree on but I'm so spoiled by my little bubble where people seek consent and check in during these heavy conversations that this drives me up a wall now).
And then we got on to their computer needing to be replaced because support for Windows 10 is ending and they thought they could just take their PC to Best Buy and get the Quicken transferred to a new laptop... I was trying to disabuse them of this notion gently when their iPad battery died because they believe you must always let it discharge completely and they never use the iPad while it's plugged in.
I'd wanted to go to the gym this evening, and suddenly it was bedtime. And my head was too full of things.
And actually I had to rearrange my bedroom a little for the alarm clock. I don't have a bedside table next to the bed; my room has a lot of fitted closets and drawers so there's only really one place for the bed to go and it means the door -- which is at a weird angle to the rest of the room because of the way the whole upstairs is, and the fact that almost every door up here opens the opposite way to the way that'd make the best use of space -- leaves no room on this side of the bed.
Mostly I've gotten around this by using a floor lamp as a bedside lamp, and shoving a piece of wood between the mattress and the bed frame which I use for bedside stuff: glasses, water, phone. But the piece-of-wood shelf is too low for the alarm clock: not much of the light would actually end up in my line of sight which would defeat the whole purpose of the thing. Also it wasn't easy to get plugged in.
Last night I balanced the clock on some good thick books, and I don't know if the light would have woken me up so I set it to make a normal sound. Then I woke up 45 minutes before my alarm went off this morning and leaned over to look at the clock to see when it would start lighting up, like a little kid. So I don't know any more yet about how or if that will work.
So tonight I've bodged a slightly better solution for clock placement next to my bed (and just as I'm writing this do I realize there's a better way to rearrange the things that need to be plugged in because the lamp has a long cord...always so much to think about!). And I hope the nice cricket sounds and dimming orange light do their magic!
I do wonder how well this supplementary daylight works on someone whose eyes are as bad as mine.
I was trying to find out where the Minnesota Vikings are training in England, because my dad wanted to tell me where but forgot the name. I was trying to speed up an excruciatingly low-information conversation with my parents.
I didn't find the name, but I did read this and laugh.
Ranch dressing, barbecue sauce and certain types of cereals were among the pallets of foods shipped early, along with Gatorade for days.
I miss ranch dressing too. Probably some of the cereals. Do they get Peanut Butter Captain Crunch?! Maybe I need to find out where they're training after all... I don't care about football but if they have any leftover ranch...!
The Essequibo River is the queen of rivers all! Buddy-ta-na-na, we are somebody, oh! The Essequibo River is the queen of rivers all! Buddy-ta-na-na, we are somebody, oh!
Somebody, oh, Johnny! Somebody, oh! Buddy-ta-na-na, we are somebody, oh!
– Sea shanty, presumed Guyanese
Let us appreciate that the only reason – the only reason – I know about what I am about to share with you is because of that whole music history thing of mine. It's not even my history. My main beat is 16th century dance music (± half a century). But dance music is working music, and as such I consider all the forms of work music to be its counsin, and so I have, of an occasion, wandered into the New England Folk Festival's sea-shanty sing. Many people go through life understanding the world around them through the perspective of a philosophical stance, a religious conviction, a grand explanatory theory, fitting the things they encounter into these frameworks; I do not know if I should be embarrased or not, but for me, so often it's just song cues.
So when I saw the word "Essequibo" go by in the web-equivalent of page six of the international news, I was all like, "Oh! I know that word!" recognizing a song cue when I see one. "It's a river. I wonder where it is?"
And I clicked the link.
That was twenty-one months ago.
Ever since, I have been on a different and ever-increasingly diverging timeline from the one just about everyone else is on.
In December of 2023, Nicolas Maduro, president of Venezuela, tried to kick off World War Three.
He hasn't stopped trying. He's had to take breaks to steal elections and deal with some climate catastrophe and things like that. But mostly ever since – arguably since September of 2023 – Maduro has been escalating.
You wouldn't know it from recent media coverage of what the US is doing off the coast of Venezuela. At no point has any news coverage of the US military deployment to that part of the world mentioned anything about the explosive geopolitical context there. A geopolitical context, that when it has been reported on is referred to in terms like "a pressure cooker" and "spiraling".
The US government itself has said nothing that alludes to it in any way. The US government has its story and it's sticking to it: this is about drugs.
As you may be aware, the US government is claiming to have sunk three Venezuelan boats using the US military. The first of these sinkings was on September 1st.
To hear the media tell it, the US just up and decided to start summarily executing people on boats in the Caribbean that it feels were drug-runners on Sep 1st.
No mention is made of what happened on Aug 31st.
On August 31, the day before the first US military attack on a Venezuelan vessel, at around 14:00 local time, somebody opened fire on election officials delivering ballot and ballot boxes in the country Venezuela is threatening to invade.
And they did it from the Venezuelan side of the river that is the border between the two countries.
That country is an American ally. An extremely close American ally. An ally that is of enormous importance to the US.
And which is a thirtieth the size of Venezuela by population, and which has an army less than one twentieth as large.
You would be forgiven for not knowing that Venezuela has been threatening to and apparently also materially preparing to invade another country, because while it's a fact that gets reported in the news, it is never reported in the same news as American actions involving or mentioning Venezuela.
Venezuela, which is a close ally of Russia.
You may have heard about how twenty-one months ago, in December of 2023, there was an election in Venezuela which Maduro claimed was a landslide win for him. There was a lot of coverage in English-speaking news about that election and how it was an obvious fraud, and the candidate who won the opposition party's primary wasn't on the ballot, and so on and so forth.
You probably didn't hear that in that very same election, there was a referendum. If you did hear it reported, you might have encountered it being dismissed in the media as a kind of political stunt of Maduro's, to get people to show up to the polls or to energize his base. It couldn't possibly be (the reasoning went) that he meant it. Surely it was just political theater.
The referendum questions put, on Dec 3, 2023, to the voters of Venezuela were about whether or not they supported establishing a new Venezuelan state.
Eleven billion gallons of light, sweet crude: the highest quality of oil that commands the highest price.
(I can hear all of Gen X breathe, "Oh of course.")
It is under the floor of the Caribbean in an area known as the Stabroek Block.
The Stabroek Block is off the coast of an area known as the Essequibo.
It takes its name from the Essequibo River, which borders it on one side, and it constitutes approximately two-thirds of the land area of the country of Guyana.
Whoever owns the Essequibo owns the Stabroek Block and whoever owns the Stabroek owns those 11B gallons of easily-accessed, high-value oil.
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It occurred to me the other day that since the SAD-fighting daylight lamp I have is pretty old now, it still has a big light bulb in it that gets really hot even in the short amounts of time it's supposed to be used. And I'm not as poor as I used to be so I could get a new one.
As always when I need to purchase anything, I asked V for help because they're very good at this. They suggested I might want to try one of those sunrise alarm clocks too. Which I'd never thought about because I'm not really an alarm kind of person a lot of the time, thanks to sleep-maintenance insomnia. But when they sent me a link to what they found and I saw it does a "sunset" thing where you can have gradually-diminishing light and sounds to put on at bedtime, I thought that might be worth a try. I've had increasing trouble settling down to sleep in recent months, and I don't love the workarounds I've resorted to.
Both arrived today, so I write this with orangey light and nature sounds next to me, and the daylight lamp set up by my desk downstairs waiting for me in the morning. We'll see how they work.
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