The Rainy-day Return of Foodie Friday

As the quality of American meat has broadly declined, the availability of exceptional meats to the relatively affluent has grown. We may be living in the End Times of the Clusterfuck Nation (that's Kunstler's admirabley precise appellation), and may soon be forced by circumstance and economy to return to bark and bitter root vegetables, but in the mean-fucking-time, if you're willing to drop a little coin, you can eat some tasty shit. I don't eat much beef, but at the store the other day I saw a really lovely beef tenderloin and asked the butcher if he could slice me a couple of steaks. I got two, each just under 3" thick, just over a pound. It was raining that day, so grilling was out. They were the dark, dark red of grass-fed meat.

Filet de boeuf and pan-cooked Brussels sprouts

However many tenderloin steaks (filet mignon) you want to serve
coarse sel gris
black pepper
clarified butter

1 lb brussels sprouts, outer layer removed, stem-end trimmed
3-4 medium shallots sliced paper-thin
2-3 cloves of garlic sliced paper-thin
olive oil
good white wine vinegar
water
raw sugar
sea salt
black pepper

Preheat the oven to 450. Rub both sides of the steak with coase sel gris and a heavy coating of ground black pepper. Set aside.

Begin the Brussels sprouts. In a heavy saucepan, sauté the shallots and garlic in olive oil over medium heat until translucent. Adding salt right at the outset helps to sweat them out. Add the Brussels sprouts; sauté them until they begin to brown, then deglaze the whole pan with a healthy pour of white wine vinegar. Add a nice pinch (1 tspn or so) of sugar. Salt again lightly. Cover, not too tightly, and simmer. If the liquid reduces too far, add water, not more vinegar.

While the Brussels sprouts simmer, heat a heavy-bottomed pan over the highest heat with a generous spoonful of clarified butter. When the butter is very hot, add the steaks, searing until both sides of the steaks are caremalized, no more than 1-2 minutes per side. Remove the pan from the stovetop and place in the hot oven for about 12 minutes. The best way to test for doneness is by touch and smell--the give of the meat under the pressure of your finger indicates how rare it is; the more give, generally, the more rare. You should just begin to smell the cooking meat above the other kitchen smells. If it becomes too powerful, you've already overcooked your meat. This should be served rare to medium rare, and if the middle third of your steaks aren't pink and just this side of warm when you eat them because you're one of those people, then seriously, there's a McDonald's down the street.

Let the steaks rest on a plate or cutting board for a few minutes. In that time, uncover the Brussels sprouts and raise the heat to boil off the liquid, leaving just a glaze in the bottom of the pan. Toss a few times. Salt and pepper to taste.

Serve unadorned on a big white plate.

First Comes Love

I am not too hep to gay marriage myself, since the solemnification and sanctification of human pair-bonding by political constructs seems . . . odd. Nevertheless, I am for gay marriage insofar as it represents a wrench in the political works.

Gay marriage is an issue on which the three major presidential candidates — John McCain, Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton — are pretty much in agreement. All oppose it, while saying at the same time that same-sex couples should generally be entitled to the legal protections afforded married couples. All think the decision should be left to the states.

Whatever it is, I'm against it! Hm hm hm hm hm hm hm hm hm hm hm. I'm against it! So in that sense, gay marriage can totally rock out with its cock out--you'll pardon the expression.

The National Review has practically exploded in holy outrage at this latest affront of activism by the damned judges. Curiously--or, not curiously--most people these days, including the strident homophobes at the National Review, seem to accept that "sexual preferences," such as they are, are more or less innate, and that whether by nature, nurture, or some godless combination thereof, some dudes are into dudes and some chicks are into chicks and these predilections are basic and irrevocable, not mere indulgences in perversion or sin. Thus therefore post hoc ergo facsiea ipso loquae hic: butt sex is icky; keep it away from my wife, you hooligans! The face of conservativism: red, aged, and shaking its fist at history. Get off the lawn!

The prize, though, goes to an excerpt from a posthumous work by something called "Elizabeth Fox-Genovese," if that really is her name, who blames our culture's "terminal decadence" on the decline of primogenture. Really! Also:

And if the gravest and most sacred features of human existence are reduced to matters of style, why should we care which styles others may choose?

To which the wit ripostes: We shouldn't!

Grab that Cash with Both Hands and Make a Stash

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

-William Wordsworth

If the "housing crisis" were as George Will describes, then his description would be accurate. Hélas. Listen, prices were overinflated, and it is good that they're dropping, but the "housing crisis" isn't a housing crisis, it's a credit crisis, because artificially inflated home values were used to restructure mortgages in order to provide pools of collateralized debt with no actual collateral of commensurable value which was in tern pooled and resold as investment vehicles at profit and now everyone realizes that these investments rest on a swamp of unrecoverable debt. It's all fine and well that Johnny and Suzy Twentysomething are able to grab a suburban 3-bedroom for 250 grand, but the former owner, Bill and Sally Fortysomething, have a 350 grand mortgage obligation. You know whaddumsayin?

No one, in other words, is trying to identify the perfect temperature, in Will's inopportune metaphor; they're trying to figure out how to rescue markets created and sustained by money that doesn't exist. Not. Gonna. Happen.

MALKIN SWITCHES CHAINS; NEWS AT NEVER

Malkin has given up Starbucks. Evidently. I'm sure they're rending clothes in Seattle. It has something to do with slogans, immigration, the Cato Institute, and the declining value of the dollar, not necessarily in that order. To quote Harry Hutton:

Why would anyone want to write laissez-faire on a Starbucks gift card? Why would anyone else want to stop them? Reading this I realised that I no more understand American culture than I understand the headhunting tribes of Borneo.

Anyway, Malkin's onto Dunkin Donuts because the dubble-D-ers are "unapologetic supporters of immigration enforcement." Yeah, nothing says you're serious about an issue like switching brand loyalties. Personally, I'm never going to buy an Audi because of their product placement in the subtly anti-American, anti-military Iron Man. I love these politics of the ready-made. It's so Dada I could cream.

"At first glimpse, we thought the seal was killing the penguin"

"Why the seal attempted to have sex with the penguin is unclear."

What do you think was their safety word?



Via Balko

HRC

"Ha haaa! That's an excellent question, Fafnir, and the only way to answer it is with a hearty chuckle followed by a complete non sequitur!"

Literature Lessons

The Crusader AXE of the Lost Causes remembers a bit of dialogue from Joyce--Portrait of the Artist, actually--and I've excerpted the scene below. Stephen Dedalus is talking to Cranly, who's been both his friend and antagonist throughout school. Stephen, who has lost his faith, has refused to take Communion, despite the request of his dying mother. Cranly begins:

-- Your mother must have gone through a good deal of suffering, he said then. Would you not try to save her from suffering more even if or would you?

-- If I could, Stephen said, that would cost me very little.

-- Then do so, Cranly said. Do as she wishes you to do. What is it for you? You disbelieve in it. It is a form: nothing else. And you will set her mind at rest.

He ceased and, as Stephen did not reply, remained silent. Then, as if giving utterance to the process of his own thought, he said:

-- Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not. Your mother brings you into the world, carries you first in her body. What do we know about what she feels? But whatever she feels, it, at least, must be real. It must be. What are our ideas or ambitions? Play. Ideas! Why, that bloody bleating goat Temple has ideas. MacCann has ideas too. Every jackass going the roads thinks he has ideas.

Stephen, who had been listening to the unspoken speech behind the words, said with assumed carelessness:

-- Pascal, if I remember rightly, would not suffer his mother to kiss him as he feared the contact of her sex.

-- Pascal was a pig, said Cranly.

-- Aloysius Gonzaga, I think, was of the same mind, Stephen said.

-- And he was another pig then, said Cranly.

-- The church calls him a saint, Stephen objected.

-- I don't care a flaming damn what anyone calls him, Cranly said rudely and flatly. I call him a pig.

Stephen, preparing the words neatly in his mind, continued:

-- Jesus, too, seems to have treated his mother with scant courtesy in public but Suarez, a jesuit theologian and Spanish gentleman, has apologized for him.

-- Did the idea ever occur to you, Cranly asked, that Jesus was not what he pretended to be?

-- The first person to whom that idea occurred, Stephen answered, was Jesus himself.

-- I mean, Cranly said, hardening in his speech, did the idea ever occur to you that he was himself a conscious hypocrite, what he called the jews of his time, a whited sepulchre? Or, to put it more plainly, that he was a blackguard?

-- That idea never occurred to me, Stephen answered. But I am curious to know are you trying to make a convert of me or a pervert of yourself?

He turned towards his friend's face and saw there a raw smile which some force of will strove to make finely significant.

Cranly asked suddenly in a plain sensible tone:

-- Tell me the truth. Were you at all shocked by what I said?

-- Somewhat, Stephen said.

-- And why were you shocked, Cranly pressed on in the same tone, if you feel sure that our religion is false and that Jesus was not the son of God?

-- I am not at all sure of it, Stephen said. He is more like a son of God than a son of Mary.

-- And is that why you will not communicate, Cranly asked, because you are not sure of that too, because you feel that the host, too, may be the body and blood of the son of God and not a wafer of bread? And because you fear that it may be?

-- Yes, Stephen said quietly, I feel that and I also fear it.

-- I see, Cranly said.

Stephen, struck by his tone of closure, reopened the discussion at once by saying:

-- I fear many things: dogs, horses, fire-arms, the sea, thunder-storms, machinery, the country roads at night.

-- But why do you fear a bit of bread?

-- I imagine, Stephen said, that there is a malevolent reality behind those things I say I fear.

-- Do you fear then, Cranly asked, that the God of the Roman catholics would strike you dead and damn you if you made a sacrilegious communion?

-- The God of the Roman catholics could do that now, Stephen said. I fear more than that the chemical action which would be set up in my soul by a false homage to a symbol behind which are massed twenty centuries of authority and veneration.

-- Would you, Cranly asked, in extreme danger, commit that particular sacrilege? For instance, if you lived in the penal days?

-- I cannot answer for the past, Stephen replied. Possibly not.

-- Then, said Cranly, you do not intend to become a protestant?

-- I said that I had lost the faith, Stephen answered, but not that I had lost self-respect. What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?

"A raw smile which some force of will strove to make finely significant." That is some fine-ass writing.

Do Nothing

The other challenge we face lies within Myanmar. Because a humanitarian invasion could ultimately lead to the regime’s collapse, we would have to accept significant responsibility for the aftermath. And just as the collapse of the Berlin Wall was not supposed to lead to ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia, and the liberation of Iraq from Saddam Hussein was not supposed to lead to civil war, the fall of the junta would not be meant to lead to the collapse of the Burmese state. But it might.

-Robert Kaplan

Although my anarchist sympathizing lends itself to dreaming fondly of the dissolution of states, of the disintegration of states, their sudden, violent collapse tends to be somewhat less than salutary for the poor bastards who live in them. The quotation above comes from an opinion piece called "Aid at the Point of a Gun," which refers to "an armed humanitarian intervention," which refers to "an American-led invasion of the Irrawaddy River Delta." Kaplan stops short of endorsement; in fact, he does a pretty decent job of describing the law of unintended consequences in world politics. What happened in Myanmar is terribly sad, and the fact that a brutal and repressive government exacerbated what was already a disaster is sadder still, but in this world there are practical limits to what you can do. Sometimes you can't do anything. Each one of us has a friend or a relative or a lover or a spouse who through illness or addiction or abuse or bad bets or poor decisions or miserable luck has passed beyond our ability to offer anything at all. Justin at Americana's written about exactly such a predicament. You do what you can; you offer anything within your ability; but there are lost causes in life; there are limits to our abilities; and to pursue heedlessly that which you cannot alter except by making worse is the most selfish course that any man or woman can set.

We scoff at the civilizing missions of English or French imperialism--rightly--and identify the impersonal, implacable political and economic forces that lay thickly under the patina of social uplift, but it's a mistake in history or politics to assume that no one believes his own bullshit. The truth is that there were plenty of parliamentarians who sincerely believed that what they were doing was necessary and just: a gift. There are likewise plenty of Americans, even a few in power, who truly believe that they are saving the world from itself, that the United States has an inexhaustible capacity to do good. They see the catastrophe of Iraq as the result of the bad, rapacious men who put that policy into place. Yet instead of repudiating the policy of invasion and occupation, they propose that it be continued for the right reasons. Well armed narcissism. It's the American way.

The conviction that "something must be done" is the damned father of "something can be done." That's what you call a broken cart before a dead horse. I think we should send food and medicine to Myanmar, and I hope that some of it gets where it ought to go, but fucking that country up even further in the name of proving our own imaginary omnipotence is only another step on the road to hell for all of us.

Yom Huledet Same'ach

Just a link, but since we've been chattering about Israel, you can't go wrong reading this great piece by Tony Karon of Rootless Cosmopolitan.

Condition

I love this shit. "Will Israel Survive to 100?" Run for the hills! It reminds me of one of my favorite jokes:

So I says to the doctor, I says, Doc, am I gonna die?

Doctor looks at me, and he says, Yes.

You know, I understand that establishment papers feel it to be a central part of their public responsibility to fan the flames of a permanent Israelocrisis, as if the Kingdom of Judea again faces the might of Babylon, but come on. I love these "existential crises." Neither Iran nor Hamas is going to drive Israel into the sea. Israel's guerilla problem has to do with its own security policy, and the Israelis, including both the supporters and opponents of its security policy, know this. They understand that pockets of stateless people in an un-contiguous moonscape of shelled concrete with no functionl economy will turn to insurgency and terrorism, but consider the alternatives. A unified Palestinian state? Ha! Israel's political-military establishment was not stupid; they knew what Occupation meant, and they've lived with it for forty years now. Of course, Israeli jingos are tickled that their US subsidizers and suppliers are so willing to believe that Ahmedinejad is the second coming of Nebuchadnezzar.

The Theosophical Society, Take Two

David Brooks comes off as a sort of cut-rack Blavatsky in today's column, in which he predicts that the vague spiritualism that represents the last attempt by "faith" to comport itself to the contemporary understanding of the physical world will supplant both non-belief and "traditional" religion, by which he means Western monotheism, I suppose. The Buddhists get a little nod, as they often due from people who imagine Buddhism as a gentle hybrid of the Sundance Film Festival, Whole Foods Market, and Hot Yoga class on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. As you'd expect:

Just as “The Origin of Species” reshaped social thinking, just as Einstein’s theory of relativity affected art, so the revolution in neuroscience is having an effect on how people see the world.

This is itself a gentle way of saying that Darwin caused the Holocaust and Einstien was responsible for Modernism. The former is familiar and easily dismissable. Eugenics and attendent notions about heritable race traits have got fuck-all to do with the random mutation Darwin proposed, and instead indulge the Lamarckian fallacy. The latter is a little more novel, but General Relativity and the decline in the authority of the narrative voice are maybe related thematically, but certainly not causally.

The almost bottomless willingness of the bourgeois faithful to de-doxologize their religions in order to maintain the existence of a Higher Power is pretty amusing. Since God increasingly resembles a demiurge, the self-will of existence to become itself, or whatever, perhaps we can stop proposing that "faith" categorically contains some particular moral component. If you want to follow the urgings of the Beatitudes even though that Jesus is a myth, I'm okay with that; everyone needs a system of values, and if you want to crib someone else's, fine by me. On the other hand, I have difficulty accepting that belief in the deus abscondus proves that you're less likely to sacrifice kittens and sex-murder little boys than I am. Religionists in America anyway have made an intramural sport of imaginary besiegement, and I wonder at last if the true human universal is not belief in things unseen but instead the unremitting need to bitch and moan.

In Praise of Nothing

I think I am coming around to an Obama presidency. Internet badfly Mr. Fundamental directed me to this little chat with television fruitfly Wolf Blitzer (when, oh Lord, will I tire of saying that name--Blitzer? It almost killed 'er!). On one hand "the world" wants America "to lead"--lead where? games Mr. Fun--but on the other hand "we're going to have to make some investments and ensure that the dynamism and the innovation of the American people is released. It's very hard for us to do that when we're spending close to $200 billion a year in other countries, rebuilding those countries instead of focusing on making ourselves strong." Well, turns out we're going to lead by example. Clearly, Mr. Obama, you've never been a schoolteacher.

C'est-a-dire, the emerging consensus among the squabbling factions within the Brain of IOZ is that Barack Obama may in fact be precisely the hollow messiah that he appears, that he really will prove to be a sort of national Deepak Chopra, peddling easy salvation without actually doing anything. That, needless to say, is a program I can get behind. Four years of new-age-Christian babble is the least harmful outcome that I can imagine at the current moment in the empire. Let us all go upward and forward toward the future of our destiny leading the world forever. I am in favor of directions, whichever ones they are.