Gay Pareee

While hardly the Hunter-Gatherer Anarchotopia of my dreams, it's true that Western and Northern Europe are, ya know, pretty nice. I mean, I'd certainly pick Paris over LA, or Munich over Atlanta, or Copenhagen over, I don't know, Cincinnati. Yes, the Euros are in the passing lane on the Hayekian road to surfdom, but at the same time our transatlantic brothers and sisters have yet, as far as I can tell, to collectivize agriculture or what have you.

Anyway, Yglesias says that Europe "isn’t, however, as friendly to the interests of rich people or business managers" as the United States, to which I'd amend a quite. Despite relatively narrower income gaps between their rich and poor, there are still plenty of rich people in Europe!

Good Friday

Oremus et pro perfidis Judaeis: ut Deus et Dominus noster auferat velamen de cordibus eorum; ut et ipsi agnoscant Jesum Christum, Dominum nostrum. Omnipotens sempiterne Deus, qui etiam judaicam perfidiam a tua misericordia non repellis: exaudi preces nostras, quas pro illius populi obcaecatione deferimus; ut, agnita veritatis tuae luce, quae Christus est, a suis tenebris eruantur. Per eundem Dominum nostrum Jesum Christum Filium tuum, qui tecum vivit et regnat in unitate Spiritus Sancti, Deus: per omnia saecula saeculorum. Amen.

Haha. The Hitleryute hates Jews. Abe Foxman to the rescue!!!!!!!!!!

Ratzo seeks a religion that is internally coherent. It is of course a vicious fraud because, among other demerits, there are no gods, but at the same time I grudgingly admire the man for stepping back from the contentless ecumenicism of "interfaith dialogue," or in the words of The Most Important Homosexual Ever to Say an Inaugural Prayer Ever™ (and AA!), "the God of our many understandings."

I'd like to know how Catholics praying for Jews to see the true light is categorically different from, say, bombing the Gazans in the hopes that they will, uh, see the true light?

Terror Trains

Many moons ago, The Port Authority of Allegheny County, which runs one of the most comprehensive urban transit systems in the country, but not very well, announced that it would build a connector between Downtown and the North Shore. The connector would consist of a tunnel beneath the Allegheny River, would extend 1.2 miles, and would cost a perfectly reasonable $390 million. The North Shore is notable for having two stadiums, a semi-failed, incomplete, debacle of a slots casino, and no residents. The tunnel would house an extension of Pittsburgh's light rail line, which serves the South Hills and Downtown. It would be paid with, as they say, with Other People's Money.

Har dee har, it's now $117 million over budget and counting, and no one wants it! I mean, half a billion dollars to lay a mile of light rail track that will see use every other weekend in football season? This seems to me to be excessive. The East Busway, ironically named the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Busway, in honor of the immense concrete moat in creates as a physical barrier between affluent white Pittsburgh and poor-ass black Pittsburgh, could be laid with light rail track (it runs adjacent to heavy rail lines) all the way out to the near-East boroughs, and the moat could be bridged several additional times over for the same amount of money. According to the Port Authority et al., all that OPM was contingent on building a tunnel that no one would use, which has the unvirtuous virtue of being, in all likelihood, entirely true.

So, not much chance of economic development resulting from this boondoggle, but fortunately, Jack Murtha to the rescue! I have to admit that there's something that charms me in the idea of putting a supermax facility in Johnstown for the terrorists, and true to form, it charms Pennsylvanians as well:

Yesterday, many people in Johnstown agreed with Murtha. None of those asked expressed security concerns, while some saw it as a possible economic boost.

"If there is space within the district to do so, then I say fine," said Larry Stiles, a Vietnam veteran and political consultant. "We've got employment issues. People are out of work and prison facilities generally help with providing a decrease in unemployment. If we can do it, then we should definitely investigate the possibility."

I love this state.

Foodie Friday, Winter Weather Edition

My dad and all of my uncles are great cooks. My brother and I and all of the first cousins are all great cooks. My grand mother can't cook for shit. She used to tell us, "Your grandfather and I were the perfect couple. He married the only Italian woman who can't cook, and I married the only Jew with no money." She and my grandfather owned a bar, and she used to work the lunch shift--sandwiches, at least, she could handle. But her most popular special, by far, was her Italian Wedding Soup, believed by the regulars to be an old family recipe, made from scratch and passed down through generations. It was, in fact, that old, super-salty Campbell's chicken broth, frozen meatballs, and romaine lettuce with Kraft grated parmesan cheese on top. On a cold day, it really wasn't so bad.

Italian wedding soup with spicy pork meatballs

There are as many real wedding soup recipes as there are Italians. Here's a preparation I often use to make a thick, hearty winter soup.

for the broth
2 fresh ham hocks, unsmoked
1 yellow onion, quartered
1 carrot, cut in large chinks
1 celery stalk, cut in large chunks
bay leaf
sea salt
black pepper
water

for the meatballs
1/2 lb fatty ground pork
bread crumbs, equal volume
1 egg
1/2 teaspoon cumin, finely ground
several allspice berries, finely ground
black pepper, finely ground
sea salt
several pinches ground cayenne

for the greens
small bunch of red kale, thinly sliced crosswise (including stems)
1 sweet onion, halved and sliced paper thin
3 cloves garlic, sliced paper thin
1/2 lemon
olive oil
sea salt

for finished soup
1 medium starchy potato, unpeeled, cubed
1/2 cup reserved bread crumbs
1/2 lemon
Parmigiano Reggiano

To make the broth, combine all the ingredients in a stock pot and bring to a boil. Skim off any scum rising to the top. Reduce heat and simmer for several hours.

To make the meatballs, combine all of the ingredients in a large mixing bowl. Mix very well by hand. Form the mixture into small meatballs, just under 1" in diameter, rolling between your palms. Set on wax paper and reserve.

When the broth is ready, strain through a fine sieve, transferring to a clean pot. Return to high heat and bring back to a boil. Add the meatballs, potato, and juice of 1/2 a lemon. Reduce heat so that it simmers briskly, covered.

While the meatballs cook, prepare the greens. Heat olive oil in a heavy sauté pan. Add garlic and onions, and cook until just tender. Add the greens, salting lightly. Toss with the oil and onions. Add the juice of half a lemon. Cook until tender.

Add the hot oil and greens to the soup. Stir together well. Add the breadcrumbs, stirring constantly for several minutes afterward. Simmer all together over low heat for at least 1 hour.

Serve garnished with freshly-grated cheese.

As a cautionary note, keep the salt light at each individual step. The final product should be salty, but not overwhelmingly so.

www.manhunt.net

Here's the thing: Jim Newell so totally needs to bone up on his lexical faggotry if he doesn't get why it's even funnier that the Portland mayor's underage rentboy consenting adult intern-lover's name is Breedlove.

Personally, Ima get ta work on the screenplay.

Entranced Interrogation

Consider, for example, the CIA program that Bush created to detain and question senior leaders captured in the war on terror. Many of these terrorists, including Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed, refused to talk -- until Bush authorized the CIA to use enhanced interrogation techniques. Information gained using those techniques is responsible for stopping a number of planned attacks -- including plots to blow up the American consulate in Karachi, Pakistan; to fly airplanes into the towers of Canary Wharf in London; and to fly a hijacked airplane into the Library Tower in Los Angeles.

-Mark A. Thiessen

Yeah, this was the same Sheik Mohammed who said he was responsible for every terror attack from A to Z, from anthrax to blowing up the moon.

Those Rich Fucks. This Whole Fucking Thing

This Larison post, which is mostly an explication of a few passages by Bacevich, connects with the curveball, so to speak. In particular:

Well, of course, Obama accepts the ideology of national security completely, and it has been clear that this is the case for years [...] It is doubtful that he could have been elected President had he not accepted this ideology, and it is important to understand that this is an ideology shared by essentially the entire political class. In that respect, it is “mainstream,” regardless of how crazy it seems to some of us. The similarities with Bush are no accident–Bush’s tenure represented an expansion, an exaggerated expression, of past habits, but as has become more and more depressingly evident his administration has not represented a radical break from past practice so much as a redoubling of the same practices.

To say that Obama has accepted this ideology is not a statement about Obama’s flexibility or lack of it, except to say that he is constrained by the assumptions that govern how the political class understands the world and America’s place in it. The belated recognition by neoconservatives that Obama accepts this ideology was inevitable. They feign surprise mainly because it is useful to maintain the fiction that there are meaningful, large differences between the parties on major policies and they have an incentive to perpetuate the idea that they are better adherents of this ideology than those farther to the left. Likewise, there is a strong incentive on the left to emphasize small differences with neoconservatives over means and tactics. [emphasis mine]

None of these observations is new or surprising, least of all to readers of this-a-here blog, but they bear repeating, if only to further agitate the melancholy ghosts of Auguste Comte and Karl Marx, the former wondering how Positivism got lassoed by crypto-Christian American global hegemony (ahem . . . leadership), the latter befuddled that the end of prehistory is viewed with eager, if unrecognizing eyes, by the big men of a debtor nation run by financiers.

Obama's speech played to the familiar national myth, that Benjamin Franklin invented Freedom along with electricity, and thenceforth America bequeathed it to the liberty-hungry world. Best laff line may have been "For us, they fought and died, in places like Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sanh." I don't see the connection to Vietnam, Walter. Well, there isn't a literal connection . . .

But back to the bowdlerized Positivism.

For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.

I personally can't wait for the deracinated post-cultural Positivity-Singularity, but really. As ultimately cynical as they are, our ruling class truly does share a belief in this central article of faith, that at some point the whole world will be just like America, and all cultural identity will be ethnic food festivals and dance troupes in gaudy native dress.

Or, to put it rather more precisely, the whole world that matters will be as such, the Africans will calm the fuck down and stop with the AIDS and civil wars, and the Muslims will sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up and do as they're fucking told.

Praise Song for Blasé

It is not simply that Elizabeth Alexander is a terrible poet, nor even that occasional verse tends to be banal, but rather that Elizabeth Alexander's innauguration poem is the worst poem ever written, constructed with sufficient skill to avoid outright self-parody, too long and prosaic in tone to become doggerel, too plain to attain unintentional hilarity, too contemporary-precious to achieve the vital ridiculousness available to serial failed journal submitters and literary outsiders. It is, as we say in the medium of movies, so bad that you couldn't even laugh at it. It achieves a magisterial level of mediocrity, so utterly plain and forgettable that it transcends mockery.

Hive

The central conceit of Obama's inauguration and the crisis-wracked program he began to lay out is that given our troubled times, we must put aside difference in favor of "unity" and seek common purpose in collective action. Subsumed beneath an overwrought paean to national character and responsibility is the notion that only through centralization can crises of such magnitude be met and bested. This is precisely the wrong lesson to draw. Each of our current crises, whether imperial overreach or economic calamities, are at root problems of scale. If you really wanted more a more flexible, resilient, and self-sustaining economy, you would seek means to increase regional and local enterprise at the expense of State-subsidized national and transnational corporations; you would notice, for instance, that most small banks are doing just fine, and you'd let Citigroup go belly-up.

A Grain of Salt

All of the recipes I tested resembled their originals, but none perfectly recreated the restaurant version—not an entirely surprising verdict. As Kenny Shopsin writes in Eat Me, "My regular customers know that if they order the same thing they got last week, there is a good chance they won't even recognize it. I don't do it differently on purpose. It's just that everything I cook, every time I cook, is an event in and of itself." Variable factors like ingredient quality, temperature, and timing will ensure that a dish is different every time it's prepared, whether at a restaurant kitchen, or a home kitchen, or even from one day to another at the same restaurant.

-Lauren Shockey in Slate

Kenny Shopsin mustn't run a very tight ship. Tony Bourdain observed, back when he still cooked in a restaurant, that one of the biggest differences between cooking at home and cooking in a restaurant is that the enthusiastic amateur goes for creativity; the restaurant cook wants consistency.

In any case, the key to recreating restaurant dishes is never to use their cookbooks. Restaurant cookbooks are works in translation. No matter how skillfully done, they're approximations. They must account for smaller batches, different equipment, different ingredients, inferior skill sets. They must translate one Ecuadorian line cook's handful of something into a measurement in cups and tablespoons. If you want your food to taste like the finest restaurant food, learn to taste, and learn to cook. You should be able to tell how a thing was seasoned and prepared, if it is well-prepared, just by tasting it. (Ferran Adrià et al. perhaps being the exceptions.) You should be able to recreate that taste at home without much trouble. Cooking is not the art of following recipes, any more than art is paint-by-numbers. Like any craft, it's a set of techniques that, once mastered, allow you to create or recreate as you choose.

Octavian

Footworn Augustus, last arrived, but first
among the citizens of Rome, reprised
with tailored eloquence a clarion burst
of sentiments, each deftly sanitized
not to offend the Pantheon, nor pre-
commit to any course or anyone;
rather suggest a skein of victories
from present’s battles met to future’s won:
Remeber by your strength to rule the Earth.
Then retired, took a glass of wine,
put up his sandals, thought of his net worth,
told his Livia, All this is mine,
and gestured toward the map beneath his feet,
and asked his cook to bring him something sweet.

Ceux qui m'aiment prendront le train

I blame the incoming Obama administration for my flat tire this morning. Otherwise, I shall endeavor to keep my big mouth shut while Superjesus Black Reagan accepts the mandate of heaven. What immodest hoopla. You would expect at least some nod in the direction of humility. Instead, we get DeMille. What a tragic queen you are, America.

Department of Dumbassery

I am corrected. Given my general disposition, it's rare that reality is worse than I imagined. Whatever, though, I was Reform, yo.

Yitgadal v'yitkadash sh'may raba

In synagogue, right after the prayer for our country, there is a prayer for the state of Israel, asking the “rock and redeemer of the people Israel” to “spread over it the shelter of your peace.”

-Bill Kristol

I've always been surprised--can never get used to--the profound ignorance of people regarding their own professed religions. The people of Israel is most certainly not the state of Israel. This guy could read the Shema and determine it to be a prayer for the Likud. Aren't the people of Hashem supposed to be literate?

Emm Eff Exx

As a Fayette County boy, I well recall the halcyon days of my youth, when bottle rockets were still a damn good time and The Mon-Fayette Expressway was naught but the first tentative chubbing-out of Jack Murtha's dick. One more concrete artery, and the bombed post-steel towns of the Monongahela Valley were going to survive and prosper. No more would little Wilmerding suffer a cracked and inevitable decline. No longer would Brownsville be the butt of methamphetamine jokes.

I mean, for real, I too dislike driving Route 51 when I'm heading down to visit my folks in Uniontown, or taking the Turnpike to 119 and zooming south through Connellsville when I'm feeling especially crazy, but thing is, it's not that big a fucking deal. How much truck-borne freight is really moving from Motown West By God Virginia through Fayette Nam to Pikksburgh, and why, pray tell, wouldn't it just take 79?

The Ivory Glower

At The Good Professor's mention, I've been rereading Between Past and Future by Hannah Arendt, which is just so goddamn lucid, yaw no? In the first several essays, she treats the development of history from an effort to commemorate great deeds as a memorial bulwark against mortality and transience to its more contemporary incarnation as a "scientific" discipline devoted to causal processes, a change, as she puts it, from what to how as the basis for inquiry.

Somehow those essays stuck in my mind as I read The Evil Professor, Stanley Fish, arguing for the umpteenth to the nth degree time that "higher education, properly understood, is distinguished by the absence of a direct and designed relationship between its activities and measurable effects in the world." Let me here express some modest sympathy for Fish. His profession is under steady attack in the popular media; a layaway McCarthyism stalks the borders of the academe, accusing humanities profs of sedition. But Fish's solution, which is to retreat into cloistered irrelevance, studying a scale-model human universe in a drafty library lit by candlelight, is what you might call fake anachronism, the desire to emulate a time and practice that never really existed in the present day.

So we will all still read Marx or Foucault or Derrida or whoever is the subversive anti-American ideologue-of-the-week, but never fear, we shall be certain to impress upon our students the total inuntility of this body of work, remind them not to apply anything they may have learned from their reading to any analysis of the world in which they live, encourage them to think of real, lived human experience only in the most banal, broadly accessible, and thoroughly popular manner possible.

In making his case, Fish marshals to his side Michael Oakeshott, Immanuel Kant, Max Weber, and Aristotle, who, being dead, were indisposed to burn their draft cards. What is there to say except that Fish seems genuinely to believe that "measurable effects in the world" are the results of quadrennial elections and the outcomes of lawsuits. That is all. Counsel rests, your honor. There can be no profounder misunderstanding of those four men than to believe their lives and works support the half-baked argumentation of one Professor Stanley Fish. For good measure, he hauls out and decontextualizes Arnold's dictum that poetry will save us from anarchy, as if it were meant to mean that quatrains would bring peace to Palestine.

Words fail. What a fucking douche.

Battlestar Galactica

A shark, a refrigerator, Indiana Jones, and the Fonz walk into a bar . . .