Bringing Up Baby

The teenager said she started taking birth-control pills over the summer, a decision made with her mother, her boyfriend and a doctor. The pill is supposed to be taken at the same time every day. So when school started in the fall, she kept up with her daily routine during school hours.

According to school policies, her pills should have been kept in the school clinic. But the student said she did not see the logic in making a special trip to see the nurse, a relative stranger, each day during her 25-minute lunch break. She preferred to take the pill on her own. She tried to be discreet but she got caught.

The teenager and her mother maintain that the decision to take birth-control pills is personal. Now that private choice has been shared with her principal and many teachers. On Thursday, a long table full of school officials weighed her case at a hearing.

While the student awaits a decision on whether she will be expelled, she said she has learned one major lesson: It's important "to read the fine print."

-The Washington Post

I don't know, I think the major lesson here is: retain legal counsel and sue.

Surely some enterprising young attorney would love to bug the bejesus out of the school board and make his name in the growth industry of post-Griswold jurisprudence.

Structuralism

Barack Obama speaking in Turkey:

The United States is not and never will be at war with Islam. Our partnership with the Muslim world is critical in rolling back a fringe ideology that people of all faiths reject. The future must belong to those who create, not those who destroy. That is the future we must work for, and we must work for it together.

Bill Clinton, speaking in America:

But I want to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me. I'm going to say this again: I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time; never. These allegations are false, and I need to go back to work for the American people. Thank you.

Pinkertons

Look, I work with unions every day. Our Collective Bargaining Agreement with one of our bargaining units is ninety pages long. Shit is byzantine, complex, and often unwieldy. On the other hand, the guys, most of them, know what they're doing. Negotiation and implementation is a dance, but it's entirely manageable if you make minor efforts to cultivate an air of openness and trust.

Here is a telling exchange between Stretch Gregory and the new head of GM:

GREGORY: Well, let's talk about how you can do more. How many union jobs are there in a typical factory for General Motors that have nothing to do with producing automobiles?

HENDERSON: Well, actually every job we have in the factory has something to do with producing an automobile. Whether it's obviously putting the actual car together or supplying materials to the line or maintaining the equipment that’s in the plant. So we have worked very hard and if you look at external surveys, for example, like a Harbor Report, we have closed the gap in terms of competiveness, in terms of the manpower. We have within our operation. We need to do more. Every person in the plant has something to do with putting together a car or truck.

GREGORY: But in some factories, you have a shop steward who's responsible for appointing--whether it's a civil rights chief or an education person, these are all union jobs that don’t have anything to do with producing the cars.

HENDERSON: Well, we have--the union has key jobs, as you identified, but let's take an example. Let’s take health and safety-- we work together with the union health and safety in our plants. We have the safest plants in the United States, in fact, around the globe. And I think providing, for example, a safe work place is very much in the best interests of the company as well as the union.

Yo, pencil neck, you never heard of human resources?

The idea that GM has been crippled by its unions rather than by its crappy finance arm and the fact that it relied too heavily on the light truck/SUV revenue streams to fund its whole creaky operation is nuts. Auto unions have been inflexible, yes. That is their institutional purpose. But they're not responsible for the lousy state of their industry.

It is of course also worth noting that every other nation with a major auto industry indirectly subsidizes that industry, especially its labor costs, by providing universal health care and generous social security/public pension programs.

Hey You Get Off Of My Cloud

Obama didn't get elected to warranty your muffler. He's here to warranty your life.

-Charles Krauthammer 40,000

You know, I share Krauthammer's sentiment--no, really--that "the notion of presidential car warranties strikes me as simply too bizarre, too comical, to mark the beginning of Yankee Peronism." At the same time, I find the persistent insistence by Chuckles and company that technomanagerial efforts to direct this or that facet of the economy distract the President from his real job as enemy-devouring Imperator, dieu-donné, charged with the mortal existence of all 300 million of his charges simply too bizarre, too comical . . . well. I mean, yes, let us by all means grant the President not only the right but the solemn duty and obligation to construct a worldwide panopticon enforcing its all-seeing Defense-diktat with death drones and killer robots and preemptive wars and a global gulag of black-site prisons, just so long as he stays away from our boards of directors.

Foodie Friday - Asian Edition

You too have had lousy pad thai with a sauce composed of one part ketchup, one part fish sauce, and two parts icky vegetable oil. Fuck that. Real pad thai is closer to what we think of when we think of Vietnamese food, a subtle, light blend of bright and savory flavors, but with the characteristic piquant kick of thai cuisine. Although it's a simple recipe, even the experienced cook can run into trouble with the unfamiliar palate of Southeast Asian ingredients. Trust your senses of taste and smell, by which I mean, taste and smell anything unfamiliar before hand. Yes, raw. You'll live. You'll need a powerful flame to cook this dish properly, and either a wok or a very large frying/sauté pan. The contents of this recipe should be easily available at any Asian grocery. I use refined safflower oil for its clean flavor/odor and very high smoke point.

Pad Thai

1 package thai rice noodles (thin, but not "vermicelli")
6 cloves garlic, crushed and minced
4-5 medium shallots, finely diced
1/2 large carrot, roughly grated
1 1/2 cup mung bean sprouts
4-5 thai ornamental chili peppers, diced
1 1/2 cup blanched peanuts, crushed or ground (I use a food processor)
2 tbspns coriander, freshly and roughly ground
2 tbspns tamarind pulp
1 1/2 cup diced firm tofu
2 eggs, scrambled together
1/2 cup fish sauce
juice of 1 lime
1/4 cup vinegar (rice wine or plain white)
fresh cilantro and asian basil, chiffonade
sea salt
black pepper

Bring a large pot of water to boil for the noodles. Make sure you check the package carefully. Some rice noodles need to be actively boiled like Western wheat noodles; others are introduced to boiling water which is then removed from the heat. In either case, slightly undercook your noodles, drain, and set aside.

In your wok or pan, heat a generous amount of oil (in a flat-bottomed pan, the bottom should be thoroughly covered; in a wok, you'll want oil perhaps a half-inch deep at the center) until very hot. Add the garlic and shallots. Toss several times. Add the chilis, carrot, half the sprouts, and the tamarind, tossing together. Use your spoon or spatula to help break up the tamarind pulp. Add the coriander and half the peanuts. The nuts will quickly absorb oil and you may need to add a little more. Continue frying and tossing. Deglaze the pan with the vinegar and a bit of fish sauce. Add the noodles. Fry and toss together for a minute or two.

Push the noodles to one side of the pan and add the egg and tofu to the other. Cook the egg until slightly underdone and then fold it and the tofu into the noodles. Add the rest of the fish sauce and a nice handful of the fresh herbs. Salt to taste. Toss together until the noodles are well coated, tangled, and beginning to clump a bit. Transfer immediately to a large serving dish, garnish with the rest of the peanuts, fresh herbs, cracked black pepper, and raw bean sprouts.

If at First You Don't Succeed

Ladies and gentlemen, my hometown.

Fast Approaching a Moment of Truth

Pax Americana, unlovely but effective, has endured for more than 60 years, the consequence of the post-war development of the United States as a European and Asian power. It has averted the worst, but it is safe to say that it is closer to the end than the beginning of its life.

-Rog Cohen

Let's see, 2009 . . . minus 60 . . . 20 to 19 . . . 10 less 6 . . . So, 1949. Now, it is true that since then no one has repeated America's neat trick from foedeefie, but on the other hand there was Korea, with hundreds of thousands of dead, a series of conflicts in Vietnam, first French colonial revanchisme and then the American war, which ended up killing a couple of million Vietnamese, not to mention all the folks that had the bad luck to live in Cambodia or Laos. There was the Khemer Rouge, the Iran-Iraq war, the Soviet war in Afghanistan, several post-Partition wars between India and Pakistan, the French war in Algeria, millions dead in post-colonial civil conflicts in Africa, everything that went on behind the Iron Curtain, the various coups and dirty wars in South America, the conflict in Northern Ireland, the wars fought by and against Israel, the Gulf War, the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, the brutal Russian-Chechen war, the US war in Afganistan, the US occupation of Iraq . . . And, mean, these are just the highlights.

The oddest thing about American triumphalism, even this backwards-looking sort that wonders if we may not now be facing inevitable decline, is that it so assiduously ignores its own mythos, so that in Roger Cohen's estimation this 60-year peace did not include any of the above wars nor yet the half-century Cold War that was so central, fundamental, and essential to America's national identity. Behind the weaseled language of "greater disasters" lurks the Turgidsonian arithematic: "two admittedly regrettable, but nevertheless, distinguishable post-war environments: one where you got twenty million people killed, and the other where you got a hundred and fifty million people killed." In other words, yeah, it's regrettable that millions died, but at least we didn't destroy all multicellular life on earth!

Sigil Me This, Batman

This is the most amazing thing I have ever seen. It is like someone found a series of extraordinary synchronicities between Matthew Barney's Cremaster 3, Terminator 3, and Jurassic Park 3



and then alchemically transformed it into a FOX News program. Magick.

Some Pig

This is a beautiful animal. Here is the article. I'm a fine amateur gardener but know next to nothing about animal husbandry, so I'm always impressed by this sort of thing. Who wants to take a trip to the Berkshires?

Sigmund Fraud

It would be easy enough to criticize Saletan for being hopelessly out of his depth in the fields of "science, technology, and life" that his blog-column purports to cover, for being a scientific illiterate, for engaging in endless moral persnickery on questions about abortion and sexuality in which he extrapolates from his own juvenile discomforts broad social mores. But that beat is already covered in blawgonia, so let me say this instead: what columns like his prove, albeit unintentionally, is that psychology and psychiatry are total frauds, more pseudoscientific than more infamous fields like eugenics, which at least managed a pretense of consensus. The therepeutic fields are full of totally contradictory ideas and practices that are nevertheless held to have commensurable value. As a science, they lack predictability and repeatability. Any two psychologists can examine the same patient under the same conditions and draw almost diametrically opposed conclusions about diagnosis, treatment, or both.

Conflicting Accounts

If you had paid attention to the most pro-war voices over the last four years or so, you would have noted that their opposition to withdrawal of any sort from Iraq was based in part on an unarguable conclusion: that departure would lead, at least in the short-to-medium term, to an increase in violence as newly unconstrained factions sought political dominance. And during the great, gung-ho months of The Surge Is Working, you saw a few lonely voices making a similar point: that assuming an end to the occupation, or at least a reduced American presence, the result would be to empower and arm a restive domestic faction that would turn its attention back to warfare with its factional Iraqi rivals as soon as the opportunity presented itself. Unlike supporters of the war, I don't believe that these sorts of contingent arguments provide either moral justification or ethical necessity for a continued occupation--foisting problems into an ever-receding future hoping that the chimera of reconciliation will turn out to be real is not a plan. That said, it's plain that these predictions are coming true. The certainty of a reduction in US forces and the approaching sunset of US patronage for the various "Awakening" groups is prompting a subtle but noticeable repositioning of indigenous Iraqi power centers for a resumption of civil conflict.

Here in America we will play a bipartisan game of Ungrateful Iraqis, and lament that after delivering them from tyranny they proved to be too degenerate to take advantage of the gift of democracy, even as we bumble over to Afghanistan and the Pakistani border regions to repeat our blunders within a political and cultural context that, if anything, is even more hostile to American intentions. It is worth bearing in mind that Iraq was a modern nation state with a reasonably coherent pre-Occupation identity, broad literacy, a 20th-century infrastructure, a system of public works and social provision, experience with modern medicine, technology, manufacturing, resource extraction, agriculture, etc. That is to say that for all the obvious flaws and failings of our colonial dreams, it was at least conceivable that a recognizable modern nation could be grafted with a more Western-style social compact. No such conditions are present in the part of the world we're currently groping toward; Afghanistan has several sprawling mega-city-states and is otherwise an illiterate backwater riven by linguistic, ethnic, and cultural divisions--many predating the arrival of Islam itself. The Pakistani cosmopole, meanwhile, is fiercely nationalistic and enraged by foreign intervention in its affairs, even as it is terrified of the destabilizing and violent forces at play in its vast hinterlands, which are egged to greater violence by American bluster and bombs. Simultaneously, India and Pakistan continue to walk the knife-edge along their own disputed borders, and the US has no senior military or diplomatic personnel who speak any of the dozens of native languages or have lived for any amount of time in the dozens of native cultures.