What Do You Need That For, Dude?

People keep asking me why I post about Matthew Yglesias, who isn't exactly a moving target, and the only answer I have is that he is the most consistently ridiculous person in America. That is not to say that he is the most ridiculous--that prize probably goes to Victor/Victoria Perseus Thanatos Upanishad Velocity Hanson--but that he manages, day in and out, to maintain a steady, cruising velocity of Warp 6 on the what-the-fuck-is-he-talking-about scale. We already nabbed him once today.

Now he has returned to write a completely bonkers post called The Arbitrariness of Manufacturing, in which he posits that manufacturing is "not very rigorously defined." Well, okay, I mean, when does a pond become a lake? When is a creek a stream? When is a tree just a bush? He confuses agriculture with manufacturing and then confuses a farmer's market with a farm. He seems to think that the petrochemical companies manqués that produce fast food are not considered manufacturers, whereas he believes that the cooks at McDonald's fabricate the hamburger patties on-site. Thus armed with this quiver of soggy arrows, he suggests that we should not be quite so upset about the decline of manufacturing, because people will just switch to "manufacturing" blogs and McNuggets.

Of course, when people talk about the decline of manufacturing, what they are talking about is the decline of industries that produce durable goods of some enduring value. This is worrisome not because of the inherent desirability of cars and clock-radios and fridges and industrial steel over strawberries, hamburgers, and blawwwwgs, but because no alternate means of providing so large a segment of the population with a substantial, comfortable, long-term, maintainable income has emerged. The lesson of the ongoing cycle of economic busts is that you cannot employ every goddamn American as a middle assistant spend process materials operations director manager, and meanwhile, the absence of a labor-heavy industrial segment in our economy means that people must compete with each other for an ever-narrowing pool of precisely such fantastical job titles or else, uh, manufacture fries for nine bucks an hour and no sick days. Fuck you, Yglesias.

In the immediately preceeding post, entitled, Where Obama's Gone Wrong, Yggie writes:

But to give Obama critics their due, there’s a whole range of other topics on which I really do think the administration has been screwing up and where he’s largely been let off the hook. First and foremost in my mind has been the unaccountable delays in filling the vacant seats on the Federal Reserve Board.

You know, I would've picked blowing up thousands of people with killer flying robots or expanding the global gulag of black prisons or conducting clandestine warfare throughout the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and the Indian Subcontinent, or further hammering away at Habeas, or basically in general broadly speaking being the fucking Angel of Death itself in an earthly guise as a motivational seminar speaker, now available for YOUR corporate event. But, yeah, sure, you know, unaccountable delays in filling the vacant seats on the Federal Reserve Board, within the city limits . . . that ain't legal either.

The Next in a Long Line of Nexts

Oh, fuck it. I say that Yemen is the next Turkmenistan. No, the next Eritrea. Uh, the next Hanseatic League. The next Achaemenid Persepolis. The next Mohenjo-Daro.

Meanwhile:

By 2007, it was clear that a new and more dangerous generation of Al Qaeda militants was emerging. Unlike their predecessors, these men aimed openly to overthrow the Yemeni state and refused all dialogue with it.

Oh, boy, that sounds bad. The aimed to overthrow the state. They refused dialogue. Who refuses dialogue?

Many later claimed that they suffered torture in Yemeni prisons during long terms - usually without formal charges.

Oooooohhhhhhhhh.

I encourage you to read to the end, where the reporter wonders how the "remote" al Qaeda gang can produce a "slick" magazine. Yeah, man, like, how did they afford the mimeograph. Fuck.

The Literary Offenses of Matthew Yglesias

To my eye, the argument that the United States has a moral obligation to not abandon Afghans who want our help fighting the Taliban is quite strong.

-Yggie

Let's see. I'd remove as inaccurate, incorrect, dishonest, and euphemistic, the following: argument, moral, obligation, abandon, Afghans, want, our, help, fighting, Taliban, quite, and strong. That leaves Yglesias' eyes, tranforming the sentiment from retarded to merely romantic.

I guess this is what remains of the edifice of Liberalism--wishy-washy imperialism masquerading as callow moral sentimentalism dressed up in the tattered, vaguely Sovietique drag of Realpolitik. "I don't think there is a strategic interest in invading and occupying foreign nations, but I do think there is compelling case for remaining in nations we've already invaded and occupied so long as there is a nebulous civil conflict in which we can pretend to take sides."

In the neighbourhood of any equilibrium state of a thermodynamic system, there are equilibrium states that are adiabatically inaccessible

BROOKE GLADSTONE: But why wouldn't reporters want to tell a story like this?

CHARLES BOWDEN: There’s two hindrances to the U.S. press. One, there can be an element of danger messing around the border. Secondly, it is far easier to take in a statement from an agency or a public official than to go investigate it. They take the easy way out.

I mean, I have been baffled for over 20 years why one of the biggest stories in my country is underreported, both the explosion of drug money and the explosion of human beings. Mexico is collapsing. This is an exodus of human beings. This is a far more significant event for the future of the United States than the war in Iraq.

-from On the Media

Charles Bowden is a very interesting if occasionally florid and overwrought author [ed. look who's fuckin talkin], but it is seriously worth pondering his inarguable point: "This is a far more significant event for the future of the United States than the war in Iraq." Or in Afghanistan.

I thought of this after reading a Will Wilkinson post in which he tries to make it plain to our friend our friend, Yggie, that the popular perception that birthright citizenship constitutes a kind of loophole in the legal immigration régime fuels anti-immigrant and anti-immigration sentiment. I don't really think this is debatable. I spend a lot of time listening to Doc Savage, and although there is certainly a loud constituency propounding the belief that all "illegals" are criminals and drug-dealers, the most persistent refrain is that immigrants use public services. Savage, for instance, is particularly incensed about non-native English speakers using hospitals. They come here, they have families, they use schools and hospitals for free . . . they're freeloaders.

Will explicitly doesn't share this view, but, he says, "many Americans reasonably find the current system unfair." He then writes:

I think most Americans believe that the immigration rate ought to be under democratic control, and they are frustrated by the fact that it isn’t really. I also think most Americans believe that the distribution of citizenship ought to be under democratic control.

There is of course a degree to which the flow of Mexicans into America is under political control. At its most fundamental, the slow-motion disintegration of Mexican society is the direct and proximate result of the conjoined American policies of prohibition and the Drug War, and it is true that the pressurized outflux of humans from Mexico in particular and Latin America in general would be greatly reduced by the simple act of making drugs legal.

That having been said, the idea that the migration of human populations can be controlled through some legislative process or other is as preposterous, as impossible, as fully absurd as the idea that the second law of thermodynamics can be repealed by an act of Congress.

Lemme Hit It

Ain't seen many white people lately. What, y'all stop fuckin?

-The Pryor

Camille Paglia. If she did not exist, we would not invent her. Her entire, uh, sexual persona is devoted to the notion that women can embrace both armpit hair and cultural subordination--you know, it is fine to go bra-less, as long as you've got perky tits. Here she is opining that "bourgeois propriety" and an "ideological view of gender as a social construct" which she hilariously attributes to the "careerist technocracy" (Harvard offers women's studies; Wall Street is populated with Harvard grads; ergo, Wall Street is bell hooks--LOLZWUTTTTT?) form some horrific biumvirate of sexual doom through which emasculated men and shrewish women have stopped doin' it. Except, of course, for black people, who fucking loooove to hit dat shit.

Look. It is hard to find authoritative numbers, and since most sexual-practice surveys rely on self-reporting, they are inherently unreliable, but what they reveal generally is that people have sex pretty often, including married people--a couple of times a week, anyway, which, let's do the math, means that this fundamentally recreational activity is enjoyed over a hundred times a year. This suggests that fucking hasn't become rare, but has remained a routinized part of human relations, in particular human pair-bonding. I don't mean to sell the bad acid at anyone's Woodstock here, but the truth is that sex, while it can be a natural, zesty experience, can also be pretty quotidian, and in a good way. I like fucking my boyfriend, but I also like taking him to dinner or gossiping about our friends or playing with the dog. I don't mean to minimize the importance of the regular orgasm to the human condition, but elevating any single pleasure to a position of singular importance is the first grim step toward addiction. On the other hand, and not to be too terribly crass, "the elemental power of sexuality" is the sort of turn of phrase employed by someone who hasn't got a lot of experience getting laid.

Tricher

Colleges and universities are basically credential fabricators that provide an indicator of class status for a fee. The fundamental nature of the relationship between the student and the "institution of higher learning" isn't pedagogical; it's transactional. It is worth bearing this essential truth in mind when reading about the efforts by our dons and donettes to combat cheating. (And by the way, is their a fussier ethical fetishist than The New York Times? A thousand-plus words on cheating without a single scintilla of evidence that the scope or prevalence of the offense has increased!)

The stoontz, as we say in Western PA, perceptive little goons that they are, mostly seem to recognize what they're in school for, and according to the article they strive to do an absolute minimum of totally meaningless and unproductive work within the confines of an authoritarian surveillance regime--in other words, let's see, how shall we put it, to acquire valuable skills that will make them competitive in today's global markets. It's only the professors and deans who appear to be confused about the whole affair.

Pass It On

They sound like a gaggle of ancient priests, and they confirm that the worst thing to happen to professional journalism wasn't the internet, but the bachelor's degree. Listening to these guys word-chomp their way around the most absurd series of self-imposed vocational-ethical imponderables as if determining the divinity of Jesus or whatever is truly silly, and in any case betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature and the nature of human communication. There are no secrets in the world excepting those you keep solely and exclusively to yourself

A Little Bit Louder Now

This is just great, just wonderful. I especially like the Donk jumping in to accuse Mike Steele of hatin' on the Troupes. Plus ça change, bichizz.

Foodie Friday: Eat yer liver

One of the tricks of good sauce-making is knowing how to use small, intensely flavored ingredients to deepen the character of the sauce. Almost any tomato-based sauce, for instance, can be improved by the addition of a few chopped achovie fillets, which will disintegrate into the liquid (your friends who think they don't like anchovies will never know they're there) and imbue it with a complex, salty, savory backbone. You can achieve a similar effect with a splash of nước mắm, a bottle of which should always be handy in a kitchen. But to my taste, nothing beats chicken livers as an intensifier. Most good groceries sell packages of them, a few dozen in a plastic olive container. They'll keep for up to a week in the fridge, or you can freeze them. Dredged in salt and flour and fried in olive oil, they make great little hors d'ouevres on their own, but in this recipe they serve to enhance a stock-based pasta sauce.

Tagliatelle with pancetta and red onion

for the noodle

3 cups unbleached AP flour
3-4 small (AKA "large") eggs
bench flour

for the sauce

1 large red onion, diced
1/4 lb pancetta, diced
1-2 chilies, chopped
2 chicken livers (4 lobes), chopped
a pinch of fresh oregano leaves, whole
a pinch of fresh basil, chiffonade
a pinch of fresh parsley, chiffonade
2 cups chicken stock
3 tbspns crème fraîche (see recipe below)
juice of 1 lemon
extra virgin olive oil
sea salt

To make the noodle, use the ingredients above and follow last week's instructions. After you have rolled out the sheets of noodles, brush them generously with flour, fold lengthwise four times (into eighths), and place in a floured pan, uncovered, in the refrigerator. This will serve to dehydrate them slightly and allow them to be easily hand-cut.

Put on a large pot of very salty water to a boil.

In a heavy sauce-pan over high heat, get several tablespoons of olive oil very hot. Add the onion, salting lightly. Toss a few times. Add the pancetta and chilies. Toss together. Reduce heat to medium high. Cook until the onion is softened and some fat has rendered from the pancetta. Add the chicken livers. Sauté until just done--they will appear "crumbly." Deglaze the pan with lemon juice. Add the stock. Bring to just under a boil, then reduce to a quick simmer. Add the herbs. Add the crème fraîche. (I make my own rather non-traditional crème fraîche using the following simple method: I combine a 1/2 pint of heavy cream with several tablespoons of active-culture yogurt--I really like Erivan--and then let it sit for about 8 hours at room temperature. That's it. To thicken it, place it uncovered in the fridge for a day.) Stir the crème into the sauce to thicken in.

To finish the noodles, cut them perpendicular to the fold into 1/4" ribbons. Shake out the cut noodles. Cook them for no more than a couple of minutes in rapidly boiling water, then add directly to the sauce, tossing for another minute over high heat. Serve immediately garnished with more parsley and grated pecorino romano cheese.

Abdominance

Considered objectively, the Twilight "saga" is not so much a brief for virginity as it is a powerful case for the moral imperative of rape. I submit to you, dear readers, that it is therefore the most odious work of science fiction since Mein Kampf.

Heal Thyself

Increasingly, we're losing our perspective, maybe our minds. We have candidates for the U.S. Congress comparing the taxes that we pay to finance the U.S. military or to pay for public schools to slavery, or to the Nazi-led Holocaust. As Americans, we should all seek higher ground over what we talk about when we talk about slavery, and what we talk about when we talk about torture.

-Will Bunch

American progressives are forever bemoaning the fact that the more publishable and marketable end of Donkeydom, your basic Beinarts and Goldbergs and suchlike, make much of their dough by calling the Party's putative "left" wing a clutch of trigger-shy pussies. The typical, pathetic rejoinder is to up the ante on troop-lurve. Rather than embracing anti-militarism in principle, they push their sad, little-boy boners more firmly against the leg of the military, uh, excuse me, "our troops" . . . oh, uh, no, OUR VETERANS. The more openly cruise-missile liberals then call them pansies and fetishists. Are they wrong? You can of course absolve many individual soldiers of some of the moral culpability for the foreign actions of the American government, just as you don't have to blame every private in the Wehrmacht for invading Russia, but let's not pretend that any of them are fucking heroes. The American military is an instrument for world domination, conquest, invasion, and occupation, not a goddamn gang of Girl Scouts.

So here you have notable purrrrrgressive Will Bunch objecting to the LUNATICS exclamation point exclamation point of America's nominal right for comparing taxation to ruhlly bad stuff like the Holocaust, and yet his first counterexample to this egregrious and tendentious comparison is that taxes pay for the army. LOLwut? You'd think he could've just picked bridges and railroads . . . okay, maybe railroads are a bad comparison. Schools and daycares? Of course, most of the teapartyische tax protesters to whom Bunch objects are incoherently pro-military, so I understand the rhetorical method here, but from the lofty, post-partisan, trans-racial, pansexual perch of Who Is IOZ?, it seems to me that nothing so undermines the case for the dissimilarity between taxation and the worst depredations of the twentieth century as a foreceful reminder that a fair bulk of the taxes we pay go to feed the ghastly death-delivering Mammon that is America's Armed Forces.

As for seeking so-called higher ground "as Americans" when we talk about slavery . . . Jesus. You know, Americans seem to have some idea that Abraham Lincoln was a path-blazing emancipator and that America's ultimate freeing of its chattel slaves was some sort of moral example to the world when, at least among European peoples, America was a rump offender, a vicious, backward nation of slave-drivers long after the Brits and French and Vikings had given up the ghost. Look, I know King Leopold did some nasty shit in the Congo, but from Colonial times onward, the American slave-owning regime was one of the most depraved and inhuman episodes in the whole history of our miserable species, and the idea that "as Americans" we have even the option of speaking about it from some elevated moral position is as damnheaded and wrongballed as the idea that America, a nation founded on perhaps the most thorough policy of genocide since the Old Testament, has some special post of moral authority from which to engage in importunate hectoring about ethnic cleansing.

Always Look on the Bright Side

Tom is the one who saw you at Susan's. He's known about you all along, isn't that right? We do know what that means. If Commander Farrell is the man who was with Miss Atwell, then Commander Farrell is the man who killed Miss Atwell. And we know that the man who killed Miss Atwell is Yuri. Therefore, Commander Farrell IS Yuri, quod erat demonstrandum.

-Scott Pritchard, No Way Out

Anne Applebaum is a fool, but mad props for citing my absolute favorite obscure mid-eighties Costner vehicle in her column. Among the many questions that no one appears to be asking is, is it bullshit? Ima go with yes. On the other hand, the idea that these people were basically getting paid to hang around DC and troll the internet for information that any asshole with dial-up can acquire, and that this is somehow illegal, tickles and pleases me, for it suggests that we are that much closer to jailing Matthew Yglesias.