1. Dick Armey explains: the only reason to listen to a woman is so she'll have sex with you.
(via Bitch, Ph.D.)
2. Also: gross. And not that free from the scrutiny of feminists. You're on the internet, for crying out loud.
3. Question of the day: if ultra-right-wing Christian teen-agers think saddlebacking doesn't ruin their purity, what about fisting? Or dildos?
yes, Beyonce's "Single Ladies" "celebrates the oppressive power dynamic that exists between men and women, while simultaneously trying to imply that women can utilize the subordinate position in a heterosexual romantic relationship to empower themselves." That is undeniably true.
Also true: the video is based on Bob Fosse choreography, which is kind of amazing. And it's a great fucking dance song, especially if you happen to encounter it at a queer dance party. Nothing quite like dancing to oppressive heteronormativity in a bubble tea restaurant/bar crammed with dykes. Actually, there's another opportunity to do that this weekend, for those who live around here.
Still not writing. Instead, experimenting with desserts. It's "would you still love me?" week at my house for baking. What if I add too much of something? Or don't have a particular ingredient at all? Will I still be a worthwhile person and will the recipe work out and how is this related to me getting into grad school? So far all the desserts have turned out fine, and no one has disowned me for fucking them up. Maybe I'll get into grad school after all.
Two weeks ago I made the Cook's Illustrated coconut cream pie with bananas and caramel on the bottom. The recipe has a lot of moving parts, which kept hitting me over the head like the workshop tools in the Pirates of the Caribbean fight scene. I bought the crust, because last time I made a graham cracker crust it was more like graham cracker crumbs weakly coating the outside of some custard. The store-bought one held together much better. But no sooner had I heated the milk, the coconut milk, and the unsweetened coconut than I realized I didn't have enough eggs. To the co-op! Which was out of eggs! Fortunately a friend was working there: he offered me as many eggs as I needed from his own refrigerator if I'd go to his house and bring his dog back over. Great. I got to pretend I have a dog for 15 minutes while I picked up my two eggs. When I got home, I realized that I actually needed three eggs. I had to wait til the next day to make the custard, but ultimately triumphed.
The pie was awesome. The custard is good enough to be a stand-alone recipe. To convert it to banana-caramel, per the suggestion of the original recipe, I just made caramel sauce (half of the recipe lower down in this post), poured the caramel into the crust, sprinkled in some toasted coconut, sliced up a banana and arranged it on the caramel, and then added the custard. I did not top the custard with a full layer of whipped cream, because I've done that before and it dilutes the coconut flavor. Instead, just a dab of whipped cream on top. If I'd had it, I would have added black rum to the whipped cream, though vanilla is also very good with coconut.
Last night: Gramercy Tavern Gingerbread, from Smitten Kitchen, which I discovered earlier this week and love. Also delicious. I added an extra half tablespoon of ginger, a little more of the other spices, and an extra teaspoon of baking powder. That last entirely by accident. The cake completely collapsed in the middle, but its deliciousness remained, especially eaten with caramel sauce and maple-bourbon whipped cream. Use plenty of bourbon.
Speaking of caramel sauce, I don't understand why people don't make it more often. It's easy, and forgiving. This time I accidentally put the cream in before the butter, and for a while I thought I was going to end up with a floating layer of butter on top of my caramel. Fortunately, it mixed in eventually.
Caramel Sauce
1 c. sugar
5 Tbsp water
1/4 c. butter
1 c. whipping cream
salt to taste
Combine the sugar and water in a heavy-bottomed saucepan. Stir. Heat gently until bubbling slightly, then turn the heat up to medium high. Let boil without stirring (original recipe says to use a wet pastry brush to get crystals off the sides - do this if you want, but all that happens if you don't is that it burns a little on the side and you need to give it more soaking and scrubbing.)
Eventually the sugar starts to caramelize. Swirl and stir it - the edges will be darker, and you want to see the combined color. When it's the color you want (I like burny dark caramel, but you can experiment) turn the heat off. Whisk in the butter, then the cream. The caramel will bubble up furiously and maybe crack a little, and the sugar will tend to form a sticky tangle. Stir over low heat until everything is smooth. Add salt and taste. You can also add vanilla or other flavorings here, though I've been wondering what would happen if I mixed the sugar with Earl Grey instead of water.
Just made chocolate-chip coconut meringues, because we had left-over egg whites, and tried science to discover the relative merits of greased-and-floured versus plain baking surfaces when you don't have parchment paper. Or cookie sheets, but all our alternatives are Pyrex. No science there. Surprise! If you grease and flour the pan, the meringues stick less.
The recipe is for Almond Rochers. We didn't have almonds, but there was a penciled note suggesting coconut and chocolate chips instead. We didn't have enough chocolate chips, so I just added some extra coconut (left over from the cream pie). They turned out beautifully: the recipe (which I'm not posting right now; maybe tomorrow) has you warm the egg whites and sugar before you beat them, and the residual heat melts the chocolate just a little, so that it's streaky instead of chunky. They make interesting stripey organic forms, kind of like less regular, flat-bottomed pollen particles. Yummy yummy allergens.
I'm supposed to be writing about why David Brooks is wrong about education, and how Value at Risk relates to No Child Left Behind.
But I just started a new (yet remarkably non-stressful) job, and I've been traveling, and it's winter, and the Gardener is sick, so what I actually want to write about is food.
I found out last week that the awesome, famous, surprisingly unpretentious1 beer bar in my city - which I knew to buy local when possible and to buy wind power offsets - also serves at least some meat that I'm happy to eat. I found this out by calling and asking in the middle of the afternoon, and the reaction of the person I talked to was, "Are you writing an article or something?" No, no, I just want to know for myself. What about the steak frites? The burgers? What about chicken dishes? "Is this for an article or what?" Oy. No, I am just that interested.
Also, are you sick? Is someone in your household sick? Do you need something tasty and nourishing to eat that doesn't take long to make? Consider miso-tofu-rice-greens Feel Better Soup.
Feel Better Soup for 2
Just go read the Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson op-ed in the NY Times. It's Wendell Berry! Also they talk about pasturing, which is really awesome, and about perennialization of grain crops - definitely awesome.Soil that is used and abused in this way is as nonrenewable as (and far more valuable than) oil. Unlike oil, it has no technological substitute — and no powerful friends in the halls of government.
Agriculture has too often involved an insupportable abuse and waste of soil, ever since the first farmers took away the soil-saving cover and roots of perennial plants. Civilizations have destroyed themselves by destroying their farmland. This irremediable loss, never enough noticed, has been made worse by the huge monocultures and continuous soil-exposure of the agriculture we now practice.
Correct!
The Bush administration: refusing to regulate workplace safety in order to more aggressively regulate allowable species of service animals.
I almost want to leave it at that, but there are a few things in the articles that are too good to pass up. From the OSHA article, which you should read only if you still have the capacity to be shocked by Bush administration venality:1
In 2006, Henshaw was replaced by Edwin G. Foulke Jr., a South Carolina lawyer and former Bush fundraiser who spent years defending companies cited by OSHA for safety and health violations.Foulke's
Foulke quickly acquired a reputation inside the Labor Department as a man who literally fell asleep on the job: Eyewitnesses said they saw him suddenly doze off at staff meetings, during teleconferences, in one-on-one briefings, at retreats involving senior deputies, on the dais at a conference in Europe, at an award ceremony for a corporation and during an interview with a candidate for deputy regional administrator.
His top aides said they rustled papers, wore attention-getting garb, pounded the table for emphasis or gently kicked his leg, all to keep him awake. But, if these tactics failed, sometimes they just continued talking as if he were awake.
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
Jonathan Cohn’s piece about auto workers in the New Republic talks about both the major gains that unions won, and the way that right-to-work laws closed off opportunities for further union organizing. Union efforts developed the modern American welfare state: because union wage and benefit gains altered the market for labor, other companies had to offer better wages and benefits, and Americans became accustomed to the idea that they would receive health and retirement benefits through their employers. But globalization (which allowed manufacturing to take place in other countries) and the decline of unions changed that situation.
As Ezra Klein points out, weakening unions leads to a collective action problem: a dilemma in which the rational actions of individual actors make everyone worse off. What's smart for the one proves to be dumb for the many. Imagine, for instance, that you are a new business entering a field where the major players are decades old. Over time, they've bargained with their workers, raised their pay, offered good health benefits and retirement packages. The rational thing for you to do is undercut their labor costs. Then you can sell the good more cheaply and take away their market share.
Klein and Cohn both point out that countries which provide their welfare state benefits directly through the government don’t face this collective action problem. Every firm both receives benefits and pays taxes to support them, so there’s no empty market space in which a firm can evade costs that others bear. This is changing to some extent as manufacturing and services both go global, but since countries are sovereign entities that have substantial control over their borders (especially over legitimate cross-border transactions), they have far more options for mitigating the collective action problem than any individual firm.
What Klein and Cohn both ignore is how things got to be this way. Why does the US, unlike every other wealthy country, rely largely on private employers for its welfare state services? The answer is complicated, but one part of it is union co-optation. In most countries, unions pushed for national health insurance; in the US, unions made what looked like a temporary, tactical decision to push for an employer mandate to provide health insurance, and to negotiate individual agreements with employers that offered union workers health insurance. The Taft-Hartley act, which Cohn notes allowed right-to-work laws and made union organizing much more difficult, combined with the Employee Retirement Income Security Act to give unions substantial control over multi-state health and welfare funds. It didn't just limit organizing - indirectly, it limited activism.1
Just as union ability to organize was declining, and as the percentage of workers who were unionized dropped, unions were handed control over health and welfare funds, which they viewed (correctly) as a major potential source of continued influence and as a potential recruiting tool. National health insurance, which would make the Taft-Hartley funds obsolete, would deprive unions of one of the best reasons for employees to join a union. In other countries, unions focused on winning guaranteed health benefits, vacation time, and retirement security through the political process, rather than through bargaining with a single employer at a time. In the US, partly because of the arrangement of institutional incentives but also for other reasons (which I think I used to know more about), unions negotiated an expansion of the private welfare state. It doesn’t look like such a good bargain now: we’re losing those benefits one employer at a time, and we never did get maternity leave. I have some hopes that the slow-motion collapse of private benefits will generate the political will for an expansion of public, guaranteed benefits, as seems to be happening with health care. We still need to remember, while we do it, that today’s temporary, tactical decision can radically change tomorrow’s incentives and possibilities.2
My first reaction to Rick Warren being selected as speaker was something like this:Listen, it's my right to marry that Rick Warren wants to take away. I hate the man, for his sexist opposition to women in positions of authority, his stand for forced pregnancy, his homophobia.
I've changed my mind, partly. I believe Amelia that there are other, real progressives out there on the evangelical scene - people for whom poverty isn't an afterthought, but same-sex marriage is. And I also find Amelia's argument compelling: that Obama is supposedly someone for whom scripture has some real meaning, and that choosing Warren suggests either that he cares rather less about theology than he has claimed, or that Warren is in line with his theology. So I don't think this was such a great decision anymore: this wasn't his only option, or even his best option, and it suggests that he is not serious about things which he claimed to be serious about. Like gay rights, women's rights, and science.
But I find it pretty persuasive when a Balloon Juice commenter points out that anointing Warren as the next evangelical leader puts Dobson out in the cold and means that we'll have some evangelical leaders who aren't dead set against all progressive politics. We'll peel some evangelical votes off by emphasizing poverty and the environment, and we'll get more Democrats in Congress and more progressive programs on those issues. We'll get better policy out of it, so I'll swallow that symbol.
Ezra is right about the use Warren will make of that power, but that's only a concern insofar as Warren giving the invocation will give him a larger audience. I'm betting not. I'm betting he already has the audience and congregation he's going to get - that the major effect of tying Warren to Obama will be to make the Democrats more acceptable to evangelicals rather than the evangelicals more acceptable to the Democrats. So ok. I'll trust Obama to make that decision right now. If we start getting bad policy out of the deal, that'll be the time to get mad.
(I'm not saying, by the way, that Obama should never talk to Warren. Just that delivering the invocation is a much larger public honor than inviting him to dinner at the White House. Though the day when Warren's views are considered as socially unacceptable as David Duke's cannot come too soon.)
I also, in thinking that this was a clever piece of triangulation, had argued against being angry about the pick. I was wrong. We should be furious. One, having all these straight people online being angry about queer issues cheers me up. I love knowing that queer issues are not peripheral for my straight friends, but something that actually is close to their hearts - and I'll say that I was surprised and warmed by the reaction to Prop 8, even among people I'm close to. Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight mentioned the increasing engagement on queer issues earlier this week as well, and points out that we're seeing a rapid transformation in public opinion. Eight years ago, neither candidate for president favored civil unions; this year they both did.
Second, I think Ta-Nehisi Coates is the person who really has it right on this. My job isn't to make Barack Obama's job easier. And--as I'm sure he knows--his job isn't to his marching orders from the bloggers who have no political capital to lose. Jelani talks about Adalai Stevenson putting segregationist John Sparkman on the ticket. I think about Lincoln promising to unite the country, blacks be damned. And now Biden defending the Warren pick. I want to be clear--in the context of who they are, national politicians, these people are not "wrong." I think Biden, like Stevenson, and like Lincoln make a solid, political case.
And not just that, true as it is. Obama just pissed off a lot of queer people, and a lot of our already pissed off straight allies. He owes us. And he just burned up all his queer-friendly cred: not just because he chose Warren, but because people - some of them straight - made a gigantic fuss about it. Because we expected something better. So now Obama owes those of us who care about queer rights. We have the chance to get better policy precisely because people got mad about Warren. There's more about gay issues on the Change.gov site than there was on the campaign website. Baby steps. But now he's got something to prove. I have to say, I don't mind that as an outcome.
But that doesn't make Frederick Douglass wrong either. That doesn't make black leadership wrong for denouncing Stevenson. And it doesn't make those of us who believe that a man who bans gays from his church should not be giving the invocation, wrong. Obama and co. have the job of building national consensus. We have the job of expanding the boundaries of that consensus. We are in conflict, and this is as it should be. Seriously, what is one without the other?
Ta-Nehisi Coates asks, about the whole gay marriage thing, "What if it is a lifestyle?" The argument (as often publicly made) for letting us queers do our thing rest on the idea that we didn't choose to be gay, and thus can't choose to be straight, so it's just mean to try to force us into a role that won't work. Ta-Nehisi says,
"Implicit in that logic is a kind of judgment, the notion that if I could choose, I obviously would choose to be white. But what if I just like being black? What if I could choose and would still choose black? Ditto for homosexuality. So what if you do choose to be gay? I understand that a lot of the science says you don't, but why do we accept this implicit idea that heterosexuality is, necessarily, what everyone would chose?"
Dear Vanity Fair,
Perhaps you commissioned Maureen Dowd to write about Tina Fey knowing only that she was a New York Times columnist, and never having read any of her columns. I’ve actually read those columns, though, and the profile she turned out was exactly what I would expect. You did a disservice to Tina Fey, and to your readers. We learn little about Tina Fey’s childhood, nothing about her philosophy of writing, nothing about her transition to acting – nothing about the substantive development of her personality and career. Instead, we hear endlessly about her German father and German work ethic, her Greek mother, her weight gain, weight loss, frumpy dresses, mousy appearance, thrift store sweaters, worries about her body. The weight and body image angles are particularly upsetting, since Dowd uncritically accepts the idea that thin equals beautiful, and thus that thin equals successful. But the cumulative effect really says it all: after reading that article, I was bored, offended, and self-conscious about my ass. Tina Fey’s talent deserves better. So does my reading time.
Better luck next time,
North
Shorter David Brooks: "I know nothing about the subject I'm writing on, and would like to display my ignorance for the world to see."
I don't have time to write a full analysis right now. I'll do it on Sunday or Monday. But I just want to say. People who don't know shit about shit should stop talking about schools and education reform. Of course, if that were the standard, David Brooks wouldn't get a column at all.
You know you're a sustainable farming nerd when you get all engrossed reading the Organic Valley farmer profiles. This one made me happy: the farmers switched to grazing from row crops, and from Holsteins to Jerseys, and went to seasonal dairying, and they're happier and have a better family life and the cows are happier too. If you, too, are a sucker for little stories about the world getting better, you can get a few minutes of enjoyment here.
If you haven't seen the dancing walrus video, you owe it to yourself to spend the next 49 seconds watching it. Especially if you're too busy. Then, if you have a couple minutes, you should read the Natalie Angier article about walruses. Sample: "Males woo females with lengthy compositions that have been compared in the complexity of their structure and phrasing to the songs of nightingales and humpback whales, but that use a greater number of body parts." Attention walruses: you are amazing. Please come visit.
I hope none of the three children in my generation ever has occasion to send a letter like this to another sibling.
The Gingriches are going to have a fun Thanksgiving.
I've been in Chicago for the last two days. It's cold and windy, and my grandmother is crazy; otherwise great. At the coffee shop this morning, the cashier asked where I'm from.1 I don't know if I look out of place - in Hyde Park? it's full of dressed-up pseudo-hipsters! - or if my voice, which is ridiculously scratchy, makes me sound like I have an accent.
I claimed Philadelphia, because I'm not there. In Philadelphia I would have claimed Des Moines. In Des Moines? I guess I would have said, "I grew up here," which is not quite the same as, "I'm from here." I always claim the last place I was, which means I can never be home. Next year I'll probably be from Philadelphia full time.
Anyway. When I told him I was from Philadelphia, he said congratulations. The Phillies win, which seemed like such a big deal at the time, is such ancient history that he had to remind me why Philly got congratulations. After the Phillies won, there were riotous celebrations; for days afterward, Philadelphia was full of irritable, slightly hungover fans who wandered around shrieking "Go Phillies!!!!1!" every time they saw anything red. They were kind of like grumpy, overtired bulls.
Election day was totally different. I wouldn't have been anywhere else. After they called the election - at 11:01 pm - people poured out into the streets and danced, banged pot lids, chanted, sang, shouted, hugged each other, drummed. The church on the corner near my house has a tiny school, and on Wednesday morning all the kids, ages 4 to 13, were out there waving home-made "Honk 4 Obama" signs and screaming and dancing. People smiled at each other on the street.
I know Obama's bound to disappoint us. I know it. And I'm ready to leave Philadelphia, because if I don't do it soon I never will. But that day, I wouldn't have been anywhere else.
It's like this election has its own vocabulary: double down, vetting, surge, in the tank, rogue, close the deal.
Conspicuous by its absence is the most useful phrase to describe the last several months: jump the shark.
(See This. Fucking. Election for a last-minute replay of this. fucking. election.)
Because I'm really, really cool, I was getting some coffee ice cream and Nutella (with bonus roasted almonds on top!) together to eat while I watched the Daily Show. And the phone rang. And it appears that Jon Carson, Obama's voter contact guy, decided, why don't we just call everyone? And put them on a conference call with Obama?
I feel slightly suspicious of my telephone, and absolutely validated in feeling that this election is just like a sports game. What is going to happen next?
[I am not a hard-core volunteer - I volunteered once and signed up for 3 days of GOTV - so I'm curious who else got that call.]
Godwin's Law
"As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."John McCain, on the LA Times's refusal to release (per its promise to its source) a tape of Obama at a fellow professor's going away party from Chicago:
"I'm not in the business of talking about media bias but what if there was a tape with John McCain with a neo-Nazi outfit being held by some media outlet?"According to internet tradition the first person to make such a comparison loses.
Look, I want to be sympathetic to Sarah Palin spending $150,000 on new clothes. I buy that she needed new clothes, even though she wasn't "a beet farmer last week" (if you want to see how she dressed before, there's a set of photos on the Seattle PI website; a lot of what she wore in Alaska would have been savagely mocked if she wore it in front of a national audience). The demands of the national stage are intense, and much more so for women: no female political figure (and I include Michelle Obama and Cindy McCain) could follow the Obama strategy of wearing a rotating set of identical dark two-button suits, white shirts, and variably colored ties. I also buy that those clothes have to be not only varied, but high quality, expensive, and fashionable, and that people will notice and mock her if they are not. And she needs a lot of them, because she can't wear the same thing every day, or even twice in the same week - and even then she needs far more clothes than seems normal, because she doesn't stay in one place long enough to get everything cleaned and sent back to her before she leaves, so they probably have to get shipped by her post-event team.
But $150,000! That's a different $2000 outfit every day of a 2.5 month campaign. It's just, just.. it is just not reasonable. I have been to fancy department stores! There are very nice outfits available for much, much less than $2000, and her standard outfit of femme skirt with jacket is completely amenable to mixing and matching. (I'm not the only one who can't figure out where the money would go: the editor of Glamour magazine basically agrees.) If it had been some smaller, seemingly unreasonable amount of money, like $50,000 or $75,000, I could have seen defending Palin. But I just can't make the numbers make sense.
(post title from the Political Schmientist)
