The Women's Movement Today

excerpt from Susan Faludi

The contemporary women’s movement seems fated to fight a war on two fronts: alongside the battle of the sexes rages the battle of the ages.

And I'm sorry, but you'll have to find this month's Harper's to read the whole thing.

Mmm, Pasta

http://www.babbonyc.com/recipe-archive.htmlIn all its shapes and combined for goodness.
Mmm, spaghetti.


OMFG, Babbo has recipes!

This Way Lies Reefer Madness

 The last I heard, California's Prop. 19 looks likely to pass with about a 10-point lead in polls.
But not if the Booze Lobby has its way. Why, "Marijuana operatives" could buy up thousands of acres of farmland, and other dire outcomes. Heh.
Oh, and the price could drop, putting a lot of dispensaries out of business.

Fair Warning

I know, I know. Posts have been sparse. They're about to get sparser. I seem to have become partially employed despite all efforts to the contrary. Miss you, too.

Laff O' Teh Nite

Doc to woman in labor:
"Now Mrs. Morgan, I've already administered the epidural, would you like one as well?"

30 Rock

DNA O' Teh Day

It was his subconscious which told him this - that infuriating part of a person's brain which never responds to interrogation, merely gives little meaningful nudges and then sits humming quietly to itself, saying nothing.

It is rumored that Oct. 10, 2010 will be the first of many happy 42 Days to come. You heard it here first. Unless, of course, you heard it somewhere else. Towel anyone?

More Fun Than That Porn Thingie

From Utne!

A lot of pissed-off people wind up at our monastery. This place has a tractor beam like the Death Star in Star Wars that pulls in everyone within a thousand-mile radius with four-letter words on the tips of their tongues. Her marriage tanked, he’s got an itch in his brain he just can’t scratch, she’s 45 and smells of cabbage and lives in a small studio apartment and nobody ever calls her back. They all wind up here, sold on the promise that Buddhism can alleviate suffering...

...In other words, spiritual work isn’t always “instructive”—it’s transformative, and this kind of transformation can get messy. The Sanskrit term for this is clusterfuck.

Oh, God. Porn.

I really wanted to just see how Lawrence O'Donnell does tonight and sort of peruse MeFi at the same time.
But somebody had to spoil it all.

Given that the average boy first sees porn at the age of 11, we are raising a generation of boys who are cruel, bored and desensitized.

I Am Very Proud

of the fact that I intend to complete this very long and worthwhile piece on David Axelrod before indulging the Monday-morning quarterbacking on last night's superior Mad Men.
Sample:

Axelrod is a liberal with a populist streak; Obama is more of a technocrat who leans left but generally shuns ideology.

Cancelled: Civil War History Month

Still going, the actual Civil War in which "Yankees" invaded Virginia and killed thousands of innocent civilians over nothing. Nothing, except that little thing, treason.
There was a family anecdote that one of my ancestors, the mother of six, was deserted by her Confederate soldier husband after he learned she was aiding and abetting escaping slaves by hiding them on their farm. Supposedly, she moved to Cleveland and began taking in washing to survive.
Given that boths sides of my family were full of bigotry with rare exceptions like my mother, I doubt the story. But I retain it. I like it.

Things To Think About

YouTube has more than kitties and puppies. Really.

Learn Something New Every Day

About

Teh Gays

are mad at Obama over the failure of DADT. Feh.
I'm watching the long game. And Andrew Sullivan easily acknowledges that the major gay activist organization is an embarrassing joke.
I'm reminded of that FDR quote to the effect that "Madam, I want to do as you ask, but you must make me."

About Your House

I sat in the barber shop last week and listened as the woman who cuts my hair and her 40ish male customer discussed strategies on how to sell their homes. He has an inherited one in this Victorian city, but doesn't want to let it go at rock-bottom prices and will wait until the market turns up. Yeah, right, I thought, having absorbed the speculation out there that overall home prices in the U.S. must fall another 10 percent before economists consider the market normal.
The barber showed off the big front-page ad she got in one of the regional housing shoppers. She wants about a mil for the two homes on five acres in the country that she "has to sell," but she'll take $75K less if they don't go through a Realtor.
Yeah, right, I thought.
I have other friends here who just took their home off the market, not a nibble in months, after their Realtor told them it was the worst market since 1967.
Actually, since 1963, since they started keeping records.
But it's better here in the West. Well, somewhere in the West, certainly not Nevada.

Or:
— There were 206,000 new houses on the market at the end of August, the fewest since August 1968.
— The last time unemployment exceeded 9 percent for three consecutive years was from 1939 to 1941.


Unemployment was, of course, much higher than 9 percent in those years. But still.

Spooky! Whodunit?

I have always felt that cyberterrorism is an under-examined question.
But how about cyber warfare conducted by a nation state? Richard Clarke didn't say anything about that.

Stuxnet is essentially a precision, military-grade cyber missile deployed early last year to seek out and destroy one real-world target of high importance – a target still unknown.

And...

A geographical distribution of computers hit by Stuxnet, which Microsoft produced in July, found Iran to be the apparent epicenter of the Stuxnet infections. That suggests that any enemy of Iran with advanced cyber war capability might be involved, Langner says. The US is acknowledged to have that ability, and Israel is also reported to have a formidable offensive cyber-war-fighting capability.

Could Stuxnet's target be Iran's Bushehr nuclear power plant, a facility much of the world condemns as a nuclear weapons threat?

Erm, About That Sharia Law Thingie

that we're all supposed to be so afraid of.
Instead of just blindly quoting Newt Gingrich and finding somebody on the other side to say "no, I don't think so," TPM actually did a little investigative real journalism.
Among the findings:

Numerous American cities now have one or more Muslim 'religious courts' in operation where believers go to adjudicate family law disputes, real estate transactions and various other matters according to Sharia Law by binding arbitration. These religious court verdicts can then be enforced by civilian American courts. Various states have also passed laws to codify Muslim dietary laws, though a few of these laws have been struck down. And numerous national corporations now process foods to suit Muslim dietary standards. Finally, one jurisdiction in New York has been settled entirely by devout Muslims; no candidates run for office except those approved by the local imam; road signs in the town are all printed in both English and Arabic; and various local practices have been brought into line with Sharia.
Actually, there's one detail I didn't mention. The law here isn't Sharia; it's Halakhah, Jewish religious law. And all the above are true if you change 'Muslim' to 'Jewish' and 'Arabic' to 'Hebrew'. (Actually, Yiddish written in the Hebrew script, to be specific.)

Get To Know Some Interesting People

All the Paris Review interviews are now online.
Picking at random, Ann Carson:

“At least half of your mind is always thinking, I’ll be leaving; this won’t last. It’s a good Buddhist attitude. If I were a Buddhist, this would be a great help. As it is, I’m just sad.”

And then there's always HST:

“Who the fuck do you think wrote the Book of Revelation? A bunch of stone-sober clerics?”

I plan to use this daily as a sort of meditation. I'm no good at real meditation. Probably because it's just not real to me.
Rain, shower, rain, shower. The season has begun.

Are You WEIRD?

Yeah, unlike most people.

Worth A Second Mention

FrontSection is just the sort of thing I need at this time of night. Better than coffee and cigarettes.

In our imagination it is still 2003 and the idea of an aggregator of smart stuff with a concise, vaguely cynical tone is thus a novel idea.

Unfortunately, it's the weekend and I plumbed it all last night after MetaFilter failed to brighten the dark hours. Oh, well.

Contrarienne Extraordinaire

Elizabeth Warren, of course.

In an age of few progressive heroes, it took amazing combination of persistence, principle, political shrewdness and personal grace to make herself the indispensable woman.

h/t EE

Tax Cuts For Everybody

Something I didn't know, so maybe you didn't either.
TPM explains.

Ennui Monday

For some reason, StatCounter does not seem to be working when accessed from bookmarks, although the link at the bottom of the home page works fine.
So, it's nice to know there are still a few of you out there despite Contrarienne's inexplicable productivity decline.
Also, I notice that nothing has been posted since last Thursday, violating my interim resolution to post at least once a day just to make it appear let you know that I care.
There has been no news worth noting. Sullivan is uniformly depressing, TPM hung up on marginal issues, Huffpo even more irrelevant than usual, Drudge fails to find even a single radical animal abuse story, Kos yada yada yada. Even MetaFilter fails to satisfy.
The only new thing I've learned today was from Wikipedia's entry for Lady Gaga, my search an act of desperation. But I can't remember any of it except that her parents named her Stephani with an i.
Oh, and she went to the same Catholic high school on the Upper East Side as Paris and Nicky Hilton. Is Nicky Paris' sister or brother? I think one of Liz Taylor's husbands was a Nicky Hilton. Is he Paris' father or grandfather or an uncle of some sort?
See what I mean? Life is meaningless.
Contrarienne has been nursing what remains of a debilitating cold, which would be less debilitating if she hadn's smoked cigarettes for 50 years of her life.
Breathing is a conscious act, which is just not right.
Therefore, she has had plenty of down time to develop the following diet resolutions:
1. No more saurkraut
2. No more bean soup
3. Eat more donuts

Recommended TV: Breaking Bad, the first two of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy
Here's to a better Tuesday.

There's Terry Jones

the crazy Koran burner and then there's The Real Terry Jones (as the MC) h/t Andrew Sullivan.

Harvest Day

The trouble with growing food is that you have to harvest it. And cook it. Luckily, I have a great vineagrette for the beans.

Just Go

here. Then here.http://meowmania.jqln.org/

Best Roller Derby Name

Debbie Does Malice
But you choose your own, here's the list.
And here's the MeFi thread. Apparently there's a new video game coming out. I can hardly wait for the new season. I think I want to be a regular.

Sunday Guilt Trip

Today's topic: Trash
The New York City Dept. of Sanitation has a resident anthropologist. Who knew?

"...everything is clean and fine and running along..."
Wait, what's that burning smell coming from the dishwasher?
No, really.

Hey Man

you seen my lunch?
Uh, no. Not here.

Don't Say I Never Gave Ya Nothin'

Season Ten

because I only speak Catholic school

and other poems about home.
Yay Larkin. Also.
(Is it Friday already?)

50 Years Ago Today

the first presidential debate. Radio listeners thought Nixon won. TV watchers scored it for Kennedy. But for Papa Joe, Nixon would have won the election. Or so "they" say.

Friviality Tuesday

"I am so, so sorry."

What's So Funny?

So. "Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn't seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy whips out his phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps, "My friend is dead! What can I do?". The operator says "Calm down. I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead." There is a silence, then a shot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says "OK, now what?"

Supposedly, world's funniest joke.

"Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into a sewer and die."
Mel Brooks

I will have to remember the Benign Violation Theory and other related discussion over at MeFi, which keeps me up too late. 'Nite.

How Can I Not Love This?

She is, after all "the first British-Kashmiri female dholi, trained by the Dhol Blasters and Azaad dhol..."

Don's Pharmacy Potato Salad

I used to get all fancy and complicated with potato salad, because I really didn't like it. No matter how fancy I made it.
Then I discovered French potato salad made with vinegriette and that was pretty good. And different.
But it wasn't until I impulsively ordered  — and tasted — the house potato salad while at ONE OF THE LAST LUNCH COUNTERS IN AMERICA (and one of the few places you can still get a real malted milk shake) — for my annual BLT w/o the L or the T, that I knew I'd finally found the secret.
And what is it, you ask. KISS, honey, just KISS.

Take any number of white potatoes that you want and microwave them on baked potato setting, then let them cool but not get cold.
Or you can boil them if you want to go to all that trouble. They do get a little too soft in the microwave.
Chop up a bunch of scallions, greens included, until you've got enough to kind of balance the potatoes. Roughly, I'd do about one bunch to four medium potatoes.
Peel and dice the coolish potatoes into 1/2 inch chunks, throw in the scallions (you HAVE washed them, cut off the root ends and discarded anything that looks brownish, right? Do I have to explain everything?)
Then start spooning in heaping tablespoons of mayo (Best's only, unless you live in the Midwest, where I've heard Heilemann's is the man) and gently coating everything until it looks neither too dry nor too wet. Salt and pepper to taste. Eat. Enjoy.
Refrigerate leftovers. You can add chunks of peeled harboiled egg to this, but it's not necessary unless you're making it a one-dish vegetarian dinner and need some protein. Scallions and potatoes, scallions and just about anything. I would not recommend substituting any other kind of onion. Then it wouldn't be Don's and you'd have to get all fancy to pull it off, in which case, why bother, just buy some of that overpriced pre-packaged stuff at Safeway.
BTW, Don's is no longer called Don's. It's called The Leader Drug Store, which probably means the local newspaper publisher bought it and named it after his paper or paper company or something.
But to me, it will always be Don's. The waitresses are all the kind you usually only find in the movies, call me honey and some of them are older than I am.
The cook used to be female but they've got some passing ex-shed boy in there now.
He makes great potato salad, a decent cheeseburger and there's lots of B on the BLT without the L or the T.
It was a great place to hang out my first winter here when the rain was driving me crazy and the kid was at school. Still feels like home.
What's a shed boy? Well might you ask.

Early Meatless Monday For AB

So I have all this aging celery in the garden, it's getting fibrous and I don't even like celery but even the celery lover doesn't want to eat it but I hate to let it go to compost.
Just so happens the NYT had a recipe that I saw when linking to something else that called for five cups of celery, which is a lot.
Yesterday I decided to make the Greek beans, which I think of as Italian beans because instead of tomato sauce or paste, I used a can of diced Italian spiced tomatoes.
The celery lover and I split the results and, guess what, we each have only about a spoonful left after less than 24 hours.
I like my beans with enough broth to eat as soup because the broth is soooo good. But I was still scarfing the dish down at midnight while I watched The Ghost Writer — pretty good thriller — and so it turns out it was an uplanned but totally satisfying Meatless Friday.
Use all your bean broth when you put the dish in the oven and  bake in something larger than the two-quart glass casserole I used, which boiled over a bit.
I will never be a vegetarian, but I could do more things like this and skip the  beef/pork/chicken entirely every couple of days and never notice the difference.
P.S. I had small navy beans, so that's what I used.

Recipes for Health
White Beans With Celery
By MARTHA ROSE SHULMAN

This dish is inspired by a Greek recipe from Diane Kochilas’s “The Glorious Foods of Greece” that calls for giant white beans and about three times as much olive oil. I had regular white beans in my pantry and a bunch of celery left over from a recipe that called for only a couple of stalks (which happens so often). I love the textures here. The celery retains a little crunch, which contrasts nicely with the soft beans.

1/2 pound (about 1 1/8 cups) white beans, rinsed, picked over and soaked for six hours or overnight in 1 quart water

Salt to taste

1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil

4 to 5 cups chopped celery, including the leaves

4 large garlic cloves, minced

1 8-ounce can tomato sauce, or 2 tablespoons tomato paste diluted in 1 cup water

1/4 to 1/2 cup finely chopped parsley (to taste)

Juice of 1 to 2 lemons, to taste

1. Drain the beans, and combine in a large saucepan with enough water to cover by 2 inches. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat to low, add salt to taste, cover and simmer until the beans are just tender, about 45 minutes to an hour. Do not let the beans boil hard or they’ll fall apart before they’re cooked through.

2. Heat 2 tablespoons of the olive oil over medium heat in a large skillet, and add the celery and a generous pinch of salt. Cook, stirring often, until it just begins to soften, about three minutes, and add the garlic. Stir together for a minute, until the garlic is fragrant, and remove from the heat.

3. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Drain the beans over a bowl. Place in a large baking dish, preferably earthenware, and toss with the celery and garlic, the remaining olive oil and the tomato sauce or diluted tomato paste. Add enough of the drained broth to cover by an inch, and stir in the remaining olive oil. Cover the dish tightly with foil, and place in the oven. Bake one hour, or until the beans are soft and creamy.

4. Uncover the beans, stir, and add salt and pepper to taste. Add a tablespoon or 2 of lemon juice, or more if desired, and adjust salt and pepper. Serve hot, warm or room temperature, with a little more olive oil drizzled over the top if desired.

Yield: Serves four.

Advance preparation: The beans will keep for three days in the refrigerator. You may want to thin them out with a little water or broth.

Email O' Teh Day

(Thanks, JK)
Inner Peace: This Is So True

If you can start the day witout caffeine
If you can always be cheerful, ignoring aches and pains
If you can resist complaining and boring people with your troubles
If you can eat the same food every day and be grateful for it
If you can understand when your loved ones are too busy to give you any time
If you can take criticism and blame without resentment
If you can conquer tension without medical help
If you can relax without liquor
If you can sleep without the aid of drugs


...then you are probably
the family dog

Blog It Is

I admire and respect Jerome a Paris over at Daily Kos.
He's French but with a native grasp of American politics as well as the world picture, plus he knows all about energy and economics. He's in the business, as it were, green energy investment apparently.
Anyhoo, I just started reading his new post, the first in a long time that I've noticed, and just thought I'd recommend it for his impressive grasp of the salient factors in our recent economic experience. Guess what, he doesn't include the housing bubble. Hmm.

The First Contrariennes

"When sentenced at Bow-Street Police Court to two months hard labor the two Suffragettes who were yesterday released from Holloway Gaol uttered the threat 'It will be bombs next time'."

Ah, memories.
August 26 18? is the anniversary of women's suffrage in the U.S. Should I go to the Plague of Women Vultures luncheon?

Exactly

Refusing at Fifty-Two to Write Sonnets
by Thomas Lynch


It came to him that he could nearly count
How many Octobers he had left to him
In increments of ten or, say, eleven
Thus: sixty-three, seventy-four, eighty-five.
He couldn't see himself at ninety-six—
Humanity's advances notwithstanding
In health-care, self-help, or new-age regimens—
What with his habits and family history,
The end he thought is nearer than you think.

The future, thus confined to its contingencies,
The present moment opens like a gift:
The balding month, the grey week, the blue morning,
The hour's routine, the minute's passing glance—
All seem like godsends now. And what to make of this?
At the end the word that comes to him is Thanks.

Web Site O' Teh Week

MetaFilter says it could become as addicting as ... wait for it ... MetaFilter.

My fav:

Neoliberalism has unshackled public culture from the chains of innovation, freeing it to be bland, nervous, artistically moribund, and commercially limp…

Or maybe:

Loose regulation, poor women, and wads of cash combine to form a lively market in human eggs in Cyprus…

A gold mine is what it is.

Tvxtg! Fast!

Google CEO Eric Schmidt said we now create 5 exabytes of data every two days, an amount equal to all the information created from the dawn of civilization through 2003.








UPDATE: Anonymous wants to know what the connection is. Franklin (who Tara later "kills" — her success is questionable and fans apparently want him back) is just contributing his bit to the bytes, so to speak.

Roger Ebert Speaks

I was asked at lunch today who or what I worshipped. The question was asked sincerely, and in the same spirit I responded that I worshipped whatever there might be outside knowledge. I worship the void. The mystery. And the ability of our human minds to perceive an unanswerable mystery. To reduce such a thing to simplistic names is an insult to it, and to our intelligence.

From this piece on Christopher Hitchins.

Frist!

Georgia Boscolo, the 24-year-old daughter of a gondolier, becomes the first Venetian gondoliera in 900 years.

In National Costume

One of Andrew Sullivan's readers responds to a previous post about the lack of color photography in the early period of photography and that the dominance of black-and-white distances us from our view of the past.

Bashkir woman in national costume, 1910, Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii
 
And s/he sends a link to a little treasure trove from a pioneering Russian photographer.
Seeing this, I am inspired to ask, what would a photograph captioned "American woman in national costume, 2010" look like?

Words

So Ted Stevens Is Dead. So, Let's Eat

I'm not dead and I have this great recipe to share because there is no news, repeat, no news today. So far.
So, okay, I ran across this fantastic recipe at Slate, and I have no memory of why I was even there. And the Chinese-American chef who gave it talked about spilling his mother's homemade ginger-scallion sauce on the chair and wanting to eat the upholstery every time he sat in it.
Luckily, he had some sauce in the refrigerator and could just go add it to noodles or something. It's good on rice. It's used to dip BBQ in and also on poached chicken.
So I finally made the sauce last weekend and it was a pain because a) I don't own a food processor (Goodwill, do you hear me? Habitat?) and b) I sort of fudged on reading directions.
It's a simple recipe and I thought he said just salt the hell out of the processed ginger and scallions. He sort of did, but he also recommended tasting it as you went and making it "just a little too salty."
I just dumped too much salt in thinking everything would be fine for the double batch I was making. It wasn't so I had to make another single batch because that's all the ginger I had left and even now it's too salty.
But it's really, really good.
I made a quick Thai instant noodle thingie for lunch and it sucked so I grabbed the sauce from the refrigerator and cautiously put a little bit on them. It was good, so I put more on. Then more. The noodles disappeared. I wish I had more. Oh, wait, maybe I do.
Send some to your kids in college, tell them it's great on Top Ramen, just forget the other crap in the package and only cook the noodles because Top Ramen DOES have way too much salt.
Here it is:
Ginger scallion sauce
Makes 1 cup; a little goes a long way
Active time: 5 minutes
Ingredients
1 ounce ginger, peeled and cut into 1/2-inch chunks
1 bunch (about 4 ounces) whole scallions, cut into 1-inch lengths
1/2 cup oil, preferably peanut or corn (Avoid olive oil and definitely no canola, which, when heated like this, smells like a fish. And not in a
good way.)
Salt
Directions
Whirl the ginger in a food processor until it's finely minced, but not puréed (meaning stop before it gets liquidy and pasty). Put it in a
wide, tall, heatproof bowl, several times bigger than you think you need. For real. The bowl matters. Use a cooking pot if you have to,
because when that oil gets in there, the sizzle is going to be serious business.
1. Mince the scallions in the food processor until they're about the same size as the ginger. Add it to the ginger.
Salt the ginger and scallion like they called your mother a bad name and stir it well. Taste it. It won't taste good because that much raw
ginger and scallion doesn't really taste good, but pay attention to the saltiness. You want it to be just a little too salty to be pleasant,
because you have to account for all the oil you're about to add.
3. Heat the oil in a pan until you just start seeing wisps of smoke, and pour it into the ginger scallion mixture. It's going to sizzle and
bubble like a science-fair volcano, and it's going to smell awesome. Don't stick your face in it. You wouldn't stick your face in lava,
would you? Give it a light stir with a heatproof spoon.
4. Let cool to room temperature. Keep it in the fridge, for whenever you want to be one spoonful away from deliciousness

The chef's name is Francis Lam and I'm going to make the ratatouile, no the eggplant pasta first. Anyway, follow him here.http://www.salon.com/food/

One Of Those Days

today was. You know, where it suddenly becomes clear that exactly nothing is clear. What's the opposite of momentum? Oh, yeah, intertia.

In that spirit, I offer Comment O' Teh day from MetaFilter's Vonnegut thread:

I wish Vonnegut were a professor of science. "Alcohol, it's what happens when little creatures called yeast binge on sugar until they suffocate in their own shit. And so it goes."

Did You Notice Anything Odd About Chelsea's Wedding?

Like, for instance, you know almost nothing. As opposed to more than you ever wanted to know?
Okay, so here's something. Hillary's dress.
No comment.
Oh, okay, it's Awful de la Renta.

Best Headline Ever

Who woulda thunk the Christian Science Monitor would go viral?

Dog Days Of Summer

Shorty and Gus.

Why Garden?

Why garden, indeed.

Where Should Education Dollars Go First?

Preschool, preschool, preschool.

the gains from preschool appear to be so significant and consistent that, according to Cunha and Heckman, investing in early childhood education is just about the most cost-effective way to spend public money. The economists calculate that, for every dollar invested in preschool for at-risk children, society at large reaps somewhere between eight and nine dollars in return. That’s how I want my tax-dollars spent.

Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/frontal-cortex#ixzz0vNgxZm92

The Maths

Some people believe in cosmological intentionality, that God loves them and watches over their every moment, often intervening.
Some people believe in string theory.
And some people, well, speak a language I cannot understand and must take on faith. Faith that they know what they're doing, not necessarily that they have a final answer for me to believe.
Black holes. Time. Space. What's for dinner?

A Little Light Summer Reading

Guess I have no excuse not to read David Foster Wallace now. Somebody's compiled an informed list of best magazine articles and he seems to dominate. Whatever happened to Susan Orlean anyway?

Goodbye, And Good Luck

No, I'm not going anywhere soon that I know of. And neither are you, that I know of.
But eventually we'll all go.
As usual, the peerless Atul Gawande offers something important to think about.
I know, I don't want to either. Read it anyway.
On that cheerful note:

Twenty-five per cent of all Medicare spending is for the five per cent of patients who are in their final year of life, and most of that money goes for care in their last couple of months which is of little apparent benefit.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/02/100802fa_fact_gawande?printable=true#ixzz0uqNR0GY6

Ah, The Race Card. Now I Get It.

Josh Marshall draws the depressing conclusion from TODAY'S NEWS IN REPUBLICANS.
So they did some polling, right, and found there is a lot more anti-black feeling directed at Obama than they thought. Enough to win elections even. This makes sense to me. I spent a harrowing afternoon with a woman who is convinced that Tacoma is "mostly black," and that it's crime-ridden and that's why. Blatant, unthinking, uninformed racism. It's her mind set and has been for 70-some years.

Cats, Dogs Plot Against Civilization

Think about it, you could have been building the pyramids or something. Instead you were watching this.


Ultimate cats.

Ultimate dogs.

What's In Your Purse? Come Play With Me

Contrarienne got the idea from this. She hasn't touched her then-new video cam in three years and in fact the first film tape is still in it.
But this, this she can do. And so can you.
Email a copy of what you find in your purse — kemrocken at gmail dot com — and she'll post it.
This could be fun, contrariennes.
Oh, and guys, just empty your pockets and take a shot at it. Or your man purse.
Briefcases, knapsack, backpacks, fannypacks. You get the idea.

 My purse. Pretty cool, huh? $15 at the consignment shop and like new at the time.

Boring, I know. You can do better? Show me. kemrocken at gmail dot com

The Stakes Are Too High

to "elect another career poltician or former athlete." I think I drowned my keyboard.


For reference, original Daisy ad, which ran once, but is iconically embedded in the national political memory.

Oh, Now I Get It

Never mind putting Shirley Sherrod's speech in context, let's put the whole thing in context. Thank you, Talking Points Memo.

It's also important to understand that Andrew Breitbart's timing of the release of the grossly distorted video of Sherrod, which he admits having had for weeks, may not be entirely random. Congress will soon vote on whether to fund part of a settlement between the USDA and African-American farmers who faced acknowledged discrimination -- farmers like Sherrod and her husband used to be. It's a tiny piece of the upcoming war supplemental bill.

Josh Marshall Is Pissed

Andrew Breitbart and Fox News are the guilty parties, and that's the story.
Everything else is media cowardice.
Second.

I'm On A Horse Guy

 Old Spice's ad people have turned their iconic, viral, self-mocking humor into a social media phenom.
 Last week they started making video Twitter responses, hundreds of them, starring the guy himself, Isiah Mustafa, who not only is a cool black buy with a Muslim name, but apparently has a new NBC contract for something even more lucrative.
Anyhoo, I was waiting for someone to pick through the mess and pull the best.
Here they are.

Dana Priest, Dana Priest, Dana Priest

How did I know Dana Priest's name would be on this story?

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

Drudge has been warning for days that WaPo was about to open the can of worms, making it all sound like national security was at stake. But what's really at stake is the security of entrenched interests.
Dana Priest broke the groundbreaking black ops stories. Dana Priest broke the Walter Reed fiasco. Wide open.
Journalism lives. Long live journalism. Long live Dana Priest. And, dare I say it, WaPo lives despite its toady publisher (Katherine, are you turning in your grave?) and its joke of an editorial page.

Heat, Humidity, Sex

The Republican's knew what they were doing when they devised the Southern Strategy.

Abortion, Birth Control, Whatever, It's All Bad

The new health care reform bill and you, your daughter, your granddaughter.

Personal Photos 2010

Some keen alternatives to the family album.

I Write

I write like
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

 And here's the proof.

UPDATE: My blog and several pieces of fiction come back Wallace. My last journalism piece comes back Stephen King. A recent piece of poetry comes back H.P. Lovecraft. Apparently, I am unable to write like Dan Brown, which is a relief.
UPDATE II: Ooh, something I wrote for fun last summer got an Atwood!

Your Brain On Caffeine: Zzzzzz

No, not really, just messin' wit ya.
So, here's the lowdown.
Question: Is my ache-all-over feeling from all this coffee or all these years?

Today In Ice Cream

The thing I can't figure out, and something this article does not address, is:Why are we this bored?
Meanwhile, at the world's third best restaurant:

One of Blumenthal’s most famous dishes is scrambled-eggs-and-bacon ice cream, which he has served with tomato jam, French toast and jellied Earl Grey tea.

I liked the black pepper ice cream, I really did. And today, as we speak, I am enjoying orange cream ice cream with chocolate chips. But spare me the Dead Elvis, or whatever they call it.

You And The Fed

Krugman keeps using the term liquidity trap to describe our economic situation in which, he argues, federal stimulus spending equal to the last one must be applied because the last one was too small, which he warned about at the time.
But even though I know interest rates (not yours, silly, the ones the banks pay) are near zero, I keep getting hung up when he says liquidity trap.
He doesn't really bother to define it anymore, as in "a liquidity trap is" because all his readers but me and the right-wing nuts responding to imaginary flashing neon signs that say Keynes was wrong, Friedman was right, already know what he means.
So I figured if I look it up and write it down, I will remember.
Oh, and Japan. Also.

From Wikipedia:

The term liquidity trap is used in Keynesian economics to refer to a situation where monetary policy is unable to stimulate an economy, either through lowering interest rates or increasing the money supply.

I thought you lowered interest rates by increasing the money supply, but I think a lot of things. That Jon Hall is the sexiest man on the planet, for instance. (No offense, George, but you're old.)
Anyway, things are gonna get worse and the Dems are a bunch of chicken-hearted fools who are going to lose power anyway, so why not take a stand for what's right and needed? I dunno, maybe Obama's got something up his sleeve. My guess is not, though.

Self-Improvement 101

Now that you know about the extinction burst, you can lose weight. Or whatever.

Philosophy Saturday: Lesson 1, Day Cart

For others in the pantheon, go here.

Letter O' Teh Year

A TPM reader in the military was asked by DOD his/her opinion of DADT.

Feel Good Friday

Friviality Friday

BANG!

Cosmologists estimate the Big Bang occurred about 13.7 billion years ago, when all the matter and energy that would eventually constitute the universe was concentrated in a space smaller than the period at the end of this sentence at ineffable pressure and density. Shown below is the picture...

See it here.

Whaddya Mean It Isn't All About Money?

Clay Shirky is a guy whose name you ought to know.

Warning: Wear Gloves

Friviality Friday

Kagan Kills: Comment O' Teh Day

It's like a Catskill Mountain Resort -- a Jewish comedian playing to a bunch of senior citizens (but in this case, there are more gentiles than Jews in the audience).

Video at TPM. Lindsay Graham apparently thinks Hanukkah and Christmas are on the same day.

New/Old Agnostics: Back To Square One

Remember yesterday when I converted wholeheartedly to agnosticism?
Wait, you don't even remember what you had for lunch yesterday?
Well, anyways, I did, seduced as always by the highly persuasive Ron Rosenbaum despite my disappointment in his reaction to 9/11 (kill all the bastards now!).
I admitted that I knew nothing of physics, but I was willing to take his word for it that it doesn't help answer the question.
Except, apparently, it does.

As Nobel Laureate physicist Frank Wilczek has put it, "The answer to the ancient question 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' would then be that 'nothing' is unstable."

PZ Myers over at ScienceBlogs blasts Rosenbaum for being a lazy thinker and essayist and I also find him persuasive, although pretty hyperbolic. But it's easy to forgive since Rosenbaum probably is. Lazy, I mean.
So, sigh, back to the quest.

101 Recipes For Grilling

From Mark Bittman. I love reading Bittman, and watching his videos, but I totally screwed up on his Phad Thai and I had to drive 45 minutes for the something-or-other paste (tamarind, that was it), which I used too much of as well as not enough honey (I ran out) so that I couldn't eat it although my companion thought it was yummy and had seconds.
Anyway, MeFis (MetaFilter denizens) love/hate Bittman and have other links to his stuff.

If You're So Smart, How Come You're Not Rich?

Love my inner Bob. He's my headline writer.
So, Jonah Lehrer talks about Type 1 and Type 2 intelligence and YOUR BRAIN!
Cool stuff. But that's just me. Or is it Bob?

Contrarienne Reviews 50 Top Videos

This is the best, partly because it's only five seconds but also because it made me laugh out loud. Well, Charlie biting my finger was the best. Then this.

What's really embarrassing is that Contrarienne had seen 30 of the 50 videos.
It took more than an hour to scan through, not watch, them all. Anything over two minutes without good music is a speech, not a YouTube video. Most of the ones I hadn't seen weren't worth it. I should have liveblogged, but because I watch it so you don't have to, here's the recommended list.
#15 Wedding Dance
#16 Sneezing Panda
#17 Otters Holding Hands
#18
#27 Hillary ! classic
#36 if you want to know what auto-tune is, you'll know enough at 1:38
#40 Thriller in Manilla
#42 SNL's Adam Samburg--Lazy Sunday--classic
#43 Diet Coke and Mentos, you know you want it
#47 Skateboard Dog
#48 Christian the Lion (you'll probably cry)

Charlie Bit Me

and 49 other top YouTube videos from Time Mag. I'm going to watch them all. It should take about half and hour, better than the news.

Who Says The Democrats Haven't Learned Anything?

It's probably too soon, but I'm an optimist, albeit a damaged one. (Cynical? I prefer skeptical.)
So when the House started balking today at funding Afghan projects, citing corruption and bellowing about the waste of taxpayer money, I sniffed a plan.
Obama can't take the lead on this, because for the Republicans it's all about Obama all the time.
And why should he?
Congress needs to get us out of there. What better way than to start closing the purse? First the slushy stuff, then the military stuff, and finally, force withdrawal.
I just don't see many Republican candidates making much headway toward election by accusing their opponents of wanting to cut and run from 25 AQ — that was the number estimated to be there, in a report a day or two ago. Good timing? Heh.
Polls show a way high percentage of Americans  think the war in Afghanistan is lost, for fools, just don't care. Most of them forgot we're there.
It's bleeding dollars, and Tea Partiers and whatever sympathizers they have can't muster much to appeal for the opposite action.
I'm willing to bet some resourceful staffers are ready with a nice study to show how much we could reduce spending and reduce the deficit with these cuts.
It's a winner all the way.
I'm feeling better already.

It Was String Theory

that put me back in the agnostic camp, just when I was ready to jump ship and confirm my unbelief.
But, frankly, can anyone who knows nothing of physics — and knows she knows nothing — honestly subscribe to either belief or unbelief? And I know nothing of physics. And neither do most people. I just like string theory, I don't know it.
Anyhoo, if they're selling this, I'm buying it.

Our T-shirt will read: I just don't know.

Kagan Hearings

Best comment so far on the Republican idiots blasting Thurgood Marshall and Kagan for clerking for him:

It's just warmed over Rovianism... take an opponents strength (clerking for one of the best-know and most beloved justices of the modern Supreme Court) and try to turn it into a liability.
See also: boating, swift.

although I also liked the one calling Sen. Sessions a "little rat-eared racist prick."

The Front Fell Off

Circulating via email as an actual interview.
But it's not. But it's hilarious. What can we do but laugh?

Sarah's Baby: Hang In There, Andrew

Andrew Sullivan's not letting this go and I, for one, will be forever grateful.
His biggest bitch, and mine, is not Palin or the birth story fiction.
It is the media.

What have we seen to back up the maternity of Trig? Nada. Not a single page from what must be a mountain of medical records, no birth certificate, nothing but a single page doctor's note confirming the birth in passing, issued four hours before polls opened, by a doctor who once spoke freely with the local press but clammed up completely as soon as Palin hit the national stage...because if Palin has lied about this, it's the most staggering, appalling deception in the history of American politics.

The Bush Lega$y

Yeah, I know it's spelled with a "c" but I had to do it.
And now, folks, for a nice graph of the Third Depression.
Be sure to skim the comments. CBO apparently backs this up.
Whadda we want? JOBS!
When do we want 'em? YESTERDAY!

Wing House: Recycling A 747

Yup, the whole thing.

Dept. Of Sex And Quote O' Teh Day

Female sexual response is too complex for any pill.

Wit ya on dat, Brutha.

New Media Dept.

Worry. Not worry. You decide. Me, losing the intertubes would be like cutting off both arms.
I just love this line, so I'm linking to the whole piece even though it's not as witty overall.

Yes, every time we learn a fact or skill the wiring of the brain changes; it’s not as if the information is stored in the pancreas.

Maybe I just like the word pancreas. It's a silly word.

Next Up: Elena Kagan

Hearings start Monday. So what?

For Congress, it's an election year, and the hearing provides Democrats and Republicans a platform to make their respective campaign arguments to the viewing public.

Oh, and, um, the G-20 idiots decided to commit to austerity, just the opposite economic policy needed at this time. Because, Krugman says, they're idiots. Obama seems to be still favoring more stimulus, although how this will all play out is anybody's guess. Maybe when they start cutting spending and the unwashed masses begin to notice, things might change.

Blood Cell Phones

I'm probably going to buy one later this year.
But which one? Are there any electronics companies listening to the "conflict" movement? Seems the new video is going to go viral and Kristof's column yesterday gave it a big push.
Here's what you can do.

Warning: Science Rears Its Ugly Head

• The total precipitation that falls on the world in one year is about one meter of rain, the height of a golden retriever.
• The total amount of rain that has fallen on the world since the industrial revolution began is about 200 meters, the height of Hoover Dam.
• The amount of rain that has fallen on the world since the time of Moses is enough to fill up all the oceans.
• The amount of rain that has fallen on the world since the Ice Age ended is enough to fill up all the oceans four times.
• The amount of rain that has fallen on the world since the dinosaurs died is enough to fill up all the oceans 20,000 times—or the entire volume of the earth three times.
• The amount of rain that has fallen on the world since coal formed is enough to fill up the earth 15 times.
• The amount of rain that has fallen on the world since oxygen formed is enough to fill the earth 100 times.

Okay, you say, and I should care why?
Wait, we haven't even gotten to rocks yet. And, and, ice.

And so, he concludes:

The geologic record suggests that climate ought not to concern us too much when we’re gazing into the energy future, not because it’s unimportant, but because it’s beyond our power to control.

Uh, okay, I don't need a Prius after all. In fact, I don't matter. In fact, who is I?

The Mother Of Us All, Reborn

I will never read this book. Either translation. And it doesn't matter. I am lucky to be the recipient of its benefits to the cultural change and personal awakening it created.