Atomic Nerds

- You know you’ve got writer’s block when you find yourself trawling through the comments of blogs you don’t even read that often, looking for a bit of archetypical dumbassery to refute.

- Springtime in New Mexico: transferring roughly 40% of the state’s valuable topsoil from outdoors to indoors.

- Having a female dog in heat really drives home why we use the term “bitch” or “bitchy” the way we do. From mood swings to clinginess to irritability to exaggerated pathos to bloody-mindedness, it’s like living with a menopausal Barbara Streisand.

- Gandhi: not necessarily such an awesome dude. An oldie but a goodie.

- Want to know how you can make your online gaming experience even more like a job? Become an officer in a guild/alliance/whatever. Bonus points for doing so in a guild that raids or PvPs. I have new sympathy for anyone in management of any kind, as well as those in Human Resources.

- Our latest TV thing, thanks to the #gunblogger_conspiracy folks, is Spartacus: Blood And Sand. It’s very firmly in the “so bad it’s good” category. It’s a great big bowl of sex and violence smothered in cheese sauce. I don’t even like the protagonist. I don’t like anybody except maybe the gladiator instructor, whom we last saw being kicked down a well. The entire purpose of the show’s existence seems to be getting the Starz network to pay for softcore porn so long as they match the sex parts with equal amounts of violent parts. I can’t look away.

Vicious Circle 41, the one-year anniversary episode, is here.

It’s… well, if you’ve actually been listening for the past year it might appeal.

Sorry for the lack of content the last couple of days. It’s been a combination of busy and “omg nothing to write about”.

So instead, have a link to someone genuinely funny, who pretty much entirely summarized the opening round of McDonald v. Chicago.

*motorboats Sotomayor*

As has been noted, that magnificent bastion of sound planning and competent government that is California has decided that among such wonderful plans as releasing dangerous felons early or requiring James Bond style magic to appear on every gun in the state or working on that ….thing they call a budget, the best use of their time is to do something useful and not made of fail to try to get people to stop cussing so gosh darn much!

The state Assembly passed a resolution Thursday that would establish the first week of March as “Cuss Free Week” throughout the state. If approved by the Senate next week, the measure would take effect immediately.

The resolution includes no enforcement mechanism and is simply meant to promote greater harmony and connectedness, said Assemblyman Anthony Portantino, a Democrat from La Canada Flintridge and co-author of the measure.

If I may…
Read the rest of this entry »

So I’m in the grocery store the other day, browsing the perfunctory bookshelves while I wait for Stingray to finish going through the line, and a book title catches my eye: Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage. It struck me as being bizarre in its very concept, in the same way that “we have to protect marriage” political sloganeering does. A legal binding contract to effectively merge lives with someone else has never fucked up anyone’s relationship, it’s a neutral concept and entity. Likewise, neither Tiger Woods’s philandering nor Dan Savage’s same-sex marriage has affected my marriage or anyone else’s except maybe direct family members; “protecting marriage” or being “skeptical of marriage” makes every bit as much sense to me as being skeptical or protective of humor. It exists as a concept that is entirely individually experienced.

You can talk about the history of marriage as a civil and religious institution (and how much of each, if any at all of one or the other, varies highly across cultures) until you go blue in the face, and it might even be an interesting lecture, but it’s just that: the history of how cultures handle what is, fundamentally, entirely an arrangement between two people whose existence that the social structures in place agree to honor. You can get married in Las Vegas to someone you’ve known for six hours or to someone you’ve known and loved for sixty years and it makes no difference to society; once it happens, whether it succeeds or fails isn’t up to society, isn’t up to patriarchy, and it’s only tangentially up to God if you’re a believer- it’s all on the people in the marriage how to proceed from there.

Any given marriage has two failure points, and neither of them are anything but the two people involved in it. Sometimes marriages do fail, for a host of reasons “good” and “bad”; maybe one person turned out to be incapable of fidelity or honesty. Maybe the headier aspects of attraction died and the bond underlying didn’t turn out to be as strong as it seemed. Maybe the involved parties grew in opposite directions. Maybe one or both failed to grow at all. Maybe expectations of marriage in general and the other person in particular were just completely unrealistic, or way out of line with the other person’s expectations. Maybe somebody, or both somebodies, just stopped trying at some point and then were surprised when things eventually shuddered to a halt. Maybe they DID try, try real hard, and it just turned out to not be enough, because sometimes it just isn’t. None of this is on anybody else’s failed marriage or desire for a marriage or strange conception of marriage; just the people in this marriage.

It’s fashionable within some circles to postulate that our conception of marriage is literally unnatural, that humans were never “meant” for long-term monogamy, whatever that means. I guess somewhere back before anybody had invented writing there was some broad aberration that struck humans before they began to differentiate into truly distinct cultures and caused them to start doing something unnatural for the next multiple thousand years. I usually interpret such commentary as “I can’t handle long-term monogamy”, much as I tend to interpret men asserting that it’s just male biological destiny to fuck around as “Not only will I cheat on you, I expect to be entitled to your understanding forgiveness of my need for extra tail”. But really, it’s not really any of my goddamn business; it doesn’t actually affect my damn marriage if somebody screws up their own relationship through infidelity, or for that matter decides amicably between partners that their marriage includes an agreement that some on the side is okay as long as ground rules that both are comfortable with are obeyed. Accusing them of somehow making an assault on marriage is absurd- much like any assertion that mine is a soulless lie because I do it differently is.

Just as the concept of a “collective right” is absurd when discussing what individuals are entitled to or not to be restrained from, marriage is not a collective institution in any way except statistically.

You Don’t Lose Your Mule, You Just Lose Your Turn

Me, Jay, Alan, Old NFO, Wee’rd Beard, and Stingray, ostensibly talking about Brady campaign scores, mostly talking about everything else.

Not addressed at any of the comments I got to my last post, but to a certain strain of argument I’ve seen come up repeatedly in issues related to civil rights of all kinds that’s still itching at me. To wit, in response to some variant of “we should grant Annoying Minority Group X this thing because they actually have legitimate point Y”, the following logic:

“We should fight against (thing) because if they get that right they’ll only push further and ask for (series of unreasonable things).”

Which… is true, but that’s not the point. Yes, any minority group will take any victory as a stepping stone to push for more, and that “more” might be completely reasonable or it might be completely unreasonable. That’s human nature; the only reason a given interest group ceases to push for its interests is if it suffers defeat so thorough that all members of that group come down with a collective case of learned helplessness. Even then it has to be really thorough or they’ll bounce back- just ask the Israelis.

The point is that not only is pushing for whatever goals they think are in their interest their right even if they’re wrong about the legitimacy of those goals, this is the fucking American way. This is the way politics in a representative democracy is conducted; people form coalitions based around their interests, no matter what you or me or anyone thinks about whether those interests are good or bad things, and they push those interests and do their best to make sure their point of view is represented. Not only do various squeaky minority groups that annoy me and I disagree with, like the whiny Christian fundamentalists from the last post, have a right to exist and do what they do, I’m a member of squeaky minority groups that other people wish would shut up too. In terms of, say, gun rights, I’m way the hell over on a tail of the bell curve when it comes to what I think should be legal and what restrictions on second Amendment rights I think are legitimate. The Brady Gang, who I wish would shut up and stop trying, really wishes people like me and other 2A advocates would shut up and stop trying. Not gonna happen in either case, and both of us have goals a randomly selected centrist American would probably regard as completely unreasonable. I personally think my goals and principles are completely grounded in reason and can explain why at boring length- but until I can get enough or the right people to agree with me, we’re probably not going to see Alaska-style gun laws in Chicago.

More than that, there’s something fundamentally unsound about basing your civil-rights argument on what an annoying minority might try for rather than whether or not they have a legitimate point. A society in which we have serious political debates about affirmative action, racial profiling, and Ebonics is a far healthier society than one in which we have serious political debates about segregation and Jim Crow laws precisely BECAUSE the former arguments are more trivial and ridiculous than the latter, which represented a serious abuse and violation of the political ideals outlined in our founding. I’m sure Al Sharpton would never have had his career as a race-baiting profiteer if we’d never desegregated- but it doesn’t follow that that was therefore a bad thing.

If you would put aside values like individual liberties and equality before the law aside in favor of political strategy, you don’t really have values at all so much as you’re playing a team sport with national consequences. It’s one thing if you think collective benefit trumps individual liberties and equality of outcome should be favored over equality of opportunity- that is at least a conflict of values rather than an opportunistic discarding of values in order to make sure the “right” people win or lose. If you find yourself doing this, I suggest you either examine your conscience or switch your focus to the inconsequential team sport of your choice in order to spare the rest of us from serious consequence.

In any case, I find the easiest way to marginalize the more outlandish goals of annoying squeaky minorities is to ruthlessly starve them of legitimate grievances.

Seems some folks are really upset that some people are getting gay into their conservative cake, and that it’s all the fault of those nasty libertarians. To wit:

California Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) chairman Ryan Sorba generated a media controversy when he was shown at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) denouncing the organizers for inviting a homosexual Republican group, GOProud, into the event as an official sponsor. In “controversial” remarks, Sorba said homosexuality was unnatural and that he welcomed more debate and discussion about the subject from his political adversaries.

But what many people don’t realize is that Sorba’s “outburst” was provoked by a speaker who preceded him, Alexander McCobin of Students For Liberty (SFL). McCobin went out of his way to use valuable time from the podium to thank the American Conservative Union, the main CPAC organizer, for making the controversial decision to approve GOProud’s participation.

Actually, what Sorba said specifically was that homosexual sex is not reproductive, which is not natural, therefore gays don’t have natural rights because they’re based on what “natural human behavior” is, and civil rights that conflict with this conception of natural rights shouldn’t exist. In that case I damn well hope he was booed down, because that’s such a tortured construction of natural rights that it should offend any principled conservative. For starters, under such a definition my civil right to use birth control to prevent sequential pregnancy shouldn’t exist either- and a conservative pastor’s right to tell teenagers they shouldn’t be getting it on and popping out babies is also at issue, given that it’s natural in terms of human history to become reproductive at around thirteen.

Sorba said the negative reaction he got from some in the CPAC audience came from those in libertarian and pro-Ron Paul groups whose purpose is “to infiltrate the conservative movement and take it over from within.”

Well, yes. And from where I’m sitting, I sure as hell hope they succeed. But the point that Sparky seems to be missing here, possibly because the whole natural-rights brouhaha reveals he has as much familiarity with the history and philosophical roots of conservatism in America as he does Aboriginal rain rituals, is that his bunch did the exact same thing. The religious right is a relatively young force in conservatism; they became a movement in the eighties, organized groups like Falwell’s moral majority, and did exactly what Sorba’s bleating about here: gained a such a significance in the Republican party and movement conservatism that for decades they could not be ignored. The damn dirty libertarians have a hell of a lot more in common with Barry Goldwater’s conservatism than Mike Huckabee’s. That’s the nature of American politics; the tent is big, contains several factions struggling for influence, and none of them own conservatism, or liberalism for that matter. To Goldwater conservatives, these people aren’t trying to take over conservatism from the inside, they’re trying to take it back. It’s almost like this kind of cycle is somehow natural in movements or something.

“We have our work cut out for us, between the media and the libertarian student movement that supports sodomy. We are going to organize a huge turnout of socially conservative youth next year, to offset the libertarian slide that CPAC has taken.”

Given the demographics, good luck with that, chief. But seriously, they’re perfectly free and within their rights to do so- just like the libertarians are.

In fact, GOProud’s commitment to constitutionally protected homosexual sodomy (i.e., anal intercourse) is not a position that appears on the agenda of any conservative groups. Hence, using the term “gay conservative” to describe these people is either a deliberate deception or an oxymoron that doesn’t stand up under scrutiny.

Only if you define the opinion that it’s none of the government’s or Ryan Sorbo’s goddamn business what consenting adults do with each other- and when it comes to sodomy, that includes a hell of a lot of straight couples- is inherently unconservative. Others of us would assert that the position that a great many things are not the government’s business, with this being merely one issue on a very long list, is an inherently more conservative position.

These “radical regimes,” such as the Christian-dominated government in Uganda, are trying to prevent the spread of AIDS and protect traditional moral values by toughening laws against homosexuality.

Death is a pretty tough sentence, yes. Apparently it is also conservative to approve of targeted genocide in the name of traditional values.

GOProud also says it wants to “defend the Constitution” in the U.S. by “Opposing any anti-gay federal marriage amendment.” It doesn’t explain how protecting the country against out-of-control judges legalizing gay marriage without a vote of the people is unconstitutional.

Oh, those radical judges, going around overturning laws the court thinks are “unconstitutional”. It’s almost like they think that’s their role in government or something. Curse this creeping liberalization! The whole thing started to go to hell at Marbury v. Madison, I tell you.

David Barton of Wallbuilders, whose knowledge about the moral foundations of America has been cited and recognized by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, points out that the founding fathers regarded homosexual sodomy as a crime against nature and believed it should be outlawed and punished severely. Indeed, Barton cites a case in which General George Washington himself authorized the expulsion of a solder from the army for sodomy.

The Founders also were pretty much okay with slavery, being human beings congruent with their times and not moral and philosophical superbeings, after all. Liberals accuse conservatives of wanting to bring this particular bit of old-school back, and reading stuff like this I’m not entirely sure I can accuse them of being totally off the wall.

McCobin’s CPAC remarks consisted of the following: “In the name of freedom, I would like to thank the American Conservative Union for welcoming GOProud as a co-sponsor of this event, not for any political reason but for the message it sends….Students today recognize that freedom does not come in pieces. Freedom is a single thing that applies to the social as well as the economic realms and should be defended at all times.”

That subversive bastard.

Asked to explain where Students For Liberty stands on the major social issues, McCobin told me that his group doesn’t take “policy stances” on such issues as abortion and illegal drug use.

But it does apparently believe that government should protect and promote the right to practice homosexuality.

This guy has a serious issue with conflating government not banning something with actively promoting it. He reminds me of the leftist nanny-staters that want to ban trans-fats and punish smoking with forty lashes. I demand he and everyone who agrees with him be kicked out of conservatism immediately.

He’s right. The libertarians are coming to get conservatism, and if a majority of other conservatives agree that fiscal conservatism and individual liberty are mayhap more important, more coherent values, and more crucial to defining acceptable alliances than writing into law who can fuck whom and why, then maybe they deserve to get it. I certainly think so.

We are coming to get you, Ryan, and Cliff. And we’re bringing our friends. But I really wouldn’t flatter yourself they’re interested in doing more with your ass than kicking it.

Holly Pervocracy has an excellent post shredding a misogynist douchebag blogging at Psychology Today’s site. I started to write “mysteriously” blogging at Psychology Today, but they’ve been pretty much completely taken over by the status-quo just-so’s for awhile now, and cannot fairly be called science journalism anymore. Money quote from Holly’s post:

I agree that human behavior is evolved, but I believe that we evolved into humans. If we still had the hierarchies and behaviors of apes on the savannah, we’d be apes on the savannah. (Also, even apes are often more complex than Kanazawa assumes.) It’s like saying “dolphins are descended from land creatures with legs, therefore dolphins have legs.” And the idea that men are harem-keeping sperm machines and women are antler-contest-judging baby machines is some serious dolphin legs.

I am totally stealing “dolphin legs” as a metaphor when I rant about this brand of bullshit in the future. Read the whole thing.

Sorry I don’t have much clever or interesting or just splenetic to say. Last week the dogs broke out of the fence, which they accomplished by reaching under the fence at a rabbit scrape and physically yanking the planks off. This was not the first time, but it will be the last, which means that until we fix the fence up right, they cannot be outside unless supervised. “Right” has yet to be defined, since we’re trying to figure out how to make this specific point of exit more difficult without a major construction project or constant maintenance problem.

This is a problem because the dogs love being outside. Kodos would be entirely happy LIVING outside if it weren’t that the best vantage points were here in the office and his occasional desire for affection. I do not love being outside when it’s winter and the yard is a mix of mud, slush, and solid sheets of ice, but they do. Today, it is snowing, and they both LOVE snow and thus want to be outside all day. There is a period of roughly twenty minutes to half an hour after a spell outside (with me sourly watching them eat snow and hump each other’s heads) in which they sleep, after which they revert to sighing heavily, desultorily orbiting from the office to the kitchen to the living room to the dining room and back through the office, and generally leaping up and reminding me how awesome it would be to be outside right now every time I move. Actually, strike that, it’s been ten minutes since their last trip outside, and Kodos took five minutes to meditate on his bed before returning to ownersynchronous orbit.

Hanging around with cold wet feet (my boots are disintegrating, and while proper new ones are on the way, no doubt they will not arrive until the final storm of the year has passed) while snow accumulates in my hair is not an inspiring experience for me. It might have been just toe-curlingly awesome for Robert Frost, but I have concluded I am a warm-weather and indoor sort of writer.

In conclusion that is why there is no meaningful content today.

Hey look, it’s a bunch of idiots of questionable sobriety shooting their mouths off! And we’re two of them again!

Vicious Circle 39

Don’t click those links at work. Seriously consider if you want to click on them at all.

New stuff on Paladin Pants that has a fair amount of relevance outside the context of the game. Preparing for a Vicious Circle now.

Here? Um…. come back tomorrow.

So, by now the internet has reacted in its usual frenzy of contradictory action after director Kevin Smith (of whom I am mostly a fan) was booted off a Southwest Airlines flight for allegedly violating their “customer of size” policy, which is no doubt known to employees under some variant of the “flying whale” policy.

Southwest apologized. Smith wants more than that, he wants them to admit they were in the wrong. He says he had the armrests down and his seatbelt buckled and was therefore fine, but the policy actually says:

Customers who are unable to lower both armrests and/or who compromise any portion of adjacent seating should proactively book the number of seats needed prior to travel.

The flight attendant responsible says it was a “judgement call”. I would bet money that the part of the policy he supposedly violated fell under that second and/or rather than the armrests and seatbelts thing. Smith’s a big guy, but he’s not anywhere near morbidly obese- but on the other hand *I’m* not obese, I’m much shorter than him, and on some airliners I’m pretty near the boundaries of that comfortable part.

I sympathize with Smith. Those seats really are on the tiny side, and that had to have been epically humiliating, as I’m sure it would be to anyone at all on the wrong side of the policy- especially when you don’t really need to be all that fat to cross the lines as dictated by the standard. I’ve seen a fair amount of opinionating that the policy itself should be scrapped as inhumane.

At the same time, though, space on a passenger jet is incredibly valuable per square inch. It’s why the seats are so tiny to begin with- profit margins are getting thinner and thinner for airline corporations, and it’s an easy place to try and ride the razor edge. Not only is it very much a nontrivial cost for that airliner to absorb to give an extra seat for the price of a single seat to someone large enough to need it, the passengers adjacent to one overflowing into other seats paid for their space too. I know before the introduction of policies like this, I was sometimes forced to share up to a third of my seat with someone else because they were too physically large for their own. Aside from being a horrid experience for someone with as much sense of personal space as I have, it was also, effectively, being cheated out of something I had paid for.

Airlines are not public transportation, and no one has a right to cheap air travel. It really sucks for those affected by the policy, but I can’t see a good solution here.

As for Southwest, they have made the fatal mistake of pissing off a man with a massive audience. I wish them and the hapless flight attendant, who regardless of her rightness or wrongness was simply doing her job, luck.

I’m all down with showing the love to companies who don’t treat gun owners like pariahs (and how sad is it that simple civility is the gold standard?), but this “chat up the barista about your heater” notion is the stupidest thing I’ve heard outside an Obama press conference. Breda covers it nicely. Ignoring the fact that by going to Starbucks you’re buying what is either the worst coffee in the world, just made standardized, or the most embarrassing caffeine delivery system ever, I wonder how often the conversation is going to go more like this than whatever “Baristas make policy” version went through the heads of whoever came up with this….

Customer McHeatertoter: “Please know I’m here because firearm owners across the country want to show Starbucks our appreciation for your decision not to ostracize customers who own and carry guns.”

Minimum Wage Counterjockey: “Ohmigod! You have a gun! Are you robbing me!?”

CMcH: “What? No, I just wanted you to know that gun owners– ”

MWC: “Don’t hurt me! I can’t open the safe! Brad is the manager because he showed up on time for three weeks straight but he’s out back taking the trash out and I can give you a pastry if you don’t hurt me and ohmigodidontwanttodie!”

CMcH: “You don’t understand, I’m thanking Starbucks on behalf of gun owners who carry”

MWC: “*blubbering* And I only got this job because my parents said a music major didn’t mean they’d keep refilling my iTunes card every week and I don’t have the keys to the safe but Brad forgets them a lot too please don’t hurt me mister why isn’t anyone helping me oh god I don’t want to die please mister!”

CMcH: “But I’m here because I like your policies about–”

MWC: “I DON’T MAKE POLICY I MAKE SHITTY COFFEE PLEASE DON’T KILL ME I CAN’T OPEN THE REGISTER!”

CMcH: “…I’ll just go now.”

MWC: “Oh thank God! Thank you for not hurting me oh thank God I swear I won’t call the police oh thank you I don’t want to die!”
….
….
Brad: “Hello, Police?”

Mayhaps a letter to the regional offices might be more effective?

So it seems the White House response to lions and plummeting polls and ship-jumping Democrats, oh my, is going to be to revamp communications. In general I think their taking a look at how they communicate with the public would be a good idea, especially when it comes to replacing the smarmy little wormsucker currently communicating via making childish jokes ripped off from others in order to take potshots at political opponents that aren’t even holding any kind of office, but it turns out that’s not what they have in mind. What they have in mind is having Obama talk even more, because Christ knows he doesn’t do enough speeches.

The messaging adjustments are the result of an end-of-the-year analysis in which White House advisers said the president’s communications team had not taken the initiative often enough and had allowed drawn-out debates in Congress, and relentless criticism by Republicans, to drown out his message.

“It was clear that too often we didn’t have the ball — Congress had the ball in terms of driving the message,” communications director Dan Pfeiffer said. “In 2010, the president will constantly be doing high-profile things to be the person driving the narrative.”

Here’s a narrative: having debates is part of the function of Congress, and being the opposition to things they are opposed to is the function of minority parties. The Republicans are ALLOWED to vocally disagree with Democrats, and with the administration. They wouldn’t be doing their jobs properly if they weren’t. The same thing was true of Democrats from 2000-2008, however convenient it would have been for Bush and the Republicans if they’d just rolled over and gone along with things.

Here’s something they’re desperately trying to leave out of the narrative, which is that there’s a Democrat in the White House and a huge majority of Democrats in Congress. If nothing is getting done, it’s not because of Republicans, it’s because of Democrats. And if they’re spending all this time debating rather than delivering a nice tied up package of hopefully changed health care and job stimulus and budget reform, it’s because they’re having a really hard time coming up with something that a sufficient number of them can vote for without getting booted the hell out of their jobs this fall- which is the fault of Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and if he wanted “his” Congress to deliver “his” agenda, Barack Obama. If you want to lead, you have to lead, not just stand at the head of the parade.

Unfortunately, I’m not sure that they understand that.

First, they said, is a return to the disciplined messaging that was a hallmark of the 2008 campaign, in which unhelpful themes were filtered out in favor of topics that advanced the candidate’s goals. In the White House, they said, that will mean a tighter focus on Obama’s commitment to the economy and jobs for average Americans. “The threshold for things he will go out and talk about is higher,” one senior aide said.

EARTH TO OBAMA ADMINISTRATION: THE CAMPAIGN IS OVER. THE CAMPAIGN IS WHAT YOU DID TO GET THE JOB, NOT THE JOB ITSELF. WHAT WORKED FOR CAMPAIGNING WILL NOT WORK FOR GOVERNING.

In order to accomplish a policy agenda, you have to legislate, not message. It is IMPOSSIBLE to turn to Congress and go, “Deliver for me comprehensive health care reform that eases the burden on the American taxpayer and creates a stronger safety net for the people currently falling through the cracks, and do not let the special interests have a say.”, and have that actually occur. In order for Congress to legislate policy, they have to come up with a big passel of specific little laws written in boring language, and they have to get a whole bunch of people to agree to it, even a bunch of the people wearing the same initial on their team letter jackets. Negotiating is part of the legislative branch of our system, and like it or not, lobbyists are a huge part of the negotiation system. You can’t just say “let’s not do that anymore”, you have to actually wade in and provide a more convincing alternative, as well as convincing consequences for falling into old bad habits.

This is something that Lyndon Johnson, a Democratic president that actually DID accomplish a lot of sweeping social legislation, understood- he was a veteran of twisting arms and scratching backs on the floors of Congress and understood on a deep level how to get his priorities accomplished come hell or high water. So, for that matter, did George W. Bush- who accomplished a lot more with a much smaller majority during a similar period in office. I don’t approve of much of what either man did, but the fact remains they knew how to do it, and it wasn’t “give more speeches”.

What I think the administration doesn’t understand is that even with the abysmal state of the public education system, the American people understand that there’s a big difference between what the President says and what Congress actually does- and that it’s Congress’s job to actually do the doing when it comes to domestic policy and the President’s to attempt to lead the agenda. It’s not as though we don’t have a long-established cultural tradition of ingrained skepticism of politicians- or that we haven’t been through coming up on ten years of a deep-seated contempt for Congress, as reflected in the polls. It wasn’t just George W. Bush that caused that skepticism, and being not-Bush won’t change it.

All the news that comes in from reporting on the actual bills, and the results of them, suggests ugly legislative sausage-making on a grand scale, which feeds very strongly into that pre-existing suspicion. If the public- and for that matter Congressional Democrats- are disagreeing with the message, it’s not because of Republicans and it’s not because of the length of the debate. It’s because the message doesn’t match observable reality. Reiterating the message more and more often in ever more querulous tones won’t restore credibility, just continue to reinforce the impression of an administration not truly in control and not understanding that it’s not.

Campaigns are about convincing that you will do, and do well, enough to get a chance to do it. Governing is about doing. Talking about what you want to do counts for just as much as wishing on a star if there’s never any do, and being the head of state of the United States of America contains no tasks other than press conferences that don’t require a lot of effort. This is the difference, and the public understands it well.

….Not something you’ll usually hear me say. But, from an article titled “Romeo and Juliet has led us astray”, the author offers the following:

What if Shakespeare had it wrong about love in “Romeo and Juliet”? In fact, what if all of us have it wrong and our ideals of love and romance are hopelessly awry?……

…We never remember that part of the story, though, because if we think of “Romeo and Juliet” from that perspective, the whole play starts to skew in ways that contradict our usual romantic notions.

Perhaps the time has come for us to take a skeptical view of romance, particularly the over-the-top variety peddled so effectively on Valentine’s Day. We should throw off the shackles of our reigning romantic orthodoxy and realize that “Romeo and Juliet” and its many cultural offspring have led us astray. Shakespeare’s story may be transcendent entertainment, but it is disastrous dating advice.

And, overall, I agree with the points he makes, although I think he’s a little bit too caught up with smell studies of initial attraction and not sufficiently caught up with “lasting love takes lasting work” message inherent in some of the other studies he cites.

However, am I the only one on the planet that read the play and thought Shakespeare, a creature of Elizabethan times, was writing about two impetuous teenagers driven by ideals of courtly love and hormones that ruin their own lives and everyone else’s, and not about how love should be? If the play “skews” upon re-examining current Western notions of romantic love, maybe that’s not because the story is being turned on its head- but because we are now able to see the author’s original intent, from a culture that had a very different notion of relationships than Hallmark.

Go to Jared, Kay, or DeBeers if you want to. If you want to. And more importantly, if she wants you to- commercials lie and some women would rather get a game or a gun or a Dustbuster than a lump of highly organized and highly overpriced carbon. If she’s into that sort of thing, well, some of us will pay a lot for shiny. Go to the nearest car catalogue and you’ll get the male version.

Get flowers, or chocolate, or don’t. Does that turn her or you on? Not? Groovy.

Do something surprising and romantic, or do something completely expected that you both know you enjoy.

Key point: that you will both enjoy. If you’re coupled up, be that any arrangement or number of genders, then go connect and be good to each other for the day. If not, find a friend likewise unattached and be good to them for the day.

Just because Hallmark is going to make money off it doesn’t make it evil. But don’t buy those Russel Stovers’ boxes of candies. Those things are made with Fail Filling.

Good? Good.

You don’t use science to show that you’re right, you use science to become right.

Awhile back, I asked my mother for some of the recipes she made when I was younger; she CAN cook, but didn’t much care to for just two people after my father left, and I wanted to make sure that some of the things she used to make would be preserved. Having done so, I promptly filed the recipes and largely left them alone, not because I didn’t want to eat any of them, but due to a combination of my not being such a great cook myself and the most doable of them relying on an ingredient I can’t get. (Fresh shell-on shrimp.)

Now that I’m making a project out of improving my own skills, it makes sense to revisit these recipes. I picked one that Mom always made for holiday dinners like Thanksgiving and Christmas; it was a surprise to me to discover that not only do most American families not eat dirty rice on holidays, it’s actually highly specific to the central Louisiana region Mom grew up in. I didn’t think much of it as a kid, but then my palate was pretty limited at the time to “things that taste much like things I eat regularly”, as it tends to be with kids. So I decided to dust off the recipe and have a crack at it.

Transcribed from Mom’s notes, the recipe:

Tish’s Dirty Rice Dressing

1 container chicken livers (8-10 livers)
1/2 lb hot, ground sausage
1 large onion, minced
1/2 large bell pepper, minced
1 tsp celery seeds
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/4 tsp red pepper (optional)
1-2 tsps salt
1/2 tsp dried thyme
2 cups uncooked brown rice
1/4 cup chopped parsley

Boil livers until done. Remove livers and set aside to cool. Add to the remaining liquid enough water to make 2.5 cups of stock. Add the rice, bring to a boil, and then simmer covered for half an hour. Meanwhile, pan-fry the sausage until brown, breaking it into small pieces. Stir fry the onion, garlic, bell pepper, and celery seeds for 7 minutes. Chop the livers finely and add them and all remaining ingredients to the rice and cook on low for 6-7 minutes. Add salt and pepper to taste. It should be mildly spicy and very salty. Cover and refrigerate 12-24 hours to let the seasonings blend and mellow. Heat at 350 degrees in an oven for half an hour before serving.

Looking over the ingredients, I decided to throw out the green bell pepper. I’ve managed to largely cure myself of my screaming aversion to them, and they no longer ruin a dish for me, but I’m still not fond of them in and of themselves, so out they go if I’m making this for me. I also decided that, since I’m no longer a spice-aversive little wuss, I’d swap out the small amount of red pepper (heat only) for some good New Mexican chile powder (heat and flavor). So this is now more of a New-Mex-Cajun dish. I also have no idea how many livers actually went into the dish, since all I did was buy a container of them and didn’t bother to count. On with the cooking!

1. “Cook until done”? Seriously? Time to hit Google. Search “how long to cook chicken livers”. Get lots of results regarding giving them a quick fry in bacon grease. Contemplate how good that sounds and consider drastically changing the plan. But, no; reading the recipe, we need the liquid we’re going to be boiling the chicken livers in as a rough and ready stock to cook the rice in. Google “chicken livers dirty rice” and go with a general estimate of half an hour. Write the revision into your handwritten version.

2. Marshal your cast of characters. Livers, sausage, onion, garlic, brown rice… now put Benny Hill’s “Yakety Sax” on your MP3 player while you play yet another round of Seasoning Scavenger Hunt. Naturally, your spouse will have chosen the most obscure cabinet with the most things out of your visual range to stick the celery seed, and that is of course where the chile powder always lives.

3. Ponder the direction “add to the remaining liquid enough water to make 2.5 cups of stock”. Reason that some of the liquid must boil off over the course of half an hour, and there is no practical way to measure the remaining liquid without needlessly dirtying a measuring cup. Draw up 2.5 cups of water and eyeball the water level in your chosen pot.

4. Remove your livers from the fridge. (Note: this action will cause Kitchen Bitch to dematerialize from wherever she is in the house and rematerialize in the center of the kitchen.) Carefully remove the lid and contemplate the contents. Since the directions don’t include “add the liquid” or a more frank “add a bunch of blood and dubious fluids”, use a fork to carefully transfer each of the livers from container to pot, saving the odd bits and pieces for Kitchen Bitch, who hasn’t been getting much in the way of scraps lately. Studiously eyeball the new water level. Throw the container in the outside trash where the dogs can’t get at it.

5. Turn the heat to high until you get a good boil going, then back the heat back down to medium high. Since not losing much if any water would make things easier, cover the pan and set your kitchen timer. Time to disassemble the vegetables.

6. Cut the top and bottom from your onion, then pause and stare at it for a bit. Go confirm with your spouse that there is nothing wrong with an onion whose juices run milky white instead of clear. Go back and try to put it out of your mind that it looks very much like the onion is secreting a certain fluid associated with human reproduction. Be sure to toss an eye toward the stove on your path.

7. HOLY CRAP THAT’S A LOT OF FOAMY LIVER JUICE. Back the heat down to medium from medium high and remove the cover, just in case that contributed rather than the higher heat alone.

8. Continue carefully taking apart the onion. Since the initial cuts gave you a hint that this is another weaponized onion as well as a vaguely obscene one, stand well back and go slowly with a good sharp knife. Putting this thing in the food processor would probably attract the attentions of Homeland Security. Reduce your usually frenetic onion-chopping pace to a stately one suitable for a waltz beat. Take a few breaks when your mucuous membranes get close to being overwhelmed. Transfer the onions to a bowl and wash the knife and board mostly clean of the dangerous juices.

9. Select as many garlic cloves as you damn well please and whack them with the flat side of your blade to get them out of their paper. Mince. There’s not really a lot to this process these days. By this point, given the pace imposed by the onion, your livers should be done cooking.

10. …Yuck. The foamup created a really unappealing green scum. Resolve to see if you can’t clean the livers up a bit when you chop them and transfer to a bowl, using a spider to skim off the worst of the scum, then move the livers.

11. Eyeball the pot and pour in enough water to reach what looks like the first watermark created during the first stage of cooking. Measure out two cups of rice, pour into the “stock”, and resume the high-boil-medium pattern.

12. Haul out a skillet, then grab the one-pound package of hot sausage out of the fridge. Snip off the end and squeeze at roughly the halfway point; once enough has squeezed forward of your pinching point, twist the package up to force the first half out and keep the rest firmly in. Best done over the skillet.

13. Kick the heat up to medium-high and choose an implement to break the sausage into small pieces as it cooks. Discover that using your barbecue fork, if that is your implement of choice, is only a good idea after the sausage has cooked enough not to pack firmly between the tines. Cook until everything is pretty much browned and more or less in small pieces.

14. Discover that two is an insufficient number of hands to gracefully transfer greasy bits of sausage from a greasy pan into a smallish bowl. Snap off the burner while you ponder what to do. Improvise with a balance point created by the middle spine of the kitchen sink and a towel under the handle. At least the dogs will be grateful for the strays.

15. Replace the pan on the burner and restore the heat. Dump in the onions and garlic and spread them evenly, then apply the celery seed and sautee in the fat left from the sausage. As you work on keeping everything evenly distributed, wonder in a vague sort of way why it seems like a lot longer than four minutes you observed left remaining on the timer when you put the vegetables to heat. At some point it will dawn on you that you never started a new timer for the rice, and the “four minutes and ten seconds” you saw left on the microwave display was actually the time. Fortunately, onions and garlic are one thing we do know how to “cook until done”, likewise rice. Cook the onions until soft and translucent, then remove from heat.

16. Return your attention to the livers. Since early experimentation reveals it’s going to take roughly ten years to wash each liver carefully enough to remove scum without it falling apart, reason that it’s called “dirty rice dressing” anyway and hope it isn’t noticeable. Chop the hell out of them, then scrape carefully from the cutting board into the pot of rice, which has absorbed all the stock and looks pretty well done. Stir in livers. Retrieve sausage and stir that in. Stir in vegetables.

17. Add the chile powder. This is pretty mild stuff and 1/4 tsp is a pretty wimpy amount. Add about a tablespoon and a half of pepper-and-salt mix. Add the thyme. Recall that you never did get around to buying fresh parsley because it always amounts to getting a small tree of which you will only use a few sprigs, and add some amount of dried chopped parsley between “none” and “1/4 cup”. Stir everything in again and cook another 6-7 minutes.

18. Cover the pot and pop into the refrigerator. Since you have now spent two hours cooking something you cannot eat until tomorrow, go out for sushi.

19. Discover that, due to your spouse making roast duck to go with your dressing, it is not possible to reheat in an oven at 350 because the one and only oven is occupied and is chugging along at 475. Swear. Improvise by spreading out the dressing in a layer in a baking dish and giving it a quick warmthrough while the duck is browning. Serve and consume.

This turned out “meh”, due to my mistakes rather than due to the recipe; between the lack of kitchen timer on the rice cooking, my being rushed to make a dinner reservation, and my not bothering to taste for doneness, the rice was undercooked and unpleasantly crunchy. No doubt the browning it got didn’t help either. We think we’ll try to salvage the rest (and there’s a lot of rest) by pouring in about a cup of chicken stock as it reheats the standard way next time. There’s nothing wrong with the flavor profile, however, and I can easily see myself making it again. I think next time I’d also add some green onion, and possibly some peas to replace the “green” role left unfilled by the absence of the green peppers.

So, thanks to the evening being tied up with a social obligation, the dirty rice dressing I made for Cooking Noob shall have to remain unconsumed, and the post incomplete, until tomorrow.

In the meantime, have the latest thing to tickle our funny bones: PhD Comics