Superjesus Black Reagan and the Great Game

The Wise Mister Smith brings us some proggie barnacles scraped from the bottom of the leviathan. Haven't we been saying for years now that the Donk isn't anti-war, but anti-one-particular-war-when-conducted-by-one-particular-dude? Such slow-moving creatures, but they do give a man whiplash, don't they?

Papa IOZ, gaudy old capitalist that he is, said of managing staffs and boards of directors: the more they think you're their man, the more they're yours.

Foodie Friday - Monotheism and Its Disconents Edition

Since Pesach and Easter coincide I felt it best to prepare some dirty Muzlin food as a sort of boo-yah to the mighty Ja. So:

Lamb shank tagine with dried fruit and spice

The lamb shank, which is cut from the shoulder of the arm, is a dense, difficult cut covered in a thin layer of silvery fell (connective tissue)--the perfect cut for very, very slow cooking. As is almost always the case with a slow roast or braise, a bone-in cut is best: the bone adds more and richer flavors to the dish. I cook mine in a large ceramic tagine; if you don't have one, a good Dutch oven (preferably enameled) works almost as well. Just remember to leave the lid of the Dutch oven slightly cracked to mimic the vent at the top of a tagine. The following recipe serves eight or so.

4 bone-in lamb shanks
1 medium yellow onion, grated
2 medium shallots, grated
8 cloves garlic, smashed and minced
3 whole cinnamon sticks
2 tablespoons cumin seeds, lightly toasted and ground
1 teaspoon allspice berries, ground
2 teaspoons ground turmeric
1 pinch saffron strands
dry white wine
1 cup golden raisins
1 cup chopped pitted dates
1 cup chopped dried apricots
1 cup sliced blanched almonds
1/4 cup honey
extra virgin olive oil
cracked black pepper
fine sea salt

The night prior to cooking, remove any large bits of fat from the exterior of the lamb and cut away the thicker bits of fell. No need to be too thorough about this, though. Lightly salt and pepper the meat, rub generously with olive oil, and marinate overnight.

You will need eight hours to cook this dish. The day of, preheat the oven to 215. Take out the lamb and let it come to room temperature. Sprinkle the ground spices (turmeric, allspice, cumin) all over the meat. Heat a few cups of wine until just below boiling, add saffron, remove from heat and let steep for 15-20 minutes. Put the onion, shallot, garlic, and whole cinnamon in the base of the tagine. Pour in the wine and saffron. Place the lamb on top, bone ends facing up. Place in the oven and cook for seven hours. Go do something useful.

When you return, remove the tagine from the oven. Raise the oven temperature to 300 while you perform the following steps. Take the lamb out of the vessel and remove the meat from the bone. It should be very tender, almost falling off on its own. Remove any marrow you can get from the bone as well (there won't be much, but even a bit adds flavor). Remove the cinnamon sticks from the pot and discard. Save the bones for stock or some such. Return the meat to the vessel, stir in the fruit, almonds, honey, a little extra wine (it should not fully submerge the ingredients, but only maintain moisture to stew), and a generous pinch or two of additional salt. Cover again and return to the oven for 40 minutes. After 40 minutes, uncover, turn your broiler on high, and blast brown for 5-10 minutes.

Remove and let stand for 10 minutes, then serve over a simple couscous or rice.

The Emperor's New Mutual Fund

You have to admire the sheer moronic audacity of it. Treasury takes public money and buy fundamentally worthless assets, driving up their "value." Then you encourage the public to make "private" investments in these same assets at their new, artificially inflated, but still low prices. If you're lucky, pooled public investment temporarily further inflates the prices of the assets. More small private investors buy into them, seeing rising valuations and looking to get in on the action. Meanwhile, large institutions divest themselves of these same assets because they are worthless, toxic, Satanic, etc. Then "Main Street" is left with a big pile of fundamentally worthless assets that in fact still represent unrecoverable debt notes and big banks and investment companies have purged themselves and everyone lives happily ever after inshallah.

Not that anyone involved gives a damn, and not that younz don't already know n'at, but it yet bears repeating: the "troublesome assets" are worthless. Investing in them guarantees loss.

Insurance

To mandate that everyone purchase health insurance, as many have suggested, would require that the government specify what constitutes adequate coverage — in other words, what health conditions an insurance policy would need to cover. Every provider group with a lobbyist, from massage therapists to fertility specialists, would want in. The result would be expensive insurance policies and costly government subsidies to help people buy them. Young and healthy people, especially, would be forced to overpay. So we would end up with more cost-shifting, and no savings.

-Ramesh Ponnuru

Eventually the opponents of universal coverage are going to lose because so many of their spokesthings are retarded. Hey, did you know that The Government already specifies what constitutes adequate coverage? That the Department of Health and Human Services promulgates regulations for the health insurance industry? That every provider group with a lobbyist from massage therapists to fertility specialists wanted in, which is why so many insurance plans now cover massage or fertility or cosmetic surgery ad inf. Hurray for the free market!

But the fattest duck of the debate is that

young and healthy people . . . would be forced to overpay

Yes, we might create a horrific communistic system of distributed risk wherein those taking payments and utilizing services are subsidized by those not.

I See A Bad Moon Risin'

Gaymarriage will take away my peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Gaymarriage will make hockey players skate on gravel. Gaymarriage will create weakly godlike artificial intelligences that will destroy you, soft, weak human. Gaymarriage will disassemble all of the planets and non-stellar matter in the solar system and create a matrioshka brain of infinite computational power that will achieve demiurgic godhead. Gaymarriage will alter the Planck Constant reordering the physical structure of spacetime itself and causing baryonic matter to cease to exist.

Chag sameach Pesach

For the holiday: some excerpts from Schoenberg's Moses und Aron.

Mao III

Beginning in Hawaii more than a decade ago, queer activists have sought access to civil marriage through legal actions challenging what they believed to be discriminatory practices and statutes. Where they have been successful, cultural opponents have decried "judicial activism" and declared that any expansion of equal protection jurisprudence is in effect "legislating from the bench," i.e. creating new rights while bypassing the proper legislative or constitutional channels. The expansion of social and economic rights and privileges, goes the argument, is solely within the purview of the people's representatives in their state houses, senates, etc.

So. The Vermont legislature legalizes gay marriage and then overrides a gubernatorial veto (an attempt to "legislate from the executive office"?) to make marriage in the state gender neutral. Semifamous eschatologist and Norelco spokesmodel Rod Dreher avers that although it is better to burn than to gaymarry, this was the "right way" to get gaymarried. He's smart enough to recognize that with the practice now legal in several states and soon-to-be-legal in several others, the US Supreme Court is sooner rather than later going to be forced to take up the issue, and assuming Baby Jesus doesn't send His High Priggishness Paul on an errand from heaven to go all Baghdad on their asses, the queers will triumph, as the Supremes senza Il Nino will likely conclude that Bill Clinton's Defense of Marriage Act and its baby-DOMA offspring are unconstitutional violations of full faith and credit, and that dykes married in Boston are likewise married in Boise.

Dreher's hope, at once hilarious and uncomfortable and terrifying, like the Fischli-Weiss Rube Goldberg device, is that the Supreme Court will act swiftly enough that the remaindered cultural ressentiment luxuriating in semiretirement among the foreclosures and abandoned vehicles of pre-Apocalyptic America will rise up, rise up!, to pass a Constitutional Amendment "erecting a high barrier or protection around religious institutions." I have been contemplating this notion for fifty or sixty long seconds now, and if I were to try my hand at the text of such and amendment, I'd probably go with something like: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." It lacks my habitual flourish, but it is direct.

I understand the fearful burden Dreher imagines will soon be imposed, that Rick Warren may yet have to break off from his Proustian ambition to document the full-spectrum sensate experience of memory-temptation against the grim, gray tides of ever-effacing memory in order to officiate some gaymarriage, but as Rick Warren is not a county clerk I imgine he will find it within himself to escape from that pit and pendulum. About Dreher, meanwhile, I'm less sure. A man in a constant state of hysterical suggestive hypnosis, as if plugged into a slow-drip IV of Ketamine and cough syrup, I suspect his own black future holds endless Moonie stadiums of matching-tux fag couples staring in nuptial awe as Dreher self-flagellates himself bloody for the sin of officiating their multitudinous wedding.

Bringing Up Baby

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

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

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

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

-The Washington Post

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

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

Structuralism

Barack Obama speaking in Turkey:

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

Bill Clinton, speaking in America:

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

Pinkertons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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