Bug Me Not

Last night's supper, or plate #3 at Ish Kabbible's Smoke Shack and Grill, wood roasted pork tenderloin and potatoes, tomato and motz with fresh basil and lemon, side of butter poached pearl onions with rocket.

Had I but known, however, that I should be economizing for the return to the the 19th century, I would have eaten:

Menu
Slug soup.
Boiled Cod with Snail Sauce.

Wasp Grubs fried in the Comb.
Moths sautéed in Butter.
Braized Beef with Caterpillars.
New Carrots with Wireworm Sauce.

Gooseberry Cream with Sawflies.
Devilled Chafer Grubs.
Stag Beetle Larvae on Toast.

Speaking of Baffling

In this week's The New Yorker there is a long account of the assassination of Osama Bin Laden. It was, if a bit hagiographic, filled with all manner of details and etc. It turns out that there are all manner of questions about the author, Nicolas Schmidle, the story's content and sourcing. The New Yorker really needs to clear this up.

It's a Puzzle

 A few days ago, John Quiggin argued for increasing taxes on the rich.  Matthew Yglesias responded by insisting that

a lot of the political dialogue I see online seems to consist of a slightly strange form of class resentment in which intellectuals, nonprofit workers, or public servants express bitterness about the high incomes of businesspeople whose lives they don’t actually envy.

Today, among other things, Henry Farrell points out that this is nonsense. Yglesias, or someone claiming to be him, shows up in the comments and argues:

Apologies if you feel I impugned the motives of anyone in regard to inequality. Let me simply restate my hypothesis that few tenured professors at reputable Anglophone universities actually envy the lives of CEOs earning above the “top one percent” threshold. Perhaps that hypothesis is false. But if my hypothesis is true, I think it complicates the issue of inequality somewhat beyond the terms in which Quiggin presented it.

In the space of a few short sentences he changes an observation, class resentment drives a lot of online political etc, to a theory which, if true, complicates discussions  of inequality.  Leaving aside that there needs to be some kind of an argument about how non-envy driven resentment based tax policies complicates inequality, how is possible that an initial factual claim is really a theory?

Baffling. What is clear, however, is that it is becoming harder and harder for the spokesmodels for "left neoliberalism" to keep their stories straight.

Update:
From the comments over to CT from Yglesias, or someone pretending to be him:

I also think that in a relatively affluent society it makes sense to take a somewhat broader view of quality of life—and thus of inequality in quality of life—than would be suggested by a narrow focus on cash income. This is why the fact that many people who earn substantially less than CEOs do not in fact envy the lives of CEOs is relevant.

This is just word salad.  The issue under consideration is quality of life, i.e., the poor today are better off, in the sense of having cell phones and ac, than the rich of the 1920s. This kind of an argument, which has been around, if not for ever, at least since William Graham Sumner, ignores the fact, and fact it is, that inequalities in wealth translates into political inequality.  This fact, in turn, means that the benefits the next generation of have-nots and almost-haves will be worse of than this generations. Furthermore, whatever is meant by "quality of life" it's something, in any kind of a capitalist society, requires  "cash income." So fine, provide everyone with a salary and subsidized house equal to that of his imaginary non-envious, CEO-resenting and consequently tax-increasing demanding professors without taking some of the "cash income" from the unenvied CEOs.

What, exactly, does he mean by "envy the lives"? Is he referring to the light work load? the long vacations? the endless homes? or the mind-numbing boredom of being able to whatever you'd like at any given day or week? Does he mean that some people live lives they find perfectly satisfying? Of course they do. What this has to do with increasing the taxes on the wealthy as a means of paying for civilization and, whatismore, doing something to decrease the political power that comes with excessive wealth escapes me entirely.

When is a Tax Cut Too Much For a Republican?

When it helps the poor. Iowa's Republican gov, vetoees a a tax decrease for the working class, while insisting on one for corporations that would decrease revenue 4 times as much, at least in part because of the revenue lost.

Those of you out there who were under the impression that the GOP at the national, region, or state level actually gave a hoot about taxes, as opposed to catering to the rich and capital more generally, might want to reconsider that particular position.

WWI: Origins and Causes

Around 1912 General Friedrich von Bernhardi penned a little ditty called The Next War in it he argued, among other things, that he

must first of all examine the aspirations for peace, which seem to dominate our age and threaten to poison the soul of the German people, according to their true moral significance. [He] must try t prove that war is not merely a necessary element in the life of nations, but an indispensable factor of culture, in which a true civilized nation find the highest expression of strength and vitality.

 It's easy, if you ignore what actually happened, to argue that things in the past happened because of impersonal forces and the like. When, in fact, it happened because a sufficiently powerful group of people thought that what they were about to do, start a war say, was in the world's best interests.

A Crucial Difference

Why did Obama "cave" when Clinton didn't? From an article getting quite a bit of attention, although not -- apparently -- this paragraph:

THE MOST CRUCIAL difference between Clinton’s debt limit battle and the current crisis is that, in 1996, the Republicans were bluffing. No Republican seriously considered defaulting on the debt to be a viable option. “It was essentially unthinkable,”Alice Rivlin, director of the Office of Management and Budget under Clinton, told me. “There was nobody in the Congress who really contemplated forcing a default.” Larry Haas, communications director for the OMB from 1994 to 1997, agreed. “Everybody in the White House and on Capitol Hill knew that the conflict had to end at some point,” Hass told me. 

Then again, maybe the Tea Partiers were just bluffing.

Here In Wisconsin

On page A5 of today's Wisconsin State Journal there is brief mention of some possible shenanigans involving various unnamed etc in the upcoming recall elections. It's not clear who or what or if anything exactly happened. Here is what really went on:

Updated: August 1, 2011, 4:40PM
Is the Koch-backed conservative group Americans For Prosperity up to no good in the Wisconsin state Senate recalls?
As Politico reports, mailers have now turned up from Americans For Prosperity Wisconsin, addressed to voters in two of the Republican-held recall districts, where the elections will be held on August 9. The mailers ask recipients to fill out an absentee ballot application, and send it in -- by August 11, after Election Day for the majority of these races.

Wisconsin's independent voice, indeed. And, for what it's worth, I searched for the story on the WSJ's site and couldn't find it, which isn't to say it can't be found just that after searching for verbatim sentences, article title, and browsing the day's news I failed to find it. Found something, after 6 pages of browsing:

Voters across Wisconsin are receiving misleading information about the dates of upcoming recall elections.
Absentee voter applications sent by the conservative group Americans for Prosperity tell voters to return the mailing after the Aug. 9 recall elections targeting Republican Sens. Sheila Harsdorf of River Falls and Rob Cowles of Allouez.
And the Democratic National Committee has been placing calls giving the wrong date for the recall election against Republican Sen. Dan Kapanke of La Crosse.
Wisconsin Government Accountability Board spokesman Reid Magney says DNC officials were contacted about the calls with the wrong date and they told election officials the calls would stop.
The GAB is also urging voters who want to cast absentee ballots to not rely on mailings but instead to contact their local election official.

And now a transcription for the actual morning  paper:

State election watchdogs have seen absentee ballots applications supposedly being distributed to voters in upcoming recalls, containing errors such as incorrect addresses and dates, Government Accountability Board officials said Monday.
  Kevin Kennedy, Wisconsin's chief elections officer, said it is legal for groups and political parties to produce and distribute absentee ballot applications, but voters should not rely on them.
 "If you need or want to vote absentee, contact your municipal cleark directly and request a ballot," Kennedy said.
 Kennedy said if the address on the absentee ballot application mailer or envelope is incorrect , it could go to the wrong place and ultimately could go uncounted.
 There have been cases where political groups try to influence outcomes by confusing voters with absentee ballots.  Kennedy said there has been confusion between the recall elections in Senate districts, 2, 8, 10, 14, 18, and 32 on Aug. 9 and those in districts 12 and 22 on Aug. 16.
  The board has received reports that some automated telephone calls and telephone polls in recent days contained incorrect election dates.

Some difference eh? Also, too misaddressed mail goes to the right address, somehow or another?

Image of article:

UPDATE: In today's WSJ on the front page there was a long AP article that concluded that both sides do it.

Matt Damon Says Glibbertarians Don't Understand Reality

On Occupation as Calling:



He dropped the ball on the 10% figure. Says who? Measured how? Percentages in other  professions, etc.

Jonah Goldberg Still Wrong

He writes an impassioned screed about how no one is calling out the characterization of the Tea Party and Republicans more generally as terrorists and hostage takers is evidence of liberal bias. TPM, which is a biased liberal media outlet, publishes a long piece making the very point that lots of people, who complained re Giffords, are using wholly "uncivil" discourse.

A Quick Point

One reason that has become so difficult to raise taxes is that neoliberals posing as Progressives make this kind of arugment:

That’s not to say we need to “soak the professors” rather than “soak the rich.” Taxing the consumption of high-rollers and redistributing it to the less fortunate is a great idea. But a lot of the political dialogue I see online seems to consist of a slightly strange form of class resentment in which intellectuals, nonprofit workers, or public servants express bitterness about the high incomes of businesspeople whose lives they don’t actually envy.

Here the desire to tax the wealth is represented as class warfare. The obvious response:

Taxation isn’t a matter of rewards and punishments. It’s a matter of paying for the public obligations a govt takes on by collecting money from the members of society. The reasonable way to go about this is in the manner that least disturbs the ability of those individuals to go about their lives, at the very least to go about their lives in a way that leaves them capable fo contributing next year at tax time. We don’t tax the rich members of society at higher rates than the poor because we imagine that they are sinners in need of punishment. We tax the poor at lower rates because we don’t want the govt to take from them what they need to survive and thrive. We could tax people who earn $1,000,000 a year at 90%, and they and their families would do fine, would have food and shelter and clothing and health insurance, and even amusement, in abundance, and they would still be doing just as well next year and able to pay just as much in taxes. Take 90% from someone who earns $25,000, take almost any % from them, and you’re going to starve them. They won’t be able to pay taxes next year if they go quietly with this arrangement, because they will be dead of starvation or exposure, and there will be war if they don’t go quietly

Small wonder, then, that tax increases are off the table when we have to rely on some guy on the internet to make the argument alleged progressives refuse to make.

Substance Not Process

A fair reading of the new debt ceiling/spending cut "deal," as of right now unpassed, Is that it's not good for what ails us  and, more importantly, appears to be a pretty important abdication of the state's role in the post-WWII era. 

Take the threatened defense cuts, for example, the left has been calling for these ever since Reagan turned us into military-industrial complex with a state attached; however, the idea has always been to redirect the spending into productive or socially useful, infrastructure, research, etc, or necessary, e.g., education, welfare, medicine, acts and transactions. Across the board cuts in defense spending will lead to a  loss of jobs in both the explicit defense industry, factories, support services and other contractors[1], as well as those dependent on these  now unemployed people. How this can be anything other than bad is beyond me. What's worse is that lots of these workers make a decent wage, a janitor, for example, working in the Pentagon or for a military contractor is making more than a janitor at Macy, although both are underpaid.  So this is yet another blow against decent paying jobs and etc.

I have no idea what the people engaged in crafting this deal were thinking[2];  but I am leaning toward hypnotized by toads fed up with wetlands destruction striking a blow for their amphibian brothers.


[1] I know,  I know, but lots of people have jobs not only creating fighter planes and bombs and what not but also logistics and food.

[2] And I am sick of the ill-informed attempts to explain the negotiating process all of which proceed from zero actual information and rely on various forms of tea-leaf reading criticism, which, particularly on the left, which rely on some mixutre of: Obama got rolled, Obama's a coward, Obama's a neocon

Heightening The Contradictions

My Grandma Marmee, who stood 4 feet 1 inch or so, despised vulgarity, for example ketchup bottles on the dinner table. And yet this was one of her prized possession:

Go, as they say, figure.

Fourth Foundation

For the sake of simplicity let's say that there have been four moments when America fundamentally altered it's sense of self: Articles of Confederation, Constitution, Lincoln, and Ike's change of our motto. I know that this is over simplistic at so forth but bear with me. Like lots of sensible people, I blame Reagan for the mess in which we find our selves and like lots of other folks I like Ike's military industrial complex speech, yet today is the anniversary of his signing into law the change for E Pluribus Unum to One Nation Under God. That this was a change dictated, at least in part, by the on-going struggle with the USSR is, I think, true. At the same time the phrase "Out of Many One" is one of those lovely phrases that capture an ideal of what it meant to be an America and, like all Latin tags, it is multivocal. For many of the WWII movies the phrase evoked the multiethnic character of the Army that defeated the fascist threat. For some dedicated to the idea of meritocracy the tag is redolent of the struggle for one man or woman to achieve greatness. At its heart, I think, it meant that this was a nation, like some someone or another named Legion, that contained multitudes all dedicated to a common proposition.

The phrase "One Nation Under God," on the other hand, transforms our national identity into a narrow and exclusive vision. Tom Paine, a notorious atheist, is written out of the national identity. Our collective struggle to animate the notion that the founding generation held

these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed 

 became a sectarian and exclusive commitment to being a godly people.

A Modest Proposal

More or less by accident, I rode down to Monroe and back today. The first thing I want to say is that the new bike flat out rolls. The gearing is perfect; it's stable as all get out and as comfortable as a lazy-boy. I have three specific nits to pick. First, although the Brooks tape is lovely to look at, I would rather have the next step up in Avid disc brakes in which both pads have micro adjusters instead. Given that the better Avids retail for 20 less than the tape, the trade off seems like a no brainer. I am also not sold on the rear rack, which has this odd up-swooping rails at the front end that make it difficult to position the trunk rack properly. It should also have a kickstand plate especially as the spare spokes retainer, which is totally unnecessary, makes it difficult to get a "normal" kickstand top nut dealio in. None the less, a bike for the ages.

The Bike:

Now to the proposal: most of the path is crushed something or another gravel. Not only is this filthy but it's slow. Despite all this, there was a surprising large number of people from all walks of life and economic stations ambling up and down the trails.  Over to Rortybomb evidence is presented that in the current jobless recovery joblessness and age are barriers to getting jobs, which is to say ads encourage employed youngsters to and suggested that the older and unemployed need not apply. Let's have a CCC and WPA for men and women aged 45+ to build and pave bike multiuser paths and pay them Davis-Bacon wages. The first could be a triangle that connects Madison, Milwaukee, and Chicago.  The Madison to Milwaukee already exists but needs paving, so let's start there. Then Chicago to St. Louis with the Katy Trail from St. Louis to KC to follow.  Seattle to Portland, Philly to DC, and so forth. Every 50 miles or so, build a hostel/camping area with an attached beer garden. Let either the aged and unemployed run the hostel/camping/beer garden with the state as a sleeping partner.

If nothing else, there'd be a bicycle multiuser based infrastructure for a non-petroleum based Mad Max dystopia.

Oh For Dumb

Megan McArdle doesn't know what an unintended consequence is.  If a group or individual launch policy z in hopes of outcome a and they get not-a, not-a is an unintended consequence. Sort of like, if you argue that lower taxes for the rich, fewer limits on what the rich can do with their money and less oversight of what they do with their money will lead to a world in which everyone has a pony and, instead, it leads to an economic train wreak, the train wreak is the unintended, but not unforeseen, consequence. So when the good government types argued that earmarks were a form of bribery that enabled speakers to coerce legislators to vote against their or their constituents best interests and you have a situation were  Boehner's inability to bribe legislators to vote against their (incorrect, imo) understanding of their best interests , it isn't an  unintended consequence it is the intended consequence. 

Something is Slightly Off, No?

There is a difference between words and pictures. Sometimes, it seems, the words transform a picture into its opposite:

In other cases the words just make the whole dealio weirder:

source

Two Reasons to Love Jens Voigt

He rides regardless:




He rarely wins:

Just So

This Robert Millar Tour recap is exactly right.

Laugh and Whole World Laughs With You

I cannot find where I got this from, I thought it was registan.net, but that doesn't seem to be the case. In any event, and Afghani Office:

Retirement Planing

As it seems that even should the political class avoid destroying the economy for at least 5 years or so, they are bound and determined to see to that those freeloaders and parasites, i.e., the elderly and the poor, no longer freeload or blood suck, neatly avoiding the fact that there are somewhere in the area of 10 to 20 million jobs missing, I remain in the market for a wealthy widow woman to defraud love and cherish, and together we will travel the world on a food food truck called Ish Kabbile's Smoke Shack and Grill. In addition to the brisket, chicken smoked.

and pork chops:

With more to come

Oh For Dumb

So

[t]he Interagency Working Group on Food Marketed to Children (Working Group),
comprised of representatives from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), seeks public comment on a preliminary proposal for voluntary principles to guide industry self-regulatory efforts to improve the nutritional profile of foods marketed to children.

In particular the

primary objective of the Working Group in developing recommendations for
nutrition principles for foods marketed to children has been the promotion of children’s
health through better diet, with particular – but not sole – emphasis on reducing the incidence
of childhood obesity. The proposed recommendations are therefore designed to encourage
children, through advertising and marketing, to choose foods that make a meaningful
contribution to a healthful diet (Principle A) and minimize consumption of foods with
significant amounts of nutrients that could have a negative impact on health or weight –
specifically, sodium, saturated fat, trans fat, and added sugars (Principle B).

Having looked at the

 food marketing data from Nielsen Media Research and data collected by the FTC on marketing expenditures and activities directed to youth, the Working Group has identified ten categories of food products for which the industry spent at least $50 million on marketing to children and adolescents in 2006. The categories most heavily marketed to children and adolescents, ages 2 -17 years are: breakfast cereals; snack foods; candy; dairy products; baked goods; carbonated beverages; fruit juice and non-carbonated beverages; prepared foods and meals; frozen and chilled deserts; and restaurant foods.16

In the interest of clarity the report, in note 17,

recommends the following definitions for these ten food categories,
based on standard industry Product Classification Codes: (1) Breakfast cereals – all cereals, whether intended to be served hot or cold (PCC F122); (2) Snack foods – snack chips (such as potato chips, tortilla chips, and corn chips), pretzels, snack nuts (salted and roasted), popcorn, snack bars (including breakfast and cereal bars), crackers, cookies, processed fruit snacks (such as fruit leather), gelatin, and pudding (PCC F115, F163, F212); (3) Candy – chocolate and other candy bars, other chocolate candy, hard candy, chewy candy (including licorice, gummi candy, and jelly beans), and sour candy (PCC F211, excluding gum and breath mints); (4) Dairy products – milk (including flavored milk drinks), yogurt, yogurt drinks, and cheese (PCC F131, excluding butter, eggs, and cream, F132, F139,
excluding cottage cheese and sour cream, F223); (5) Baked goods – snack cakes, pastries, doughnuts, toaster baked goods (such as frozen waffles, French toast sticks, and toaster pastries), bread, rolls, bagels, breadsticks, buns, croissants, taco shells, and tortillas (PCC F161, F162); (6) Carbonated beverages – all carbonated beverages, both diet and regular (PCC F221, F222); (7) Fruit juice and non-carbonated beverages – fruit juice, juice drinks, fruit-flavored drinks, vegetable juice, tea drinks, energy drinks, sports drinks, cocoa, bottled water, and all other non-carbonated beverages, including ready-to-pour beverages as well as those sold in concentrated or powdered form (PCC F171, excluding all varieties of coffee, F172, F173, F224); (8) Prepared foods and meals – frozen and chilled entrees, frozen pizzas, canned soups and pasta, lunch kits, and non-frozen packaged  7 entrees (such as macaroni and cheese) (PCC F121, F125, F126); (9) Frozen and chilled desserts – ice cream, sherbet, sorbet, popsicles and other frozen novelties, frozen yogurt, and frozen baked
goods (such as frozen pies and cakes) (PCC F133); (10) Restaurant food – menu items offered in a restaurant (including both quick-serve and other types of restaurants) (PCC G330).

This all seems clear enough. We want information to help guide self-regulation so that there are fewer rather than more overweight teens with fewer rather than more related health problems to the extent that telling the truth about foods' nutritional value might make a difference.

For one of the flying monkeys over to the NRO, this translates as

Let’s take a look at what foods the IWG sees as a barrier to children developing a “healthful diet.”
● All cereals
● Pretzels, nuts, popcorn, snack bars, and crackers
● Milk, yogurt, yogurt drinks, and cheese
● Bread, rolls, bagels, breadsticks, and buns
● Fruit and vegetable juices, tea drinks, and bottled water
● Canned soups and pastas
● Sherbet, sorbet, popsicles, and frozen yogurt

It's not just a misreading of the purpose of the study, which is to gather information about marketing standards and practices. It's one thing to hold a silly notion, Government action except in the blowing up of things is wrong, and its totally another thing to make stuff up.

Smoke Signals

The other day a pal and I were at the grocery and we ended up in a discussion with two other cyclists about hand signals. Neither of the other two knew what they were. I ran through them and mentioned that the use of the left hand has to do with how easy it is for other vehicles, particularly motorists, to see the signals.  As it happens for some time now I have used the point with the left hand for going left, point with the right hand for going right. About a block after the conversation, Ian pointed out that I had just said that motorists are unlikely to see my right hand and shouldn't I use the bent left arm instead? Um, er, ah, I argued. The fact is I hate the bent left arm signal, no real idea why but it's aesthetically unpleasing to me. However, having realized that I was wrong and condemned out of my own mouth, I have gone back to the bent left arm.

As the economy  continues to morph into some kind of hellish neo-liberal dystoptia, I have become increasingly convinced that the proper response is to marry a rich widow, defraud her of a portion, but not all not even the majority, of her wealth and use to buy a food truck. I would then change my name, I am leaning toward Ish Kabbile and a bbq.  In the service of this future easy street, I decided to make a smoked beef brisket. According to all and sundry smoking blogs and webpages it is the sine qua non of bbq. Indeed, according to all and sundry making bbqed beef brisket is slightly, but only slightly, less complicated that than the logistics of the Berlin Airlift. Not true. I went to the store bought a half pre-trimed brisket and seasoned it:

The next day I set up the grill for smoking:

I used two thirds of a chimney of lump charcoal in a little metal container, an aluminum pie tin filled with water and, in total, 1/2 bag of soaked apple wood chips added every half hour or so.  And cooked it for about 5 hrs turning it over about half way. It looked like this  when I flipped it:

And then, because everybody said to, I took it off the grill wrapped it twice in aluminum and stuffed it in oven at 220 until it was done, about 2 hrs more. After 1/2 hr of resting, it looked like this:

When I sliced it, it looked like this:

It was very, very, good and a lot less work then it sounds.

He Hates Us For Our Freedom

For reasons that escape entirely, a two bit grifter named Grover Norquist seems to have more power than Zombie Ronald Reagan in the Republican Party. May the Islamophobes are half right. Or maybe it's just that like a lot of bufflaheads, he thinks the nineteenth century's  radical economic, social, and political inequalities were "real" America and those who fought and died for FDR and a new America were commie symps. In either event, his war against sensible budgeting places him firmly in the category of people who won't let us have nice things.

The Tour

Had Evans not ridden like a champion in the prior two stages, and really his performance all Tour was really impressive, I'd be ticked that he won in the race of truth. As it is, it's been a great Tour. I wish A. Schleck would have taken it all, but I think he erred in going with Contador on the Telegraph mistaking AC for his real threat when it was, pretty obviously, Cadel. Still, what Evans did was really amazing.

In any event, smarter people than me think so:

Reviews:

Who doesn't like a nice refreshing beverage, particularly when the day has been hot and sticky?  No one, that's who. Indeed, you judge a human society's generosity and all around greatness by the kind, quality, and quantity of its beverages. I like a nice seltzer or bubbly mineral water prior to the beer and/wine part of the evening. So when  I saw this:





I had to buy some. It's great. Sweetly, tart and very refreshing.