Friday we had pot roast (pork); Saturday I made pizza dough for homemade pizzas. Last night was chicken and potatoes. Today, with all the weekend cookery, there are too many leftovers in the refrigerator.
So I took the leftover pizza dough and made it into a pie crust, shredded the pork and chicken, and stuffed the pie with that and some onions and potatoes, and vegetables from the pot roast. It came out well.
There are several good ways of spicing such a pie, both savory and (odd to the modern taste) sweet. The sweet ones -- made with things like cranberries or currants, cinnamon and ginger -- are sometimes called "Great Pies," and were served at holiday feasts. The savory ones are more likely to be eaten today. The Scots have a version called the bridie that is very good.
A number of traditional recipies can be found here. If you like it, and you might be down in Louisiana in September, you might like to try the Meat Pie Festival. I haven't been myself, but it sounds like fun.
A Great Pie
Free Speech as Patronage
Via Dad29, an exception is being made:
...restrictions on companies that received government bailouts during the financial crisis apply to businesses, but not unions: Under the DISCLOSE Act, General Motors can’t tell you who to vote for, but the United Auto Workers union can.The whole "campaign finance reform" bus was always an affront to the first amendment. The freedom of speech that the Founders most wanted to guard was political speech.
...
Government contractors with contracts of more than $7 million are not permitted to engage in express advocacy. Unions that receive their dues from the taxpayer-funded salaries of public sector employees face no such restriction.
Apparently, that freedom of speech will be just another form of patronage for the party in power.
Border Issues
Will Senator Kyl stand by this claim, I wonder?
It's a remarkable claim to make, and he has to know that the President will deny it. It wasn't long ago that no one wanted to get crosswise with the President on questions like this, because he was the most popular politician in the world. If some Republican said X and he denied it, the Republicans feared the public would believe they were lying because of their essential good feelings for the President. Does this show that the numbers are so bad that they don't worry about that anymore? Or is it these numbers that Kyl is more concerned about?
This story appears to be evidence for a developing middle position between "the President's doing his best, but..." and "the Manchurian President is intentionally destroying America out of malice." According to the middle position, the President isn't trying to destroy America intentionally; but he is intentionally using his office to harm or punish parts of America, sometimes aggressively and sometimes through neglect of his duty. See here re: "McCain-voting Gulf states."
I have largely found this middle narrative unconvincing -- on the general principle that you shouldn't attribute malice where incompetence is an adequate explanation -- but Senator Kyl's claim appears to be support for the "middle-malice" position.
UPDATE: As expected, the denial has arrived. So far, the Senator is standing by his claim.
Testimonies
Testimonies
In 1952 the little-known brief novel “Testimonies” appeared in print. The author was Patrick O’Brian, who later would achieve considerable fame from more than twenty rollicking novels following the careers of a British Royal Navy captain during the Napoleonic Wars and his particular friend, a ship’s surgeon, naturalist, and sometime spy. “Testimonies,” a first novel written when O’Brian was in his 20s, is a wonderful book, though much different in tone from the beloved Aubrey/Maturin series, which was begun a full 17 years later. Here is its description of Joseph Pugh, an awkward, alienated, slightly ill ex-Oxford don’s discovery that he has fallen in love with his Welsh neighbor’s young farm wife, Bronwen Vaughan:
I was very simple I suppose. I had no idea that I was there at all until I was in love so deep that it was a pain in my heart. I had thought it was the pleasure of looking at her, the pleasure of joining that good and kind family circle (good in spite of the bad undercurrent that I suspected) and talking about country things to Emyr and the old man. Then one day it was upon me. I knew then what was the matter, and why nothing had seemed profitable but the evenings I spent there; she came in, just as I had seen her the first time, and my heart leaped up and I knew that Emyr was talking but I could not link his words together. . . . There may be things more absurd than a middle-aged man in the grip of a high-flung romantic passion: a boy can behave more foolishly, but at least in him it is natural.
“Testimonies” takes the form of a kind of inquest, though its nature becomes harder and harder to pin down as the novel gathers speed toward its conclusion. Here is Bronwen explaining how she saw Mr. Pugh:
Q. . . . I understand that he had many different ways, the other way of talking and behaving, but he was still a man like every other man, was he not?
A. No. He was not a man like any other man. He was the dearest man in the world for me. The difference in him was right inside, nothing to do with him belonging to other people. Without his gentry or his money or anything, if you put him by another man it was gold against brass. But to begin with it was just the ordinary difference that made me so slow and stupid. Unless he is wicked (which you can see at once) you do not expect a man like him to admire you.
New and used copies are available in hardcover and paperback at Amazon and alibris.
I'm feeling literary this weekend, so I'm going to quote an A.E. Housman poem here and recommend a book in the next post.
The chestnut casts his flambeaux, and the flowers
Stream from the hawthorn on the wind away,
The doors clap to, the pane is blind with showers.
Pass me the can, lad; there's an end of May.
One season ruined of our little store.
May will be fine next year as like as not:
Oh ay, but then we shall be twenty-four.
We for a certainty are not the first
Have sat in taverns while the tempest hurled
Their hopeful plans to emptiness, and cursed
Whatever brute and blackguard made the world.
It is in truth iniquity on high
To cheat our sentenced souls of aught they crave,
And mar the merriment as you and I
Fare on our long fool's-errand to the grave.
Iniquity it is; but pass the can.
My lad, no pair of kings our mothers bore;
Our only portion is the estate of man:
We want the moon, but we shall get no more.
If here to-day the cloud of thunder lours
To-morrow it will hie on far behests;
The flesh will grieve on other bones than ours
Soon, and the soul will mourn in other breasts.
The troubles of our proud and angry dust
Are from eternity, and shall not fail.
Bear them we can, and if we can we must.
Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale.
. . .
This is the first poem I recall having anyone help me with in college, and I remember the professor pointing out to us the constant playing with "can" and "may." What strikes me now is the mournful tone about having to bear being all of 24 years old. I still like "Bear them we can, and if we can we must."
Fathers
FathersHappy Father's Day
Welcome to the 20th of June, Father's Day, which is a holiday of special importance here because it happens that certain birthdays and my wedding anniversary all fall on the same day. It's a major festival at Grim's Hall, about six months off of Christmas but with no religious aspects. It's a good day, the first day of summer, with the green of the forest at its heights.
The part of all that I share with all of you, however, is Father's Day. So, let's talk about that.
I read Colbert I. King's latest piece this evening. It's a pity that he didn't stop about halfway through the second sentence, because up until then he had a good point; there is no excuse for the poisonous piece that follows.
But let us ignore the poisons in his veins, and attend to the good point. Our President's other achievements and qualifications remain highly debatable a year and a half into his term, but one thing that is easy to admire is the family he has built. It's plain that he adores his daughters, and has a solid marriage to his wife. Whatever other disputes we may have with that man, in this matter I am pleased to speak well of him.
That's enough for today. Go and call your father, if you still may; or spend the day with him; or visit his grave, or his memory. It is no easy thing to be a father, and is indeed a great weight if it is undertaken with the seriousness it deserves. Not all bear it well, and none of us bear it as well as we might wish. The best gift to give a father is forgiveness, for those times he has not borne it so well; and respect, for those times he did.
Holiday concerts at the Met
A non-ambush ambush
Here's a third example to round out our series on so-called 'guerrilla' tactics in politics. This is an "ambush" interview only in the sense that it wasn't scheduled. It happened in a Congressional office building, following a meeting on the subject, by someone who was plainly identified as a reporter from a new media outlet with a known political agenda.
This kind of thing is perfectly OK with me. It's not an intrusion into the private lives of the individual; it's not a use of 'the rules' to undermine the system. And indeed, unlike the other two examples, we can see that our national dialogue is being advanced here.
So, here's the limit case for "what right looks like." You don't have to get on the Congressman's schedule. By all means any citizen should be able to ask their Congressman a question at town halls and through normal dialog, and new media reporters should also be free to talk to Congress in professional venues. This doesn't require jumping people on their way back from lunch, or traveling under the false flag of 'students working on a project,' when you're really acting as political operatives in the opposition. It's great to use your First Amendment rights to advance the discussion, not good to use them to shut down someone else's First Amendment rights.
The Congressman here is still a bit testy, but I think both he and the reporter are doing just fine. Politics is not a tea party, even when it's a Tea Party.
Exactly
Andrew Sullivan cites this video, saying, "Finally, a way to respond to holy rollers, tea-partiers, Larouchies, Code Pink, Mormon missionaries, Farrakhanites, HRC fundraisers, at al" [sic].
I don't even know what political message was being advocated in the video, and I genuinely do not care. I do know that, far from being encouraged, this kind of disruption of civic free speech is an aggressive abuse to our democracy. Frankly, to put it in the words the President used just this week, I think this is the kind of thing that ought to put you in danger of having your ass kicked -- and kicked, not to charges or threats of charges of simple battery, but to the wholesome and wholehearted applause of the American people. The law should not oppose such kicking, and neither should we.
Any single gentleman who wished to escort this young man aside for remedial education would enjoy my approval -- so long as he took reasonable precautions to ensure that the harm done was passing, while the education was lasting.
Neo-Platonism & TV Analogy
In our recent discussion on faerie creatures, T99 suggested that she had a Platonist model of consciousness. I was reading from Plotinus' fourth ennead today, in which he talks about the unity of all souls under his theory. Plotinus was the founder of Neo-Platonism, in the third century A.D. Here, for ease of reference, is the 'television model' for consciousness.
There's an alternative model of consciousness -- which I may have invented, although it's highly likely that someone else has achieved it separately -- that thinks about consciousness as a kind of signal that is part of the universe. This is opposed to the standard view of consciousness arising from chemical activity in the brain (a highly problematic concept: these same chemicals exist everywhere, but produce the experience of consciousness as far as we know only when arranged as a brain, and possibly only as a human brain).Now, Plotinus is not talking about a unified consciousness, but a unified soul -- indeed, consciousness poses a problem for him. How can two souls actually be one thing, if one is consciously experiencing pain and the other is not? He has an explanation for this which is similar to, but different from, the television analogy (which was obviously unavailable to him).
In this sense, the brain is not creating consciousness, but interpreting something already present. The brain can be thought of as like an old-fashioned television, the kind that pulls TV signals from the air. Two such sets, tuned to different channels, will give you a completely different experience -- one of a football game, the other of a soap opera. Yet they are pulling from the same signal.
If a set grows old, the picture it offers begins to alter in certain ways; but it is interpreting the same signal. If it is damaged, the picture may become quite distorted -- but the signal is unharmed. If you unplug it, or it dies of age, or you bash it with a baseball bat hard enough, it may cease being able to interpret the signal at all. The signal is still there. You just have lost your means of interpreting and understanding it. (And even when you had that means, you were only seeing a small part of what was really there -- the one channel.)
On this model, then, what culture is doing is helping to "tune" our minds in certain ways. That would explain (for example) why a child who hasn't read 1,000 year old books might make a claim about an event (say a fairy) that harmonizes with those books. No one told her that story; she has simply been tuned, by genetics and culture, to interpret consciousness in certain ways.
That is compatible with the Platonic model you are suggesting, I think.
Now to begin with, the unity of soul, mine and another's, is not enough to make the two totals of soul and body identical. An identical thing in different recipients will have different experiences; the identity Man, in me as I move and you at rest, moves in me and is stationary in you: there is nothing stranger, nothing impossible, in any other form of identity between you and me; nor would it entail the transference of my emotion to any outside point: when in any one body a hand is in pain, the distress is felt not in the other but in the hand as represented in the centralizing unity.The concept of 'tuning' was not available to him, but he is in some sense reaching for a similar concept, especially when he speaks of how one body may not be conscious of all its sensations at the same time. Apparently the view of the soul he suggests was influential with Freeman Dyson, and Schrödinger.
In order that my feelings should of necessity be yours, the unity would have to be corporeal: only if the two recipient bodies made one, would the souls feel as one.
We must keep in mind, moreover, that many things that happen even in one same body escape the notice of the entire being, especially when the bulk is large: thus in huge sea-beasts, it is said, the animal as a whole will be quite unaffected by some membral accident too slight to traverse the organism.
Thus unity in the subject of any experience does not imply that the resultant sensation will be necessarily felt with any force upon the entire being and at every point of it: some transmission of the experience may be expected, and is indeed undeniable, but a full impression on the sense there need not be.
Another place of harmony with Plotinus is the idea we often discuss that aesthetics underlies ethics, which in turn underlies politics. As the Stanford Encyclopedia puts it, "Plotinus' chronologically first treatise, ‘On Beauty’ (I 6), can be seen as parallel to his treatise on virtue (I 2). In it, he tries to fit the experience of beauty into the drama of ascent to the first principle of all. In this respect, Plotinus' aesthetics is inseparable from his metaphysics, psychology, and ethics."
Of course, in thinking of beauty as being directed at something like a Platonic form (in fact, toward God), he is suggesting that the underlying root of beauty is the same for everyone. We appear to differ on particulars because, he says, we get hung up on sensible beauty; we ignore the inner beauty that we can see when we ignore mere physical beauty.
As to that, it's a principle that reminds me of our discussion of The Knight's Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer.
Guns: A Tale of Two Traditions
Guns: A Tale of Two Traditions
For a special day at school, a Rhode Island 8-year-old decorated a hat with patriotic themes, including camouflage, an American flag, and tiny plastic toy soldiers. The school banned the hat. “Why? The toy soldiers were carrying tiny guns.”
The Rhode Island principal explained that "the hat would be fine if the boy replaced the Army men holding weapons with ones that didn't have any." (Post-modern soldiers, holding copies of U.N. sanctions, are available at enlightened toy stores.) The school felt that the toy soldiers were the equivalent of wearing images of marijuana leaves on t-shirts.
The director of the Rhode Island National Guard gamely stepped in and tried to talk some sense to the school: "The American soldier is armed. That's why they're called the armed forces," he said. "If you're going to portray it any other way, you miss the point." I imagine him speaking very slowly and calmly.
Here’s another approach to guns, inspired by news reports of a Presidential Internet “kill-switch” to be triggered by an “emergency measure or action" announced by the Department of Homeland Security. Glen Reynolds responded: “If they shut down the Internet, I’m getting out my gun. And I think everyone should take it as a signal to do the same — because one way or the other, it means the country’s under attack.”
My solution to the boy’s hat? Use a razor blade to cut the plastic weapons loose, and replace them with tiny nerf bats. But as Bruno Bettelheim noted, the reason boys play with tin soldiers is that it’s not much fun to play with tin pacifists.
Update: Once again, embarrassment works. This gives me hope for November.
How about a Complete Rollover?
Sally Quinn's article making the rounds suggests that Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden switch jobs. It's not impossible, if Congress were to confirm the swap.
Why stop there, though? The arguments for her being Vice President are better arguments for her being President. Or we could simply move everyone one spot over: Joe Biden to President, Hillary Clinton to Vice President, and Obama could resign to pursue other opportunities. A stint as Secretary of State might give him some actual experience that would improve his odds if he wanted to run for a second term as President when he was really qualified for the office; or, he could follow his heart and move on to become Secretary General of the United Nations.
I'm not sure I see the benefit to the nation of swapping the two lower jobs without addressing the core of the problem. If we can get some agreement on that, though, I'll be happy to support the move.
Great Headline of the World
From Reuters today:
"Global Organized Crime Becoming New Superpower: U.N."
It's good to see some honest reporting about the U.N. for a change! And the first phrase of the article is also insightful. It quotes the "U.N. crime chief," who says:
"Governments must smash markets..."
The truth will out! What?
Parzival Entrance
I'm reading Parzival, as I mentioned. One of the striking things about it is the German High Medieval sense of the aesthetic. It's not the understated, somber German sense you might know today! For example, here is how King Gramoflanz prepares for a ritual combat with Sir Gawan (or, as you better know him, "Gawain").
Now the king was armed. Twelve damsels took a hand, mounted on pretty palfreys. They were not to be negligent -- that lustrous company -- but each was to carry by a shaft the costly phellel-silk beneath which the king wished to arrive. Two little ladies, none too feeble -- indeed they bore the brightest sheen there -- rode with the king's stout arms about them.Now, this is an entry that would do David Lee Roth proud. The king arrives on horseback, with twelve mounted damsels bearing a giant silk tarp above him, and two more in his lap.
Somehow, no artist has thought to render this image, which seems to me a striking omission! I can't think of anything else quite like it in Medieval literature -- but Wolfram is an interesting writer all the way around. He is also remarkable for how he insists that love and marriage be unified, as other Medieval writers did not always do. He does it consistently.
States v. Feds
Eric has occasionally remarked that we should be of peacable mind about about the state of the union, until we started to see state efforts to organize against the Federal power. We are not quite there yet; but clashes between Federal and state officials are beginning to become common.
Two items from today.
Item one: Coast Guard halts oil-sucking barges for 24 hours over Governor Jindal's objections, while disrupting rescue efforts elsewhere.
"These barges work. You've seen them work. You've seen them suck oil out of the water," said Jindal.Item two: the Secretary of State says that the Federal government will be suing Arizona of its immigration legislation.
"The Coast Guard came and shut them down," Jindal said. "You got men on the barges in the oil, and they have been told by the Coast Guard, 'Cease and desist. Stop sucking up that oil.'"
...
In Alabama today, Gov. Bob Riley said that he's had problems with the Coast Guard, too.... The governor said the problem is there's still no single person giving a "yes" or "no." While the Gulf Coast governors have developed plans with the Coast Guard's command center in the Gulf, things begin to shift when other agencies start weighing in, like the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
"It's like this huge committee down there," Riley said, "and every decision that we try to implement, any one person on that committee has absolute veto power."
[The Arizona governor] said in a statement that "this is no way to treat the people of Arizona."All three complaints are essentially the same. The Federal government is asserting veto power over state actions; it is reading that power in the broadest possible way, even in emergency situations. It's unresponsive to the needs of the people of the state; but every piddling regulation ("How many fire extinguishers do you have on that oil-sucking barge?") is put ahead of doing something about the emergency at hand. They are more interested in the questions of precedence and propriety than they are in the disasters that are lapping at our shores, or storming across our borders.
"To learn of this lawsuit through an Ecuadorean interview with the secretary of state is just outrageous," she said. "If our own government intends to sue our state to prevent illegal immigration enforcement, the least it can do is inform us before it informs the citizens of another nation."
I'd say we're starting to see the friction. Heat follows.
Demi-God, Eh?
It has a certain ring, doesn't it?
If you’re a 30-something dude and this doesn’t describe you, congrats! You’re likely one of the other generalized types I mentioned—somewhere on the spectrum between single d*****g and taken demi-god.Why should one wish to be congratulated for being on that spectrum? I would think any man would like the idea of being seen as a demi-god.
Apparently the standards for admission are fairly low, too. It's achievable!
More on Diplomatic Betrayal and Duplicity
More on Diplomatic Betrayal and DuplicityDouglas Mackiernan (1913-1950) was the first CIA officer to be killed in the line of duty, though he was not honored until 2000, and then in a secret ceremony. In 2002 a journalist began to break the story, which was largely acknowledged by the CIA in 2008.
Just the story of the effort to pierce the veil of secrecy and honor Mackiernan's service would make for a bestselling potboiler, but the story of the service itself makes the cover-up thriller look pedestrian. The brilliant MIT-dropout misfit born to a Scottish whaler/explorer in Mexico City, the dawn of the Cold War, the Westerner engulfed by the East, the nuclear secrets, the abandonment of the U.S. embassy/spy station in remote northwest China upon the surrender of Chiang Kai-Shek in 1949, the wife's last-minute escape overseas to bear twins, the husband's desperate 1,000-mile trek by camel and foot across the Taklamakan Desert and the Himalayas fleeing the ascendant Chinese Communists, the tragic death at the Tibetan border crossing resulting from bureaucratic sloth and duplicity, the U.S.’s later abrupt betrayal of Tibetan freedom fighters upon re-establishment of diplomatic ties to China in the 1970s – and believe me, I’ve barely touched on the high points of suspense and irony.
Thomas Laird’s 2002 book about Mackiernan, “Into Tibet,” is about to join a pile on my reading table that’s getting way out of hand. Despite the CIA’s belated confirmation of many parts of the story in 2008, there remains controversy about Laird’s accuracy and partisan bent. I can’t begin to judge that side of things yet, but what a yarn! This guy is T.E. Lawrence, James Bond, Indiana Jones, and Jack Ryan rolled into one. It’s a Le Carre novel as re-imagined by Arthur Conan Doyle and Rudyard Kipling. Ridley Scott? Russell Crowe?
I stumbled across Mackiernan because I was surprised by reports in the morning paper that newly released information indicated the CIA was caught flat-footed by the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950. Wasn’t that common knowledge – the January 1950 Acheson flub and so on? I’m no Korea buff. Quickly reading the Wikipedia summary of the Korean War that's linked above, I saw Mackiernan mentioned as the source of advance intelligence of the North Korean invasion, which he was trying to get across the Tibetan border when he was killed. In reading other accounts of Mackiernan’s exploits I can’t be sure that’s right; if so, it’s such a minor part of the saga that it doesn’t rate a mention in other summaries. Either way, I’m motivated to read the Laird book now.
Iran
Former CIA case officer Reuel Marc Gerecht writes about the Iranian protests: how they came about, why they didn't succeed, and how the US failed to follow through where it should have. It cites the Austrian philosopher Karl Popper's work as the foundation.
It's an amazing case: the Clinton administration's policy toward Iran seemed hopelessly optimistic at the time they adopted it, but the Bush administration largely saw it through in spite of the challenges of the war on terror. The internal revolution that the policy hoped we would see -- if only we avoided giving the Iranian government a conflict they could use to convince the young that we were their enemies -- actually arrived!
Unfortunately, we did nothing; for now there was a third administration in place, one that viewed stability and engagement of the mullahs as its goals. The moment, so long hoped for both here and among the Iranian youth, arrived and passed.
See what Mr. Gerecht has to say; but also remember this piece, not from a case officer (or "operations officer," as I believe they call the position now) but from a long time agent of the CIA within the Revolutionary Guards.
The Art of Euphemism
The Net is abuzz, including at Cassandra’s place, with the sad spectacle of a blogger threatening a series of critics with libel actions. I’m not familiar with the blogger and haven’t the patience to figure out what she’s on about, but I do have some helpful advice on how to avoid lawsuits of this kind. Truth is a defense, of course, but beyond that, let euphemism be your friend.
I haven’t any entertaining euphemisms on this specific subject, beyond the possible “leak in the think tank,” but I did find an entertaining column the other day about euphemisms for drunkenness. If you’ve never tried “The Word Detective,” now would be a good time to start. I ran across this recent column about the origin of the expression “snootful.” The Detective points us toward last year’s book by Paul Dickson, “Drunk: The Definitive Drinker’s Dictionary” (Melville House, 2009), which lists and explains thousands of synonyms for that blunt accusation, including “not quite himself,” “overwrought,” “outgoing,” or “ruddy-faced.”
The British seem to have a special flair for this kind of thing. One of their expressions, new to this writer, is “pissed as a newt.” A Foreign Office official, informed of Brown’s press agent’s explanation, suggested that Brown had been “tired and emotional as a newt.”
Alas, PC evasions can ever be only temporary. Once the meaning becomes well understood, even the euphemism can land the writer in trouble. An expert writing in 2001 suggested that the phrase “tired and emotional” might expose the writer to liability even if it was meant literally. It must remain the job of restless wordsmiths to expand the boundaries of gentle evasions in every generation.