The good and bad of Bill Clinton was on show at his appearance with John McCain from which leaked his disagreement with Obama on Syria. Clinton understood foreign policy needs but his decisions were made with a finger measuring the political breeze and therefore cautious to the point of insufficiency as far as actually achieving long-term goals. His political calculation on the Rwandan genocide was Clinton's low point, but my chief criticism is that he set up policies and precedents for the terrorism and Saddam problems but neglected to move decisively (and controversially) to resolve the problems on his watch, rather leaving the controversy for his successor to deal with when the problems reached a head. In contrast to Clinton, his successor, Bush, made rational choices to match means with ends and dealt with the controversy that Clinton avoided.
Given the prominent role of Sunni terrorists among the Syrian rebels, the destruction the terrorists caused in neighboring Iraq, and current day terrorist attacks in Iraq likely bleeding over from Syria, I wonder how Obama's decision to give military aid to the Syrian rebels plays in Iraq? It may be the death of any lingering alliance between the US and post-Saddam Iraq. Obama's feckless Middle East policy increasingly vindicates Bush's Middle East policy.
I responded to Professor Nacos about Libya and Iraq here.
John Yoo's take on the Snowden leaks about the NSA surveillance. In short, the program is Constitutional, legal, and fulfills a compelling state interest.
Damn, Nature, you scary! The Cordyceps parasitic fungus take over the mind and body of zombie ants. The ants' cuticle (hardened skin) offers no protection. Not only ants are affected. Different species of Cordyceps attack different insects. There is a variety of parasitic mind control in nature. The complexity of behavior under mind control is striking, such as parasitoid voodoo wasp larvae that control their caterpillar hosts. Who's to say that human beings aren't changed in mind and body by parasites?
Interesting take on the social-political implosive collapse of American society. The life-cycles of parasites that exploit and eventually kill their hosts seems analogous.
Confessions of a Sociopath. Yikes. It seems scary to be around one yet liberating to be one, but also alienating. Hm. Is Amanda Bynes a sociopath?
More sour cream's "I put that beep on everything." Mozzarella cheese, at least the factory version sold in supermarket dairy sections, is more about texture and has subtle flavor to begin with. It loses its flavor in storage. Adding sour cream to bannock pizza made with flavorless mozzarella adds flavor and a creamy texture. I've also used sour cream as a cheese replacement but cooking with the sour cream diminishes its effect. I may substitute a different, more flavorful cheese on my bannock pizza. Sour cream + hot sauce make a creamy, tasty dipping sauce for meat, especially chicken, which needs the flavor boost.
Egg and scallion fried rice and broiled pork with sour cream + hot sauce dipping sauce on the side is decadent.
Approximate broiling guide: 15 total minutes for beef, 25 total minutes for pork, 35 total minutes for chicken. Beef, as I've noted before, has the least room for error in cooking time.
Once again, wet heat (steam) does not cook the same way as dry heat (bake).
3 boxes of 11 oz double chocolate Krave cereal and 1 gallon whole milk for 9 dollars is a pretty good deal, but not a healthy one. I finished the gallon of milk and 1.5 boxes of the Krave in 1 day. That stuff puts on pounds and my body feels off, whether from the chemicals or sugar, afterwards.
I failed to kill an exceptionally quick mosquito last night and today I have a bite on my index finger. It's likely resting in my apartment somewhere digesting my blood. Update: I killed it plus 3 more mosquitoes. What hole(s) are they using to enter my apartment?
Nietzsche excites an MGTOW like Marx excites an activist. The temptation is to be belligerent and defiant of everyone else's conventions and repressions. To expurgate the internalized subjugation and throw off in a zealous burst all the chains of society in every personal interaction as a matter of principle and newly appreciated ego. However, when I am weak, needy, and disenfranchised, an adolescent acting out without a rational purpose is an unnecessary risky behavior. To subjectify myself and solve my alienation must be a thoughtful, long-term - even lifetime - mastery project. Real life is not literally like the movie The Matrix, with a Zion, or even a Nebuchadnezzar, to which to escape the entirety of reality in one move. I can't physically sever my connections to the world and be reborn as a new, greater self in a fantasy world. I must navigate my way out of the trap in this world. The better compromise with Nietzsche's provocation is to critically diagnose the conditions of my objectification, control the internalized repressions within my mind, and learn to know the world for what it is, like Feuerbach's sensual observation. Be situationally aware and self-aware, and respect the power that the world and other people have over me. Then intelligently apply praxis along Marx's original thesis of sensual activity in order to change the circumstances of my objectification. Weigh the risks and rewards. Interact with the world as a rational self-interested free agent. Renegotiate my Hobbesian social contract. Even if I choose to be altruistic again, I must do so from a reified conscious state.
Richard Swanson was an alienated man who died on his praxis quest to actualize his reified consciousness. I don't know that he was red pill, but he was definitely going his own way. By Swanson's and the author's example, the life metamorphasis must be created with dedicated whole mind-body physical activity.
I had a dream about the Stuy bowling team. It wasn't about my truncated time as a bowler, but more my leadership experience recasting the culture of the team that extended beyond my HS career. It wasn't a replay of the actual experience but rather its pattern with different faces, ie, the more things change, the more they stay the same. All of my leadership experiences have been praxis with the Marxist premise that truth is subjective, creative, and deduced rather than objective and induced. The status quo is just an option. However, I eventually reach a point where my internalized subjugation stops me and fills me with doubt with thoughts that Truth is in fact objective, everyone else is in on it, and I am alone, out of tune with a quixotic fantasy. Yet I have made a difference. I have brought my subjective truth to life, just not completely to life at 1st attempt. But that's only a failure from a performance test perspective, not a mastery perspective. Even when change is a smooth run, Daniel Patrick Moynihan said that civil reform requires a 30 year commitment. I certainly have not followed through on any 30 year commitments to completion. So perhaps the obstacles I've run up against are not Truth dispelling my quixotic fantasy, but rather simply breaching the comfort zone of the status quo, aka the blue pill Matrix, Nietzsche's bad air of lies, and Freud's internalized repression. At that point, it's the dominant subjective Truth vs my insurgent subjective Truth, and it requires competition to break through. And that means competing with my teammates who are still shackled by the blue pill status quo and winning over the fencesitters, which I can do, but the uncertainty strikes at my anxieties and insecurities. To compete, I need to trust my capability and my vision and have the iron will - the Nietzschean classical will to excellence - to fight against social pressures to rise alone. The evidence says I can do it in terms of capability, but I must build up my inner game to match my outer game. I must be in control. I also need to figure out what I want to be and the world to be; bigger than morality, the right thing, or selflessly making the world a better place in a Judeo-Christian sense, but what is my truth I want to define my life and with which to change the world.
This NY Times opinion discusses the compounding impact of moral decay and fraying of the social compact in our society. My aspirations for SU4A seem quaint. As an idealist, where could I begin to patch the tearing holes? It's sticking fingers in a dike that's crumbling under a flood.
From the Grantland article on the Spurs' Tracy McGrady: "Most coaches who don't understand young players view 'selfish' as something bad," Carter said. "My thing as a coach is, I can't get a player to be at the level he needs to be at unless he is selfish. He's got to be selfish to invest in himself."
Eric
Showing posts with label thoughts of the day. Show all posts
Showing posts with label thoughts of the day. Show all posts
Monday, 10 June 2013
Thursday, 9 May 2013
Thoughts of the day
I agree with Ethan Chorin that President Obama's misguided Libya policy set the stage for the Benghazi consulate attack and other deleterious effects. For a liberal leadership posture, Bush's Middle East policy was correct. By retaining the same liberal posture yet switching course based on the faulty premise that Bush's Middle East policy was incorrect, Obama's Middle East policy has gone wrong.
2004 CNN report with Clinton supporting Bush on Iraq:
As shown by Clinton's quote, the Democrats understood the context and stakes in Iraq, yet they still distorted the public perception of the Iraq mission for parochial partisan gain. This postsecret from May 18 reminds me of the layers of damage caused by the misinformation, propaganda, and false narrative against the Iraq mission that the Democrats validated. Let's see whether this and this make a difference.
Bravo, Richard Kemp. More of this needs to be said and often about our roles in Iraq and Afghanistan. I would emphasize more the liberal and humanitarian aspects of our peace operations, but he takes the narrative in the right direction by critically spotlighting and contrasting the nature of the enemy. We need a better, stronger narrative. The leftist anti-peace narrative works hand in hand with the Islamic terrorist narrative to deadly result.
Bravo, Michelle Malkin. This is the right tack to criticize Obama's hypocrisy and overreach, and rehabilitate Bush's legacy while not throwing out the baby of national security and the War on Terror with the bathwater. Make Bush the standard and hold Obama to it.
I haven't been following the Jason Richwine controversy, but here's his side of it. Judgybitch's take.
Abandoned places, such as the abandoned showpiece City Hall subway station.
Youtube fun:
Schmoyoho's (Gregory Brothers) Churchill remix. Churchill is a soul brother.
A red-pill song by Matt Hires: Restless Heart.
The Crazy Nasty Ass Honey Badger (original narration by Randall).
Touching google doodle of a girl excited, then apprehensive and tentative, then finally released and intimate with her military dad when he comes home from a deployment. The theme is Best Day Ever and the artist is contest winner Sabrina Brady.
Who you are, character, personality, intrinsic self, inner game is determinative. It always wins out. Talent, skill, resources, given advantages, and luck are just tools. What you do is episodic. Character is thematic. In the end, you are what your record says you are.
Free Northerner's manly reading lists. Compare to Columbia's renowned Core Curriculum.
Project Gutenberg - classics for free on-line.
Story of a family who travelled from a Lockean state, the UK, to visit family in India and fell into a Hobbesian nightmare.
At some point, I'll make a separate post for Szelenyi's lectures, like my knots progress post.
What's happening to good-girl paragon Amanda Bynes? Her fall is yet another harsh disillusioning blow to my idealism where a hitherto unimpeachable American paragon is brought low in shocking and/or sordid fashion, like Lance Armstrong, Alex Rodriguez, Lehman Brothers, Columbia space shuttle, GEN Petraeus, Bernie Madoff, Tiger Woods, Horace Mann, and Penn State. Bynes was seemingly the most stable and virtuous of her peers, yet her fall has been the hardest. It's like Taleb's black swan enacted on a personal level. Insight from Mara Wilson.
A red-pill explanation for Bynes's breakdown: The truth about female desire: It’s base, animalistic and ravenous. It may be, at least in part, her nature breaking free.
Duke of Earl by Gene Chandler. "As I walk through this world, nothing can stop the Duke of Earl ... Nothing can stop me now, coz I'm the Duke of Earl!"
Goodnite, Sweetheart, Goodnite by the Spaniels. "Good night, sweetheart, well, it's time to go. I hate to leave you, but I really must say, oh good night, sweetheart, good night." "Baby, I just can't get right. Well, I hate to leave you, baby, I don't mean maybe, because I love you so." That's what it felt like when I left Korea, the Army, and her behind. To summarize, Every Little Thing She Does is Magic by the Police, Can't Fight This Feeling by REO Speedwagon, Teenager in Love by Dion and the Belmonts, and Goodnite, Sweetheart, Goodnite by the Spaniels sing the love story that wasn't. Rollo explains the 'click' together but ... mystery.
Sorrow.
Honor your father and mother by begetting children.
Sarah at Trying to Grok regrets waiting too long to start having children and recommends women should start their families before age 25.
Narcotics Anonymous: "Insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results."
7 stages of grief (modified Kubler-Ross): Shock - Denial - Anger - Bargain - Depression - Testing - Acceptance.
Pulp Fiction Ezekiel 25:17 (the whole scene; revisited in the final scene). "The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who would attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee!"
No matter how much a drill sergeant yells at you while smoking you (and your fellow privates) in the pit or anywhere else, muscle failure is muscle failure. Where the drill sergeant makes a difference is your muscular capacity is higher than your perception of your muscular capability. The drill sergeant bullies you past the limits of your perception, gets more out of your capacity, and thereby improves your capability more than you would have on your own.
Principle is fine - it's the ought. But power comes first - it's the real that is.
Andy Greenwald on the moral of the Game of Thrones's Red Wedding - the practical purpose for the fiction of idealism and the danger of codes of honor: "Jon Snow is a bastard, born outside of the tight web of convention that gave Ned meaning and purpose, the same fiction that Varys spoke of a few weeks back as being essential to keeping an empire from falling into chaos. While there's enough Ned in him to save the life of the elderly horsetrader — and blow his own cover in the process — Jon's still fluid enough in his worldview and allegiance to keep him alive for the foreseeable future." Rational choice wins. Greenwald's post is worth reading even if you (like I) haven't watched the show. It's a prescription for the red pill. "Greater good", "make a difference", and "make the world a better place" can be spun, interpreted, and modified to mean a number of different things.
Related to that the frame of the problem informs the solution, knowing parties, premises, (first) principles, purpose, and definitions tells you the rest.
I made myself a bannock pizza deep dish style using my 3 quart mixing bowl in the Nesco. It worked. The crust tasted, looked, and felt (texture) like a reasonable approximation of a deep dish pizza crust. I left the bannock dough in the refrigerator overnight because I wasn't hungry. I learned that chilled bannock dough, like chilled brownie paste, also flour based, is easier to work with than just-made bannock dough. The cooked crust seemed thicker than usual, too. I'm not sure whether it tasted different, though the bitter taste from the baking soda seemed less.
This time, I let the Duncan Hines dark chocolate fudge brownie cool completely before eating it. Cooled, but not cold, the texture was more brownie-like and seemed to taste better, too.
I tried mixing evaporated milk into my last dark chocolate brownie mix. The result was the consistency was more brownie like. Still low on taste, though.
I bought Duncan Hines dark chocolate fudge cake mix on sale for 1.25 for a 16.5 ounce box. Ugh. It's tasteless, more tasteless even than the Duncan Hines dark chocolate fudge brownie mix. Granted, cakes are meant to be frosted, but the cake portion should have at least some flavor. The texture is cake texture rather than the relatively denser brownie. Adding evaporated milk to the cake batter makes the cake spongier.
I wonder why chicken takes longer to cook than pork. Less dense muscle fiber?
Golden Krust honey barbecue jerk sauce is quite tasty as a dipping sauce. Hunts hickory & brown sugar barbecue sauce is too strong as a dipping sauce and okay as a pre-cook baste - quite sticky, though, due to the corn syrup.
The turkey sausage is a pain in the ass. I just ate 2 bites that were half raw. How am I supposed to know the inside is no longer pink? I'm going to try boiling one next time before I grill it, like how I broil my pork before grilling it. I'm just afraid the tasty oil will leak out of the sausage when I boil it.
.99/lb pork neck bones - not worth it for the meat. A lot of bone for broth, though.
Best Yet frozen southern selection cut okra is good. Slimy, so I cook it with my rice so the slime is soaked up in the rice.
Bachelor meat-sauce pasta shortcut: Add the uncooked pasta directly to the sauce. Add enough liquid for the pasta to plump. The Mirro and burner worked well for making the meat-sauce pasta. Bachelor meat-sauce pasta is illusory. It looks like a heaping pile (as I've noted before) and tastes okay, but it's not filling, so it goes quick.
The canned salmon makes for a decadent bachelor stew with Progresso soup. Earlier, I tried making a bachelor stew with a can of crushed tomatoes rather than soup and ended up with something like a weaker bachelor meat sauce, which I usually make with ground turkey, chicken, or pork. Today, I tried making a bachelor meat sauce pasta with the canned salmon (scallion greens, canned corn, frozen spinach, crushed tomatoes with basil). Pretty much the same result as the bachelor stew-turned-sauce. Not bad, but the canned salmon is miscast with the meat sauce. The salmon is weaker flavored with the crushed tomatoes than with the Progresso soup for some reason - tomato juice neutralizing the salmon oil, perhaps? From now on, I'm sticking with pork, turkey, or chicken for the meat sauce pasta and the canned salmon will be reserved for stew. Plus, I'm quite pleased with the Mirro so far.
With the Sunbeam wounded, I could use a skillet, frying pan, or wok for my single burner. I'm waiting for one to turn up for scavenging. I can only cook so many ways with the grill pan. At least one frying pan was available, but I declined to take it at the time because my Sunbeam was still healthy and I wasn't using my burner yet. Just goes to show, gotta think ahead.
I recovered a Circulon stove-top grill pan insert but without its holder/drip pan. It looked sort of like a skillet. I can't use it to cook without its holder unless I use it concave or underside side up, and I don't know that the underside is safe to cook on. I can't think of any other use for it. So, back in the recycling bin it goes. Oh well.
16MAY13: I scavenged an aluminum Mirro-matic electric frying pan today. I guess it was discarded because it's missing its power supply, so now it's just a frying pan, no longer electric. It's otherwise in good shape. The lid is intact and it's been scrubbed clean. It has scratches, some discolorations, and stubborn (soybean) vegetable oil stains in all the hard-to-scrub places. The key, and lucky, characteristic of the pan is its bottom fits onto my burner. The Mirro-matic has a 15-cup (120 ounce) capacity, compared to 12 cups for the 3-quart mixing bowl and 9 cups for the Sunbeam.
In cooking and other useful endeavors, the right tool for the job makes a big difference and trial and error is necessary for improvement beyond the limits of conception.
Eric
2004 CNN report with Clinton supporting Bush on Iraq:
Clinton, who was interviewed Thursday, said he did not believe that Bush went to war in Iraq over oil or for imperialist reasons but out of a genuine belief that large quantities of weapons of mass destruction remained unaccounted for.
Noting that Bush had to be "reeling" in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, Clinton said Bush's first priority was to keep al Qaeda and other terrorist networks from obtaining "chemical and biological weapons or small amounts of fissile material."
"That's why I supported the Iraq thing. There was a lot of stuff unaccounted for," Clinton said in reference to Iraq and the fact that U.N. weapons inspectors left the country in 1998.
"So I thought the president had an absolute responsibility to go to the U.N. and say, 'Look, guys, after 9/11, you have got to demand that Saddam Hussein lets us finish the inspection process.' You couldn't responsibly ignore [the possibility that] a tyrant had these stocks," Clinton said.
As shown by Clinton's quote, the Democrats understood the context and stakes in Iraq, yet they still distorted the public perception of the Iraq mission for parochial partisan gain. This postsecret from May 18 reminds me of the layers of damage caused by the misinformation, propaganda, and false narrative against the Iraq mission that the Democrats validated. Let's see whether this and this make a difference.
Bravo, Richard Kemp. More of this needs to be said and often about our roles in Iraq and Afghanistan. I would emphasize more the liberal and humanitarian aspects of our peace operations, but he takes the narrative in the right direction by critically spotlighting and contrasting the nature of the enemy. We need a better, stronger narrative. The leftist anti-peace narrative works hand in hand with the Islamic terrorist narrative to deadly result.
Bravo, Michelle Malkin. This is the right tack to criticize Obama's hypocrisy and overreach, and rehabilitate Bush's legacy while not throwing out the baby of national security and the War on Terror with the bathwater. Make Bush the standard and hold Obama to it.
I haven't been following the Jason Richwine controversy, but here's his side of it. Judgybitch's take.
Abandoned places, such as the abandoned showpiece City Hall subway station.
Youtube fun:
Schmoyoho's (Gregory Brothers) Churchill remix. Churchill is a soul brother.
A red-pill song by Matt Hires: Restless Heart.
The Crazy Nasty Ass Honey Badger (original narration by Randall).
Touching google doodle of a girl excited, then apprehensive and tentative, then finally released and intimate with her military dad when he comes home from a deployment. The theme is Best Day Ever and the artist is contest winner Sabrina Brady.
Who you are, character, personality, intrinsic self, inner game is determinative. It always wins out. Talent, skill, resources, given advantages, and luck are just tools. What you do is episodic. Character is thematic. In the end, you are what your record says you are.
Free Northerner's manly reading lists. Compare to Columbia's renowned Core Curriculum.
Project Gutenberg - classics for free on-line.
Story of a family who travelled from a Lockean state, the UK, to visit family in India and fell into a Hobbesian nightmare.
At some point, I'll make a separate post for Szelenyi's lectures, like my knots progress post.
What's happening to good-girl paragon Amanda Bynes? Her fall is yet another harsh disillusioning blow to my idealism where a hitherto unimpeachable American paragon is brought low in shocking and/or sordid fashion, like Lance Armstrong, Alex Rodriguez, Lehman Brothers, Columbia space shuttle, GEN Petraeus, Bernie Madoff, Tiger Woods, Horace Mann, and Penn State. Bynes was seemingly the most stable and virtuous of her peers, yet her fall has been the hardest. It's like Taleb's black swan enacted on a personal level. Insight from Mara Wilson.
A red-pill explanation for Bynes's breakdown: The truth about female desire: It’s base, animalistic and ravenous. It may be, at least in part, her nature breaking free.
Duke of Earl by Gene Chandler. "As I walk through this world, nothing can stop the Duke of Earl ... Nothing can stop me now, coz I'm the Duke of Earl!"
Goodnite, Sweetheart, Goodnite by the Spaniels. "Good night, sweetheart, well, it's time to go. I hate to leave you, but I really must say, oh good night, sweetheart, good night." "Baby, I just can't get right. Well, I hate to leave you, baby, I don't mean maybe, because I love you so." That's what it felt like when I left Korea, the Army, and her behind. To summarize, Every Little Thing She Does is Magic by the Police, Can't Fight This Feeling by REO Speedwagon, Teenager in Love by Dion and the Belmonts, and Goodnite, Sweetheart, Goodnite by the Spaniels sing the love story that wasn't. Rollo explains the 'click' together but ... mystery.
Sorrow.
Honor your father and mother by begetting children.
Sarah at Trying to Grok regrets waiting too long to start having children and recommends women should start their families before age 25.
Narcotics Anonymous: "Insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results."
7 stages of grief (modified Kubler-Ross): Shock - Denial - Anger - Bargain - Depression - Testing - Acceptance.
Pulp Fiction Ezekiel 25:17 (the whole scene; revisited in the final scene). "The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who would attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee!"
No matter how much a drill sergeant yells at you while smoking you (and your fellow privates) in the pit or anywhere else, muscle failure is muscle failure. Where the drill sergeant makes a difference is your muscular capacity is higher than your perception of your muscular capability. The drill sergeant bullies you past the limits of your perception, gets more out of your capacity, and thereby improves your capability more than you would have on your own.
Principle is fine - it's the ought. But power comes first - it's the real that is.
Andy Greenwald on the moral of the Game of Thrones's Red Wedding - the practical purpose for the fiction of idealism and the danger of codes of honor: "Jon Snow is a bastard, born outside of the tight web of convention that gave Ned meaning and purpose, the same fiction that Varys spoke of a few weeks back as being essential to keeping an empire from falling into chaos. While there's enough Ned in him to save the life of the elderly horsetrader — and blow his own cover in the process — Jon's still fluid enough in his worldview and allegiance to keep him alive for the foreseeable future." Rational choice wins. Greenwald's post is worth reading even if you (like I) haven't watched the show. It's a prescription for the red pill. "Greater good", "make a difference", and "make the world a better place" can be spun, interpreted, and modified to mean a number of different things.
Related to that the frame of the problem informs the solution, knowing parties, premises, (first) principles, purpose, and definitions tells you the rest.
I made myself a bannock pizza deep dish style using my 3 quart mixing bowl in the Nesco. It worked. The crust tasted, looked, and felt (texture) like a reasonable approximation of a deep dish pizza crust. I left the bannock dough in the refrigerator overnight because I wasn't hungry. I learned that chilled bannock dough, like chilled brownie paste, also flour based, is easier to work with than just-made bannock dough. The cooked crust seemed thicker than usual, too. I'm not sure whether it tasted different, though the bitter taste from the baking soda seemed less.
This time, I let the Duncan Hines dark chocolate fudge brownie cool completely before eating it. Cooled, but not cold, the texture was more brownie-like and seemed to taste better, too.
I tried mixing evaporated milk into my last dark chocolate brownie mix. The result was the consistency was more brownie like. Still low on taste, though.
I bought Duncan Hines dark chocolate fudge cake mix on sale for 1.25 for a 16.5 ounce box. Ugh. It's tasteless, more tasteless even than the Duncan Hines dark chocolate fudge brownie mix. Granted, cakes are meant to be frosted, but the cake portion should have at least some flavor. The texture is cake texture rather than the relatively denser brownie. Adding evaporated milk to the cake batter makes the cake spongier.
I wonder why chicken takes longer to cook than pork. Less dense muscle fiber?
Golden Krust honey barbecue jerk sauce is quite tasty as a dipping sauce. Hunts hickory & brown sugar barbecue sauce is too strong as a dipping sauce and okay as a pre-cook baste - quite sticky, though, due to the corn syrup.
The turkey sausage is a pain in the ass. I just ate 2 bites that were half raw. How am I supposed to know the inside is no longer pink? I'm going to try boiling one next time before I grill it, like how I broil my pork before grilling it. I'm just afraid the tasty oil will leak out of the sausage when I boil it.
.99/lb pork neck bones - not worth it for the meat. A lot of bone for broth, though.
Best Yet frozen southern selection cut okra is good. Slimy, so I cook it with my rice so the slime is soaked up in the rice.
Bachelor meat-sauce pasta shortcut: Add the uncooked pasta directly to the sauce. Add enough liquid for the pasta to plump. The Mirro and burner worked well for making the meat-sauce pasta. Bachelor meat-sauce pasta is illusory. It looks like a heaping pile (as I've noted before) and tastes okay, but it's not filling, so it goes quick.
The canned salmon makes for a decadent bachelor stew with Progresso soup. Earlier, I tried making a bachelor stew with a can of crushed tomatoes rather than soup and ended up with something like a weaker bachelor meat sauce, which I usually make with ground turkey, chicken, or pork. Today, I tried making a bachelor meat sauce pasta with the canned salmon (scallion greens, canned corn, frozen spinach, crushed tomatoes with basil). Pretty much the same result as the bachelor stew-turned-sauce. Not bad, but the canned salmon is miscast with the meat sauce. The salmon is weaker flavored with the crushed tomatoes than with the Progresso soup for some reason - tomato juice neutralizing the salmon oil, perhaps? From now on, I'm sticking with pork, turkey, or chicken for the meat sauce pasta and the canned salmon will be reserved for stew. Plus, I'm quite pleased with the Mirro so far.
With the Sunbeam wounded, I could use a skillet, frying pan, or wok for my single burner. I'm waiting for one to turn up for scavenging. I can only cook so many ways with the grill pan. At least one frying pan was available, but I declined to take it at the time because my Sunbeam was still healthy and I wasn't using my burner yet. Just goes to show, gotta think ahead.
I recovered a Circulon stove-top grill pan insert but without its holder/drip pan. It looked sort of like a skillet. I can't use it to cook without its holder unless I use it concave or underside side up, and I don't know that the underside is safe to cook on. I can't think of any other use for it. So, back in the recycling bin it goes. Oh well.
16MAY13: I scavenged an aluminum Mirro-matic electric frying pan today. I guess it was discarded because it's missing its power supply, so now it's just a frying pan, no longer electric. It's otherwise in good shape. The lid is intact and it's been scrubbed clean. It has scratches, some discolorations, and stubborn (soybean) vegetable oil stains in all the hard-to-scrub places. The key, and lucky, characteristic of the pan is its bottom fits onto my burner. The Mirro-matic has a 15-cup (120 ounce) capacity, compared to 12 cups for the 3-quart mixing bowl and 9 cups for the Sunbeam.
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In cooking and other useful endeavors, the right tool for the job makes a big difference and trial and error is necessary for improvement beyond the limits of conception.
Eric
Tuesday, 30 April 2013
Thoughts of the day
The Serenity prayer should be my guide, yet I couldn't resist commenting here, here, and here on a Princeton history professor's hit piece on President Bush, coinciding with the opening of Bush's presidential library. Here, too, under Yoo's National Review article.
There are cost/benefit and risk/reward analyses. There is also weighing trade-offs and alternatives.
CUMilComm need: core (living heritage and essence) and progress (tangible benefit and making a difference), with ties that bind a demographic with living flows across generations and geographies, especially to the core base on campus. Eg, Hearts of Oak.
“Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die.” (on youtube) is the grim mantra that revives the Mandy Patinkin character who refuses to accept defeat despite seemingly mortal injuries in his running duel against the Christopher Guest character in The Princess Bride. I associate the line and scene with anyone who refuses to quit and keeps fighting despite seemingly decisive defeat and overwhelming disadvantage when surrender and submission seem reasonable. A good pop culture example is Rocky coming off the mat in Round 13? to nearly knock out Apollo in their first fight. With the NBA play-offs in mind, another example is an 8th seed that's blown out 3 straight games by an obviously superior number 1 seed to start their series, but then in Game 4, the 8th seed claws its way to a win. Then they eke out a Game 5 win. Now it's Game 6, 1 game from a tied series and a winner-take-all Game 7. The 8th seed is dug in and the 1 seed has no more moves in reserve, no higher gear to put away the 8th seed.
Truth (introverted, honest, genuine, real, open, integrity, essential, inquisitorial) and politics (extroverted, dissembling, guarded, maneuvering, manipulative, agenda, adversarial) are fundamentally different in nature.
Meg Tilly says she was burned when she gave her truth in a political setting, an interview. The interview was represented to Tilly as focused on her new book, but instead focused on "tabloid fodder" about Tilly's love life. A journalist's take. How does one live a truthful life while engaging a political world?
I like elegant, simply functional solutions. Goes with scavenging.
Maslow's hierarchy: Making a life decision based on I-want is preferable to I-need, but I-need must be secured, too.
The dead end of Junior Seau's CTE: How do you fix your crumbling life when the tool to fix your life is your mind, your brain, yet the chief culprit in your downfall is corruption of your brain's workings (broken hardware, software errors).
Ray Mears ties an "Arab-style headdress" to shade his head for desert survival.
The ADA's How to floss.
Best Yet garden combination pasta sauce is surprisingly good.
Salty egg and onion fried rice, fatty country pork rib (broiled and grilled with onions), and bone broth is a decadent meal.
I tried a bachelor stew with ground turkey instead of the canned salmon. It's better with the canned salmon and salmon oil. Bachelor stew made with canned salmon is decadent. Made with the ground turkey, it's just soup.
When deciding what flavors to add, keep in mind it's not a sliding scale where more flavors equals better flavor and fewer flavors equals worse flavor. Plain is a flavor, too. Think in terms of distinct flavor profiles, not comparitively more or less or better or worse.
The store-brand smoked hocks aren't bad at 1.49/lb. There's still some aftertaste, but it's better than the factory-brand smoked ham I bought a while back. Still, cooking my own pork is better.
Duncan Hines dark chocolate fudge brownie mix is unexpectedly weak flavored. Too bad I didn't grab a 2nd chewy fudge brownie mix instead. The dark chocolate fudge brownie mix instructs adding 1 large egg, 1/3 cup oil, and 1/3 cup water for chewy brownies, while the chewy fudge brownie mix instruct adding 2 large eggs, 1/4 cup water, and 3/4 cup oil for chewy brownies (the amounts differ for "cake like" or "cookie like" texture). I planned to exchange the 2nd box of dark chocolate fudge brownie mix, and would have, had the store not been sold out of chewy fudge brownie mix. Instead, I decided to experiment. Since the listed ingredients are the same for both brownie mixes, although it's implied the amounts of the various ingredients differ, I tried adding 2 eggs, 1/4 cup water, and 3/4 cup oil to the 2nd dark chocolate fudge brownie mix in order to find out whether the result would taste like chewy fudge brownies. Nope, still weak flavored. I'm adding grape jelly and sour cream for flavor.
The Salton works for making brownies and bannock. They fluff up like man-tou, probably because I use the 1 quart mixing bowl with water around it, so it cooks with wet steamer heat, not dry oven heat.
Farrelly brothers bowling comedy Kingpin is a classic.
Simpsons classics Homer's Barbershop Quartet and Last Exit to Springfield sped up to 15 minutes.
Laina, aka Overly Attached GF, has a youtube channel. Turns out she's an entertainer with an expressive face.
Jason Collins, the starting center on the fun, likeable Kidd-led Nets teams of the early 2000s, admitted he's gay. Good for him. However, the dark side of the story is that Collins dated Carolyn Moos for 8+ years from 2001 to 2009, when Collins broke off their engagement a month before their wedding. (Pic of her in college - cute girl.) Moos, born in 1978 and unmarried and childless at 34, invested her biologically prime years in Collins based on a lie. Dated 8+ years, engaged - did they not have sex?
I wonder how Monica Seles is doing these days? I had a small crush on her back in the day. She seemed like an unaffected, down-to-earth, approachably cute, nice girl who happened to be great at tennis. Hm. As far as I know, she hasn't married nor had kids either.
'Yeah? You and what army?' It's true. If you're going to battle, you need an army, or at least a gang. Righteousness ought to be enough to compete, but in the real world it is not even close.
Keanu invokes The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost and wonders whether he should pursue his dream and thereby choose the risk of freedom over the guarantee of security. As always, the harder right is weighed against the easier wrong.
Oh, my broken heart.
The change must be internal this time.
Eric
There are cost/benefit and risk/reward analyses. There is also weighing trade-offs and alternatives.
CUMilComm need: core (living heritage and essence) and progress (tangible benefit and making a difference), with ties that bind a demographic with living flows across generations and geographies, especially to the core base on campus. Eg, Hearts of Oak.
“Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die.” (on youtube) is the grim mantra that revives the Mandy Patinkin character who refuses to accept defeat despite seemingly mortal injuries in his running duel against the Christopher Guest character in The Princess Bride. I associate the line and scene with anyone who refuses to quit and keeps fighting despite seemingly decisive defeat and overwhelming disadvantage when surrender and submission seem reasonable. A good pop culture example is Rocky coming off the mat in Round 13? to nearly knock out Apollo in their first fight. With the NBA play-offs in mind, another example is an 8th seed that's blown out 3 straight games by an obviously superior number 1 seed to start their series, but then in Game 4, the 8th seed claws its way to a win. Then they eke out a Game 5 win. Now it's Game 6, 1 game from a tied series and a winner-take-all Game 7. The 8th seed is dug in and the 1 seed has no more moves in reserve, no higher gear to put away the 8th seed.
Truth (introverted, honest, genuine, real, open, integrity, essential, inquisitorial) and politics (extroverted, dissembling, guarded, maneuvering, manipulative, agenda, adversarial) are fundamentally different in nature.
Meg Tilly says she was burned when she gave her truth in a political setting, an interview. The interview was represented to Tilly as focused on her new book, but instead focused on "tabloid fodder" about Tilly's love life. A journalist's take. How does one live a truthful life while engaging a political world?
I like elegant, simply functional solutions. Goes with scavenging.
Maslow's hierarchy: Making a life decision based on I-want is preferable to I-need, but I-need must be secured, too.
The dead end of Junior Seau's CTE: How do you fix your crumbling life when the tool to fix your life is your mind, your brain, yet the chief culprit in your downfall is corruption of your brain's workings (broken hardware, software errors).
Ray Mears ties an "Arab-style headdress" to shade his head for desert survival.
The ADA's How to floss.
Best Yet garden combination pasta sauce is surprisingly good.
Salty egg and onion fried rice, fatty country pork rib (broiled and grilled with onions), and bone broth is a decadent meal.
I tried a bachelor stew with ground turkey instead of the canned salmon. It's better with the canned salmon and salmon oil. Bachelor stew made with canned salmon is decadent. Made with the ground turkey, it's just soup.
When deciding what flavors to add, keep in mind it's not a sliding scale where more flavors equals better flavor and fewer flavors equals worse flavor. Plain is a flavor, too. Think in terms of distinct flavor profiles, not comparitively more or less or better or worse.
The store-brand smoked hocks aren't bad at 1.49/lb. There's still some aftertaste, but it's better than the factory-brand smoked ham I bought a while back. Still, cooking my own pork is better.
Duncan Hines dark chocolate fudge brownie mix is unexpectedly weak flavored. Too bad I didn't grab a 2nd chewy fudge brownie mix instead. The dark chocolate fudge brownie mix instructs adding 1 large egg, 1/3 cup oil, and 1/3 cup water for chewy brownies, while the chewy fudge brownie mix instruct adding 2 large eggs, 1/4 cup water, and 3/4 cup oil for chewy brownies (the amounts differ for "cake like" or "cookie like" texture). I planned to exchange the 2nd box of dark chocolate fudge brownie mix, and would have, had the store not been sold out of chewy fudge brownie mix. Instead, I decided to experiment. Since the listed ingredients are the same for both brownie mixes, although it's implied the amounts of the various ingredients differ, I tried adding 2 eggs, 1/4 cup water, and 3/4 cup oil to the 2nd dark chocolate fudge brownie mix in order to find out whether the result would taste like chewy fudge brownies. Nope, still weak flavored. I'm adding grape jelly and sour cream for flavor.
The Salton works for making brownies and bannock. They fluff up like man-tou, probably because I use the 1 quart mixing bowl with water around it, so it cooks with wet steamer heat, not dry oven heat.
Farrelly brothers bowling comedy Kingpin is a classic.
Simpsons classics Homer's Barbershop Quartet and Last Exit to Springfield sped up to 15 minutes.
Laina, aka Overly Attached GF, has a youtube channel. Turns out she's an entertainer with an expressive face.
Jason Collins, the starting center on the fun, likeable Kidd-led Nets teams of the early 2000s, admitted he's gay. Good for him. However, the dark side of the story is that Collins dated Carolyn Moos for 8+ years from 2001 to 2009, when Collins broke off their engagement a month before their wedding. (Pic of her in college - cute girl.) Moos, born in 1978 and unmarried and childless at 34, invested her biologically prime years in Collins based on a lie. Dated 8+ years, engaged - did they not have sex?
I wonder how Monica Seles is doing these days? I had a small crush on her back in the day. She seemed like an unaffected, down-to-earth, approachably cute, nice girl who happened to be great at tennis. Hm. As far as I know, she hasn't married nor had kids either.
'Yeah? You and what army?' It's true. If you're going to battle, you need an army, or at least a gang. Righteousness ought to be enough to compete, but in the real world it is not even close.
Keanu invokes The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost and wonders whether he should pursue his dream and thereby choose the risk of freedom over the guarantee of security. As always, the harder right is weighed against the easier wrong.
Oh, my broken heart.
The change must be internal this time.
Eric
Wednesday, 3 April 2013
Thoughts of the day
From the New Yorker, an update on the Horace Mann sex abuse and cover-up scandal.
This NY Times story via SWJ matches my prognostication and encouragement for CU ROTC+ to prepare Columbia cadets to carry out small-scale, surgically delicate missions.
At the Foreign Policy article on OIF, a commentator recommended to me his 'Why We Fight' explanation for OIF.
The villain: The author of this piece also authored the misinformation/propaganda campaign against President Bush and the Iraq mission. In the Salon piece, he equates libertarian militia with Islamic terrorists. Here is a diluted echo of the same theme by Professor Nacos.
The lectures by Professor Iván Szelényi for Yale course Foundations of Modern Social Thought (SOCY 151) are on youtube. Course page here. According to the Nietzsche lecture, Thus Spake Zarathustra sounds like the Nietzsche book I ought to read.
You know you're a Ray Mears fan when . . . I'm enjoying his Wild Britain series, despite that it's a nature show andnot only occasionally a survival show.
An accounting trick to create the appearance of lowered spending in the short term is to eat into the capital reserve. If usage doesn't go down yet spending goes down, the difference has to be made up somewhere.
The classic appeals of persuasive writing - pathos (emotional), logos (pragmatic, also implying scientific or statistical evidence), and ethos (ethical) - seem to match the concept of id, ego, and super-ego.
TED talks tidbits. The organizational and family success formula is core and progress. On fear of failure and dabbling.
The growth of Lebron James as a basketball player, as he's profiled in this Grantland piece, reminds me of the artist Louis Comfort Tiffany who made the most of his internal and external advantages.
The moral of the story of Kobe Bryant's failed rap career is that internal vision, talent, motivation, and dedication are necessary but not sufficient. To realize a goal, external steps from the alpha (α or Α) to omega (ω or Ω) must be achieved. On that journey into the world, outside influences, including people with supportive intentions, can misdirect and undermine the project even when the originator hits all of the marks in his plan. The outside factors that click into place in the right or wrong way are normally referred to as luck or fate. Bryant's pursuit of basketball greatness succeeded, but his pursuit of hip-hop greatness failed despite his similar passion and drive for both.
Christopher Knight, the North Pond Hermit who survived in the Maine woods alone for 27 years by foraging (stealing), was captured by an enterprising game warden who set a trap with a motion sensor camera and alarm. Knight doesn't know why he walked into the woods in April 1986. He just did. Impulse, feeling.
Pro wrestling jargon for a good guy going bad is a face (to) heel turn and a bad guy becoming good is a heel (to) face turn.
Funny youtube series: Retarded Policeman.
The Four Quarters, a Canadian singing group that joined together in HS, sing Pachelbel's Canon in D acapella style. While other videos show off the girls' superior skill and harmony, this one stands out as a beautiful classic that manages to highlight each girl in contrast to their usual trade-off of feature and background roles. What stands out most in the video is the display of modest feminine grace. The unaffected placid harmony and joy in their music and demeanor is enchanting. I hope that quality endures in the girls' performances as they mature. It's special and perhaps even marketable. The light doo-wop "In Time", which was written for them, is catchy. The glimpse into their world supports the notion that outward confidence correlates with outward appearance.
Talented fun Gen Y musical collective cdza or collective cadenza (h/t) pinpoints the sudden vulgar turn of male and female "love" songs in the middle 1990s. (The gorgeous girl singer is Dylan C Moore.)
Don't sleep on Gen Y. I went to college with these kids. They'll remake the country in some ways perhaps uncomfortable for us Gen-Xers, but the Gen-Y kids are more aware and clear headed than we give them credit for being. They have fewer hang-ups than we do. And they are talented. If any American generation can figure out the changing world order, it's them. They might be the last best hope of our country.
HS senior vents in the Wall Street Journal about being rejected by colleges. I predict she will go to law school.
It takes 12 feet or 144 inches of 1/16" diameter accessory cord to make a 39-inch long 3-strand braid. Inefficient but still cool. Right now, I'm using the braid to dummy-cord my laptop's power cable.
The shooter's cliche of "slow is smooth, smooth is fast" also applies to getting out of bed. I was scissoring my legs and swung my right knee into the wood corner of my bedside table. Ouch. Fortunately, there's a little bit of give or else I might have broken something. At least, I don't believe anything is broken in my knee. It's stiff and sore, though.
My Sunbeam electric fryer works since the heating indicator bulb broke, but I'm convinced the temperature is lower, maybe by as much as 100 degrees. My proof is that anything I try to brown with it, such as onions or bacon, is browning much slower than before. The pizza bannock is taking longer to bake and the bottom isn't searing like before. Where my pizza bannock was done in 5-7 minutes before, it's now taking 20 minutes and the crust is lighter colored. Whatever mechanism regulates the temperature is wonky, too - it takes too long to turn back on and makes loud clicking noises. I'm chagrined that the Sunbeam worked for as long as 60 years and then broke while I was using it.
My latest pizza bannock in my Sunbeam failed. The whole middle of the pizza bannock crust stuck fast to the fryer, which hadn't happened before. Part of the blame may be spreading the dough using an oily spoon on a cold unoiled fryer, rather than placing the dough on the heated fryer and flipping and pressing on the crust. I've spread the dough cold before without the bannock sticking like it was glued though.
The burner has a higher temperature than the fryer and with the grill pan works well for making pizza bannock. I eventually may need to buy a cooking pan for the burner if the fryer gets worse.
Everything I cook in my Nesco is cooked in a mixing bowl because the "non-stick" Cookwell flakes.
I adopted the 1-handed 2-utensil tong technique, with one utensil locked in my pinky, ring finger, and middle finger and the other utensil held by my thumb and index finger, after my latest meat flipping fiasco. I was broiling pork in my toaster oven, which is shoulder level, and flipping the pork with a fork when the pork slid off the fork and dropped on the floor. It's the second time I've done that. During the clatter, I caused 2nd degree burns (self diagnosed by the blisters) on the inside of my right wrist and below my left index finger. From now on, I'll use the pseudo-tongs to flip the meat.
Rite Aid, Western Beef, and NSA weekly circulars are on-line.
I'm tempted to buy pork that's on sale for 88 cents a lb. The catch is that it's only sold in a bulk size. I don't know that I'm willing to apportion and freeze 10+ pounds of pork.
I'm struggling to finish the beef liver. I have no doubt it's healthy. It's filling and packed with iron and protein. I'm just not a fan of the taste. The liver ruined what should have been my best pizza bannock to date, made with onions and spinach with sauce and mozzarella. I figured I had enough flavors in the pizza bannock to cover for the liver. I was wrong. I used another slab of liver in my latest bachelor meat sauce pasta. It's still unpleasant tasting, but there's enough flavor in the pasta to cover for the liver. A benefit of adding liver to my pasta is I'm eating it slower.
Speaking of which, my second latest bachelor meat sauce pasta: mix of Barilla elbows (n.41) and farfalle (n.65) pasta, about 8 oz of frozen Perdue fresh ground chicken, about 4 oz slab of beef liver, 1 can 28 oz Marzano crushed tomatoes (works well), 1 can 15.25 oz Green Giant whole kernel sweet corn, 1 box 10 oz Best Yet frozen whole leaf spinach, 1 yellow onion.
I used the remainder of the beef liver in my latest bachelor meat sauce pasta. The notable difference is I used the Nesco and 3-quart mixing bowl to boil the sauce rather than use the Sunbeam to make a a sloppy-joe-style sauce. When boiled, the ground turkey atomized in the sauce rather than clump into chunks as ground meat does when fried. Another more-subtle difference is the lack of cooking oil, which I didn't use, and char flavor in the boiled meat sauce. I'm glad I've finished the liver. Unless I find a very reliable recipe that can overcome the liver taste, I don't anticipate buying liver again.
Cooking Western Beef frozen chopped spinach with my rice works, except I've found that frozen chopped spinach has lost its taste. Frozen whole spinach tastes better.
I've been wearing down a Cook's traditional bone-in, Hickory smoked, super trim, butt portion ham and water product, cured with water, dextrose, salt, sodium phosphate, and sodium nitrite, 4.920 lb chunk that I bought on sale at 1.49/lb. They're not kidding about "23% of weight is added ingredients." The ham shrinks when cooked. The package says "ready-to-eat" but also instructs to "heat through" before eating. I've eaten a few pieces without cooking them. The ham tastes okay but I'm not fond of the unpleasant after-feeling from eating the ham, which I don't get from eating pork that I cooked myself. I think I'll stick to buying raw pork from now on. Given that I need to heat the ham anyway, there's no advantage to it.
Pillsbury chocolate fudge brownie mix brownies are okay.
Sour cream is versatile: butter substitute on toast, pasta creamer, brownie topping, cheese substitute for pizza bannock (in a pinch). Cue the grandmotherly voice-over in the Frank's Red Hot radio spot: "I put that beep on everything."
I've eaten a pizza bannock and a bowl of spinach, onion, and egg boiled rice (using the Salton rice cooker and 1 quart mixing bowl, turned out not bad) today, and I'm still hungry. I'm boiling the remainder of the Perciatelli pasta now in the Salton rice cooker (broken into thirds to fit). Update: Pasta with sauce, hot sauce, and sour cream. Yum. That should hold me over for the night.
The Perciatelli pasta looks interesting, like exceptionally thick spaghetti, but it actually has a hollow core. I don't know the purpose of the hollow core or whether it's just a different look.
Roger Ebert (RIP) advocated for rice cooker cooking and I agree. I'm satisfied with my bachelor cookware that co-stars my rice cooker in the ensemble, though I mourn my wounded Sunbeam electric frying pan, which had been the star of the set. With my Sunbeam diminished and maybe dying, I may shift the load and broaden my range of cooking with the Salton, which I've used to cook rice, pasta, soup, and boil my bone broth.
A dumpling skin recipe.
Bachelor stew with the canned salmon and pasta sauce turns into bachelor salmon sauce. Not bad, but not really bachelor stew.
Young husband records his cute crying wife. He stopped updating their web presence in 2010. I wonder whether he stopped because she changed on him like Kate changed on Jon. Update: I don't know whether she changed on him, but the husband has continued his web presence.
Slick.
Claire Abbott apparently is the new Angie Varona. Just remember, young lady, with great power comes great responsibility.
Rollo linked to an interesting collection of photos showing porn actresses before and after their stage make-up is applied. The popularity of tattoos among young women saddens me. It's not attractive and interferes with their natural beauty. I disagree with Rollo's harsh downgrade of Zarena sans make-up. Rilee's appearance changed more for the worse.
Women can transform their appearance and demeanor to a degree that's beyond most men who aren't actors or con artists. Men change like driving a manual shift, while women change like driving an automatic. The unreliability of judging girls' actual looks through the illusion of make-up reminded me of a recent post by Emma observing that, contrary to the worldview espoused by PUAs, most men assign high value to traits in women besides looks. I agree with that. Looks matter, but compatibility and good-womanly traits matter just as much or more. Victor Pride of Bold and Determined touched on the subject of a girl's appearance and demeanor in his post How to Meet Shy Girls. (More here.) If her looks are good enough, that's good enough if she brings other valuable qualities to the table. Besides, I like girls who can dress down and relaxed and dress sharp and made up as the occasion calls for it.
Emma also talks about faking normalcy for the sake of others. There's what I desire from the world and there's what I want to give to the world. As an INFP, my approach has been to harmonize both sides of the equation with my inner self. I can give or push to the world on my terms. But self-centered integrity is not a realistic way to draw or pull what I desire from the world. To pull what I want from the world, I need to be better at faking normalcy and communicating on other people's wavelengths. How does the other person sense and process me? What does the other person want? What makes the other person happy? What cues are the keys that will unlock the reactions I want? How should I present myself and what image should I portray for the other person's sake rather than my sake? One answer.
British mom who loves her husband resents having had children but was a dutiful, conscientious mom nonetheless. Just not a loving mom. I have some suspicion that she is a loving mom and her over-the-top essay is a covert attempt to comfort her daughter who has been bed-ridden with MS and under her mom's full-time care since age 23 and is now 31. In other words, it's unlikely at this point her daughter will have her own children. The essay may be mom's heavy-handed way of trying to reassure her daughter that the alternative to becoming a mom is okay, too.
Judgybitch on Husband ≠ Friend.
I like this blog. Happycrow is red pill, but not an ideologue. I believe that's the right approach. The red pill is not a religion that one joins reciting a fixed catechism. It's about the truth, less universal Truth than emotionally and critically filtered, custom-fitted personal truth.
An interesting discussion deconstructing the popular cultural concept of romantic love. I think the commentators go too far in their attempt to discredit romantic love by revealing it as a deliberately manipulative social construct. They're like radical feminists in that regard. There is some pushback within the comment thread. I believe romantic love is real, and I want it, though I agree with the cynics that the popular cultural concept of romantic love has been harmfully misleading.
Liz asks for advice from men on raising a son from middle school through high school.
The questions are who am I, love, what do I do, in that order, albeit with some shifting and combining. I don't feel that I can answer the 3rd question until I've answered the 1st two.
For some, the red pill is rational and logically reasoned. For others, the red pill is koanic and intuitive.
Mastery learning goal orientation and growth mindset.
Eric
This NY Times story via SWJ matches my prognostication and encouragement for CU ROTC+ to prepare Columbia cadets to carry out small-scale, surgically delicate missions.
At the Foreign Policy article on OIF, a commentator recommended to me his 'Why We Fight' explanation for OIF.
The villain: The author of this piece also authored the misinformation/propaganda campaign against President Bush and the Iraq mission. In the Salon piece, he equates libertarian militia with Islamic terrorists. Here is a diluted echo of the same theme by Professor Nacos.
The lectures by Professor Iván Szelényi for Yale course Foundations of Modern Social Thought (SOCY 151) are on youtube. Course page here. According to the Nietzsche lecture, Thus Spake Zarathustra sounds like the Nietzsche book I ought to read.
You know you're a Ray Mears fan when . . . I'm enjoying his Wild Britain series, despite that it's a nature show and
An accounting trick to create the appearance of lowered spending in the short term is to eat into the capital reserve. If usage doesn't go down yet spending goes down, the difference has to be made up somewhere.
The classic appeals of persuasive writing - pathos (emotional), logos (pragmatic, also implying scientific or statistical evidence), and ethos (ethical) - seem to match the concept of id, ego, and super-ego.
TED talks tidbits. The organizational and family success formula is core and progress. On fear of failure and dabbling.
The growth of Lebron James as a basketball player, as he's profiled in this Grantland piece, reminds me of the artist Louis Comfort Tiffany who made the most of his internal and external advantages.
The moral of the story of Kobe Bryant's failed rap career is that internal vision, talent, motivation, and dedication are necessary but not sufficient. To realize a goal, external steps from the alpha (α or Α) to omega (ω or Ω) must be achieved. On that journey into the world, outside influences, including people with supportive intentions, can misdirect and undermine the project even when the originator hits all of the marks in his plan. The outside factors that click into place in the right or wrong way are normally referred to as luck or fate. Bryant's pursuit of basketball greatness succeeded, but his pursuit of hip-hop greatness failed despite his similar passion and drive for both.
Christopher Knight, the North Pond Hermit who survived in the Maine woods alone for 27 years by foraging (stealing), was captured by an enterprising game warden who set a trap with a motion sensor camera and alarm. Knight doesn't know why he walked into the woods in April 1986. He just did. Impulse, feeling.
Pro wrestling jargon for a good guy going bad is a face (to) heel turn and a bad guy becoming good is a heel (to) face turn.
Funny youtube series: Retarded Policeman.
The Four Quarters, a Canadian singing group that joined together in HS, sing Pachelbel's Canon in D acapella style. While other videos show off the girls' superior skill and harmony, this one stands out as a beautiful classic that manages to highlight each girl in contrast to their usual trade-off of feature and background roles. What stands out most in the video is the display of modest feminine grace. The unaffected placid harmony and joy in their music and demeanor is enchanting. I hope that quality endures in the girls' performances as they mature. It's special and perhaps even marketable. The light doo-wop "In Time", which was written for them, is catchy. The glimpse into their world supports the notion that outward confidence correlates with outward appearance.
Talented fun Gen Y musical collective cdza or collective cadenza (h/t) pinpoints the sudden vulgar turn of male and female "love" songs in the middle 1990s. (The gorgeous girl singer is Dylan C Moore.)
Don't sleep on Gen Y. I went to college with these kids. They'll remake the country in some ways perhaps uncomfortable for us Gen-Xers, but the Gen-Y kids are more aware and clear headed than we give them credit for being. They have fewer hang-ups than we do. And they are talented. If any American generation can figure out the changing world order, it's them. They might be the last best hope of our country.
HS senior vents in the Wall Street Journal about being rejected by colleges. I predict she will go to law school.
It takes 12 feet or 144 inches of 1/16" diameter accessory cord to make a 39-inch long 3-strand braid. Inefficient but still cool. Right now, I'm using the braid to dummy-cord my laptop's power cable.
The shooter's cliche of "slow is smooth, smooth is fast" also applies to getting out of bed. I was scissoring my legs and swung my right knee into the wood corner of my bedside table. Ouch. Fortunately, there's a little bit of give or else I might have broken something. At least, I don't believe anything is broken in my knee. It's stiff and sore, though.
My Sunbeam electric fryer works since the heating indicator bulb broke, but I'm convinced the temperature is lower, maybe by as much as 100 degrees. My proof is that anything I try to brown with it, such as onions or bacon, is browning much slower than before. The pizza bannock is taking longer to bake and the bottom isn't searing like before. Where my pizza bannock was done in 5-7 minutes before, it's now taking 20 minutes and the crust is lighter colored. Whatever mechanism regulates the temperature is wonky, too - it takes too long to turn back on and makes loud clicking noises. I'm chagrined that the Sunbeam worked for as long as 60 years and then broke while I was using it.
My latest pizza bannock in my Sunbeam failed. The whole middle of the pizza bannock crust stuck fast to the fryer, which hadn't happened before. Part of the blame may be spreading the dough using an oily spoon on a cold unoiled fryer, rather than placing the dough on the heated fryer and flipping and pressing on the crust. I've spread the dough cold before without the bannock sticking like it was glued though.
The burner has a higher temperature than the fryer and with the grill pan works well for making pizza bannock. I eventually may need to buy a cooking pan for the burner if the fryer gets worse.
Everything I cook in my Nesco is cooked in a mixing bowl because the "non-stick" Cookwell flakes.
I adopted the 1-handed 2-utensil tong technique, with one utensil locked in my pinky, ring finger, and middle finger and the other utensil held by my thumb and index finger, after my latest meat flipping fiasco. I was broiling pork in my toaster oven, which is shoulder level, and flipping the pork with a fork when the pork slid off the fork and dropped on the floor. It's the second time I've done that. During the clatter, I caused 2nd degree burns (self diagnosed by the blisters) on the inside of my right wrist and below my left index finger. From now on, I'll use the pseudo-tongs to flip the meat.
Rite Aid, Western Beef, and NSA weekly circulars are on-line.
I'm tempted to buy pork that's on sale for 88 cents a lb. The catch is that it's only sold in a bulk size. I don't know that I'm willing to apportion and freeze 10+ pounds of pork.
I'm struggling to finish the beef liver. I have no doubt it's healthy. It's filling and packed with iron and protein. I'm just not a fan of the taste. The liver ruined what should have been my best pizza bannock to date, made with onions and spinach with sauce and mozzarella. I figured I had enough flavors in the pizza bannock to cover for the liver. I was wrong. I used another slab of liver in my latest bachelor meat sauce pasta. It's still unpleasant tasting, but there's enough flavor in the pasta to cover for the liver. A benefit of adding liver to my pasta is I'm eating it slower.
Speaking of which, my second latest bachelor meat sauce pasta: mix of Barilla elbows (n.41) and farfalle (n.65) pasta, about 8 oz of frozen Perdue fresh ground chicken, about 4 oz slab of beef liver, 1 can 28 oz Marzano crushed tomatoes (works well), 1 can 15.25 oz Green Giant whole kernel sweet corn, 1 box 10 oz Best Yet frozen whole leaf spinach, 1 yellow onion.
I used the remainder of the beef liver in my latest bachelor meat sauce pasta. The notable difference is I used the Nesco and 3-quart mixing bowl to boil the sauce rather than use the Sunbeam to make a a sloppy-joe-style sauce. When boiled, the ground turkey atomized in the sauce rather than clump into chunks as ground meat does when fried. Another more-subtle difference is the lack of cooking oil, which I didn't use, and char flavor in the boiled meat sauce. I'm glad I've finished the liver. Unless I find a very reliable recipe that can overcome the liver taste, I don't anticipate buying liver again.
Cooking Western Beef frozen chopped spinach with my rice works, except I've found that frozen chopped spinach has lost its taste. Frozen whole spinach tastes better.
I've been wearing down a Cook's traditional bone-in, Hickory smoked, super trim, butt portion ham and water product, cured with water, dextrose, salt, sodium phosphate, and sodium nitrite, 4.920 lb chunk that I bought on sale at 1.49/lb. They're not kidding about "23% of weight is added ingredients." The ham shrinks when cooked. The package says "ready-to-eat" but also instructs to "heat through" before eating. I've eaten a few pieces without cooking them. The ham tastes okay but I'm not fond of the unpleasant after-feeling from eating the ham, which I don't get from eating pork that I cooked myself. I think I'll stick to buying raw pork from now on. Given that I need to heat the ham anyway, there's no advantage to it.
Pillsbury chocolate fudge brownie mix brownies are okay.
Sour cream is versatile: butter substitute on toast, pasta creamer, brownie topping, cheese substitute for pizza bannock (in a pinch). Cue the grandmotherly voice-over in the Frank's Red Hot radio spot: "I put that beep on everything."
I've eaten a pizza bannock and a bowl of spinach, onion, and egg boiled rice (using the Salton rice cooker and 1 quart mixing bowl, turned out not bad) today, and I'm still hungry. I'm boiling the remainder of the Perciatelli pasta now in the Salton rice cooker (broken into thirds to fit). Update: Pasta with sauce, hot sauce, and sour cream. Yum. That should hold me over for the night.
The Perciatelli pasta looks interesting, like exceptionally thick spaghetti, but it actually has a hollow core. I don't know the purpose of the hollow core or whether it's just a different look.
Roger Ebert (RIP) advocated for rice cooker cooking and I agree. I'm satisfied with my bachelor cookware that co-stars my rice cooker in the ensemble, though I mourn my wounded Sunbeam electric frying pan, which had been the star of the set. With my Sunbeam diminished and maybe dying, I may shift the load and broaden my range of cooking with the Salton, which I've used to cook rice, pasta, soup, and boil my bone broth.
A dumpling skin recipe.
Bachelor stew with the canned salmon and pasta sauce turns into bachelor salmon sauce. Not bad, but not really bachelor stew.
Young husband records his cute crying wife. He stopped updating their web presence in 2010. I wonder whether he stopped because she changed on him like Kate changed on Jon. Update: I don't know whether she changed on him, but the husband has continued his web presence.
Slick.
Claire Abbott apparently is the new Angie Varona. Just remember, young lady, with great power comes great responsibility.
Rollo linked to an interesting collection of photos showing porn actresses before and after their stage make-up is applied. The popularity of tattoos among young women saddens me. It's not attractive and interferes with their natural beauty. I disagree with Rollo's harsh downgrade of Zarena sans make-up. Rilee's appearance changed more for the worse.
Women can transform their appearance and demeanor to a degree that's beyond most men who aren't actors or con artists. Men change like driving a manual shift, while women change like driving an automatic. The unreliability of judging girls' actual looks through the illusion of make-up reminded me of a recent post by Emma observing that, contrary to the worldview espoused by PUAs, most men assign high value to traits in women besides looks. I agree with that. Looks matter, but compatibility and good-womanly traits matter just as much or more. Victor Pride of Bold and Determined touched on the subject of a girl's appearance and demeanor in his post How to Meet Shy Girls. (More here.) If her looks are good enough, that's good enough if she brings other valuable qualities to the table. Besides, I like girls who can dress down and relaxed and dress sharp and made up as the occasion calls for it.
Emma also talks about faking normalcy for the sake of others. There's what I desire from the world and there's what I want to give to the world. As an INFP, my approach has been to harmonize both sides of the equation with my inner self. I can give or push to the world on my terms. But self-centered integrity is not a realistic way to draw or pull what I desire from the world. To pull what I want from the world, I need to be better at faking normalcy and communicating on other people's wavelengths. How does the other person sense and process me? What does the other person want? What makes the other person happy? What cues are the keys that will unlock the reactions I want? How should I present myself and what image should I portray for the other person's sake rather than my sake? One answer.
British mom who loves her husband resents having had children but was a dutiful, conscientious mom nonetheless. Just not a loving mom. I have some suspicion that she is a loving mom and her over-the-top essay is a covert attempt to comfort her daughter who has been bed-ridden with MS and under her mom's full-time care since age 23 and is now 31. In other words, it's unlikely at this point her daughter will have her own children. The essay may be mom's heavy-handed way of trying to reassure her daughter that the alternative to becoming a mom is okay, too.
Judgybitch on Husband ≠ Friend.
I like this blog. Happycrow is red pill, but not an ideologue. I believe that's the right approach. The red pill is not a religion that one joins reciting a fixed catechism. It's about the truth, less universal Truth than emotionally and critically filtered, custom-fitted personal truth.
An interesting discussion deconstructing the popular cultural concept of romantic love. I think the commentators go too far in their attempt to discredit romantic love by revealing it as a deliberately manipulative social construct. They're like radical feminists in that regard. There is some pushback within the comment thread. I believe romantic love is real, and I want it, though I agree with the cynics that the popular cultural concept of romantic love has been harmfully misleading.
Liz asks for advice from men on raising a son from middle school through high school.
The questions are who am I, love, what do I do, in that order, albeit with some shifting and combining. I don't feel that I can answer the 3rd question until I've answered the 1st two.
For some, the red pill is rational and logically reasoned. For others, the red pill is koanic and intuitive.
Mastery learning goal orientation and growth mindset.
Eric
Thursday, 14 March 2013
Thoughts of the day
Yeah, I know. This is 3 in a row. I'll eventually put up a topical post again rather than another accreting conglomerate thoughts of the day post. My next post likely will be my thoughts on the 10-year anniversary of the commencement of Operation Iraqi Freedom, which promises to be an infuriating spinfest in the media. I'll most likely compile links and posts not included in my Perspective on OIF post and touch on President Bush's idealistic liberal response to 9/11.
I offered my help for Uncle Jimbo's 10-year anniversary project. I hope he takes advantage of it.
I offered my perspective on OIF at RangerUp, too. They're running a fascinating series of personal accounts of Iraq battles they participated in.
Neo posts on a study about casualty numbers related to the Iraq mission. She notes that in the press on the study no clear distinction is made between casualties from American actions and casualties from terrorist actions, although the numbers are in the data. Also, Saddam's regime and the terrorists caused many more deaths in Iraq than the Americans.
In my comment on Neo's post about public polls on the Iraq mission, I emphasize the weakness of the IR realist opposition to it.
Mad Minerva plugs my OIF 10th anniversary posts.
I weigh in at Small Wars journal.
I weigh in Victor David Hansen's article at National Review.
Morticia comments on INFP men. She offers a glimmer of hope with ISTJ women as a possible MBTI match for INFP men. It turns out that Isabel Myers of Myers-Briggs identifies as an INFP. No wonder INFP descriptions are uncanny.
A loving tribute to INFP icon Calvin and Hobbes.
Words are superficial. They don't convey depth of meaning. Wordsmiths with enough skill, like painters and artisans of other two-dimensional media, can create an illusion of depth, but the illusion may not be accurate.
A film critic's post on beautiful women reminds me of some of my posts.
Overheard in the supermarket checkout line: The lady in front of me was going on to the cashier about kids today having their own children too young and how she went to college and traveled before getting married at age 25 before having her son. Then she dropped a doozy. She said she got married, had a son, got divorced, then got a wife. I thought she may have misspoken due to excited speech, but she confirmed she knew she was gay when she married a man, but she wanted a child. Once she got her child, she got rid of the man. Presumably, the man she tricked is on the hook for child support and perhaps alimony. He did get a son out of it at least, although if he was lied to in the 1st place, who knows if the son is actually her ex-husband's. Scary duplicity.
I bought beef liver on sale (.99/lb) and fried it with onions. It wasn't bad, but I cooked too much of it. It cooks up fast. There's a limit of how much liver-tasting liver I can eat before it becomes gross. I'm soaking the remainder of the uncooked liver in whole milk which supposedly blunts the flavor. A liver sandwich with a generous amount of hot sauce and ketchup disguises the liver flavor. The milk marinade may have helped a little.
I made a pizza bannock with liver, mozzarella, and tomato sauce, with a generous amount of hot sauce and black pepper. I used the griddle pan covered with the fryer cover, which just happens to be a near-perfect fit for the griddle pan, for the oven effect. The liver worked okay on the pizza bannock. Basically, the more flavors I use to disguise the liver flavor the better.
Slim pickings for sale items in the meat department today. I picked up a package of country-style cut pork at regular price and chicken gizzards (.99/lb). The boneless sirloin cut pork on sale was slightly more expensive than the country-style cut pork, 1.79/lb vs 1.69/lb, but may actually be cheaper by weight of meat alone. I want my bone broth, though. Chicken gizzard recipes say to boil them first to soften before frying. Update: The chicken gizzards cooked up okay, but it made me realize just how much flour breading, salt, and spices are used in fast-food chicken like KFC. I made bannock in the leftover gizzard cooking oil, and the bannock soaked it up like a sponge.
Brownies made from Betty Crocker dark chocolate brownie mix aren't bad.
Annoying is a plastic lid under my Sunbeam electric fryer, forgotten while making dinner. When I moved the fryer after cooking my dinner, there was the unpleasant surprise: one melted, holey lid, and plastic melted into the underside of the fryer. There was no smell. That stuff is hard to scrape off, and a good amount is still there.
Sad news: The charging light under the "off" on the handle of my Sunbeam electric fryer (aka controlled heat automatic frying pan) popped, sparked, smoked, and burned out while I was cooking my latest bachelor meat sauce pasta (pork, Hunts garlic & herb pasta sauce, corn, spinach, onions, elbows). I unscrewed the dial and the panel underneath the dial. The bulb doesn't appear replaceable. I don't believe I did anything to cause it to break, although I noticed that the rubber seal for the panel on the bulb side was loose and crumbled. I don't know whether that's significant or how it will affect future performance. Given that the fryer may be 60 years old, I guess the bulb had a pretty good run. I don't believe the temperature control will be affected by the loss of the light bulb. I hope.
I don't know whether I'm being paranoid, the burned out bulb has an effect, or I put the dial on wrong (so that the actual temp is lower than the indicated temp), but the temperature of the fryer seems lower and the fryer seems to turn off more. Update: I go back and forth on whether the temp is lower, but there is something wrong with the temperature regulator. It turns off too early and stays off too long, though it does turn back on.
Funny Simpsons vocabulary: Tontine.
This is how to do effective advocacy with a TED talk: lay the foundation with limited parameters, show your work with reasonable theory and factual evidence, minimize platitudes, anticipate questions such as old prohibitions on grazing and comparison to slash and burn technique, then advocate by framing the problem and making a reasonable proposal with a reasonable inference and conclusion. Allan Savory's "holistic management" that uses a controlled grazing solution for the specific problem of desertification of grasslands seems doable. The burger companies should jump on it. Many TED activists rely on emotional appeals that elicit applause but do not offer an apparently actionable task/condition/standard problem-solution proposal.
Other TED talks: Stewart Brand on the Jurassic Park-like engineered de-extinction of recently extinct species. His talk offers a lesson on industry networking and organization. Catarina Mota advocates the open-source bazaar model to spread future 'smart material' technologies among the makers in the masses to encourage popular innovation and experimentation.
Vox: "No doubt most men will dislike the need to anticipate, misdirect, and obfuscate when they would like nothing better than to bare their souls and be accepted for whom they truly are, warts and all. But the paradox of intersexual relations is that in order to be truly accepted, loved, and desired by a woman, a man must always keep a part of himself hidden well away from her."
1.5 hr UCSF talk: How can your brain turn anxiety into calmness. I've listened to about 15 min so far. The speaker says worry and anxiety activate different parts of the brain - worry is thinking, anxiety is emotional. Anxiety also has many physical effects. TED talk Barry Schwartz: The paradox of choice. Schwartz, a psychologist, says too much choice paralyzes us.
This TED talk by Rob Hopkins is about the need to transition to a life after oil. Our current civilization is based on oil, but the oil is running out. Hopkins favors resilience (recovery from shock or ability to change) over sustainability (continuation or not changing). Resilience is independent and modular with fallbacks. More than that, he promotes granular self-sufficiency. Very John Robb. Taleeb would be pleased, too. Sustainability is dependent and vulnerable. Hopkins wants to move away from the oil-based national and global economy.
Eric
I offered my help for Uncle Jimbo's 10-year anniversary project. I hope he takes advantage of it.
I offered my perspective on OIF at RangerUp, too. They're running a fascinating series of personal accounts of Iraq battles they participated in.
Neo posts on a study about casualty numbers related to the Iraq mission. She notes that in the press on the study no clear distinction is made between casualties from American actions and casualties from terrorist actions, although the numbers are in the data. Also, Saddam's regime and the terrorists caused many more deaths in Iraq than the Americans.
In my comment on Neo's post about public polls on the Iraq mission, I emphasize the weakness of the IR realist opposition to it.
Mad Minerva plugs my OIF 10th anniversary posts.
I weigh in at Small Wars journal.
I weigh in Victor David Hansen's article at National Review.
Morticia comments on INFP men. She offers a glimmer of hope with ISTJ women as a possible MBTI match for INFP men. It turns out that Isabel Myers of Myers-Briggs identifies as an INFP. No wonder INFP descriptions are uncanny.
A loving tribute to INFP icon Calvin and Hobbes.
Words are superficial. They don't convey depth of meaning. Wordsmiths with enough skill, like painters and artisans of other two-dimensional media, can create an illusion of depth, but the illusion may not be accurate.
A film critic's post on beautiful women reminds me of some of my posts.
Overheard in the supermarket checkout line: The lady in front of me was going on to the cashier about kids today having their own children too young and how she went to college and traveled before getting married at age 25 before having her son. Then she dropped a doozy. She said she got married, had a son, got divorced, then got a wife. I thought she may have misspoken due to excited speech, but she confirmed she knew she was gay when she married a man, but she wanted a child. Once she got her child, she got rid of the man. Presumably, the man she tricked is on the hook for child support and perhaps alimony. He did get a son out of it at least, although if he was lied to in the 1st place, who knows if the son is actually her ex-husband's. Scary duplicity.
I bought beef liver on sale (.99/lb) and fried it with onions. It wasn't bad, but I cooked too much of it. It cooks up fast. There's a limit of how much liver-tasting liver I can eat before it becomes gross. I'm soaking the remainder of the uncooked liver in whole milk which supposedly blunts the flavor. A liver sandwich with a generous amount of hot sauce and ketchup disguises the liver flavor. The milk marinade may have helped a little.
I made a pizza bannock with liver, mozzarella, and tomato sauce, with a generous amount of hot sauce and black pepper. I used the griddle pan covered with the fryer cover, which just happens to be a near-perfect fit for the griddle pan, for the oven effect. The liver worked okay on the pizza bannock. Basically, the more flavors I use to disguise the liver flavor the better.
Slim pickings for sale items in the meat department today. I picked up a package of country-style cut pork at regular price and chicken gizzards (.99/lb). The boneless sirloin cut pork on sale was slightly more expensive than the country-style cut pork, 1.79/lb vs 1.69/lb, but may actually be cheaper by weight of meat alone. I want my bone broth, though. Chicken gizzard recipes say to boil them first to soften before frying. Update: The chicken gizzards cooked up okay, but it made me realize just how much flour breading, salt, and spices are used in fast-food chicken like KFC. I made bannock in the leftover gizzard cooking oil, and the bannock soaked it up like a sponge.
Brownies made from Betty Crocker dark chocolate brownie mix aren't bad.
Annoying is a plastic lid under my Sunbeam electric fryer, forgotten while making dinner. When I moved the fryer after cooking my dinner, there was the unpleasant surprise: one melted, holey lid, and plastic melted into the underside of the fryer. There was no smell. That stuff is hard to scrape off, and a good amount is still there.
Sad news: The charging light under the "off" on the handle of my Sunbeam electric fryer (aka controlled heat automatic frying pan) popped, sparked, smoked, and burned out while I was cooking my latest bachelor meat sauce pasta (pork, Hunts garlic & herb pasta sauce, corn, spinach, onions, elbows). I unscrewed the dial and the panel underneath the dial. The bulb doesn't appear replaceable. I don't believe I did anything to cause it to break, although I noticed that the rubber seal for the panel on the bulb side was loose and crumbled. I don't know whether that's significant or how it will affect future performance. Given that the fryer may be 60 years old, I guess the bulb had a pretty good run. I don't believe the temperature control will be affected by the loss of the light bulb. I hope.
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I don't know whether I'm being paranoid, the burned out bulb has an effect, or I put the dial on wrong (so that the actual temp is lower than the indicated temp), but the temperature of the fryer seems lower and the fryer seems to turn off more. Update: I go back and forth on whether the temp is lower, but there is something wrong with the temperature regulator. It turns off too early and stays off too long, though it does turn back on.
Funny Simpsons vocabulary: Tontine.
This is how to do effective advocacy with a TED talk: lay the foundation with limited parameters, show your work with reasonable theory and factual evidence, minimize platitudes, anticipate questions such as old prohibitions on grazing and comparison to slash and burn technique, then advocate by framing the problem and making a reasonable proposal with a reasonable inference and conclusion. Allan Savory's "holistic management" that uses a controlled grazing solution for the specific problem of desertification of grasslands seems doable. The burger companies should jump on it. Many TED activists rely on emotional appeals that elicit applause but do not offer an apparently actionable task/condition/standard problem-solution proposal.
Other TED talks: Stewart Brand on the Jurassic Park-like engineered de-extinction of recently extinct species. His talk offers a lesson on industry networking and organization. Catarina Mota advocates the open-source bazaar model to spread future 'smart material' technologies among the makers in the masses to encourage popular innovation and experimentation.
Vox: "No doubt most men will dislike the need to anticipate, misdirect, and obfuscate when they would like nothing better than to bare their souls and be accepted for whom they truly are, warts and all. But the paradox of intersexual relations is that in order to be truly accepted, loved, and desired by a woman, a man must always keep a part of himself hidden well away from her."
1.5 hr UCSF talk: How can your brain turn anxiety into calmness. I've listened to about 15 min so far. The speaker says worry and anxiety activate different parts of the brain - worry is thinking, anxiety is emotional. Anxiety also has many physical effects. TED talk Barry Schwartz: The paradox of choice. Schwartz, a psychologist, says too much choice paralyzes us.
This TED talk by Rob Hopkins is about the need to transition to a life after oil. Our current civilization is based on oil, but the oil is running out. Hopkins favors resilience (recovery from shock or ability to change) over sustainability (continuation or not changing). Resilience is independent and modular with fallbacks. More than that, he promotes granular self-sufficiency. Very John Robb. Taleeb would be pleased, too. Sustainability is dependent and vulnerable. Hopkins wants to move away from the oil-based national and global economy.
Eric
Wednesday, 6 March 2013
This is my first story
"This is my first story" would be a good name for a blog, or something else. For now, I'll just bookmark it by using it as the title for this thoughts of the day post. It works okay and the label function ensures I can find this post later as a thoughts of the day post. It's from this, which I know about because of this. It touches my red-pill instinct, or blue-pill programming, to be a dad and 爸爸.
I bought Chips Ahoy chocolate chip cookies on sale. The size has shrunk to 13 ounces. When I opened the package, the amount of cookies in it just looked skimpy. I'm feeling stuffed from gorging on chocolate chip cookies and whole milk, and bachelor stew with an egg, in that order. I harbor the totally baseless belief that the eater's remorseful consequences of overindulging in junk food can be ameliorated by mixing the junk food with a reasonably nutritious meal in my stomach.
Chips Ahoy chocolate chip cookies isn't the only junk food that's shrinking. I bought 1 bag regular Doritos and 1 bag Cool Ranch Doritos on a BOGO sale (2/4.29 vs the usual sale price of 2/5 or 2/6). The regular Doritos bag has been redesigned. Sale + redesign indicates a shrunken product. Sure enough, the regular Doritos bag now contains 11 oz. The Cool Ranch is 11.5 oz. Wikipedia's Doritos page displays a 12 oz bag of regular Doritos with a 3.99 labeled price. This recipe blog post from October 15, 2012 displays a 11.5 oz regular Doritos bag. Perhaps not surprisingly, most results in a google image search show Doritos bags with the weight digitally removed. And, as usual, I have eater's remorse from the Doritos and followed the chips with a real meal.
I'll fill in descriptions of my latest bachelor stew and bachelor meat sauce pasta, which I gobbled up in 2 meals (or rather 1 string of eating that spanned 2 meals), later.
Bachelor meat sauce pasta: Using my Sunbeam frying pan and Salton rice cooker, about 10 oz ground pork ($1), 28 oz can Hunts petite sliced tomatoes ($1) boosted with some Ragu sauce (Hunts diced tomatoes has tomato juice, no tomato puree), 10 oz box frozen Birds Eye frozen chopped broccoli ($1), about .5 oz remainder of 5 oz jar of HeluvaGood prepared horseradish ($1.69? for the jar), about 2/3 of 16 oz box Ronzoni small shells ($1 box), 1 chopped yellow onion (.88 2 lb bag). The amount, as usual, filled the Sunbeam, which has a 9 cup or 72 oz capacity. I started eating it at breakfast and kept picking at it until it was gone by lunch. It's a reliable comfort-food dish.
Bachelor stew: Using my 3 quart mixing bowl, Nesco, and Salton rice cooker, 14.75 oz can Icy Point pink salmon ($3), 18.5 oz can Italian-style Wedding (meatballs, carrots, and spinach in chicken broth) Progresso soup ($1.50), 10 oz box Best Yet frozen whole leaf spinach ($1), about 6 oz remainder of 24 oz jar Old World Style Traditional Ragu sauce ($1), 1 chopped yellow onion (.88 2 lb bag), 1 cup cooked rice ($10 20 lb bag). I later added about 32 oz of porkbone broth, but I don't think it made a difference from water. The stew costs more than my meat sauce pasta, but it makes for decadent eating.
Boneless pork sirloin chops - yum. I bought a 2.23 lb chunk on sale for $1.59/lb, rubbed on some seasoning salt and pepper, put it in the Nesco and left it alone to cook. 45 minutes later, tender meat. Easy. Pork has emerged as my favorite of the 3 meats. Pork is savory, forgiving to cook, and filling. Pork sears well. Beef is the most expensive of the 3 meats. It's not forgiving to cook and too easy to overcook. Beef tastes good when it's right, but it's tasteless when I get it wrong. Granted, I'm buying cheap cuts of beef, which makes a difference. Chicken is the cheapest of the 3 meats. It's forgiving to cook; I've overcooked chicken with much too high a temp for much too long and it still tasted like chicken. I like thigh meat the best. The downside is chicken is the least filling of the 3 meats; it's like the Wonderbread of meat.
I bought a 12 oz bag of BacalaRico Choice Boned Salted Alaska Pollock Fillets on sale for $2.50. These instructions on pan frying fish fillets seem simple enough. I'm just going to flour and fry the fillets in the Sunbeam, not egg and bread them. Update: I followed the instructions and soaked the fillets in water, changing the water 3 times, but they were still salty - over-seasoned salty, not preserved-in-salt salty. I don't know that it's worth the higher cost and trouble preparing compared to other meats, but the fish was edible at least. The Icy Point salmon is better. The flouring became sloppy because the fillets were still wet from soaking and turned the flour into dough. The flouring also didn't stick to the fish as I fried them, and I ended up eating fish and chips.
Bachelor cooking tips. My best method of cooking pork has been to broil it in my toaster oven, then sear it on my griddle pan and burner. I chopped up an onion and cooked some pieces on the griddle pan with the pork. However, I put the onions on the griddle pan too early, so they burned black. Next time, I'll put the onions and pork on the pan at the same time. Baking in the Nesco tends to dry out the pork while making for tender chicken - go figure; I haven't tried to bake my beef yet. Cooking too much rice + leftover chopped onions = egg-and-onion fried rice tomorrow. Okay, I purposely cooked too much rice for one meal because I'm looking forward to my comfort-food fried rice. Adding vinegar to bone broth gives it a sweet-and-sour soup kick (so that's how they do it). I had been saving the chicken, pork, and beef bones I boiled for bone broth for a reboil in order to pull out any remaining nutrients. When I roughly filled about half a 32 oz container with once-boiled bones, I boiled them all together in my 3 quart mixing bowl and Nesco. The resulting broth was thick and flavorful. Reboiling bones 2-3 times for bone broth softens and breaks down the outer bone and cartilege beyond just releasing the oils from the bone marrow. I've read that some restaurants boil bones for 24 hours and some home cooks boil bones for 4 hours in a pressure cooker to make their bone broth. It's reasonable to assume that boiling bones in my Salton rice cooker won't extract everything digestible from the bones the first time.
Keoni Galt, who has compelling thoughts on industrial food, recommends bone broth to ward off colds. Coincidentally, I haven't caught a cold since I started drinking bone broth and I usually get sick at least once in the winter.
I hadn't recorded before how much I spend on food. I wanted to find out how much it costs to feed myself so I started saving my receipts. The early returns are in:
It's a start. The data isn't reliable yet as far as projecting my spending. My October and November numbers are too low because they don't include all my eating out and I don't trust I saved all my receipts. My December number is higher because I was conscientiously saving my receipts, changing my eating routine, and paying more for same. My January and February numbers are more reliable for projection. I haven't had a budget. Before I set a budget, I want to establish a baseline by finding out how much I spend just by being moderate, buying on sale, and only minimally eating out. My diet has featured a lot of meat (beef, chicken, pork), milk, pasta, bread, bannock, and rice. I buy very little eat-in and take-out anymore, but I still regularly indulge in sweet and salty junk food. Cold whole milk and sweet cereal (eg, Post Cocoa Pebbles) is an irresistable combination. Milk good. Milk + sweet cereal bad.
The Basal Metabolic Rate, or the amount of energy or calories used by the body just being alive, is encouraging.
The History Channel Life and After People series producers obviously were big fans of Anatolian shepherd dogs. They sound like my kind of dog in their devotion to duty, steady temperament, and independent thinking. This episode features the breed, which is funny because the episode is actually about the fate of religious and other buildings if they're deprived of human maintenance. The gushing praise of the Anatolian shepherd brought to mind the LTC Dave Grossman essay On Sheep, Wolves and Sheepdogs that's a favorite of soldiers and cops.
An aspect of soldiering that spoils men is it is intrinsically meaningful work. When I was one, I was sure everything I did, most of all what I did with other soldiers, mattered. Since a soldier is a soldier 24/7, a meaningful life is just normal. Of course, the meaning is conferred with the uniform; it isn't self-determined. It's like a CIF or weapon issue. Soldiers don't own it and don't take it with them when they leave the uniform, except for their memories and, if they want, the Army values.
Soldiering suits INFPs, at least short term, because of "Mission first, Soldiers always"; it is a humanistic, fraternally bonding, paternally caring, values based, and idealistic profession. There's a lot of love in soldiering. When I decided to join the military, I chose the Army over the Air Force and Navy because they seemed designed primarily around technology (planes and ships) while the Army seemed designed around people.
What are the connections among the Marxist Frankfurt School, Modernity, feminine imperative, feminism, and Mencius Moldbug's Cathedral?
Red pill round-up: OWC tears apart nice guys (h/t Morticia), Sunshine Mary explains why she shut down her blog, Judgybitch offers wife-choosing advice to single men, Stingray opines on raising her son to be a Man, and Novaseeker helps another blogger define zeta masculinity. (Yeah, I don't know what "zeta" means, either.)
While red-pill men's blogs are more nuts-and-bolts and actionable, red-pill women's blogs, like this one, are growing on me with their insight from the woman's perspective. This red-pill woman's blog recommends this men's clothing and grooming blog. Morticia says she's an INFP, which means of course I have to pay special attention to her blog. This one has a links-heavy post on MB types and compatibilities. Emma the Emo.
Caveat: Red-pill women ≠ red-pill men ≠ red-pill me, for that matter. The red pill "sphere" has points in common, but it is not the same across demographics nor individually. With a few notable exceptions, red-pill women are not supporting men's interests exclusively but rather want social gender rules reset to support their womanly interests by nurturing healthier complementary gender roles. For example. That's fair and worthy of support, but it behooves red-pill men to know the difference. Many (not all) red-pill men want a similar rule set reset or at least define their red pill according to male-female relations, albeit from a masculine orientation. MGTOW red pill is different. MGTOWs share the masculine orientation with other red-pill men but MGTOW is introverted and eschews complementary male-female goals. The shared masculine orientation and nature, however, means MGTOW red-pill men and complementarian red-pill men can cross over.
According to The Atlantic, educated upwardly mobile girls in their 20s are finding that their instinct for coupling is clashing with their feminist indoctrination. Feminist reaction, spin, here. Blame the Cathedral. Like the Pemon matriarch explained that her traditional skills will die with her, children are being socialized in school so that politically correct values, norms, knowledge, and aspirations are displacing family and tribal heritage. Girls are being molded to be something other than traditional natural women, ie, future matriarchs.
In addition to blogging about food, Keoni Galt is an MGTOW who's a protecting and providing husband and father, so he's an FM- (Family Man) GTOW. He discusses his withdrawal from popular partisan politics. I don't agree with him that to be political for a regular guy is to be a useful idiot for a cabalistic conspiracy. I agree to the extent that regular guys, including me, are usually out of their depth with issues that are more layered and complicated than is represented in popular partisan politics. I've never identified with the Republicans nor the Democrats, but I do care about their effect on issues I care about. I agree with Galt that "The Manosphere is a clearinghouse for TRUTH. aka "The Red Pill"."
Considering the arena, I think about binary alternatives, zero sum, adversarial, zealous advocacy, tribal and competitive, false premises, false choices, false equivalencies, false narratives, strawmen, and ad hominems, sniper fire from the law school (C not R), having my side 'represented' by a bitter opponent, seeing them eye me gleefully from their meeting in the classroom, knowing what would happen but hoping it wouldn't, completing the task anyway, then returning in half an hour to find all the flyers I had tacked and taped up in Hamilton at the end of an exhausting day were torn down as I had feared, watching the same poisonous slander and shut-down approach spread like a virus into mainstream politics when I volunteered for GEN Clark in the Democratic primaries, and being sabotaged by my own people, twice. The arena is a caustic, disillusioning place, yet the arena is where causes are won and lost.
My capabilities and ideals are drawn to the arena, but the arena clashes with my temperament. Do I choose my capabilities and ideals or my temperament? Can I reconcile them? How much of my achievement in college was me and how much was luck and fate? Where did Tina Bu lose her balance?
What difference if just one of them said yes? Maybe none. Maybe everything. I started writing a post with this thought, but it was too pathetic even for the parameters I've stretched on my blog in order to facilitate my current reflection. It's saved as a draft, though, so I may revisit it later.
A good metaphor for my idealized concept of relationships is the scene in Forrest Gump where battle buddies Bubba and Forrest lean back-to-back to raise each other out of the mud: "Hey Forrest, I'm going to lean up against you. You just lean right back against me. This way, we don't have to sleep with our heads in the mud. You know why we a good partnership, Forrest? Because we be watching out for one another, like brothers and stuff." I've conceived romance as two imperfect people joining forces in a gestalt that makes both partners better and stronger. Flaws and weaknesses weren't to be hidden, but rather shared in order to foster intimate bonding, mutual dependence, and reciprocal support. The consequence has been a self-defeating schema with a negative return on investment. Reforming the ideal requires no less than removing part of my essential identity while conceiving and constructing an alien, once-offensive algorithm to replace it.
I'm working my way through Rollo's Year One and just read The Basics. Alpha Buddah, indeed - it's true in my experience that guys like Corey Worthington, who are only as sorry as much and how they need to be, have more latitude, get away with things, and get the girl.
In a case of glass half empty, sports pundits have framed the story of the American team at the World Baseball Classic according to the American stars not on the roster, such as Prince Fielder, Bryce Harper, Mike Trout, and Justin Verlander. Just based on their criticism, I thought the US roster was filled with benchwarmers. Yet the US roster has a respectable contingent of stars, including MVP position players, Cy Young award-winning pitchers, legit candidates for same, and elite closers.
Eric
I bought Chips Ahoy chocolate chip cookies on sale. The size has shrunk to 13 ounces. When I opened the package, the amount of cookies in it just looked skimpy. I'm feeling stuffed from gorging on chocolate chip cookies and whole milk, and bachelor stew with an egg, in that order. I harbor the totally baseless belief that the eater's remorseful consequences of overindulging in junk food can be ameliorated by mixing the junk food with a reasonably nutritious meal in my stomach.
Chips Ahoy chocolate chip cookies isn't the only junk food that's shrinking. I bought 1 bag regular Doritos and 1 bag Cool Ranch Doritos on a BOGO sale (2/4.29 vs the usual sale price of 2/5 or 2/6). The regular Doritos bag has been redesigned. Sale + redesign indicates a shrunken product. Sure enough, the regular Doritos bag now contains 11 oz. The Cool Ranch is 11.5 oz. Wikipedia's Doritos page displays a 12 oz bag of regular Doritos with a 3.99 labeled price. This recipe blog post from October 15, 2012 displays a 11.5 oz regular Doritos bag. Perhaps not surprisingly, most results in a google image search show Doritos bags with the weight digitally removed. And, as usual, I have eater's remorse from the Doritos and followed the chips with a real meal.
I'll fill in descriptions of my latest bachelor stew and bachelor meat sauce pasta, which I gobbled up in 2 meals (or rather 1 string of eating that spanned 2 meals), later.
Bachelor meat sauce pasta: Using my Sunbeam frying pan and Salton rice cooker, about 10 oz ground pork ($1), 28 oz can Hunts petite sliced tomatoes ($1) boosted with some Ragu sauce (Hunts diced tomatoes has tomato juice, no tomato puree), 10 oz box frozen Birds Eye frozen chopped broccoli ($1), about .5 oz remainder of 5 oz jar of HeluvaGood prepared horseradish ($1.69? for the jar), about 2/3 of 16 oz box Ronzoni small shells ($1 box), 1 chopped yellow onion (.88 2 lb bag). The amount, as usual, filled the Sunbeam, which has a 9 cup or 72 oz capacity. I started eating it at breakfast and kept picking at it until it was gone by lunch. It's a reliable comfort-food dish.
Bachelor stew: Using my 3 quart mixing bowl, Nesco, and Salton rice cooker, 14.75 oz can Icy Point pink salmon ($3), 18.5 oz can Italian-style Wedding (meatballs, carrots, and spinach in chicken broth) Progresso soup ($1.50), 10 oz box Best Yet frozen whole leaf spinach ($1), about 6 oz remainder of 24 oz jar Old World Style Traditional Ragu sauce ($1), 1 chopped yellow onion (.88 2 lb bag), 1 cup cooked rice ($10 20 lb bag). I later added about 32 oz of porkbone broth, but I don't think it made a difference from water. The stew costs more than my meat sauce pasta, but it makes for decadent eating.
Boneless pork sirloin chops - yum. I bought a 2.23 lb chunk on sale for $1.59/lb, rubbed on some seasoning salt and pepper, put it in the Nesco and left it alone to cook. 45 minutes later, tender meat. Easy. Pork has emerged as my favorite of the 3 meats. Pork is savory, forgiving to cook, and filling. Pork sears well. Beef is the most expensive of the 3 meats. It's not forgiving to cook and too easy to overcook. Beef tastes good when it's right, but it's tasteless when I get it wrong. Granted, I'm buying cheap cuts of beef, which makes a difference. Chicken is the cheapest of the 3 meats. It's forgiving to cook; I've overcooked chicken with much too high a temp for much too long and it still tasted like chicken. I like thigh meat the best. The downside is chicken is the least filling of the 3 meats; it's like the Wonderbread of meat.
I bought a 12 oz bag of BacalaRico Choice Boned Salted Alaska Pollock Fillets on sale for $2.50. These instructions on pan frying fish fillets seem simple enough. I'm just going to flour and fry the fillets in the Sunbeam, not egg and bread them. Update: I followed the instructions and soaked the fillets in water, changing the water 3 times, but they were still salty - over-seasoned salty, not preserved-in-salt salty. I don't know that it's worth the higher cost and trouble preparing compared to other meats, but the fish was edible at least. The Icy Point salmon is better. The flouring became sloppy because the fillets were still wet from soaking and turned the flour into dough. The flouring also didn't stick to the fish as I fried them, and I ended up eating fish and chips.
Bachelor cooking tips. My best method of cooking pork has been to broil it in my toaster oven, then sear it on my griddle pan and burner. I chopped up an onion and cooked some pieces on the griddle pan with the pork. However, I put the onions on the griddle pan too early, so they burned black. Next time, I'll put the onions and pork on the pan at the same time. Baking in the Nesco tends to dry out the pork while making for tender chicken - go figure; I haven't tried to bake my beef yet. Cooking too much rice + leftover chopped onions = egg-and-onion fried rice tomorrow. Okay, I purposely cooked too much rice for one meal because I'm looking forward to my comfort-food fried rice. Adding vinegar to bone broth gives it a sweet-and-sour soup kick (so that's how they do it). I had been saving the chicken, pork, and beef bones I boiled for bone broth for a reboil in order to pull out any remaining nutrients. When I roughly filled about half a 32 oz container with once-boiled bones, I boiled them all together in my 3 quart mixing bowl and Nesco. The resulting broth was thick and flavorful. Reboiling bones 2-3 times for bone broth softens and breaks down the outer bone and cartilege beyond just releasing the oils from the bone marrow. I've read that some restaurants boil bones for 24 hours and some home cooks boil bones for 4 hours in a pressure cooker to make their bone broth. It's reasonable to assume that boiling bones in my Salton rice cooker won't extract everything digestible from the bones the first time.
Keoni Galt, who has compelling thoughts on industrial food, recommends bone broth to ward off colds. Coincidentally, I haven't caught a cold since I started drinking bone broth and I usually get sick at least once in the winter.
I hadn't recorded before how much I spend on food. I wanted to find out how much it costs to feed myself so I started saving my receipts. The early returns are in:
| Oct 2012 | Nov 2012 | Dec 2012 | Jan 2013 | Feb 2013 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 118.38 | 114.87 | 173.31 | 134.04 | 116.93 |
| 5 month total: 657.53 | Monthly average: 131.51 |
It's a start. The data isn't reliable yet as far as projecting my spending. My October and November numbers are too low because they don't include all my eating out and I don't trust I saved all my receipts. My December number is higher because I was conscientiously saving my receipts, changing my eating routine, and paying more for same. My January and February numbers are more reliable for projection. I haven't had a budget. Before I set a budget, I want to establish a baseline by finding out how much I spend just by being moderate, buying on sale, and only minimally eating out. My diet has featured a lot of meat (beef, chicken, pork), milk, pasta, bread, bannock, and rice. I buy very little eat-in and take-out anymore, but I still regularly indulge in sweet and salty junk food. Cold whole milk and sweet cereal (eg, Post Cocoa Pebbles) is an irresistable combination. Milk good. Milk + sweet cereal bad.
The Basal Metabolic Rate, or the amount of energy or calories used by the body just being alive, is encouraging.
The History Channel Life and After People series producers obviously were big fans of Anatolian shepherd dogs. They sound like my kind of dog in their devotion to duty, steady temperament, and independent thinking. This episode features the breed, which is funny because the episode is actually about the fate of religious and other buildings if they're deprived of human maintenance. The gushing praise of the Anatolian shepherd brought to mind the LTC Dave Grossman essay On Sheep, Wolves and Sheepdogs that's a favorite of soldiers and cops.
An aspect of soldiering that spoils men is it is intrinsically meaningful work. When I was one, I was sure everything I did, most of all what I did with other soldiers, mattered. Since a soldier is a soldier 24/7, a meaningful life is just normal. Of course, the meaning is conferred with the uniform; it isn't self-determined. It's like a CIF or weapon issue. Soldiers don't own it and don't take it with them when they leave the uniform, except for their memories and, if they want, the Army values.
Soldiering suits INFPs, at least short term, because of "Mission first, Soldiers always"; it is a humanistic, fraternally bonding, paternally caring, values based, and idealistic profession. There's a lot of love in soldiering. When I decided to join the military, I chose the Army over the Air Force and Navy because they seemed designed primarily around technology (planes and ships) while the Army seemed designed around people.
What are the connections among the Marxist Frankfurt School, Modernity, feminine imperative, feminism, and Mencius Moldbug's Cathedral?
Red pill round-up: OWC tears apart nice guys (h/t Morticia), Sunshine Mary explains why she shut down her blog, Judgybitch offers wife-choosing advice to single men, Stingray opines on raising her son to be a Man, and Novaseeker helps another blogger define zeta masculinity. (Yeah, I don't know what "zeta" means, either.)
While red-pill men's blogs are more nuts-and-bolts and actionable, red-pill women's blogs, like this one, are growing on me with their insight from the woman's perspective. This red-pill woman's blog recommends this men's clothing and grooming blog. Morticia says she's an INFP, which means of course I have to pay special attention to her blog. This one has a links-heavy post on MB types and compatibilities. Emma the Emo.
Caveat: Red-pill women ≠ red-pill men ≠ red-pill me, for that matter. The red pill "sphere" has points in common, but it is not the same across demographics nor individually. With a few notable exceptions, red-pill women are not supporting men's interests exclusively but rather want social gender rules reset to support their womanly interests by nurturing healthier complementary gender roles. For example. That's fair and worthy of support, but it behooves red-pill men to know the difference. Many (not all) red-pill men want a similar rule set reset or at least define their red pill according to male-female relations, albeit from a masculine orientation. MGTOW red pill is different. MGTOWs share the masculine orientation with other red-pill men but MGTOW is introverted and eschews complementary male-female goals. The shared masculine orientation and nature, however, means MGTOW red-pill men and complementarian red-pill men can cross over.
According to The Atlantic, educated upwardly mobile girls in their 20s are finding that their instinct for coupling is clashing with their feminist indoctrination. Feminist reaction, spin, here. Blame the Cathedral. Like the Pemon matriarch explained that her traditional skills will die with her, children are being socialized in school so that politically correct values, norms, knowledge, and aspirations are displacing family and tribal heritage. Girls are being molded to be something other than traditional natural women, ie, future matriarchs.
In addition to blogging about food, Keoni Galt is an MGTOW who's a protecting and providing husband and father, so he's an FM- (Family Man) GTOW. He discusses his withdrawal from popular partisan politics. I don't agree with him that to be political for a regular guy is to be a useful idiot for a cabalistic conspiracy. I agree to the extent that regular guys, including me, are usually out of their depth with issues that are more layered and complicated than is represented in popular partisan politics. I've never identified with the Republicans nor the Democrats, but I do care about their effect on issues I care about. I agree with Galt that "The Manosphere is a clearinghouse for TRUTH. aka "The Red Pill"."
Considering the arena, I think about binary alternatives, zero sum, adversarial, zealous advocacy, tribal and competitive, false premises, false choices, false equivalencies, false narratives, strawmen, and ad hominems, sniper fire from the law school (C not R), having my side 'represented' by a bitter opponent, seeing them eye me gleefully from their meeting in the classroom, knowing what would happen but hoping it wouldn't, completing the task anyway, then returning in half an hour to find all the flyers I had tacked and taped up in Hamilton at the end of an exhausting day were torn down as I had feared, watching the same poisonous slander and shut-down approach spread like a virus into mainstream politics when I volunteered for GEN Clark in the Democratic primaries, and being sabotaged by my own people, twice. The arena is a caustic, disillusioning place, yet the arena is where causes are won and lost.
My capabilities and ideals are drawn to the arena, but the arena clashes with my temperament. Do I choose my capabilities and ideals or my temperament? Can I reconcile them? How much of my achievement in college was me and how much was luck and fate? Where did Tina Bu lose her balance?
What difference if just one of them said yes? Maybe none. Maybe everything. I started writing a post with this thought, but it was too pathetic even for the parameters I've stretched on my blog in order to facilitate my current reflection. It's saved as a draft, though, so I may revisit it later.
A good metaphor for my idealized concept of relationships is the scene in Forrest Gump where battle buddies Bubba and Forrest lean back-to-back to raise each other out of the mud: "Hey Forrest, I'm going to lean up against you. You just lean right back against me. This way, we don't have to sleep with our heads in the mud. You know why we a good partnership, Forrest? Because we be watching out for one another, like brothers and stuff." I've conceived romance as two imperfect people joining forces in a gestalt that makes both partners better and stronger. Flaws and weaknesses weren't to be hidden, but rather shared in order to foster intimate bonding, mutual dependence, and reciprocal support. The consequence has been a self-defeating schema with a negative return on investment. Reforming the ideal requires no less than removing part of my essential identity while conceiving and constructing an alien, once-offensive algorithm to replace it.
I'm working my way through Rollo's Year One and just read The Basics. Alpha Buddah, indeed - it's true in my experience that guys like Corey Worthington, who are only as sorry as much and how they need to be, have more latitude, get away with things, and get the girl.
In a case of glass half empty, sports pundits have framed the story of the American team at the World Baseball Classic according to the American stars not on the roster, such as Prince Fielder, Bryce Harper, Mike Trout, and Justin Verlander. Just based on their criticism, I thought the US roster was filled with benchwarmers. Yet the US roster has a respectable contingent of stars, including MVP position players, Cy Young award-winning pitchers, legit candidates for same, and elite closers.
Eric
Tuesday, 26 February 2013
Thoughts of the day
This is my 3rd thoughts of the day this month. That's a record. I don't have bright-line black-letter criteria for what gets thrown in with a thoughts of the day ensemble and what gets featured in its own post or when a thought grows into its own post. Some of the thoughts are at least as developed and interesting as many of the posts, while some posts are no more than bookmarks. I just go by a sense of it; my blog is ruled by my whims.
If I move forward from tinkering within the body on Blogger's HTML editor and try building an HTML webpage from scratch, I'll need to familiarize with editing the head with CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, which is used on HTML pages for formatting the content.
I prefer the distinctly evocative over the drily descriptive when choosing a name or symbol, although I recognize a descriptive name is sometimes more suitable for the mission at hand. The symbolism and history of the "LOVE CHERISH DEFEND IT" plaque spoke to me and served as my inspiration for the original MilVets logo design. When a later generation of MilVets leaders replaced my logo with a 'professional' emblem by the guy who designs stuff for GS, I was disappointed the new logo was merely a flat description. My logo evoked meaning that was personalized to Columbia military heritage and Columbia student-veterans. If I ever get to design another Columbia military symbol, I would use the plaque rendered in its original shining bronze, perhaps combined with a bronze Athena (Alma Mater) helm.
One of my favorite things about being MI was our evocative and pretty darn cool branch insignia. Check out the 3D renderings of the MI insignia from this site.
In her TED talk, Eat Pray Love author Elizabeth Gilbert spoke on the familiar subject of the erratic, unpredictable, and channeled nature of artistic inspiration. She suggests that the notion that something as temperamental as artistic inspiration is a creative ability internal to artists is the cause of the endemic mental breakdowns of artists since the Renaissance. Artists understand they are actually craftsmen who can only do their best to capture inspiration and give it an adequate expression. Gilbert proposes instead a return to the Greek and Roman notion that artistic inspiration is externally sourced from an invisible genius (Roman) or daemon (Greek). I'm familiar with the burgeoning urge of artistic inspiration from my student activism. I imagined and conceived the beginning of the Columbia civil-military movement mostly in spurts of inspiration that mostly came to me during long walks down from Columbia through Central Park. Once inspired, I scrambled urgently to catch the thread of the inspiration and bring it to life before it escaped, just like how Gilbert described the creative process of the poet in her story.
A full posting of 1982 movie Paradise is on youtube. Paradise is similar to 1980 movie Blue Lagoon starring Brooke Shields. It features, exploits really, a young Phoebe Cates in her first starring role. The male lead is Willie Aames, the goofy sidekick in Charles in Charge. Did I say that Phoebe Cates is a babe? Yes, I did. These days, she owns a boutique in the Carnegie Hill neighborhood.
Any cartoon that features H. Jon Benjamin's voice is halfway to being a hit with that alone.
In a February 26 Grantland piece, Rockets GM Daryl Morey is quoted, "We probably got the hardest part done, but now we have to get a second star to go with James." Before the Harden trade, Jeremy Lin was the star. Then he was the 2nd star. His status seems to have been downgraded further by Rockets management since then. The Rockets are still a good situation for Lin to establish his bonafides as a starting NBA PG, which is an improvement from earlier in the season. While playing for Woodson and the Knicks would have helped Lin become a more well-rounded PG with more responsibility, the go-go offense that the Rockets have developed suits Lin's strengths similar to the way that the Mavs' go-go offense helped Steve Nash establish his bonafides as a starting NBA PG. However, Nash grew into an NBA star only when he became the Suns' featured player, and he was at least the featured ball handler on the Mavs. As long as Lin shares the backcourt with Harden, there appears to be a limit on the height that Lin's star can reach with the Rockets. That's a concern looking ahead to years 2 and 3 on his contract, though, not a problem this season.
Bannock idea: Leave out the salt. Ray Mears's basic recipe for bannock calls for flour, baking soda, salt, and water. The problem is the baking soda, used for leavening, causes a bitter salty flavor, which is why many people substitute baking powder for baking soda in their bannock. I still use baking soda in my bannock due to its dual-use as my hair soap. There isn't much I can do about the bitter flavor except adding an acid like vinegar to counteract the alkaline from the baking soda, but I don't want to bother calculating and measuring out a balanced ratio. I can help the salty issue simply by not adding salt. There's enough sodium in sodium bicarbonate that sodium chloride isn't needed for flavor.
Don't cook jelly on pizza bannock. Melted jelly turns into melted sugar. Add it after cooking.
For a willing scavenger like me, a benefit of apartment-living is the garbage. Apartments have limited storage space so most residents will discard their replaced housewares and furnishings rather than store them. Apartment size also tends to be as needed, so as apartment dwellers transition from a single's studio to a couple's 1 bedroom, then to a family 2+ bedroom or house, they move. When they move, they throw things out. It's not uncommon to find housewares, furnishings, and sometimes more interesting things, in serviceable condition in the common bulk-item garbage area. Of course, my apartment has limited storage space, too, so I take only what's useful. A bonus of scavenging is the peace of mind that someone thought enough of the item to purchase it for living conditions similar to mine. On the other hand, that same someone got rid of the item for a reason; most but not all of my garbage pickings have been winners. The willingness, one, to leave garbage that is serviceable but not useful and, two, return a recovered item to the garbage is the line between scavenging and hoarding.
I wonder whether the philosophy of scavenging is more constrictive than productive, though. The material waste that is a sin for scavengers is merely a cost of business, or living, for the upwardly mobile person. In the modern economy, fungible consumerism seems more efficient than picayune austerity and replacing things seems like a more fluid way of life than holding onto things.
Making the world a better place with one cause, one movement, one mission at a time is selfless service, and ultimately, activism may be my life's work like activism dominated my college life. Right now though, I'm wary of jumping through external hoops, even the hoops of my own choosing and making from the causes that seductively call to me. They're noble pursuits and I've proved I'm an effective activist, but they're not of me. What is of me, internally? I don't know and that's the problem. I only know that relying on outside sources for meaning and purpose provides a respite with a simulacrum of life only. My meaning and purpose need to be internally sourced, not borrowed. It's no good to be listless and blown about, even when the blowing is by my interests and passions, and then collapse formlessly, empty, when the wind changes. The structural integrity of that life is an illusion. For sure, it's no way to a hardened reliable manhood. I must calibrate my inner compass, dig down until I hit my bedrock and anchor there, and find the castled territory within myself to claim as mine and plant my flag.
I learned this, too: "If you’re running on ideals, you’ll burn out. I would say this, and I think this universal. Any one of us can and do adopt ideals that we become convinced are worth pouring our life into, it’s never enough. The work you do must resonate with who you are at the deepest level. Some people call it a “calling” and spend a lot of time, money and effort trying to find what their calling is. . . . Ideals are like Nobel Peace Prize winners, they represent something that encourages us in the right direction, but can never give us enough steam to go take us all the way."
In his Wild Food series, Ray Mears observed that the everyday lives of hunter-gatherers are predominated by the full-time tasks of feeding their families. Men's and women's and boys' and girls' roles and relationships are defined and ordered by tangible needs. The animist cultures of hunter-gatherers are largely based on the intimate relationship between their food and the natural environment that surrounds them. The focus of their lives is basic provision and protection for their families. It's an undoubtedly arduous and seemingly anxious life, but for the men at least, it seems like a fundamentally satisfying way of life. They know their utility, their place in their family, role and relationships within the social hierarchy, and the rites of passage with which they'll be promoted. The men and women know what they each need to do for their family to survive, and they do it. Everything fits together and makes sense. A theme in Mears's visits with native or primitive peoples is their entry into modern society breaks down these essential bonds. The smarter ones return to the 'bush' and restrict their interaction with modern society in order to save their social order and cohesion. However, given that the originating building block of the hunter-gatherer society is tangible need and modern society seduces with easily obtained, industrially produced provisions and protection, efforts to hold modern society at arm's length and preserve the hunter-gatherer ethos are an uphill fight.
Men traded their provision and protection for modern society's provision and protection at a steep price. The tangible gains have been offset by a profound spiritual loss. Hunting-gathering boys and men know who they are and who they will be. Modern boys and men do not.
Individually, modern men who have distanced themselves from modern society have observed the soul satisfaction of ordering their lives around providing for their basic needs with fewer modern conveniences. Socially, while the Army is not a hunter-gatherer society, military society shares important features with a hunter-gatherer society, such as functional roles defined by utility to the whole, common purpose, hierarchy, fraternal and paternal relationships, mutual dependence, and rites of passage. My soldiering experience made sense to me on a deeper level as a man than anything I've experienced as a civilian. Modern men who haven't been immersed in a genuine masculine culture don't appreciate what's missing in their lives, just the ambiguous dissatisfaction of somehow living as less than men.
The enduring lesson above all others for soldiers is not Duty, Honor, or Country, it's Team. Acerbic red-pill housewife blogger Judgybitch describes her marriage as a team that approximates the mutually dependent relationships of hunter-gatherers. Judgybitch is not ashamed of her financial dependence on her husband and is proud that he relies on her to take care of their home and kids. To her, depending on each other to fulfill different family needs according to traditional gender roles is akin to chemical atomic bonding. Her take: "I take a lot of my life for granted. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. It certainly helps me to understand that I am taken for granted in return, and that isn’t a problem that needs to be solved! It’s the basis for security and happiness and contentment. I take for granted that the members of Team JB are all working together, and I trust them to take for granted that I am, and always will be, pulling right beside them." [Bold-faced emphasis added.]
Judgybitch's characterization of her husband as her teammate sounds like it validates my quixotic pursuit of androgynous love, but there's a difference. In my exposition on desire versus love, I said, "my cherished notion of laying the foundation for love with an equal partnership with my best friend has been a mistake." Judgybitch doesn't say her marriage is an equal partnership. Rather, their partnership is based on the needs of theArmy family. Complementary gender roles may be in equilibrium, equitable, or even equivalent, but they're not equal. Nor does she say her husband is her best friend. Her husband is her husband, and she describes his most important qualities to her here. Mating or courtship is not, as I once thought, an evolution of friendship. Friendship may overlap and perhaps enhance the relationship, but it's not the essence and heart of the relationship. As much as analogies instruct through similarities, careful attention must be paid to the differences.
At Rational Male, two commenters, Jeremy and YaReally, fell into an interesting mini-debate about the Manosphere versus PUA. My view is in line with Jeremy's "Yes, but having the high standards for commitment is not an endemic feature of being a PUA, it’s a feature of being a f-ing red-pill man. The PUA community is only teaching men how to be the favorite horse on the carosel. The Manosphere is what is teaching men to be men again." Jeremy doesn't identify himself as an MGTOW, but his stance is MGTOW. I also agree with YaReally's emphasis on the preeminence of actively applying red-pill knowledge and the utility of PUA, except I return to Jeremy's view that there are more ways to apply the red pill than PUA.
Melissa King, the former Miss Delaware Teen deposed due to her featured role in a porn video (note: the link goes to Youporn.com's blog post on the controversy, not directly to King's video, but it's still NSFW), was in foster care from age 12. She had psychological treatment, and in the interview, she refers to - albeit in 2nd and 3rd person - confidence, depression, anxiety, and money problems. I assume King is 19 now. I haven't read details, but the implication is her childhood circumstances were abnormal. I've read the explanation of irrational self-harming choices and behavior by adults that the state of one's mid-childhood through adolescence (say, roughly ages 9-18) forms a person's default sense of normalcy. Thus, people have an ingrained emotional algorithm that compels them to harmonize with their formative childhood experience, which is good when that experience was normal and healthy. By the same token, however, a person will tend to harmonize with an apparently dysfunctional formative childhood experience even when that person is intelligent, talented, decent, and otherwise a high achiever. In fact, formerly high-achieving adults who've succumbed to the gravity of their childhood trauma is a repeating theme in A&E's addiction treatment program, Intervention. As far as my opinion of King's participation in pornography in and of itself, apart from the possible psychological implications of doing porn despite the predictable repercussions in her situation, I don't think less of her any more than I thought less of Matt when his past was exposed. I wonder whether porn has become openly normal for King's generation. PS: King has 2 bench warrants in Maryland for failure to appear in court on theft (sounds like a misdemeanor petit larceny) and underaged possession of alcohol charges from last year. The theft charge is from June, the same month she filmed her porn video. I wonder whether the incidents are related.
There has to be more to this story of a nurse at an elder independent living facility - a nurse - who refused to perform CPR on a resident because the facility's policy forbade her to do so, which has been confirmed by a facility spokesman. The resident died. It reminds me of the story where firefighters stood by as a house burned because the homeowners refused to pay the county fee for firefighting services. The deceased may have had a funky living arrangement with the facility that prevented the nurse from performing even basic good-samaritan-passerby CPR. As reported, the 911 transcript is incredible.
Eric
If I move forward from tinkering within the body on Blogger's HTML editor and try building an HTML webpage from scratch, I'll need to familiarize with editing the head with CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, which is used on HTML pages for formatting the content.
- Endnote: For a beginner learning the language, this HTML5 and CSS3 upgrade business is a bit unsettling.
I prefer the distinctly evocative over the drily descriptive when choosing a name or symbol, although I recognize a descriptive name is sometimes more suitable for the mission at hand. The symbolism and history of the "LOVE CHERISH DEFEND IT" plaque spoke to me and served as my inspiration for the original MilVets logo design. When a later generation of MilVets leaders replaced my logo with a 'professional' emblem by the guy who designs stuff for GS, I was disappointed the new logo was merely a flat description. My logo evoked meaning that was personalized to Columbia military heritage and Columbia student-veterans. If I ever get to design another Columbia military symbol, I would use the plaque rendered in its original shining bronze, perhaps combined with a bronze Athena (Alma Mater) helm.
One of my favorite things about being MI was our evocative and pretty darn cool branch insignia. Check out the 3D renderings of the MI insignia from this site.
In her TED talk, Eat Pray Love author Elizabeth Gilbert spoke on the familiar subject of the erratic, unpredictable, and channeled nature of artistic inspiration. She suggests that the notion that something as temperamental as artistic inspiration is a creative ability internal to artists is the cause of the endemic mental breakdowns of artists since the Renaissance. Artists understand they are actually craftsmen who can only do their best to capture inspiration and give it an adequate expression. Gilbert proposes instead a return to the Greek and Roman notion that artistic inspiration is externally sourced from an invisible genius (Roman) or daemon (Greek). I'm familiar with the burgeoning urge of artistic inspiration from my student activism. I imagined and conceived the beginning of the Columbia civil-military movement mostly in spurts of inspiration that mostly came to me during long walks down from Columbia through Central Park. Once inspired, I scrambled urgently to catch the thread of the inspiration and bring it to life before it escaped, just like how Gilbert described the creative process of the poet in her story.
A full posting of 1982 movie Paradise is on youtube. Paradise is similar to 1980 movie Blue Lagoon starring Brooke Shields. It features, exploits really, a young Phoebe Cates in her first starring role. The male lead is Willie Aames, the goofy sidekick in Charles in Charge. Did I say that Phoebe Cates is a babe? Yes, I did. These days, she owns a boutique in the Carnegie Hill neighborhood.
Any cartoon that features H. Jon Benjamin's voice is halfway to being a hit with that alone.
In a February 26 Grantland piece, Rockets GM Daryl Morey is quoted, "We probably got the hardest part done, but now we have to get a second star to go with James." Before the Harden trade, Jeremy Lin was the star. Then he was the 2nd star. His status seems to have been downgraded further by Rockets management since then. The Rockets are still a good situation for Lin to establish his bonafides as a starting NBA PG, which is an improvement from earlier in the season. While playing for Woodson and the Knicks would have helped Lin become a more well-rounded PG with more responsibility, the go-go offense that the Rockets have developed suits Lin's strengths similar to the way that the Mavs' go-go offense helped Steve Nash establish his bonafides as a starting NBA PG. However, Nash grew into an NBA star only when he became the Suns' featured player, and he was at least the featured ball handler on the Mavs. As long as Lin shares the backcourt with Harden, there appears to be a limit on the height that Lin's star can reach with the Rockets. That's a concern looking ahead to years 2 and 3 on his contract, though, not a problem this season.
Bannock idea: Leave out the salt. Ray Mears's basic recipe for bannock calls for flour, baking soda, salt, and water. The problem is the baking soda, used for leavening, causes a bitter salty flavor, which is why many people substitute baking powder for baking soda in their bannock. I still use baking soda in my bannock due to its dual-use as my hair soap. There isn't much I can do about the bitter flavor except adding an acid like vinegar to counteract the alkaline from the baking soda, but I don't want to bother calculating and measuring out a balanced ratio. I can help the salty issue simply by not adding salt. There's enough sodium in sodium bicarbonate that sodium chloride isn't needed for flavor.
Don't cook jelly on pizza bannock. Melted jelly turns into melted sugar. Add it after cooking.
For a willing scavenger like me, a benefit of apartment-living is the garbage. Apartments have limited storage space so most residents will discard their replaced housewares and furnishings rather than store them. Apartment size also tends to be as needed, so as apartment dwellers transition from a single's studio to a couple's 1 bedroom, then to a family 2+ bedroom or house, they move. When they move, they throw things out. It's not uncommon to find housewares, furnishings, and sometimes more interesting things, in serviceable condition in the common bulk-item garbage area. Of course, my apartment has limited storage space, too, so I take only what's useful. A bonus of scavenging is the peace of mind that someone thought enough of the item to purchase it for living conditions similar to mine. On the other hand, that same someone got rid of the item for a reason; most but not all of my garbage pickings have been winners. The willingness, one, to leave garbage that is serviceable but not useful and, two, return a recovered item to the garbage is the line between scavenging and hoarding.
I wonder whether the philosophy of scavenging is more constrictive than productive, though. The material waste that is a sin for scavengers is merely a cost of business, or living, for the upwardly mobile person. In the modern economy, fungible consumerism seems more efficient than picayune austerity and replacing things seems like a more fluid way of life than holding onto things.
Making the world a better place with one cause, one movement, one mission at a time is selfless service, and ultimately, activism may be my life's work like activism dominated my college life. Right now though, I'm wary of jumping through external hoops, even the hoops of my own choosing and making from the causes that seductively call to me. They're noble pursuits and I've proved I'm an effective activist, but they're not of me. What is of me, internally? I don't know and that's the problem. I only know that relying on outside sources for meaning and purpose provides a respite with a simulacrum of life only. My meaning and purpose need to be internally sourced, not borrowed. It's no good to be listless and blown about, even when the blowing is by my interests and passions, and then collapse formlessly, empty, when the wind changes. The structural integrity of that life is an illusion. For sure, it's no way to a hardened reliable manhood. I must calibrate my inner compass, dig down until I hit my bedrock and anchor there, and find the castled territory within myself to claim as mine and plant my flag.
I learned this, too: "If you’re running on ideals, you’ll burn out. I would say this, and I think this universal. Any one of us can and do adopt ideals that we become convinced are worth pouring our life into, it’s never enough. The work you do must resonate with who you are at the deepest level. Some people call it a “calling” and spend a lot of time, money and effort trying to find what their calling is. . . . Ideals are like Nobel Peace Prize winners, they represent something that encourages us in the right direction, but can never give us enough steam to go take us all the way."
In his Wild Food series, Ray Mears observed that the everyday lives of hunter-gatherers are predominated by the full-time tasks of feeding their families. Men's and women's and boys' and girls' roles and relationships are defined and ordered by tangible needs. The animist cultures of hunter-gatherers are largely based on the intimate relationship between their food and the natural environment that surrounds them. The focus of their lives is basic provision and protection for their families. It's an undoubtedly arduous and seemingly anxious life, but for the men at least, it seems like a fundamentally satisfying way of life. They know their utility, their place in their family, role and relationships within the social hierarchy, and the rites of passage with which they'll be promoted. The men and women know what they each need to do for their family to survive, and they do it. Everything fits together and makes sense. A theme in Mears's visits with native or primitive peoples is their entry into modern society breaks down these essential bonds. The smarter ones return to the 'bush' and restrict their interaction with modern society in order to save their social order and cohesion. However, given that the originating building block of the hunter-gatherer society is tangible need and modern society seduces with easily obtained, industrially produced provisions and protection, efforts to hold modern society at arm's length and preserve the hunter-gatherer ethos are an uphill fight.
Men traded their provision and protection for modern society's provision and protection at a steep price. The tangible gains have been offset by a profound spiritual loss. Hunting-gathering boys and men know who they are and who they will be. Modern boys and men do not.
Individually, modern men who have distanced themselves from modern society have observed the soul satisfaction of ordering their lives around providing for their basic needs with fewer modern conveniences. Socially, while the Army is not a hunter-gatherer society, military society shares important features with a hunter-gatherer society, such as functional roles defined by utility to the whole, common purpose, hierarchy, fraternal and paternal relationships, mutual dependence, and rites of passage. My soldiering experience made sense to me on a deeper level as a man than anything I've experienced as a civilian. Modern men who haven't been immersed in a genuine masculine culture don't appreciate what's missing in their lives, just the ambiguous dissatisfaction of somehow living as less than men.
The enduring lesson above all others for soldiers is not Duty, Honor, or Country, it's Team. Acerbic red-pill housewife blogger Judgybitch describes her marriage as a team that approximates the mutually dependent relationships of hunter-gatherers. Judgybitch is not ashamed of her financial dependence on her husband and is proud that he relies on her to take care of their home and kids. To her, depending on each other to fulfill different family needs according to traditional gender roles is akin to chemical atomic bonding. Her take: "I take a lot of my life for granted. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. It certainly helps me to understand that I am taken for granted in return, and that isn’t a problem that needs to be solved! It’s the basis for security and happiness and contentment. I take for granted that the members of Team JB are all working together, and I trust them to take for granted that I am, and always will be, pulling right beside them." [Bold-faced emphasis added.]
Judgybitch's characterization of her husband as her teammate sounds like it validates my quixotic pursuit of androgynous love, but there's a difference. In my exposition on desire versus love, I said, "my cherished notion of laying the foundation for love with an equal partnership with my best friend has been a mistake." Judgybitch doesn't say her marriage is an equal partnership. Rather, their partnership is based on the needs of the
At Rational Male, two commenters, Jeremy and YaReally, fell into an interesting mini-debate about the Manosphere versus PUA. My view is in line with Jeremy's "Yes, but having the high standards for commitment is not an endemic feature of being a PUA, it’s a feature of being a f-ing red-pill man. The PUA community is only teaching men how to be the favorite horse on the carosel. The Manosphere is what is teaching men to be men again." Jeremy doesn't identify himself as an MGTOW, but his stance is MGTOW. I also agree with YaReally's emphasis on the preeminence of actively applying red-pill knowledge and the utility of PUA, except I return to Jeremy's view that there are more ways to apply the red pill than PUA.
Melissa King, the former Miss Delaware Teen deposed due to her featured role in a porn video (note: the link goes to Youporn.com's blog post on the controversy, not directly to King's video, but it's still NSFW), was in foster care from age 12. She had psychological treatment, and in the interview, she refers to - albeit in 2nd and 3rd person - confidence, depression, anxiety, and money problems. I assume King is 19 now. I haven't read details, but the implication is her childhood circumstances were abnormal. I've read the explanation of irrational self-harming choices and behavior by adults that the state of one's mid-childhood through adolescence (say, roughly ages 9-18) forms a person's default sense of normalcy. Thus, people have an ingrained emotional algorithm that compels them to harmonize with their formative childhood experience, which is good when that experience was normal and healthy. By the same token, however, a person will tend to harmonize with an apparently dysfunctional formative childhood experience even when that person is intelligent, talented, decent, and otherwise a high achiever. In fact, formerly high-achieving adults who've succumbed to the gravity of their childhood trauma is a repeating theme in A&E's addiction treatment program, Intervention. As far as my opinion of King's participation in pornography in and of itself, apart from the possible psychological implications of doing porn despite the predictable repercussions in her situation, I don't think less of her any more than I thought less of Matt when his past was exposed. I wonder whether porn has become openly normal for King's generation. PS: King has 2 bench warrants in Maryland for failure to appear in court on theft (sounds like a misdemeanor petit larceny) and underaged possession of alcohol charges from last year. The theft charge is from June, the same month she filmed her porn video. I wonder whether the incidents are related.
There has to be more to this story of a nurse at an elder independent living facility - a nurse - who refused to perform CPR on a resident because the facility's policy forbade her to do so, which has been confirmed by a facility spokesman. The resident died. It reminds me of the story where firefighters stood by as a house burned because the homeowners refused to pay the county fee for firefighting services. The deceased may have had a funky living arrangement with the facility that prevented the nurse from performing even basic good-samaritan-passerby CPR. As reported, the 911 transcript is incredible.
Eric
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