Yours truly, holding forth at The Atlantic on scintillating subject of passenger vessel regulations:

Uninspected Passenger Vessel (aka 6-pack) is kind of a wild-west, seat of the pants designation. It puts the burden on the skipper to maintain his vessel and operate it properly, and on his paying customers to exercise their judgement about whether or not they should even step aboard in the first place. And whatever happens, people are only going to get killed six at a time.

Yours truly, opining at The Atlantic on the subject of gun regulations:

For any weapon outside the battlefield, a 30-shot magazine is a novelty, an amusement; a chance to make a lot of noise and smoke and send a lot of lead down range. I have a 30-shot magazine for my Ruger 10/22 semi-automatic rifle. It’s fun. You set up a bunch of cans down range and then knock them all down — firing off 30 rounds just as fast as you can pull the trigger.

I spent today researching the history of the regulation of machine guns, and pondering why we, as a society seem to naturally see machine guns, grenades, RPGs and other common infantry weapons as being outside the penumbra of the Second Amendment, while seeing a weapon such as the Colt AR15 as falling plainly within Second Amendment protection.

The ban on civilian ownership of machine guns traces back to the National Firearms Act of 1934. This is what the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms has to say about the law:

While the NFA was enacted by Congress as an exercise of its authority to tax, the NFA had an underlying purpose unrelated to revenue collection. As the legislative history of the law discloses, its underlying purpose was to curtail, if not prohibit, transactions in NFA firearms. Congress found these firearms to pose a significant crime problem because of their frequent use in crime, particularly the gangland crimes of that era such as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.

Now for those of you who don’t know, the ban on civilians owning machine guns really isn’t a ban. You, or I, or just about any other law abiding citizen can own a machine gun; it’s just that there’s a lot more red tape and cost involved than there is in purchasing a pistol, rifle, or shotgun.

I’ve also been researching the invention of the submachine gun (US M1, M3, British Sten, German MP40, etc) and its eventual hybridization with the infantryman’s rifle to give us the modern assault rifle; a weapon with the magazine capacity and automatic action, combined with a cartridge  with less power and range than a rifle, but much more powerful than the pistol cartridges used in submachine guns.

What I’ve found that interesting to me is that most militaries have abandoned the idea that fully automatic fire is an option that they want their soldiers to use regularly. For example, the US Marine Corps version of the M16 only offers single shot, or three shot burst. The legendary Russian AK47 is designed to “trick” a panicked soldier into selecting single-shot mode instead of fully automatic. The M4, a carbine version of the M16 also only offers single shot or 3 shot bursts. (The M4A1, a special operations variant, offers a fully automatic, ie “machine gun” option.)

I bring all of this up because a few years ago I changed my mind about magazine capacity restrictions.

Magazine capacity was sort of regulated when “gangster guns” were banned, but the focus then was on the fully automatic action, not on the magazines required to feed that action. But as far as I can tell, there has only been a brief period when magazine capacity was regulated in this country, the ten years of the Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act, aka the Federal Assault Weapons Ban (AWB).

The AWB proported to ban “military style assault weapons” and laid out the criteria for assault weapons as follows:

Semi-automatic rifles able to accept detachable magazines and two or more of the following:

• Folding or telescoping stock
• Pistol grip
• Bayonet mount
• Flash suppressor, or threaded barrel designed to accommodate one
• Grenade launcher (more precisely, a muzzle device that enables launching or firing rifle grenades, though this applies only to muzzle mounted grenade launchers and not those mounted externally).

Semi-automatic pistols with detachable magazines and two or more of the following:

• Magazine that attaches outside the pistol grip
• Threaded barrel to attach barrel extender, flash suppressor, handgrip, or suppressor
• Barrel shroud that can be used as a hand-hold
• Unloaded weight of 50 oz (1.4 kg) or more
• A semi-automatic version of a fully automatic firearm.

Semi-automatic shotguns with two or more of the following:

• Folding or telescoping stock
• Pistol grip
• Fixed capacity of more than 5 rounds
• Detachable magazine.

I have long held that the above criteria are meaningless, cosmetic features, and that banning them does nothing but decrease the boner-quotient of the guns that gun-nuts can stroke themselves into a lather over. Government wheel spinning at it’s worst. (Except that it comes at the expense of men who see firearms as penis substitutes, so it doesn’t bother me that much.)

But the AWB also banned something that made my life less fun, and that did bother me, or at least it used to.

The AWB banned magazines with a capacity greater than 10 rounds. And that, my friends, is a friggin imposition of my constitutional rights!

You see, I have a Ruger 10/22, a nifty little plinking rifle with a cunning 10-shot rotary magazine.

I also have an after-market 30 shot magazine, which means I can blast away three times longer without having to stop and reload. If that magazine had broken between 1994 and 2004, my constitutional right to shoot 30 times before I had to stop and reload would have been impinged!

Except I changed my mind.

Somewhere along the line I realized that magazine capacity is what makes a weapon more deadly. The US military knows this. When the M16 was introduced it had a 20 shot mag and could go fully auto. 50 years and who knows how many fire-fights later it has a 30 shot magazine and can’t do fully automatic fire.

Which is to say, for all intents and purposes, an AR15 with a 30 shot magazine is a military weapon, and whatever it’s current legal status (it’s perfectly legal) it doesn’t have any place in the hands of the average citizen.

Disagree with me if you want, but then I want you to explain to me why I can’t have an RPG.

Perhaps you’ve heard: today is Thanksgiving, that day when everybody spends hours upon hours cooking so that everybody they love can enjoy a half-hour meal before retiring to the nearest fainting couch to die of turkey poisoning. In the spirit of possibly shaving a few minutes out of that laborious process, I offer you the following green beans recipe.

Step One: Ignore Grandma
Somehow, there is a generation of Americans that has gotten it into their heads that properly cooked green beans should take as long as it does for a single sailor to circumnavigate the globe. That often means putting a hamhock into boiling water, adding beans, and turning everything off weeks later, long after the beans have turned to mush. The appeal, I suppose, is that you can start your green beans approximately six months before Thanksgiving itself. But seriously, this is insane. Green beans can and should be prepared much, much more quickly.

Step Two: Get A Good Skillet With A Lid, Some Green Beans, and Your Oily Liquid Of Choice
For those who are vegetarians, I recommend your favorite flavorful oil. For those who aren’t, I recommend bacon. I used to make this with either salt pork or fatback but in my experience, bacon simultaneously manages to taste better while being more appealing to everybody else eating with you. (A word of warning: do not use “healthy” bacons like turkey bacon. You will not end up with enough liquid fat.)

Step Three: Get Your Oily Liquid Of Choice HOT
No matter what oily liquid of choice you’re using, you want it to be the hot. This means getting it that way. If you’re just using your preferred oil, put it in a hot pan until it crackles. If you’re teasing the liquid out of a meat, you’re going to want to cook whatever you’ve chosen until crispy. It will also help to dice the meat beforehand (we’re going to use it later). After crispiness has been achieved, remove the meat from the pan.

Step Four: Add Beans
After your oily liquid of choice is hot, add the beans. This is going to be noisy. You’re going to stir the beans around the pan until they’re coated in whatever you’ve got in there. This is going to take three to four minutes.

Step Five: Add Water and Cover
Add a quarter cup (or a bit more) of hot water to your pan. This is going to be incredibly loud, as it will turn to steam immediately. Be wary of that. Ideally, hold the cup of water in one hand and a lid in the other. Slam the lid down as soon as all the water is in, then allow it to cook for three to four minutes.

Step Six: Uncover
Take the lid off the beans. They will be a bright green color. There should be a hint of water left in the bottom of the pan or, perhaps, more than a hint, depending upon how much you added at the outset. Let them cook uncovered for another four minutes. Taste. Are they perfect? Probably. But if they’re not, let them cook for a few more minutes, adding a bit more water if the bottom of the pan is dry.

Step Seven: Dress And Serve
Remove the beans from the pan and add pepper and salt (although not too much, especially if you’ve used bacon or salt-pork or bacon). If you’ve used bacon, take the crisped pieces you removed from the pan and sprinkle them over the top. Serve and enjoy.

Hopefully this will help you avoid eating green bean puree and while I’m at it, hopefully you’ll all have a Happy Thanksgiving.

I’m thankful for my magnificent good fortune that covers stuff that I talk about all the time, stuff I know better than to talk about all the time, and, of course, this magnificent community that we’ve somehow stumbled into forging together. Happy Thanksgiving, one and all.

(For the record, the verse where he’s singing about all of the people in the band is easily imagined into a verse that takes its turn to sing about each of us.)

Precis: Markets arise from competition. Antitrust law arises from the need for competition. Intellectual Property laws ought to protect the rights of those who create ideas. This essay arose from Roger’s comment about competition on Elias Isquith’s Walmart and the Welfare State essay.

retail jobs, like government jobs, don’t face competition from outside the US. Manufacturing jobs were killed when we messed with market forces.

What constitutes messing with market forces? It might begin with a discussion of competition itself.

Libertarians seem much-divided on the topic of monopoly and monopsony, though that assumption probably arises from my own ignorance. I’ve been looking at what Rothbard and Kinsella said against intellectual property rights from their perspective. Roderick Long is down on it, too. Cato seems to send mixed messages on this topic. The Austrians don’t seem to like antitrust legislation, concluding a monopoly will collapse under its own weight, but I’m not sure how this squares up with their notions of property. Property has to be more than tangible objects.

I suspect this is one of those Apples of the Hesperides questions: property of the gods. I’ve been looking into another branch of AI, modelling Too Big to Fail problems.

It started out with a thought about the relationships between predator and prey species. A predator has to look forward, binocular vision depends on it. A prey animal has a much wider field of view, at the expense of binocular vision. This seems to be true since the evolution of the eye itself.

The prey dinosaurs got awfully big. Their size saved them from the raptors but they had to reproduce in huge numbers to get that big. They also formed herds to cope, a pattern we still see in prey species.

But since the evolution of mammals, who started out small, predators and prey are substantially smaller. The larger predators, lions for instance, often steal kills from faster but smaller predators such as cheetahs and leopards. Why haven’t prey species gotten any larger than they have in recent times? Even elephants aren’t nearly as large as the prey dinosaurs. The one exception to this rule seems to be whales, who continue the strategy of Too Large to Kill.

If a firm is a society, what might give it dominance in its field? A smaller firm can easily outmanoeuvre a larger firm afflicted with much bureaucracy. But as with the larger predators, there’s a dominance hierarchy which lets lions steal from cheetahs. How much of this is tolerable in human endeavour?

Those who control the technology control the world. It’s lots easier to model dominance in a universe with fewer rules. Trouble is, a monopoly can last an awfully long time. Predators can form prides: collusion and price fixing are serious impediments to market evolution.

The only reason Linux remains a viable option is because it’s free. Never mind that it’s evolved to cope with an astonishing variety of roles. The fact that it’s a de-facto reference development platform hasn’t given it much traction on the desktop. Linux evolved around the desktop island: Microsoft remains Too Big to Kill in that space and Linux remains Too Nimble to Catch. The Apple operating system went through a painful (and entirely necessary) retrofit, adopting and forking the BSD kernel. Apple did reach the desktop because it put the necessary effort into its user interfaces. But Apple could only achieve that goal by absolute control of the display hardware. Linux doesn’t enjoy that luxury. But as with Microsoft’s awkward emulation of Apple’s old graphical user interfaces, we see the pattern of the Lion and the Cheetah: Microsoft didn’t have to invent anything. It could wait for Apple to do the hard work.

The rise of the patent wars we now see is just such a Lion and Cheetah hierarchy: patent lawyers are expensive and the court cases are death by a thousand cuts. Now Apple and Google are in the same regulatory hot seat as Microsoft was years ago. As a developer, I prefer to use a reference standard and avoid vendor lock-in, whatever the advantages of some proprietary technology might give me in the short term. But there was a day, long ago, when Microsoft was at COMDEX in Chicago, handing out packets of diskettes to developers, for free, too — asking us to develop for their brand-new operating system: something called Windows. Apple charged big bucks for their toolkits in those days. They still do, too. But it was Microsoft who started the tech wars, Bill Gates furiously criticising developers for writing free software and stealing his shit.

Humans didn’t evolve to great size. The Neanderthals were certainly bigger and if their skeletons are any guide, they were stronger and far better adapted to their environments. We formed societies with internal specialities, developed technologies to gain dominance. This got us into trouble: technology evolved faster than we did as a species. Nobody’s happy with the laws as they are: they haven’t evolved and we’re now reaching an intellectual bottleneck as the Patent Wars devolve into hideously expensive trench warfare.

Who knew? Small Business Saturday, November 24th, 2012. Patronize the Mom & Pop shops, tweeteth Drew Brees. Sponsored by American Express, we kid you not.

$25 cashback for AmEx cardholders. Capitalist monster American Express as the patron of the little persons is strange, but Be There Now.
________________
ROCKIN’ UPDATE: We have an American Express card now sitting there in our drawer, used to use it @ Costco before we decided that the Mark of the Beast isn’t 666, it’s “KIRKLAND.”

If you have an AmEx card, you need to enroll it first here before spending. [Yuppies unite, as if non-yupoids actually have AmEx cards just sitting abandoned in the drawer. Not even counting you yuppersons who actually use the damn things.]

Just registered us up, and got the following acknowledgement:

THANK YOU FOR ENROLLING
You have successfully enrolled for the American Express $25 Statement Credit Cardmember Offer for Small Business Saturday®.

Remember to use your enrolled Card to spend $25 or more in a single, in-store transaction at a qualifying small business location on Saturday, November 24, 2012 to receive your one-time $25 statement credit from American Express within 8 weeks.

Visit ShopSmall.com for information about qualifying small business locations where you can Shop Small® on November 24, 2012.

Looking good so far. Spend $25 small, local and beautiful, and full cashback? It does sound too good to be true, but so did Black Friday. The difference is that on White Saturday, somebody will thank you for your patronage instead of stab you in the head for impertinently reaching for his“19 Vizio and matching pair of binoculars…

(Preamble, Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3)

Phil Bolger’s “Alice”, a 28′ power-cruiser

The late and much missed Phil Bolger, in Boats with an Open Mind, chapter 37, writing about his Alice design, a 28 footer, drawn to resemble an early 20th century power-cruiser, but with fewer of their vices:

Recreation suffers from thinking too hard. By definition it ought to be spontaneous. The people motoring through rivers and harbors look as though they were doing it right, but the boats they’ve been sold don’t. The designers have studied harder than is appropriate.

The boats are great performers, whatever you think of the looks of them (the stylists have been thinking too hard). They go faster, are stopped less in rough seas, and have fewer handling vices than anything that ever floated. They have accommodations on deck and below like Arabian Nights fantasies. They carry huge loads without complaint.

But none of them ever look tranquil, although their people often do. The boats look tense, affected, impatient. They’re fast, but inelegant when they slow down; able, but out of place in smooth water; comfortable, but obtrusive…

The virtues of this boat [Alice] is that she will bolster everyone’s self-satisfaction. Her owner will congratulate herself on her good taste as she admires the wood grain and the unaffected style, her good sense in taking an afternoon on the water with a foolish excess of power and equipment, and her independence in choosing distinction without pretension.

At the neighboring landings, the owners of the 70 knot catamaran on one side and the four-story seagoing condominium on the other will feel just as contented, knowing that their boats are faster, more seaworthy, more comfortable, and much more expensive.

Michael Brendan Dougherty is a correspondent for the American Conservative magazine and I follow him on Twitter because he often tweets things that annoy me, but that do not annoy me so much that I become uncivil. I think this is an important thing for me to do, to make sure there are people in my intellectual firmament that challenge or provoke me. So this Thanksgiving weekend I’ll thank Michael for being just such a person.

But sometimes following Michael takes me to the edge of my tolerance.

Thursday, as we journeyed from Montauk to my wife’s family homestead in Brooklyn, Michael tweeted something that filled me with such rage I nearly unfollowed him. But instead  I want to respond to  this tweet in which he offers suggestions to “fix Thanksgiving” in the context of the value of keeping an open mind, plus that whole Thermomixed thing. Here’s the text of the tweet:

Cut the parade, move dog show up into the early morning (also, allow out-crossing for health), stop deep frying turkeys. Thanksgiving fixed.

I don’t have opinions on the parade or the dog show, but I do have a story to tell about frying turkeys and turkey fryers.

I used to live out West, Oregon. I used to do a fair amount of hunting and fishing. I used to look forward to getting the Cabela’s catalog in the mail at each turn of the season.

The Cabela’s Fall Catalog, 2005 edition

This was before the internet, so the big fat Cabela’s catalog was a way to learn about and day dream about all sorts of interesting outdoor gear from other regions, other types of hunting and fishing I didn’t do, or innovations that hadn’t made it to the shops in sleepy southern Oregon yet.

And one of the things that caught my eye was the Turkey Frying Kit.

My friend Nick used to call the Cabela’s catalog the redneck supply catalog, and in the pages of the Cabela’s catalog it was easy to imagine turkey frying to be one of those battered grotesqueries that you hear about being consumed at state fairs in fly-over country. I had visions of a 16 pound tom, encrusted in a doughy batter, deep fried into some sort of insane super-sized chicken Mc Nugget. Something that people who rode around on ATVs would do.

A stainless steel turkey frying kit

I now own a turkey fryer. I bought one a few years after we moved from New York City to Montauk. I bought it because I was (still) really curious about the idea of cooking an entire turkey in a cauldron of near boiling oil. I justified it because living in Montauk means you can eat as many clams, oysters, lobsters and crabs as you’re willing to gather; and the apparatus for deep-frying a turkey doubles as a seafood steamer. Stove-top steaming stinks up the house and never churns out the volume of food needed to support a real shindig. The turkey-fryer, with it’s 145,000 btu burner supports a clambake with ease.

But back to deep frying turkeys.

Perhaps you’d be less condescending/more intrigued by the idea if we called it “fondue bourguignonne.” That, I’ve just found out, is the fancy name for fondue featuring oil and meat instead of cheese and bread, or chocolate and strawberries. Once or twice a year my mom used to serve this. (In a house around the corner from the one Mitt Romney just bought, BTW.)

At any rate, whether or not the fancy name helps you along, there are some real benefits to cooking a turkey using the poached-in-oil method. Oil gets a lot hotter than water (poaching), and conducts heat better than air (roasting)  That means faster cooking times. Poaching a whole turkey in oil will cook at about 3 min./pound, or about 45 minutes for a Thanksgiving sized bird.

The fast cooking time and total immersion in oil does not cook off nearly as much of the birds’ natural juices as a long roast. Because oil and water do not mix, the oil does not penetrate the flesh, so banish any thoughts of a grease-ball bird from your mind.

Imagine instead, a whole 15 pound turkey cooked in three quarters of an hour, emerging from the bubbling cauldron with a perfectly crisped skin, and and moist, succulent flesh. Also imagine banishing all the Is it done yet?/back-timing anxiety that is often a part of the Thanksgiving feast.

A photo-illustration accompanying the Epicurious “Thanksgiving in New Orleans” article.

And if you want to go full-redneck, which is to say, completely embrace this regional/class-specific cooking method (I haven’t actually researched the origin, but the easy inference is this is a down-market, Southern, countrified folk thing to do) you can inject the bird with any sort of marinade you can think up. Store-bought vinaigrettes work fine, but between the mild, flavor-accepting nature of the meat, and your imagination, there’s really no limit.

The first time you do this you might feel pretty chuffed. You’ll be outside (this is strictly an outdoor method of cookery) standing around drinking a beer, adjusting the flame to keep a proper temperature, gabbing with friends and family, and making sure you don’t do anything stupid that results in fire, explosion, or dumping 5 gallons of boiling oil everywhere. The entire process will feel consequential, and you’ll likely feel an urge to memorialize the event with a photo and post it to the internet.

Deep frying turkeys ten at a time!

This might get you mocked.

Siva Vaidhyanathan is a media studies professor at the University of Virginia, and another person I follow on twitter because he tweets things that often challenge or provoke me. A few hours after Michael’s turkey frying tweet, Siva tweeted this:

People who deep-fry turkeys: 1) They have to tell you about it. 2) They post pictures of themselves doing it, like it’s mountain climbing.

Siva’s sentiments must resonate, apparently there’s a lot of turkey fryer hate out there, because seven people retweeted him.

Now those of you playing the home-game already know where I’m going. Megan McArdle, from In Praise of Kitchen Gadgets:

There is, of course, the joy of acquisition.  And why give that short shrift?  The high may be temporary, but the same is true of climbing a mountain.  Why valorize one over the other?

Mountain climbing indeed! I tweeted back at Siva:

“Prople [sic] who write books, they have to tell you about it….”

At any rate, I say the hell with Siva and his seven sycophants. Probably they’ve never fried a turkey, so what to they know? And if they have and have arrived at point where they can’t enjoy other people’s pride in accomplishment to the point that fried-turkey boasting annoys them enough to try and rain on other people’s parades, well you don’t need that sort of person’s approval anyway! Take a pic, share it on Twitter and I will retweet it!

A turkey fryer explosion. Make sure your turkey is completely thawed!

Last spring I went into the city for an art opening. The opening featured a piano and singer combo, artisanal bourbon tasting, and chicken satay “lollipops”.

There was also art, and the art was quilted.

The concept (this art was conceptual) was that quilting is a very American art form, so the artist had re-made iconic American paintings as quilts, paintings like American Gothic and Chistina’s World, but then to twist it a little further, he had substituted himself and his friends for the original subjects in the paintings. Also there was a very big, quilted American flag and a sixteen panel quilt wherein each panel the artist was wearing different kinds of sunglasses.

And just so you wouldn’t miss it, there were laminated placards next to each quilt with an image of the original painting and some verbiage explaining the history and substitution and whatnot.

And just in case it’s not clear from my retelling, I was not very impressed.

An art quilt

But I wasn’t there as an art critic, I was there on a business-social outing, so despite my having some pretty strong opinions about art, I was doing my best to keep them to myself.

I found myself standing next to a woman about my age. She was tall, slender and shapely. She was very well turned out. Jeans and a jean jacket, scarf knotted around her neck. She was prematurely grey, but worked it nicely with a crisp, expensive-looking haircut. Despite her causal appearance it was quite clear she had plenty of money backing up her look. She was wearing denim, well-aged, but she didn’t look shabby, she looked posh. I could tell by the way people related to her the was a bit of a queen bee. I instinctively mistrusted her. I decided I’d go with a nugget of common interest, with generous dollop of  signaling ladled over the top.

A Mennonite quilting circle

“One of the fellows I have working for me as a carpenter is a Mennonite and an artist. He told me he wants a complete report when I get back to boat shop.” In one cleverly crafted sentence I let her know I was high enough up on the economic food chain to have employees, that we were engaged in something regarded as High Craft and that I knew a little about quilting culture.

“Oh, it’s not that kind of quilting,” she parried.

Then we both retreated; I to the chicken satay lollipops, and she to the artisanal bourbon, our mutual self-satisfaction no doubt raised considerably!

“It’s not that kind of catamaran.”

LEFT: Yogurt is comprised of Streptococcus thermophilus and Lactobacilli such as bulgaricus, acidophilus, casei, and rhamnosis.

In the spirit of Tod Kelly’s Cheap-ass Gourmet series, and to add to the plethora of food posts we’ve had here this weekend…

It’s amazing what a gallon of milk can be turned into. Below the fold I have included detailed instructions on how to turn one gallon of milk (usually ranging in price from $2.50 to $6.00) into a quart of tzatziki, a quart of Greek yogurt parfait, a glob of labneh, a block of faux-neufchatel, a medium-sized cheesecake, a small lasagna’s worth of ricotta cheese, a hearty soup, and two weeks worth of skin care.

Enjoy, oh wise Stewards of Nature.

PROTOCOL I: MAKING YOGURT

Supplies: a gallon of milk; a thick pot; a second pot; a four-cup measuring pitcher; a (meat) thermometer; one cup of plain yogurt; five one-quart (hermetically-sealable) mason jars; a fork (for mixing); a cooler

A good sterile technique is crucial for converting milk into clean, fresh-tasting yogurt. If you do this scientifically, this yogurt should taste better than any yogurt you’ve ever had. All temperature values are in Fahrenheit.

1. Sterilize mason jars: boil/steam mason jars and lids for ten minutes in a large pot(s) with the lid on. Do not remove the lid of this pot until you’re ready to incubate (step 9).

2. Pour a gallon of milk into a thick pot. (You don’t have to use a thick pot, but if you use a thin pot, you’ll have to stir frequently to avoid burning the milk.)

3. Heat milk on low-medium to about 185 degrees Fahrenheit. Make sure not to burn the milk. Properly done, this should take you at least thirty minutes.

4. Let milk cool to about 125 degrees Fahrenheit in a cold-water bath.

5. Measure out one cup of 125-degree milk.

6. Mix into a uniform slurry with one cup of yogurt in the measuring cup.

7. Slowly add this mixture to the rest of the milk still in the thick pot. Stir vigorously.

8. Make a 125-degree hot water bath in a cooler that is large enough to hold five one-quart mason jars.

9. Fill five one-quart mason jars up to their necks with milk-yogurt mix. Seal mason jars and place them in the cooler’s hot water bath so that they are still (i.e. make sure the water level does not rise above the necks of the mason jars).

10. Close lid of cooler and incubate for three to seven hours or overnight.

11. Refrigerate for twenty-four hours. If you completed all the previous steps correctly, you should now have a bit less than five quarts of yogurt.

PROTOCOLS II THROUGH IX: WHAT TO DO WITH ALL THAT YOGURT

II. Use one quart to make tzatziki:

Supplies: coffee filter, strainer, big bowl, yogurt, mason jar, extra virgin olive oil, fresh dill weed, cucumber, garlic

1. Place a coffee filter over a strainer in a big bowl.

2. Pour yogurt from mason jar onto coffee filter; let sit in refrigerator for 1 – 2 hours. Make sure to save and return whey (filtrate) to now empty mason jar.

3. Mix EVOO, fresh, pulverized dill weed, diced or julienned cucumber (make sure to scrape any juices off your cutting board and into the mixture), and minced garlic with strained yogurt to taste.

4. Refrigerate. You have just made one quart of tzatziki, an excellent salad dressing or garnish for sandwiches.

III. Use a second quart to make Greek yogurt parfait:

Supplies: coffee filter, strainer, big bowl, yogurt, mason jar, pomegranate, small bowl, honey, Grape-Nuts

1. Place a coffee filter over a strainer in a big bowl.

2. Pour yogurt from mason jar onto coffee filter; let sit in refrigerator for 1 – 2 hours. Make sure to save and return whey (filtrate) to the same empty mason jar as in (II).

3. Cut one large pomegranate in half; remove all the seeds and place them in a bowl.

4. Mix pomegranate seeds and two or three heaping spoonfuls of raw, unfiltered honey (I find clover goes best with pomegranate) with strained yogurt to taste. Layer in mason jar s’il vous préférez.

5. You now have one quart of Greek yogurt parfait. Serve with Grape-Nuts sprinkled on top.

IV. Use a third quart to make labneh:

Supplies: coffee filter, strainer, big bowl, yogurt, mason jar, mixing bowl, salt, cheesecloth, pot, small bowl for serving, extra virgin olive oil, olives, pistachios, grape tomatoes, fresh mint, bread, white vinegar, red wine, black pepper, rosemary

1. Place a coffee filter over a strainer in a big bowl (noticing a pattern?).

2. Pour yogurt from mason jar onto coffee filter; let sit in refrigerator for 1 – 2 hours. Make sure to save and return whey (filtrate) to the same empty mason jar as in (II).

3. Scrape filtered yogurt into mixing bowl; add one teaspoon of salt; mix thoroughly.

4. Spoon mixture into a fresh cheesecloth (or any clean cloth really) spread out over a pot; tie cheesecloth and suspend over the pot to collect the whey; let sit in refrigerator for 24 hours. Intermittently squeeze off lingering whey. Because it has been salted, make sure to save and return whey (filtrate) to a different empty mason jar from (II).

5. After twenty-four hours have passed, remove cheese from cloth and shape into a uniform ball with clean hands. Place in bowl, create well in the middle of the cheese (as with mashed potatoes) and smother with EVOO. Top with diced black and/or kalamata olives, halved grape tomatoes, and crushed pistachios; garnish amply with chopped fresh mint. Place this bowl on larger plate.

6. Cut pita bread, ciabatta, and/or baguette into one-centimeter-thick (or less) chip-sized pieces (about sixty or eighty pieces altogether is a nice amount).

7. Pan-fry bread in two parts olive oil; splash with one part white vinegar, one more part olive oil, and one part red wine. (Shiraz or grenache works well here.) Continue to fry until firm and golden brown but not burned. Make sure to flip bread. Garnish with black pepper and/or rosemary (this works well if you chop up a stock and a half or so, fry half the rosemary in olive oil before putting bread on the frypan and then sprinkle the other half of chopped rosemary on top of the bread when you’re almost finished frying).

8. Arrange chips on large plate around bowl. As an appetizer, this dish serves eight to ten people.

V. Use a fourth quart to make faux-neufchatel:

Supplies: coffee filter, strainer, big bowl, yogurt, mason jar, mixing bowl, salt, cheesecloth, pot, “Tupperware”, chives

1. Place a coffee filter over a strainer in a big bowl.

2. Pour yogurt from mason jar onto coffee filter; let sit in refrigerator for 1 – 2 hours. Make sure to save and return whey (filtrate) to the same empty mason jar as in (II).

3. Scrape filtered yogurt into mixing bowl; add one teaspoon of salt and chopped chives; mix thoroughly.

4. Spoon mixture into a fresh cheesecloth (or any clean cloth really) spread out over a pot; tie cheesecloth and suspend over the pot to collect the whey; let sit in refrigerator for 24 – 48 hours. Intermittently squeeze off lingering whey. Because it has been salted (and chived), make sure to save this whey along with the salted whey from (IV).

5. After twenty-four hours have passed, remove cheese from cloth and pack into Tupperware or fake Tupperware (I prefer fake Tupperware for real neufchatel and real Tupperware for fake neufchatel.) Put this on your bagel; avoid early cardiovascular death.

VI. Use a fifth quart to make cheesecake:

Supplies: coffee filter, strainer, big bowl, yogurt, mason jar, mixing bowl, salt, cheesecloth, two eggs, fresh cream, flour, butter

So far we’ve eyeballed everything we’ve made from our initial gallon of milk, but for baking we want precise amounts:

1. Place a coffee filter over a strainer in a big bowl.

2. Pour yogurt from mason jar onto coffee filter; let sit in refrigerator for 1 – 2 hours. Make sure to save and return whey (filtrate) to the same empty mason jar as in (II).

3. Scrape filtered yogurt into mixing bowl; add one teaspoon of salt; mix thoroughly.

4. Spoon mixture into a fresh cheesecloth (or any clean cloth really) spread out over a pot; tie cheesecloth and suspend over the pot to collect the whey; let sit in refrigerator for 24 – 48 hours. Intermittently squeeze off lingering whey. Because it has been salted, make sure to save this whey along with the salted whey from (IV).

5. After twenty-four hours have passed, remove cheese from cloth, and measure out 200 grams in a mixing bowl. Add the rest to labneh (IV) or faux-neufchatel (V).

6. Add 80 grams sucrose (or alternatively 120 grams honey or maple syrup); two eggs, one cup of fresh cream, 30 grams flour, and 45 grams unsalted butter.

7. Spoon into delicious graham cracker crust.

8. Bake at 340 degrees Fahrenheit for 40 minutes. 9. Top with favorite seasonal chutney or compote (future post). Let cool in refrigerator. Enjoy.

VII. Use the salted whey from IV, V, and VI as soup stock:

I won’t go into too much detail here, but, I find that salted whey goes well as a stock for French onion soup, especially considering what happens in Protocol VIII:

VIII. Heat the unsalted whey from II, III, IV, V, and VI to make ricotta cheese:

Hopefully you’ve been collecting the unsalted whey that has filtered off and you now have about a quart of it. It should be relatively clear and yellowish in color. Tasting it should make you want to polish your broadsword and shout “Valhalla I am coming!”.

1. Place a coffee filter over a strainer in a big bowl.

2. Put this whey in a thick pot and heat slowly to about 200 degrees Fahrenheit. A delicate precipitate should form. If it does not, try adding some delicate acid (white balsamic vinegar or citric acid – i.e. lemon juice – are relatively good sources for this). Try and keep the becheesed liquid just below boiling point for no longer than a few minutes.

3. Pour contents of pot over filter.

4. Let sit in refrigerator for two to three hours. You won’t get the best ever yield out of this, but you should wind up with enough ricotta cheese for a small lasagna or a few cannoli.

IX. Use the unsalted whey that remains after making ricotta cheese for skin care:

If you’re someone who is inclined towards caring for your skin, whey has been used successfully in this capacity for thousands of years.

1. Soak some paper towel strips in whey; place on face or on other area of dry skin.

2. Leave on twenty minutes; remove.

3. Wash face thoroughly.

4. If you do this everyday before bed, you should have enough whey to last ten days or so.

So there you have it. One gallon of milk: $4.00. A quart of tzatziki; a quart of Greek yogurt parfait; labneh for eight; a healthier, more-delicious cream cheese substitute substitute; a cheesecake; soup stock for one hearty bowl; ricotta cheese for a small lasagna or a few cannoli; ten days or so worth of skin care; a smaller carbon footprint; major reduction in risk factors for early cardiovascular death with very little trade off in terms of food satisfaction; the satisfaction that comes with rejecting lazy consumerism, choosing self-sufficiency, and successfully working through a challenging procedure: priceless.

Another season, here and gone, this one easily the most disappointing of the three and yet there still managed to be moments during tonight’s episode when I longed for more with some of these characters. That’s the best I can say about it.

The Good
-Pity LaDonna. She’s the show’s punching bag, sadly used again and again and again to suffer the slings and arrows of life’s outrageous fortunes. Not only was she left to clean up the disaster of her burned out bar, and not only did she suffer the indignity of being visited by the man who has been shaking her down for money (“You suffer a little misfortune and that means I don’t get paid,” he says, before she chases him from the bar), but her rapists are let off the hook by a jury that can’t decide on their guilt or innocence. Later, I’ll get into Davis’s repeated and inexplicable successes; as much could be said about LaDonna’s repeated and inexplicable suffering. Her brother, the assault, and then losing her business.

-The community surrounding GiGi’s though steps up: all of the show’s musicians, led by Antoine, go in on a fundraiser to support LaDonna. Everybody’s there – Delmond, Janette, Nelson, Albert, Desiree… – and everybody has a magical time. Big time musicians show up too. It’s Antoine at his best: arranging, hustling, supporting. Early in the show, he pays a cabdriver a full fare plus a tip, baffling the man behind the wheel as he is so accustomed to Antoine’s legendarily cheap treatment. Later, he explains to his boss at the school that he wants to create more opportunities for the kids in the band, offering to form a group to play music on Saturdays and later doing so, drawing a substantial level of participation from a group of young musicians whom we remember being profoundly disorganized.

-Albert and Delmond continue their back-and-forth with the developers, eventually becoming so sick of the process that they return the $20,000 consulting fee that they’d been given. Albert’s treatments continue and sits, starting on another suit while enduring a chemo treatment. There’s no quit in him. Meanwhile, Delmond remains in New Orleans, not having knuckled under to his managers demands that he go to Europe to tour his album.

-Sonny was featured very, very briefly,
-Terry Colson gets the opportunity to shine in various moments. First, he mercilessly beats the detective who was with him when he caught his own beating, the detective who functionally Serpico’d him. Second, he sniffs out a naked conspiracy by his fellow officers to frame him for drug possession. Third, he again asks for and is again refused a transfer. Finally, he consummates things with Toni, an outcome everybody has been expecting since he came to her house in the aftermath of Creighton’s suicide. The best of this though was seeing David Morse sad-dogging it around Toni’s house the next morning, slunk over in a gray t-shirt and striped boxer shorts. He goes downstairs for juice and runs into Sofia, home from Florida and slightly taken aback at the new man in her house. They exchange pleasantries and he looks the way you’d expect a 50ish year-old man to look when he’s been caught in the hen house.

-And finally Toni, who shows backbone in getting the federal investigator to swear that he’ll resign of sufficient evidence doesn’t result in charges against the officers responsible for Abreau’s murder. We’re reminded of what politics can mean when we see Barack Obama being elected at the end of the episode, an election that resulted in this.

The Bad
-Annie’s CD was released. It was a huge (?) success, enough to justify a party in New York City, enough to justify an apparent one-night stand and an abandonment of Davis. Maybe the character won’t come back next season. And at least she didn’t mangle the already-not-so-good “This City.” So there’s that I guess. At the end of the episode, she leaves Davis, who looks inexplicably sad, and she looks sad too, and nobody cares because nobody cares.

-In three consecutive seasons, Davis has had what appeared to be substantive musical success and in each successive season, he hasn’t changed a whit. I don’t expect his sudden success during tonight’s episode to have changed him when next we meet him; he’ll no doubt be the same man-child that we’ve come to endure. Still, it seems baffling to believe that this guy can keep having success again and again and again while other musicians on the show seemingly don’t. It’s an odd thing. Maybe we’re meant to take away something about the inherent unfairness of the music industry, but all I can ever think is, “Bullshit! AGAIN?”

-And finally, Janette, who threw one hissy-fit after another after realizing that her having a financial partner in her restaurant meant having a boss, something she’d been repeatedly warned about and something that she repeatedly ignored. She declares that she’s done making her signature dish (a baffling complaint); she fires one cook and threatens a hostess; she insists that she won’t offer Sunday breakfast, even though there’s good money to be made. We’re apparently meant to be on her side? I can’t imagine how that’s possible – and we see at the end that in fact, she’s had none of her demands met – but what are the writers thinking? It’d be one thing if she was being reasonable. Firing her chronically late kitchen staffer and dismissing the hostess made sense, but refusing breakfast service and insisting that she’ll no longer make her most popular dish? What, is the restaurant supposed to intentionally lose money? Come on now.

The Ugly
-I do not know where the show will go during Treme‘s next and final season. We know it’ll be half a season. We know that there remain open story lines. We know that Simon has shined in creating compelling mini-series. Hopes are high, despite this show’s obvious short-comings. I still like to imagine the show we’d get if Sonny and Davis and Annie were no longer involved, and all three of those characters could easily be abandoned without anybody noticing. Their arcs ended tonight: Davis’s last great hit was called “I Quit”; Annie’s album took her to New York City and represented the end of her musical journey; Sonny found a wife and sobriety on the fishing boats in Louisiana’s Vietnamese community, a community that we’ll sadly never get to explore.

Meanwhile, the show’s more compelling characters? Albert has his ongoing treatments; Antoine has his Saturday band; LaDonna’s rebuilding GiGi’s; Toni (and Terry) have the Abreau murder. There’s gold in them hills. I hope.

Thanks
-Thanks to Erik, for allowing me to publish this recaps here. Thanks to The Venetian Blond, who linked here every week. Thanks also to Dave Walker at the New Orleans Times-Picayune; he linked here too.

I guess the Fix the Debt folks are worried that their decades-long quest to roll back the New Deal and lower their own taxes is in peril, because they’re responding now to a Matt Yglesias post which argued they mainly care about rolling back the New Deal and lowering their own taxes. Here’s their non-sequitur-tastic parry to Yglesias’s thrust:

Both Paul Krugman at the New York Times and Matt Yglesias at Slate have made the claim that those who advocate for debt reduction should love the cliff. After all, it does significantly reduce the debt, sending it below 60 percent of GDP by 2022.

We’ve challenged this myth in the past, as the sudden and blunt nature of deficit reduction in the fiscal cliff would have a devastating impact on the economy. It also ignores tax and entitlement reform that could minimize harm and address the future drivers of debt. For these reasons, the fiscal cliff is the second worst option, only behind kicking the can further down the road and not addressing our rising debt.

And here’s Yglesias’s apt response:

So it’s not a group dedicated to avoiding premature austerity at all costs and it’s not a group dedicated to deficit reduction at all costs either. But it does include among its “core principles” that we need to reduce entitlement spending and enact “comprehensive and pro-growth tax reform” that, among other things, “lowers rates.” That sounds a lot like the agenda of a group that’s dedicated to rate-cutting tax reform and entitlement spending cuts, rather than to any particular view about the appropriate timing of deficit reduction.

We’re not quite at the point when it’s wise to say the Fix the Debt folks are flailing, but the prospects of their suffering a near-total defeat are looking better than I could’ve imagined, say, nine months ago. Obama’s been reelected on a fuzzy but pro-soak the rich mandate, and with the cliff fast-approaching it’s looking increasingly likely that we’ll tumble over it (which wouldn’t immediately be that bad) and find ourselves living in the dystopian Hellscape that was the majority of the Bill Clinton 90s. At that point, Obama can sit back and wait for Republicans to reinstate the current tax rates for the 98 percent and, should he so desire, leave it at that.

Worry is, what if Obama’s unwilling to leave it at that? It’s long been something of his White Whale, the Grand Bargain, and there’s reason to think the president is no less committed than before on trading cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid for higher revenues from the wealthy. I happen to think David Plouffe’s recent comments at the University of Delaware were intended not so much to make news as to completely troll my Facebook feed; and that Plouffe didn’t say anything we haven’t heard before anyway. But 2011′s debt ceiling-inspired Grand Bargain justifiably casts an ominous shadow into the eyes of any lefty who tries to divine what Obama might do.

My biggest concern isn’t that Obama’s secretly a foe of universal social insurance, but that, like Kevin Drum, he might be think you’ve got to bleed the patient in order to save it. That’s the gist of this Drum post, Why Social Security Reform Would Be Good For Liberals:

If we extended the solvency of Social Security for the next century, it’s true that the Cato Institute would be back the next day complaining that this wasn’t enough.… But the Washington Post wouldn’t. The Pete Peterson folks wouldn’t. The truth is that all the earnest, centrist, Very Serious People who want to reform Social Security don’t want to starve your granny. They don’t have a problem with the concept of a guaranteed retirement program. They just want it to be properly funded. So a deal would shut them up.

As you’d guess, I’m extremely skeptical of this proposition. It seems to me that the idea of the welfare state as simply unaffordable and even passé — best exemplified by Walter Russell Mead’s “blue social model” campaign — has become pretty influential among the Very Serious People. We’ll just microfinance our way to social and economic justice, or something! What about Kickstarter? Do they do disability aid? And as Digby has pointed out on multiple occasions, this kind of “get it off the table” logic brought us welfare reform. And that’s not a precedent to look on with a smile.

@eliasisquith

by M.A.

A friend of mine forwarded over a very disturbing letter. It’s written up as a letter to “Mom” from a daughter leaving an “abusive” household. What it really is, at least as I reread it for the fifth time, is a stark reminder of how very disturbed some people in the various state secession movements really are.
The first thing that jumped out at me was how hard it was to pin down who “Mom” was. Eventually, on the second read, I was able to tell; the “Mom”, the person the letter writer really loves, is… the old, historically slaveholding, historically Jim Crow and yes, still racist South.

The passage that clued me in, that also really disturbed me to read and re-read trying to figure out the meaning:

Remember when you tried to divorce Dad? I stood with you, Mom. I was still very small, but I and my sisters fought him and our brothers with everything we had. They were too strong. They beat us, and they raped us, and forced us back into their house. Scarred and beaten, still we forgave them, didn’t we?

That’s a very odd, and disingenuous way, to read the American Civil War… unless you’re one of the old “The South Shall Rise Again” types. Except that those types – well, they didn’t “forgive.” They’re the types who advocate a “troops on the border, shoot anything that moves” strategy with respect to Mexico. The ones who claim that Obama is president “only for ‘those’ people.” The 46 percent of the GOP who think interracial marriage should be illegal. They’re the ones who rant on about “welfare queens”, ignoring 3 decades of entitlement and social program reforms that have already happened since Ronald Reagan first trotted out that racist line of attack; they’re the ones who deliberately and maliciously lie about ‘fighting voter fraud’ while passing laws whose only goal is to suppress the votes of ethnic minorities.

The underlying premise of the whole letter feels off to me. This isn’t a rational letter; it’s something else. In therapy circles, there’s an acronym – DARVO. It stands for “Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender.” The more I see the hysterical behavior of the GOP, especially the fringe hyper-conservative GOP, the more I see this going on. The GOP, the conservatives, are the offenders. They’re the abusers. But that’s not how they want to paint it. They want to play the victim.

In their mind:

• It’s not that the GOP’s policies are odious to Americans, it’s that the GOP didn’t ‘get their message out’ because of a ‘left wing media.’
• It’s not that the GOP’s spokespeople like Rush Limbaugh are themselves odious, it’s because of “smear campaigns.” Likewise for Chick-Fil-A and the rest of the orwellian-named “Values Voters Coalition.”
• It’s not that the GOP’s policies towards gays aren’t bigoted, it’s that gays merely by existing are “infringing on the religious liberties” of the bible humpers. Similar logic from the GOP regarding women who think that their health insurance ought to cover contraception and hormonal medicines just as much as it covers viagra.
• It’s not that the GOP’s policies towards women are borderline abusive, it’s that – well, I still haven’t figured out how it is that the GOP’s policies don’t look abusive to anyone outside of the Quiverfull or “Promise Keepers” movement. I can’t even follow their logic on this one, though they certainly like to scream about “feminazis” and a “war on men.“

I’ve been in an abusive (emotionally, not physically) relationship before. I’ve friends who’ve been through relationships that were both physically and emotionally abusive.

From where I stand, the GOP’s rhetoric is abusive. Most of their argumentation is classic DARVO. And when I see letters like this, that play the DARVO card to its ultimate level, trying to cast the worst of the worst as the victim? It tells me that the USA is in desperate need of a reality check for a large number of citizens.

Greetings loyal readers!

My apologies for taking so long on this part, but life got in the way a little.

I’m glad I’m getting some really interesting discussion on these posts, and based on the discussion so far, I’m amending the sequence to address issues of cultural distinctiveness. The new contents page is as follows:

1. Introductions and Definitions
2. They took our Jobs!
3. The Tribulations of the Working Class (you are here)
4. The Race to the Bottom
5. Getting Strategic
6. You will be Assimilated

Remember, if there’s anything else you want me to discuss, let me know in the comments.

Even if society as a whole isn’t made worse off by free trade, the distributional effects may be a problem – if free trade lowers wages, then even something that’s a net social good might legitimately be seen as a bad outcome. Inequality is a legitimate concern, but it’s more complicated than most people realise.

First off, the Stolper-Samuelson theorem does suggest liberalising trade will benefit those who have the relatively abundant factor of production at the expense of those  who have the relatively scarce factor. In an industrial nation that would means that the owners of capital would benefit at the expense of workers.  However, that theory is pretty unrealistic – it only holds for a world with 2 countries, 2 factors of production and 2 goods. A “2 x 2 x 2″ model, as they are known, is a good way to teach trade theory to undergraduates, but it’s a lousy approximation of the real world. In the real world, whether you gain or lose from liberalising trade on a particular good (I’ll use removing an import tariff for my example here) depends on your economic relationship with that good:

1. If you are a producer of the good but not a consumer of it, you will probably be either worse off, or unaffected. Foreign competition will drive down revenues, reducing wages (for workers) and profits (for owners). You could even lose your job / investment entirely. How badly you are affected will depend on the specificity of your skills / capital, or how easily you can use your skills or investment to produce other goods. People with many options (or who’s other options aren’t much worse than what they currently have) won’t lose much, or possibly not at all. If all your job skills are tied up in this one industry, or you own machinery that is good for nothing else, then you are going to take a bath.  One complication – as I noted above, liberalising trade causes some industries to expand, so even if you lose your job, you may be able to get a better one in one of the expanding industries, but this come back to how product-specific your skills are.
2. If you consume the good, and don’t produce it then you are strictly better off. Foreign competition makes the good cheaper, and your job isn’t affected so this is a win for you.
3. If you produce and consume the good, then the two effects push against each other, and which one is larger will depend on your circumstances. The more versatile your skills / investment and the larger a fraction of your income that you spend on the good, the more likely you are to win out.
4. If you produce an export good (or start doing so due to trade being liberalised), you may gain. As your industry expands, your career / investment opportunities will expand with them.
5. Bear in mind that some domestic industries rely on imports to function. If those imports get cheaper then chances are everyone working / investing in that industry is better off.

Note that because of the gains from specialisation that trade permits, the winners win more than the losers lose.

So what does this mean, if you’re worried about the distributional effects of trade:

1. the biggest losers will be people whose skills or investment are highly specific to one industry. Note that to get people to make an investment like that to a specific industry, you will most likely have to compensate them. An unskilled worker can probably get another job that pays nearly as well. This means the biggest losers from liberalisation will be richer, all things being equal.
2. The poorest people in a country will gain from liberalisation. A lot of low-income jobs are in non-tradeable services. Checkout operators, janitors and hairdressers aren’t losing their job to foreign competition.  And the very poorest people don’t have jobs at all, so they stand to gain from liberalisation of any good they consume.
3. The game changes if you liberalise many goods at once. Any one person will probably only be adversely affected by the liberalisation of one good, so every other good will be a win for them. And since gains exceed losses, spreading the gains and losses more evenly leads to fewer net losers. Farmers might not like the abolition of sugar tariffs, but if cars and tractors are cheaper, they may not mind as much.
4. Even if there are still vulnerable groups you are worried about – there may be better ways to help them. Offering assistance with retraining or moving to other parts of the country will help the people adversely affected without trying to hold your entire economy in stasis. Remember that there will almost certainly be some people in a bad way who will get a job as a result of trade liberalisation, and their interests matter too.

As you can see, there’s no clear winners and losers by income here. This is why I tend to be cynical of class-based analysis. In some situations (some welfare, tax rate progressivity), income groups are interest groups, but most of the time they aren’t. The reason Occupy Wall Street’s claim to represent “the 99%” fell apart – 99% of the time the 99% aren’t on the same side.

In part 4 I’ll be looking at inequality from an international standpoint – and I’ll look at whether free trade with poorer countries is exploitative.

Actually, that’s not quite fair—I happen to enjoy watching 1776 and its John-Adams-as-Mr.-Feeney approach to history.  But perhaps that’s because there’s no one who’s going to leave any movie centered on Adams arguing for his beatification.  He was too short, I suppose, and too bald.

Lincoln, on the other hand, is hagiography pure and simple.  It was directed and produced by Steven Spielberg, so it will appeal to the masses; and written by Tony Kushner, so it will appeal to those who think their taste somewhat higher class.  Daniel Day-Lewis, as always, allows himself to be absorbed wholly into the character he portrays, and he manages to transform the screenplay’s penchant for having Lincoln speak in parables into the nervous habit of a backwoods lawyer rather than the pontificating of an American Christ—but the point of the film is found in the words with which Sally-Field-as-Mary-Lincoln lambastes Tommy-Lee-Jones-as-Thaddeus-Stevens:

How the people love my husband. They flock to see him by the thousands.  They will never love you as they love my husband. How hard for you to know that. But how important to remember it.

The movie’s intent is to reinforce and justify what we already know: we love Lincoln, that rumpled demi-god.

Lincoln favors The Thirteenth Amendment (never mentioned without its adjectival number) simply and precisely because he is Lincoln.  It is a matter of his nature; there can be no more complexity than that.  And while I suppose I can’t reasonably demand that the script have shown engagement with a more recent Pulitzer Prize Lincoln biography, recognition of the existence of Foner’s convincing, compelling, and (now) well-known account of Lincoln’s evolution on the issue of slavery would have led to a more compelling script. Lincoln, that is, was a politician, not a saint—and a damn good one at that, who understood the nuances of pro- and (more importantly) anti-slavery positions.  He himself had occupied many of these gradations over the course of his life and career, and (like his advisers) knew how to manipulate and work them.

But nothing of that Lincoln makes it into the film.  Instead, Tony Kushner—who will, at best, be remembered like Arthur Miller for having had genius perch on his shoulder just long enough to write one remarkable play—works the keyboard as ham-fistedly as Spielberg’s crisp and squeaky-clean 1865 begins to appear around minute forty-five.  Lincoln’s political positions are products of his divinely ordained, unchanging nature; those of Thaddeus Stevens, by romantic interest more than principle; and Congress—well, they’re just craven and money-grubbing.  All one needs to do to persuade is to offer a patronage position—or a bribe, but a bribe is a touch too unseemly.  Would to God that we had been given a presidency, but no Congress! the film seems to lament.  Dayeinu!  It would have been enough!

Lincoln, that is, is just another pop cultural assent to the cult of the presidency—now so terribly in vogue among the curators of pop culture, what with a young, liberal president in the White House—as opposed to a middle-aged conservative.  While Day-Lewis’ Lincoln appears fully aware of the terror of the power he has assumed, the film itself dismisses this notion with a wave of the hand: Lincoln’s concerns about his assumption of power are, with near-immediacy, put into the mouth of the anti-Lincoln, pro-slavery Congressman Fernando Wood (D-NY), where they give way seamlessly to the rhetoric of racism.

And so, after weeks of anticipation of what this movie will tell us about today and President Obama’s crises, we read conclusions like:

One has to assume that President Obama will soon take the opportunity to see Lincoln. If he does, we can hope that the film reminds him that he is clothed with immense power, and he should continue to use it in ways that will prove untidy in the moment, but wise in the rear-view mirror of history.

I can still remember the days when words like these, whispered in the ear of another American president, unleashed a clamor of fury and pontificating.  But when there is important legislation at stake—health care reform, for example—a critique of the dark underbelly of executive power is an option only for those who would stand against progress, or those who will nonetheless continue to wield the very power they pretend to critique.  We should pay no attention as the wars begun and ended without Congressional consultation (let alone approval), American citizens executed without trial or warrant, and Orwellian “extraordinary rendition” are covered over like so many amputated limbs.

If it reflects contemporary politics at all, Lincoln is an assertion of the necessity of deference before presidential power and prerogative rather than a call for a genuinely democratic or constitutional approach to the crafting of legislation.  There are no legitimately alternative views to the president’s; there are merely obstacles to be overcome.  Legislation must be crafted in the manner of the President—because the President is strong and good, while Cabinet-level dissenters and Congress (even—especially, the vocal opposition, that collective of “hicks and hacks”) are craven and weak.

But if you don’t care for this reason to object to Lincoln, I’ll end with a simpler one: it’s a terribly mediocre film, not at all worth the ten dollars you’re expected to shill out for a ticket.  You’d do better to buy and spend three hours with Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book, or Foner’s.

The culture wars over political correctness in academia never really went away, I suppose, although they only sometimes bubble up to the top of the simmering zeitgeist. One of those bubbles reaches up near the top today at Butler University, as a student took public his unhappiness with his professor’s request to a second-year political science class that students “write and speak in a way that does not assume American-ness, maleness, whiteness, heterosexuality, middle-class status, etc. to be the norm” and instead use “inclusive language” as “a fundamental issue of social justice.”

The student who found this instruction an offensive and insulting presumption that he is a racist, sexist, heterosexist, classist, and national origin-ist, named Ryan Lovelace, dropped the “politically correct” class rather than do what the syllabus asked of him. The just-under-the-text line of outrage that we are supposed to read in to the story is the professor “indoctrinating” her students instead of “educating” them.

After all, if we were to loosely say that valuing, seeking out, and emphasizing matters of demographic diversity is “liberal” and eschewing such an emphasis is “conservative,” then the outrage that actual conservatives (are apparently supposed to) feel when reacting to stories like this becomes understandable. Bear that in mind when you read that Mr. Lovelace claims:

… I expected to hear professors express opinions different from my own. I did not expect to be judged before I ever walked through the door, and did not think I would be forced to agree with my teachers’ worldviews or suffer the consequences.

After reading the syllabus, Mr. Lovelace became upset because he believed that he was being asked to write and speak from the point of view described in shorthand as “liberal,” and if he instead adopts the attitude described in shorthand as “conservative,” he is not welcome in the class.

In my experience teaching undergraduate college classes both online and in person, I have found that students are remarkably sensitive, and react emotionally and unpleasantly, when their writing is challenged. Usually, though, this is when the challenge is based upon a showing of an actual deficiency in the writing itself, as in:

Student: [tentatively enters office, wide-eyed and nervous.] Professor, this looks like you gave me a B- on my research paper. Is that right?

Professor: Yes, Student, that’s right. Twenty of of thirty sentences in your paper have no verbs, and half of the paragraphs are not about the assigned subject matter. You have only one citation to authority, which is the textbook for the class, in your entire three-page research paper, and there’s no bibliography, so it’s not clear to me that you did any research at all.

Student: OH MY GOD WHY ARE YOU GRADING ME SO HARSHLY I AM A GOOD WRITER THIS ISN’T FAIR MY PAPER DESERVES AN A AND YOU’RE RUINING MY COLLEGE CAREER I’M GOING TO FILE A GRIEVANCE AGAINST YOU AND TELL EVERY WEBSITE ON EARTH THAT YOU’RE A GRAMMAR NAZI WITH IMPOSSIBLY HIGH STANDARDS AND NO ONE SHOULD EVER TAKE YOUR CLASS BECAUSE YOU’RE A MONSTER WHO FAILS EVERYBODY WHO DISAGREES WITH YOU ON ANYTHING! [Storms out in tears.]

Professor: [Reaches for bottle of whiskey hidden in bookshelf.]

This is perhaps a little different because we’re talking about content rather than quality. But not much. Mr. Lovelace was told, right up front, that when talking in class and writing reports for it, he was not to assume that dominant demographics were the norm. (In his essay, he makes a point of mentioning that the professor is an African-American woman.) From this, he infers on his own that he was told to assume that to be within particular dominant demographics is somehow evil or morally wrong. “Not the norm” is different than “evil.”

This does not seem a fair reading of what he was asked to do, if you ask me.

If papers expressing liberal points of view were the only ones that got “A” grades and papers expressing conservative points of view were all failed, that would be one thing. But I don’t see anything that would lead me to suspect that the professor would actually grade papers based on their ideological perspective. I might go so far as to think that a paper expressing a conservative point of view which did not demonstrate meaningful consideration of a liberal point of view would be graded poorly.

I can see a potential objection that maybe such a heavy emphasis on diversity might not be what Mr. Lovelace signed up for when he asked to be in this class. The class is called Political Science 201, Research and Analysis, and is described by the university as:

Introduces you to the process of designing and executing research projects in Political Science. Focus is on approaches and methods to teach how to find information and report it.

That course description is a good example of how not to use infinitives. Hopefully the syllabus itself does not suffer from the same sort of soupy language and since language fundamentally the issue here, perhaps we ought not to make such an assumption. Nevertheless, I am baffled in my attempts to find a scan of the actual syllabus that so offended Mr. Lovelace. It does appear that the class will require research into a political issue of some sort, and a written report on the findings. It’s hard for me to imagine that things which have been traditional sorts of political cleavages – race, national identity, sex, economics – are avoidable in such a class. Diversity will of necessity be confronted in this class.

Now, in one sense, Mr. Lovelace’s sniffers of potential “indoctrination” may well be scoring a legitimate hit. There is little doubt in my mind that language, both as heard and read from others and as used by oneself, molds thought. A complex and reciprocal relationship exists between the thoughts and concepts in one’s mind, and the structure of language used to express them. So Mr. Lovelace being asked to consider the perspectives of people demographically unlike himself in the manner of his expression of ideas is likely an exercise in changing the way he thinks of his own demographic place in the world. He is being asked to consider on a different suit of opinions and perspectives, the “liberal” ones, rather than keeping his own “conservative” perspective, and to use more “liberal” langauge as a way of focusing on those new opinions and perspectives.

But here the shorthand stops being useful because it obscures more than it assists. It’s not liberal or conservative to consider perspectives other than your own; it’s not liberal or conservative to value people who are demographically different than oneself. (Yes, there are people who self-identify as conservative who seem to believe that those demographically different than themselves are somehow less important than they are, but I’m not convinced that they are exemplars of what conservatism as an intellectual position is really about.) We’re using “liberal” and “conservative” as shorthand for attitudes towards diversity and inclusiveness and acceptance of demographic differences. Somewhere along the way, that shorthand label becomes the reality and clicks in place with a constellation of other attitudes, opinions, beliefs, and (most powerfully) personal identifications.

By choosing a shorthand notation (“conservative”) that comes weighted with its own value judgments and a whole bunch of the rest of that baggage, we’ve now made something that ought to be universal (accepting people demographically different than oneself as equals and their perspectives as being as valuable as one’s own) and politicized it, and thrown it into a Manichean intellectual process of left-versus-right, what you like I dislike simply because you like it. Thus, diversity becomes a political football.

And even if we were talking about Mr. Lovelace being asked to consider liberal rather than “liberal” opinions, he’s not being asked to adoptthem. He’s being asked to try them on for size. And that process of trying them on for size may well be uncomfortable. He may find that from the perspectives he’s being asked to adopt, there are things about his “natural” or at least prior perspective that are questionable. And having seen that, he may be left with a moral quandary about returning to the opinions he once held.

Well, you know what? That’s what it is to think critically. And thinking critically is a very big part of what it is to be in higher education. You don’t have to change your mind on any particular issue, but you do have to look at the issue from several perspectives, thoughtfully and with a willingness to fairly consider that the better position may not be the one you started out holding. Unwilling to do this, Mr. Lovelace now faces a lasting impact on his academic career:

As a journalism major, I will now strive to avoid the liberal arts college as much as possible, not because the college fails to provide its students with any practical knowledge, but because the college seeks to indoctrinate its students with a hostile paradigm that views people like me—an American, white, heterosexual male from a middle-class background—as evil; whitey-righty need not attend.

Query as to how a journalism major intends to avoid taking liberal arts classes. Maybe he’s going to switch majors.

But the real problem is that Mr. Lovelace apparently intends to avoid exposing himself to any situation in which he is required to use langauge so as to reflect fair and honest consideration of perspectives other than his own. As a journalism major, Mr. Lovelace appears to be aiming himself at exactly the sort of career in which he will be routinely required to understand and describe opinions and perspectives other than his own. What kind of a journalist will he become?

I can’t be sure whether the professor was really preaching and indoctrinating a liberal perspective through the incentive of grades. Not nearly enough evidence has been offered in Mr. Lovelace’s essay to reach that conclusion. While I’ve a strong suspicion that the professor is liberal and may well wear her opinions on her sleeve, then she’s like quite a lot of college professors. That doesn’t mean that there’s some kind of mind control being attempted at Butler University.

What’s going on here is Mr. Lovelace opting out of the community of thought that characterizes a university because it’s uncomfortable for him to understand ideas and perspectives other than his own sufficiently well that he can articulate them fairly. Assuming a posture of political victimhood here is unseemly at best and contradictory to the idea of higher education at worst. Mr. Lovelace ought to take the class, learn how to separate fact from opinion, and form his own opinions based on the facts he’s learned.

That’s what college is all about.

Last year, we had a delightful time writing a handful of posts for opposite day.

(Here‘s the original kickoff! James K wrote about The fallacy of separation of powers. Murali made a case for Democracy. Tod Kelly unravelled the mystery that is Kenny G. Jason Kuznicki explained how every market transaction is a swindle. Burt Likko’s dear friend Trub Okkil wrote on Constitutional Interpretation. Ethan Gach praised Liberty Itself. I had fun writting a little pro-theism essay. Plinko wrote against Global Trade. And Doc Saunders wrote against vaccination.)

Wasn’t that fun? That was fun! Anyways, I’m thinking that we should do that again.  Moreover, I’m thinking that 12/12/12 would be a good day as a due date. Here are the ground rules, same as last year: Try to write an essay in defense of a position that is the opposite of a position that you actually and honestly hold. It’s tougher than it looks! Get your essays in (or mail them in, as guest-posts!) and we’ll read them on the 12/12/12 and enjoy (or not) Opposite Day one more time! We’ll see you there!