Author Archives: deanwebb

The Handmaiden’s Candidates

First, there was that GOP guy in Missouri with his “legitimate rape” thinking. Now there’s a GOP guy in Indiana with “it’s something God intended.” One guy might – might – be an isolated incident. Two guys start to form a pattern.

Little quips about Big Bird, binders, and bayonets are par for the course in politics. Trying to find some way to justify rapes, no matter how finely worded those justifications may be, are beyond the pale. Here in North Texas, a state race is hinging on how one candidate rejected legislation that would increase prosecution against rapists. Guess what party he’s a member of? Like I said, a pattern.

This is not a time for GOP people to react with indignation that all Republicans are being tarred with the same brush. This is a time for the GOP to put its house in order. Romney still presents a sane view on rape: he’s against it and he does not oppose abortion in the case of rape. He won’t win Democrat votes with that stance, but at least he won’t turn the USA into a bizarre theocracy with his views.

I find it ironic that the people most likely to fling poo at Romney for being “part of a cult” are also those most likely to themselves be part of a misogynistic cult that has hijacked a good part of the Republican party. There are crazed demagogues in the Democrat party, but at least they hold the view that women are equal to men as far as rights and liberties go. The GOP used to be a party that tried to claim that it was tough on crime. A fine stance, in my view.

But being tough on crime except rape? Unacceptable to me and any other sane person, in or out of the GOP.

Some Thoughts About World Cuisines…

When I travel, I don’t feel comfortable spending a large amount of money on meals. I love eating good things, but, to me, the price of the meal is part of the presentation and enjoyment of the dinner. That means I seek out great flavors at low costs. If there’s a $3000-per-gram ingredient that’s out of this world, I’ll never know about it except in legend.

I’ve been to places that offered very little in the way of affordable flavor and I’ve been to places where the locals put out impressive spreads. Not every culture or region shares the same attitude about food. That’s why, for example, Mexico’s cuisine is a UNESCO “intangible cultural heritage of humanity” and Russian cuisine isn’t. It’s not that Russian food is bad or objectionable in any way: it’s that Russians don’t have the same approach to eating that Mexicans do.

And before any Russians out there start plotting my demise for dismissing their national palate, let me defend my view of things. I consider Russian art and music to have few equals in the world. The Russian armies’ feats in World War Two were matchless. The Russian spirit is tough, indomitable, and forged in iron. The region simply hasn’t been blessed with a cornucopia of ingredients, that’s all. It’s cold there, so the growing season is short. That makes food more scarce than in tropical regions. The Russians also never developed a taste for spices, so their cuisine has more to do with subtle, muted flavors and interesting textures. And while I can’t get very excited about my next blini, I’m positively mad about Russian chocolates. If I was to write a book about chocolate, I’d be discussing instead how Chinese chocolate doesn’t stack up to the Mexican stuff and be saving the Russians for special praise later on.

You know what… one day, I’ll write about great chocolates of the world. Russia gets a big mention in that, guaranteed.
Right now, though, it’s about the food.

I’ve got a theory about the great cuisines of the world. While every region has a dish or two that can be pretty amazing, for a cuisine to truly stand out, it needs a large range of dishes that, time and again, in the hands of different preparers, cannot fail to deliver enjoyment. When I think of the differences between Mexican food and Russian food, I have to take into account the geography. I mentioned the cold and short growing season in Russia. Now consider the year-round bounty of Mexico. Add to that the fact that a huge range of fruits and vegetables will flourish in the warmth of Mexico that are simply impossible to grow in places where it freezes – like Russia. Face it, Russia is not known for its mangoes, pineapples, or papayas. If someone tried to sell you a crate of Russian bananas, you would greet the offer with disbelief.

Those fruits are exotic in colder places, but are common enough in warmer climates to be ground, pulped, and prepared in bulk sufficient to make them available as ingredients in everyday dishes. The same goes for spices. Warm places grow ’em like nobody’s business: they use ’em the same way. Colder places place such a premium on them that they will use a “th” where their warmer cousins toss in an apostrophe. Historically, the spices were harder to get to the colder places, so the people there either did without them or used them sparingly. Many is the time that I’ve looked at my pepper grinder, loaded with black peppercorns, and fantasized about traveling back in time to Europe to sell those very peppercorns for a massive fortune… and then use that fortune to sail somewhere warm, where I could enjoy food with big, bold flavors for the rest of my temporally-shifted life.

The other factor in these warmer places that makes their cooking something special has to be the warmness itself. Look, where it’s cold, there’s always an excuse to fire up the oven to keep the house warm. Want to warm up a pot of oats? Sure! No problem! You get the wood and I’ll rattle those pots and pans!

Try the same scenario where it’s sweltering. Oats? Seriously? You want oats? In this heat? Just oats? If those guys are going to actually cook something and make this place any hotter, it better be good. So how about instead of a bucket of warm oats, what say we whip up some lasagna? Or Szechuan chicken? Or tacos al pastor? Maybe some chicken tikka masala? Falafel, perhaps?

Right now, I’m thinking you’re drooling a bit more than when I discussed the boiled grains. That’s a sign of a great cuisine. Those places had plenty of stuff to eat, with an embarrassment of varietal riches, but it was so blasted hot in those places that when they made something to eat, it had to be amazing, or it simply wasn’t worth the rise in temperature. Those are the crucibles from which the great cuisines of the world emerged.

Debate a Blahfest

There were no surprises in the debate last night. There were no slip-ups, no gaffes, and no real zingers. I sat through the whole thing last night and the only memorable moments were when Jim Lehrer sounded like he wanted a killswitch for the microphones as both candidates went long on their time. Here’s a sample of what I remember:

Lehrer: President Obama, tell us about your economic plan.

Obama: First let me say blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah jobs blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.

Lehrer: Governor Romney, what is your response?

Romney My plan is to blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah jobs blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.

Lehrer: Oh mercy sakes please make them stop.

I know they established that they were different in their policies. No surprise. I know that the differences were minor, at best. Also no surprise. I know that Romney said he’d go after the “Too Big to Fail” banks and I laughed hard. I know that Obama defended his economic plan and I cried a little on the inside.

Here’s the problem: Medicare. Here’s how to fix it: gut it or cut it way back. We can’t afford it in its current state. If the government is going to provide health care to people, it’s going to have to limit it. It can’t be unlimited. Romney claimed the middle class is gettin’ crushed, but then did an about-face and said they could afford health insurance. That’s flat-out ignorant. Obama was saying his horribly convoluted plan would work. Also, flat-out ignorant.

Romney kept claiming he would be fiscally responsible, but offered no cuts in any of the areas that make up the majority of federal spending: social security, medicare, military, and treasury support of those TBTF banks. Obama said he’d make cuts in the military and that somehow the others would be fine.

BOTH of these guys have no real plan to deal with the next pending financial crisis. The global economy is going to go through some convulsions. There is going to be a massive wave of Marxism in the wake of a financial sector crisis. Workers in critical industries, trucking and mining in particular, know that they can hold nations hostage. They will strike, and they will win. They can’t be easily replaced, so their demands must be met or the nations will grind to a halt. South Africa is experiencing a wave of strikes in critical industries right now. We could be next.

What would *my* plan be? Take a page from Otto von Bismarck’s playbook and institute socialism on conservative terms before it is instituted on radical terms. Blood and iron, baby, blood and iron.

Katrina Aid and Racism

So Fox News decided to re-air an old video of Obama making an accusation that the aid in the wake of Katrina may have been tainted by racism. I think he has a valid point. Areas of public housing that were untouched by floods got condemned… and they just so happened to be on prime property between the commercial sector and Bourbon Street. Watch all of Greg Palast’s “From Big Easy to Big Empty” for all kinds of details in that regard. Palast does his homework right, and the story he uncovers is shocking and disgusting. Full video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bkpv6rpJEI8&feature=relmfu

The refineries got saved, all right – and Greg Palast got fined for filming the refinery for his documentary under the PATRIOT Act – and so did the downtown areas. The aid for the poor blacks of New Orleans, though, did not rebuild their homes. It did not rebuild their lives. They got stuck in concentration camps with daily trips to a nearby Wal-Mart, and little else.

And why was Katrina such a disaster? Let me steal a bit of the thunder from that Palast report to say that the person that tossed the LSU evacuation plan aside and put in her own total lack of a plan was a major Bush campaign donor. She had zero experience in emergency response planning, but she wrote a big check to Bush and that was good enough. In return, she got a $500,000 contract to sit on her thumbs and hope no hurricane happened. That’s a real good return on investment, by the way… And after her gross criminal negligence that resulted in people having to watch the water go past their noses… that resulted in preventable deaths of fellow Americans… she faced zero criminal charges. In fact, she wrote another check and got another $500,000 government contract: to investigate her own negligence.

Bush had a history of helping his cronies duck responsibility. This is one of those stories. If those poor blacks voted Republican, they wouldn’t have drowned in a Bush administration, I can guarantee you that much.

An Open Letter to People New to Conspiracy Theories

Dear lots of people that think Barack Obama is going to destroy democracy as we know it,

Hello. How are you? I am fine. I see more people these days noticing horrible things the government is doing and is capable of doing. Welcome to the club.

I’ve been crying in the wilderness since about 1985. The more I’ve read since then, the more I’ve hollered. I’ve been seeing trends towards maximizing power at the core of government for quite some time. I’m not alone, either. I’ve read books from around 1900-1912, when Americans first began noticing something seriously going wrong with the political-economic arrangements in the nation. The same problems those guys complained about have gotten worse over the last century. This is nothing new.

Since I’ve been doing this for some time, let me help you out with some lessons I’ve learned, so you’ll better deal with your new-found love of finding holes in the government’s claims and impending doom for our rights and freedoms.

1. Set personal limits. For me, it’s UFOs. Once a theory takes me to UFOs, I stop there. I also draw the line at Jesus having children (that one saved me a lot of grief when The DaVinci Code came out…), international conspiracies of religious zealots (Protocols of the Elders of Zion, anyone?), and anything that involves re-explaining basic principles of physics in order to work (so no flat or hollow earth theories for me). Set these limits now, because stuff comes along later that will test those limits. You’re going to be excoriated enough for your fringe views, so you want to make sure you don’t go off the deep end.

2. Be nonpartisan. Most of my research led me to conclude that Republican presidents were connected at the hip to Latin American death squads and that Democrats were guardian angels of the world. For a long time, that blinded me to how LBJ escalated US involvement in Vietnam, Carter fomented Islamic radicals in Afghanistan, and Clinton bombed Serbs to distract the nation from his extramarital affairs. By Clinton’s second term, however, I had started to see that party makes no difference. The power grabbers at the top have no loyalty to anyone but themselves. Therefore, banging the drum to beat down one party while ignoring the other one just makes you look myopic and foolish.

3. The little things are distractions you don’t need. Obama’s birth certificate is exhibit A. Seriously, this makes no difference at all in the grand scheme of things. You want to criticize the man and be taken seriously, go for his failure to close Guantanamo Bay or his use of drones to wipe out families in the desert at the wrong wedding party. The same goes for anyone that tries to argue the 16th Amendment isn’t ratified or that US judges have to have a gold fringe on their flags because they’re operating under British Admiralty Law. Even if you’re right, those aren’t going to amount to anything when you try to take on the major issues. Even the author of the 14th Amendment perjuring himself before the Supreme Court to get the notion of corporate personhood into US jurisprudence doesn’t cut it as a major issue. When that was revealed back in the 1930s, the court said it would keep ruling on that precedent, since it was the way they’d done it for 50 years. So drop the little things and go for the big issues.

3a. This is an important one: if my questioning George Bush’s AWOL when his National Guard outfit instituted drug testing was frivolous and pointless in 2000, Obama’s birth certificate is in the same dustbin of history. If you want to say that Obama shouldn’t be president, then you also need to stand ready to say Bush II was an usurper in the 2000 election. If you’re not ready for that, then you’re a partisan blowhard and you need to re-read #2, above.

4. Read some Howard Zinn. Please. The guy fought in wars, faced dire poverty, and still came out to be one of the greatest historians, ever. He’s done his homework and he knows his beans, so read his stuff and take a few lessons from him. Heck, I’ll read criticisms from the left, right, top, bottom, in between, and all around town. I won’t read ones from outer space (see #1, above). I may not agree with conclusions drawn, but I will thank one and all that bring new facts to my sight.

5. Make sure you’re not engaging in inflating citations. We all want two sources. A source that quotes an original source isn’t a second source, though. Getting a good primary source document is good, but make sure it’s not a forgery. But quoting someone that quotes someone else doesn’t mean you have two sources. You have one source, repeated. This involves more legwork and study to get your facts straight, but it’s well worth the time spent.

6. You need to read Alfred W. McCoy’s The Politics of Heroin. Next, you need to read Gary Webb’s Dark Alliance. Both of these guys did emeritus work in uncovering uncomfortable truths. They’ll put stuff on your plate that you never dreamed possible. For some advanced stuff, read the Attorney General’s report on Klaus Barbie and its mention of a “Vatican Ratline” and THEN go into some searching on Cardinal Krunoslav Draganovic to see how deep this stuff can go. After those things, it’ll put a lot of other stuff into perspective.

7. Find a moral center. I had to do this eventually, so you might as well do it now. I can’t change the world, but I can change myself and be a positive influence on the people around me. I love life and I love people in general, even though I don’t always understand them. My purpose in decrying injustice is not a national agenda, but an educative one. I don’t think I can change the way things are with my vote or a letter to Congress, but I can change the way things are in my community by being involved and taking care of those that need help. My moral center comes from my personal set of beliefs: your moral center’s mileage may vary, as it may very well come from a different source. That doesn’t bother me, as I know that anyone seeking to be compassionate is, at heart, a good person.

Hope this helps,

Dean

I Shouldn’t Have to Answer this Question

So, somehow, in my class today, the topic of Hitler came up. Two of my students insisted he was a genius. I don’t think they hold a properly informed view. Therefore, I’m going to present a case against the genius of Hitler, because I’m of the mind that the guy was a highly skilled politician, but that he did not have the genius necessary to offer a guiding philosophy to mankind.

So here goes…

Continue reading

Rotten Apples?

Apple moved only 5 million of its iPhone 5 products, on expectations of 8-10 million. Slow sales are one thing… slave riots in Chinese factories is another. FoxConn shut down the iPhone 5 production facility in Taiyuan after 2000 workers rioted there yesterday. Apple has already shrugged off accusations of horrendous labor conditions in its Chinese sweatshops and the factory will only be closed a few days, so no big worry, right?

Well… seems as though FoxConn is tossing around ideas to slap its own sticker on the iPhone 5 and market it as an OEM brand. They’re the ones that make it, after all. Apple has no other manufacturing facilities, so if FoxConn wants to pull a Bill Gates and leave its partner in the dust after it’s learned all it can from said partner… looks like they’d be able to pull it off.

This matters in a huge way because Apple stock seems to be the refuge of last resort for many a pension fund. The stock has already slipped 2% on news of the slow sales. How much more would it drop if FoxConn terminated its contract? And then what of the pensions that are desperately trying to recover the money they lost in 2008?

Two More Years of Gridlock, At Least…

This goes for either guy because, let’s face it, if Romney were running on what he really believes, he’d split the Democrat vote and all the GOP base would stay home in a funk. No matter who wins in November, the President is going to be in for a tough time, come January.

It looks like the GOP will get a majority in both the House and Senate. Before anyone of the elephantine persuasion starts dancing on tables, look at that Senate number again. The GOP won’t have 60 votes. That means the Democrats can block everything they want to block, just like the Republicans did in this session of Congress. If Romney wins and tries to pass stuff that his party wants, it won’t clear the Senate. If Romney or Obama win and try to pass things close to their hearts, that stuff won’t make it out of the House alive, let alone the Senate.

We look set to have another two years of kicking the can down the road, at least. Hate to disappoint, but them’s the facts as I see ’em.

Painful to Watch

The voters of the USA are like a girlfriend that got promised all kinds of stuff and Obama is the boyfriend making rationalizations. He’s staying cool and distant, but if there was someone the voters thought would deliver better, they’d go for him.

Mitt Romney is not that guy. Mental note: NEVER get a spray tan immediately before doing a live news appearance on Univision. Yes, Romney got a spray tan. Yes, it looked awful and made me shudder to think if he’d appear before the NAACP in blackface. I don’t think he would, but, still, I wondered.

Both candidates appeared on Univision and 60 Minutes and neither time did they get soft questions. Obama was held to account about what he failed to deliver in his first two years, when he wasn’t blocked by a Republican House. If he was unable to build a coalition to get his agenda passed then, what will he do with a GOP-run House *and* Senate, which looks likely in January?

If Obama did badly, Romney did much worse. No specifics, the spray tan thing, and he made a sudden decision to give Univision only 35 minutes instead of the 60 he promised them. He’s not even in office, and he’s going back on his promises to the Hispanic community… does not bode well…

So, if you want a reason why the polls are running the way they are, it’s because while Obama is failing to capture the nation’s imagination like he did in 2008, Romney’s campaign in unraveling right before our eyes.

And that’s why I ain’t voting for either of ’em.

This Is not the Conservative You’re Looking For…

Conservatives love Ronald Reagan. This should be no surprise to anyone. Reagan always presented a charismatic face to the media. He looked comfortable in any circumstance. It doesn’t matter what did or didn’t happen off-camera: when Reagan was in the camera eye, he looked good.

Romney doesn’t have that mojo. This is why he’s not electrifying the electorate the way Reagan did. Romney frequently looks and sounds embarrassingly out of place. Where Reagan made a connection, Romney seems like a stranger.

Lt. Col. Oliver North has the same GOP-style everyman charisma. He took Iran-Contra and actually made it a positive when he ran against Chuck Robb in 1994. Chuck Robb was the Democrat version of Romney in that race, with additional twists: he had to fend off accusations of infidelity and cocaine use. Robb even said he’d take food out of the mouths of widows and orphans if it meant he’d be able to balance the budget.

It took a third-party candidate and a set of stump speeches by Bill Clinton to get Robb re-elected. Without those boosts, Robb was the only incumbent senator in 2000 to lose his bid.

There is no third-party candidate drawing away Democrat votes. There is no big GOP charismatic leader stumping for Romney. Romney has the charisma of a shrub, and I don’t mean George Bush Jr. I mean a short, woody plant common as a landscape decoration. I’m thinking a boxwood shrub.

The GOP wants another Reagan. This is not the conservative they’re looking for. They may holler that he’s better than Obama, but that’s not a reason to vote *for* him as much as it’s a reason to vote *against* Obama.