Reason and Freedom

Dear Leftists,

Please forgive me for being presumptuous, but I have some questions for you in light of your superior intellect and finely-nuanced cultural understanding.

1. What happens when one oppressed group oppresses another oppressed group? For example, U.S. blacks oppose gay marriage in overwhelming numbers.

2. What do anarchists do for a living? I'm talking about anarchists currently living in the U.S. who currently self-identify as "anarchist".

3. Should multiculturalism trump women's rights? Remember that Islamic law and culture oppose equal rights for women.

4. Is Liberal Massachusetts culture superior to Conservative Mississippi culture?

5. Should I tolerate Islamic culture even if it is highly intolerant of my homosexuality?

I look forward to some answers. Based on my understanding of your ethics and philosophy, I hold you in the same ethical esteem as I do Pat Robertson. Perhaps your answers will help improve the way I feel about you.

There is a terrific article posted over at MSNBC regarding how drug companies are seeking to market drugs to people who are not sick. Since I don't believe the "mainstream" view of HIV and AIDS, this naturally fits into my bias: Manufacturers of "AIDS therapies" market their drugs to people who are not sick.

The article is an interview with Ray Moynihan, who has written a book on the subject of the selling of sickness. In the interview, he makes this very interesting quote:

"There’s an informal alliance between the drug companies and aspects of the medical profession and aspects of the patient advocacy world who all seem to have interests in defining more and more people as ill."

It's sad but true. Suppose we have a disease called "Syndrome X". Doctors treat this disease, drug manufacturers make medicine for this disease, and patient advocacy groups try and raise awareness for this disease. If more people start catching "Syndrome X", then are those three groups helped or harmed? I think we have such a huge need of thinking of those three groups as "good" that we don't allow ourselves to think that they might piggyback on a disease in order to improve their lifestyles. We give those groups far too much leeway over our lives. We permit creeping doom, if I can inject a nasty little bit of rhetoric.

Moynihan also makes this comment in the article:

"We’re seeing fear of disease, decay and death becoming a central part of life. I’d like people to investigate the psychic impact of being told 10 times a day you might actually be sick."

Perhaps they might also investigate the psychic impact of being told 10 times a day that you're a sinner and that you're going to suffer eternal, burning torture. It's the same misanthropic message in new trappings: "You're bad. You're broken. You're doomed. Give us money and we can save you."

This new Trinity (doctors, drug makers, patient advocates) is becoming a new religion all of their own. The god of this religion is Death.

Though I *never* chose to be a parent for the sake of a political or moral cause, I believe that gay parenting will ultimately be the phenomenon which shifts society's attitude about gay people from one of superiority to one of equality. After all, if gay parents can raise children that are as happy and healthy as the children raised by straight parents, then by what measure can someone call a gay person "degenerate" when comparted to a straight person?

Conservative politicans are well-aware that successful gay parents changes society's attitudes about gay people (for the better), and whipping the "gay boogeyman" provides a lot of political strength to drive fearful religious zealots to the polls. They haven't had a very good response (for them, politically-speaking) to the swelling numbers of gay parents since the Lawrence v. Texas U. S. Supreme Court decision.

Julian Sanchez of reason.com (my favorite online publication) has written a terrific article describing the looming war over gay adoption. It's going to get ugly, but I think that the Conservative politicans will lose. Too many straight people now know that gay people make fine parents, and they won't take kindly to seeing their friends and their friends' children suffer from stupid legislation.

I have been baking sourdough bread every weekend, following the Cooks Illustrated recipe as a basis for what I do. I basically have been repeating it, trying to make slight changes from week to week to enact changes from one loaf to the next. Here is the most recent iteration of the recipe:

Ingredients:

• 2 c active sourdough starter
  
• 10 oz distilled water
  
• 24 oz bread flour
  
• 1.5 t table salt
  

Procedure:

1. With dough hook on KitchenAid mixer, put starter and water in the bowl and mix with the machine until combined.
   
2. Slowly add flour until combined
   
3. Knead for a while, say 10 minutes
   
4. Put dough in straight-sided, tall container, cover with plastic wrap
   
5. Wait for a long time
   
6. When dough has doubled (or more than doubled) in volume, remove it onto the counter, squish it alot with your fingers (think of it like playing a piano), divide it into two blobs of equal size, then put those blobs on lightly-oiled plates, lightly oil the tops of the blobs, cover the blobs with plastic wrap, and put them in the fridge overnight.
   
7. The next day, take out the blobs, remove the plastic wrap, take them off the plates, squish them alot with your fingers again, put them into two separate loaf tins, and cover the loaf tins with plastic wrap. Let them sit there until they bulge over the tops of the tins. (Did you remember to lightly oil the tops again so the plastic wrap doesn't stick?)
   
8. Preheat oven with pizza stone (I use a terra cotta planter base inverted).
   
9. When the loaves are bulging over the tops of the loaf tins, remove the plastic wrap, slash the tops of the loaves a few times with a serrated knife, and then bake them in the oven for an hour.
   
10. Use an instant-read thermometer to check the internal temperature of the loaves. They should be between 200 and 212 degrees.
    
11. Let them cool completely before you cut into them.
    

And they kick butt! They have a soft, sandwich-bread like texture with an even crumb and a wonderful sourdough flavor.

Here are my observations about baking:

1. Bread flour can make loaves that are both tough and rustic as well as soft and sandwichy.
   
2. Giving the bread three rises and two punchdowns seems to yield a more even crumb.
   
3. Cooking at lower temperatures yields softer crust and softer bread.
   

I posted this on atlantacuisine.com on a discussion about foie gras, and it pretty well sums up my thoughts about why using animal products is not "cruelty", as PeTA cultists like to claim.

Cruelty is deriving pleasure from causing pain or death in another living thing. The reason why cruelty is wrong is because such an individual might later do the same thing to a human being.

For instance, I have actively maintained a parasite-host relationship with several plants (where I was the parasite, mind you!). Was that cruel? No. But what would others think of me if I grew plants and then torched them all, bragging about how ending the lives of the plants brought me great pleasure? They would rightly be frightened by my behavior, and they would be frightened for the reason that I might decide to expand my sadistic impulses to affect their loved ones.

That said, foie gras production would be cruel only if the individual doing the force feeding was finding joy through causing suffering. And, in that case, the only person to be prosecuted for such cruelty would be the perpetrator of the cruelty. So to call foie gras production "cruel" makes no sense. To label me as "cruel" for enjoying foie gras makes no sense. I don't enjoy causing pain in other creatures. In fact, I'm mostly numb to the idea (which still isn't cruelty). I merely enjoy the yummy, succulent flavor of foie gras and many other products derived from animals.

PeTA is a misanthropic pseudo-cult that deserves to be exposed, ridiculed, and prosecuted. The fact that they would impugn me with the actions of a sadistic killer to support their anti-human zealotry excuses them from rational discourse.

Americans still feel safe. For now.

What happens when a group of a few muslims decide to detonante a few bombs in several busy shopping malls at the same time? It will get huge press, the Leftist media will highlight it as a failure of the Bush administration, people will be afraid and stop going to malls, some businesses will fail, and many jobs will be lost.

We just don't have the resilience that Londoners have. They have the unfortunate status of being accustomed to their city being bombed by terrorists (not to mention the Luftwaffe). We Americans feel safe so bombs scare us much more.

I think we are all on the front lines of a religous war: a war of violent jihadists against us and our allies. They started the war, not us. And they view all civilians as soldiers. Until we realize that we *are* on the front lines by virtue of our target status, we're not going to have any chance of defeating the enemy. There are still far too many Americans who are weak and think that our failure to defeat the enemy is solely drawn from a lack of understanding. On the contrary, I understand the mindset of the violent jihadist perfectly.

They hate me and want to kill me and all my loved ones. They will do anything and stop at nothing to achieve this goal. They will happily exploit all of America's liberal cultural sensitivies in order to implement their wicked, life-destroying plans. I don't have to be in the army to be fighting the war. I merely have to live. I don't particularly like it, but they have made the choice and I will not go quietly.

I recently had a blood test at my doctor's request and guess what? It came back perfect! I have perfect cholesterol, perfect blood sugar, perfect blood pressure (not part of the blood test, but important for the point I'm trying to make), perfect everything.

Why is this important, and why is this post marked under "Religion"?

Because I eat:

* butter
* cream
* pork
* beef
* chicken
* milk
* sugar

And who knows how many other "sinful" foods. There are people in the world who tell me that, in order to be "healthy" (read: holy), I have to exclude all meats and all dairy. Yet my blood test seems to state otherwise! What "health" is, in terms of what we eat, has much more to do with religion and superstition than it does with science and reason.

When I was a child, one of my favorite dishes that my mom made was cube steak with rice & gravy. Cube steak is, of course, some sinewy, stringy cut of cheap steak that has been machine-pounded into near-hamburger to make it at least edible. The preparation was to pan-sear the meat, use the fond in the pan to make a gravy, then finish cooking the meat in the gravy. When I made this dish as an adult, I was surprised at how bad it was. Well, last night, I decided to re-make this dish with the cooking knowledge that I've gained in the past few years of cooking. Here's the recipe:

Ingredients:
------------
1 T butter
1 c basmati rice
1 vidalia onion, diced small
1 3/4 c water

1 strip steak
1 T butter
1 T flour
2 c beef broth
1/4 c red wine
1 bay leaf

Method:
-------
0. Melt butter over high heat in saucepan. Add rice and stir until fragrant. Add water, diced onion, and cover. Let boil then reduce heat to low. Cook for 30 minutes and turn off heat. Do the remaining steps while the rice cooks.

1. Heat a saute pan until really hot. Pan-sear steak on all sides brown on all sides. Don't let fond (the "pan scab" that is left over from browning the steak) burn. Remove steak and reserve.

2. Melt 1 tbsp butter in still-hot saute pan. When foaming subsides, mix in the tablespoon of flour and whisk until it is tan (this mixture is called a "roux" and will thicken the sauce). Add the beef broth, wine, and bay leaf. Stir to incorporate the roux. Re-add the steak and cook over high heat until the sauce thickens.

3. Serve steak with rice. Ladle sauce over steak and rice.

Yum yum yum! A childhood favorite resurrected and improved!

My partner went to a "health trade show" for his company to pitch his company's services. Naturally, he saw several million references to "removing the toxins," "flushing the toxins," and "unhealthy toxins." The use of the word "toxins" sends my BS alarm into overdrive.

Anyway, his company delivers high-quality frozen meat, so to pitch it they were offering samples of cooked chicken breast to passers-by. Every time it was offered to a vegetarian, the vegetarian would respond in some condescending manner. "I never eat anything that was once alive!"

Honestly, vegetarians have no right to complain about bad treatment because they think they are better than everyone else and openly share their disdain whenever they have the opportunity to do so. Why should I be tolerant and understanding of vegetarian's needs if they're going to treat me like scum because I don't accept their religion?