A 1944 Willys MB Jeep


Click here for high resolution version.

One of my neighbors has a friend who has restored a 1944 Willys Army Jeep, model MB. My neighbor, knowing that I’m a Jeep fanatic, arranged for me to have a ride in the Jeep, off road on some of the trails through the surrounding woods.

This Jeep, I understand, would have been a commander’s Jeep. It has a machine gun and a radio. I believe my neighbor’s friend uses the Jeep in World War II enactments.

I’ve been a Jeep owner for 22 years. I bought my Jeep, a 2001 Wrangler TJ, back in 2001 when I lived in San Francisco. It has only 80,000 miles on the odometer. I wouldn’t sell it for the world.

Pumpkin-oatmeal pudding


Pumpkin-oatmeal pudding sweetened with date sugar

I could break down and make a pumpkin pie, but then I’d have to eat it all myself — a huge calorie load. I settled on pumpkin-oatmeal pudding, because I could make it in a modest quantity, and pudding avoids all the calories and carbs in the crust.

For a year or so, I have been experimenting with date sugar. Date sugar is nothing but dried dates, ground fine. It’s expensive, but obviously it’s much healthier than sugar-sugar. You can buy it on Amazon.

To make it: You don’t need a recipe for pumpkin-oatmeal pudding. I used old-fashioned oats that I had already cooked. Mix the oatmeal and pumpkin, add a beaten egg, some sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, and a touch of cream. Put a couple of pats of butter on top before putting the pudding in the oven. I’m sure that raw old-fashioned oats would work fine, if you allowed for the absorption of liquid. Or, better yet, toast the oats before adding them to the pudding. How long you need to bake the pudding will of course depend on how much pudding you made. Thirty minutes at 375F worked great for my pudding.

A good-size pumpkin will make enough pumpkin goody for a pie and a couple of soups. To cook the pumpkin, don’t even think of boiling it. Cut around the top of the pumpkin, like a lid. Scoop out the seeds. Throw the seeds into the yard for the birds. Put the lid back on and bake the pumpkin at 350 degrees. How long to bake the pumpkin will depend on the size. But it’s done when it starts to sink, the skin is softened, and a small quantity of pumpkin juice is oozing into the pan. After the pumpkin cools, pour the liquid inside the pumpkin into a jar and save it for soup stock. Scoop out the goody. Throw the skin into the yard for the possums.

To use canned pumpkin ought to be a felony punished with prison time. Don’t Americans bother to cook and eat fresh pumpkin anymore? I don’t know anyone but me who uses fresh pumpkin. And who doesn’t like pumpkin pie? I will certainly make pies at Thanksgiving and Christmas when I’ll have some expert help eating them.

Everyone can see it now


A Facebook meme

Prison, here they come

For several years, even a couple of my friends smirked at me for what they perceived was a fringy and starry-eyed position of mine — that Trump is going to prison. Maybe I didn’t make myself clear enough about the time line. It seemed obvious enough to me that it would take time for justice to catch up with Trump. Many people gave up on justice for Trump back in 2019, after Trump’s attorney general, William Barr, squelched Robert Mueller’s investigation and lied about what Mueller’s report concluded. The media fell for Barr’s distortions, partly because Mueller made such a fool of himself in front of Congress. But, if you actually read Mueller’s report rather than being schnookered by Barr’s spin, it was obvious that Trump was guilty as sin. And, in 2019, Trump had not even yet committed the worst of his many crimes — attempting to nullify an election, take over the U.S. government, and turn us into Russia.

Now here we are. The courts now have total control over Trump, including Trump’s mouth. Trump is powerless. Even his threats and menacing words have no power anymore, except insofar as they lead to gag orders. The evidence is damning, the penalties are severe, and Trump has no defense. Our abominable media and degenerate punditry, in spite of the evidence, continue to push the hits-friendly notion that prosecutors are overreaching, that the charges are weak, and that there are ways in which Trump can beat the charges. Such notions died this week — or should have died — when both Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, both of them evil lawyers, pleaded guilty to the charges in Georgia. This shows that Powell and Chesebro understood that the evidence against them is damning and that they would be convicted if they went to trial. And, even worse for Trump, Powell and Chesebro will now have to testify against all the others who have been charged in Georgia, including Trump, meaning that an already airtight case will now include damning eye-witness testimony from Trump’s co-conspirators.

We hardly need to mention the federal indictments brought by Jack Smith. The federal case against Trump and his co-conspirators will be just as airtight and just as damning as the Georgia cases. The whole sorry lot of them are headed for prison, except for those who are clever enough to plead guilty while there is still time. And I haven’t even mentioned the civil case in New York that will expose Trump’s true net worth (which may well be negative if all the loans were called in) and ruin Trump financially.

The House of Representatives

The present chaos in the U.S. House of Representatives is extremely revealing. Some are calling it a Republican civil war. Maybe. But I think there is a good chance that, between now and, say, April, the Trumpists will capitulate, when they finally see that Trump is truly and completely doomed. If the Trumpists can find new leadership (Jim Jordan seems to be a favorite, though he is as dumb as a rock), then there may well be a Republican civil war in 2024 in which the MAGA forces of chaos and fascism struggle with the corporate wing of the Republican party, the wing of the party that provides most of the money and which has no interests other than still lower taxes on the rich, more deregulation, a government in the hands of hacks owned by the party, law enforcement used only against the poor, and right-wing courts that won’t stand in the way of money and corruption. We shall see. But one thing we can see clearly in the House is that many Republicans who are cowardly and silent in public are struggling behind the scenes to regain control of the Republican Party for the corporate wing. There is nothing good to be said about the Republicans who are resisting MAGA. They are still vile human beings and enemies of democrary, every last one of them.

What is conservatism?

For a long time, I’ve been making a claim here that I don’t have the credentials to make. Nevertheless, it’s a claim that I believe to be true, and a claim for which much evidence and strong arguments exist (including the evidence right before our eyes at present in the Republican Party, MAGA world, the U.S. House of Representatives, and the white churches, particularly the execrable Southern Baptist Convention). The evidence is equally visible in history, if we bother to look for it. That claim is that all conservatives — and certainly all authoritarians — are cognitively and morally defective.

I recently came across an excellent paper written in 2004 by Philip E. Agre, a humanities professor and AI researcher who then was on the faculty of the University of California at Los Angeles. The article is “What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It?“. Agre gets straight to the point in the opening lines:

Q: What is conservatism?

A: Conservatism is the domination of society by an aristocracy.

Q: What is wrong with conservatism?

A: Conservatism is incompatible with democracy, prosperity, and civilization in general. It is a destructive system of inequality and prejudice that is founded on deception and has no place in the modern world.

And:

Conservatism in every place and time is founded on deception. The deceptions of conservatism today are especially sophisticated, simply because culture today is sufficiently democratic that the myths of earlier times will no longer suffice.

My moral case against conservatives can be stated very simply: If a person wishes to use deception, inequality, and injustice as a tool for dominating others, depriving others of human goods that they claim for themselves, then that person is morally defective — not just morally wrong, but morally defective.

What might we say about aristocratic societies that actually were stable, for example, 19th Century Britain? Agre would say that the aristocracy was stable (at least, more stable than in France) because the lower classes in Britain had internalized their inferiority and their subordination. That is, they actually believed that the aristocracy were somehow superior and were thus entitled to rule. Agre again:

This is a central conservative argument: freedom is impossible unless the common people internalize aristocratic domination. Indeed, many conservative theorists to the present day have argued that freedom is not possible at all. Without the internalized domination of conservatism, it is argued, social order would require the external domination of state terror. In a sense this argument is correct: historically conservatives have routinely resorted to terror when internalized domination has not worked. What is unthinkable by design here is the possibility that people might organize their lives in a democratic fashion.

This is why MAGA types collect armaments and long for civil war — domination by terror, because some people refuse to internalize their inferiority and must be taught their place. Trump encourages this, formerly in dog whistles, but eventually in plain language. (See, in the New Yorker, “A President Asking for Civil War,” July 12, 2022.)

Neoliberalism as conservative derp

The theme of the Fall 2023 issue of Dissent Magazine asks the question, “Is neoliberalism dead?” (I certainly hope the answer is yes.) There is an excellent interview with Brad DeLong, an economics professor at UC-Berkeley who saw neoliberalism up close in the Clinton administration. DeLong describes the American form of neoliberalism, as it arose during the Reagan era, thus:

It was the belief that social democracy had greatly overreached and had created a society in 1979 that was too bureaucratic, too rigid, and also too equal: the rich needed to be richer so they would be incentivized to create jobs, and the poor needed to be poorer so they would be incentivized to work.

In other words, aristocracy. This begs a question: What do Republican deplorables in red states who don’t have a pot to piss in get out of aristocracy? I think the answer to that is clear. They get domination over all the people they don’t like, and, as lackeys, they get more of the crumbs that fall from the aristocratic table.

Incremental progress?

Could the U.S. yet fall backward into neofascism, in spite of Trump’s ruin and the disgusting but welcome spectacle of the Republican circus-train train wreck? On that I make no predictions, because we are still in a state of chaos and all sorts of things could go wrong. But I do think that a strong possibility for the future is some real progress, probably modest and incremental, but progress. I was wrong about Biden. In 2020, I thought that a Biden administration would be like a third term of the Obama administration — timid, staffed by neoliberals, eager for bad bargains with Republicans, and rudely dismissive of progressives like me. But Biden gets it. Dissent Magazine again:

After the Biden inauguration, many on the left settled down to await a familiar sequence of post-election equivocation and retreat. But a number of observers with no special affection for Biden have concluded that 2021 ended up marking some kind of a departure — if not quite the end of neoliberalism, at least the end of the bipartisan austerity consensus that has stifled American politics since the last days of disco. Corey Robin wrote that “No president since Ronald Reagan has achieved a more ambitious domestic legislative agenda in his first year than Joe Biden.” Cédric Durand, writing for the New Left Review, detected “a structural break in the regulation of capitalism.”

I’m not making any predications about progress, I’m only expressing hope. But one thing is clear. That’s that almost all of those who tried to pull off the Trump coup are headed for prison. Republicans have no leadership, no team of evil people capable of planning anything like Trump’s capture of the White House and his attempt to stay there after losing an election. Even the propagandists who provided weaker minds with ideas have been weakened and almost neutralized — Alex Jones, Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson. Fox News can still wind people up, but with no one but feckless idiots such as Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, and Marjorie Taylor Greene to do the wet work, and with contributions to Republicans running way behind Democrats, how can the Republican Party, in the next year, build another machine capable of winning (or even stealing) a national election?

For now, though, let’s just enjoy the circus. They are terrible people, and they deserve everything they get, and worse.


Guilty

Nothing could be finer?


A neighbor’s horse, Pete

Yep, I live in Carolina, and it was a very nice Sunday morning — the sun just above the treetops, temperature 42F with a few spots of light frost. For the past couple of weeks, the weather has been cool enough to work on re-establishing the habit of morning walks.

But I’m not sure that nothing could be finah than to be in Carolina. I think I might prefer to be sneaking into the McDonald’s at Paddington Station for coffee and an Egg McMuffin before catching a train to Edinburgh. Or, better yet, having a ridiculously huge Scottish breakfast in one of those cafes on Cockburn Street above Waverley Station. October is the very best month for travel. But October also is a very good month to stay at home and be content.

Politics

I’m following the Trump trials very closely, but I’ve had nothing to say about the trials here because the trails are going very well — as long as you’re not Donald Trump. And then there’s the circus in the U.S. House of Representatives. It seems to me that Democrats are handling that very well and have all the right contingency plans for whichever way Republicans try to go. As always, the stupidity of Republicans is astonishing — gaining absolutely nothing politically while generating millions of dollars worth of bad publicity for themselves. I think it’s important to keep in mind, though, that so-called moderate Republicans in the House, though they are too afraid of Trump to say anything in public, are working hard behind the scenes to get out of the trap that MAGA bomb-throwers have caught them in. It’s not impossible, if all-Republican tactics fail, that moderate Republicans will have to make some kind of deal with Democrats to elect a speaker. If they do, Republicans will have to pay heavily for it.

Speaking of Waverley…

I’m about two-thirds through Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley. No Walter Scott novels are well-read these days, and Waverley is hardly ever mentioned. This surprises me, because of the nine or ten Walter Scott novels I’ve read, Waverley seems like one of the best candidates to be made into a movie. The Edward Waverley character reminds me a great deal of the Edmond Dantès character in Le Comte de Monte Cristo. We get Gothic scenes in the Highlands, castles, hovels, full-dress balls at the Palace of Holyroodhouse, and a wide range of characters from eccentric earls to outlaws to the charismatic Flora MacDonald, who is famous for helping Bonnie Prince Charlie escape from government troops. (In the novel, the Flora MacDonald character is named Flora MacIvor.)

Leather-bound books

I could easily develop a fetish for leather-bound books. However, the uncommon ones would be very expensive. As for the common ones, the titles available are very limited. There is a good eBay market for the more common editions of leather-bound books from publishers such as the Franklin Library and Easton Press. The titles available for these so-called collectible editions are usually classics in the public domain. Easton Press is still in business. A five-book set of Tolkien’s books including the trilogy plus The Hobbit and The Silmarillion will cost you $395. Maybe someday. But it is a pleasure to actually read these nice editions. Many people buy them for display and never actually read them, which improves the secondhand market on eBay.


I found a major source of proper pumpkins — eatin’ pumpkins, as they’re called here. This pumpkin, after a week or two as a decoration, will become soup and pie.


Some neighbors recently acquired four goats. I wonder if they know what they’re in for.


On my morning walks, I pass an abandoned house with this abandoned old school bus. The bus is one of the short versions used for special-needs students. It breaks my heart to see fine old machines decaying. I fantasize about fixing it up and turning it into a tiny house on wheels.


Lily loves her Saturday afternoon live-streamed concerts from the Berlin Philharmonic. This is Evgeny Kissin playing the Mozart piano concerto No. 23.

Music soothes the skittish cat


Lily listens to Herbert Blomstedt conduct Richard Strauss’ “Metamorphoses.”

The television doesn’t always terrify my cat, Lily. It depends on what’s on. Long ago I started using headphones when I watch television, to accommodate Lily. Loud blockbuster movies scare the living daylights out of her. But she likes music. Last week, after we watched the weekly Saturday live stream from the Berlin Philharmonic with the speakers on, I accidentally changed channels to — you guessed it — a loud blockbuster movie. She had been lying beside me, and she shredded me as the speakers suddenly exploded and she jumped and ran.

Even with the speakers off, she knows what gunfights and explosions look like, and she’ll run and hide. But if she sees an orchestra, then she comes and lies down, and it’s safe to turn the speakers on.

Richard Strauss’ “Metamorphoses” is very agreeable to a sleepy cat. Written in 1945, the piece is an outpouring of Strauss’ grief over the destruction of Germany. According to Wikipedia, a few days after finishing the piece Strauss wrote in his diary:

“The most terrible period of human history is at an end, the twelve year reign of bestiality, ignorance and anti-culture under the greatest criminals, during which Germany’s 2,000 years of cultural evolution met its doom.”

Germany recovered, though Strauss was too old to witness that recovery. He died in 1949.

Blomstedt is 96 years old and very feeble. He was assisted on and off the stage by the concertmaster, Vineta Sareika-Völkner. The house was packed for what probably was one of the last occasions to hear Blomstedt conduct. This was the Berlin Philharmonic’s live stream on September 23, 2023.


Blomstedt conducts Beethoven’s “Eroica” symphony.

David Brooks’ airport hamburger


Yuck.

The whole world is laughing at David Brooks, the conservative columnist for the New York Times who sees himself as a great moral oracle and moral leader. Brooks posted a picture on X (formerly known as Twitter) of the hamburger he had bought at the Newark Airport. His tweet said: “This meal just cost me $78 at Newark Airport. This is why Americans think the economy is terrible.”

He was instantly busted by people on Twitter, who pointed out that the hamburger and fries had cost $18, and that the remaining $55 was the bar tab — whisky, apparently.

Brooks, like his conservative colleague Ross Douthat, also a conservative columnist at the New York Times, is actually pretty lucid and reasonable much of the time. But it’s important to keep in mind that the New York Times has some very hard-ass copy editors, and Brooks’ and Douthat’s columns have to get through those copy editors before they get into print.

Maybe it’s a cheap shot on my part, but I’m going to take this opportunity to interpret the hamburger tweet as evidence for my argument that all conservative discourse is derp, because there’s always something not quite right, both morally and cognitively, inside a conservative mind. I’ve written on that subject here, here, and here.

Had Brooks had too many glasses of Scotch? Maybe. But that’s no excuse. A normal mind, even on the fourth whisky, would look at the $78 tab and think, “Dang. I just spent $17.78 on a hamburger and $55 on Scotch.” But not Brooks. He’s a great moral oracle and moral leader, after all, so he moralizes, spins, and lies, without any real reflection, all in one short tweet. He trusts his conservative gut. It’s a given to him that non-conservatives are always the ones who are mistaken. He can’t even be fair and rational about evaluating what is literally right under his nose. He baits us — trolls us, even — with the deception.

Show me a conservative, any conservative, and I’ll show you someone with some wires crossed inside their head.


Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Name of the Rose


1986

While scouring for watchables, I recently came across the 1986 film version of The Name of the Rose, on Netflix. It’s truly a classic film and always worth watching again. Back in the 1990s, I read Umberto Eco’s novel on which the film is based. The novel, too, is worth reading again, now that I think about it.

It left me thinking about Umberto Eco and how scholars can be extraordinarily good novelists, even when their academic field is very narrow. Eco’s thesis for his degree in philosophy was on the aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas. Horrors! As an unrepentant heathen, it is hard for me to imagine a mind uglier than that of Thomas Aquinas (except maybe Augustine of Hippo). But Umberto Eco’s mind was a mind ahead of its time. (Consider, for example, his 1995 essay on fascism.)

I don’t recall that Eco’s novel was as rich in dark humor as the 1986 film with Sean Connery and Christian Slater. There are only three people in the film whom we can easily bear to look at — Connery, Slater, and the peasant girl. Otherwise the film is hilariously cast as a pageant of ghastly old men — all monks. And, as with Thomas Aquinas, the monks’ minds are as ugly as their appearances. The abbot’s hairstyle, for example, is like that of Thomas Acquinas in a portrait by Benozzo Gozzoli.

Whatever Eco thought of the church, The Name of the Rose is a story about the ridiculousness of theologies. The church itself is the main villain. The year is 1327, and part of the plot is that theologians from Rome are arriving at the isolated abbey to settle, by debate, a burning theological question: Did Christ own, or did he not own, the clothes he wore? The structure of Eco’s story is entirely classic. The wicked get punished, the good prevail. The peasants not only save the peasant girl from being burned at the stake by the inquisition, they also give the grand inquisitor a horrible and much-deserved death. Much of the dark humor is Christian Slater’s constant terror, not only that he’ll be the next to be murdered, but also the terror of being surrounded by ugly minds — a terror not unknown to sane and decent Americans during the Trump era. In fact, this film would be a good starting point for a serious essay on what I call ugliness of mind.

There was a new film version of The Name of the Rose in 2019 which was, at least for a while, available on Sundance TV. But, as far as I can tell, that 2019 version is not available for streaming in the U.S., nor are DVD versions available that will play on American DVD devices. I hope that will change. I’d really like to see the 2019 version.


2019

Brown = umami = Maillard reaction

It would be easy to believe that the secret of cooking Chinese at home is as simple as using too much salt. That’s not it, though Chinese dishes certainly like salt. The real secret is the brownness. That’s where the umami flavor comes from. When foods are browned during cooking, that’s the Maillard reaction. Whether we’re talking about toast, grilled meat, roasted peanuts or even toasted marshmallows, every good cook must take advantage of the Maillard reaction.

Here’s an experiment. For years, I couldn’t figure out how to get fried rice to be brown. Just pouring some soy sauce into the pan did not seem to be the answer — though those umami-rich sauces are necessary as a finishing touch. I suppose that even rice, if it was in a skillet or a wok for long enough, would start to turn brown. But it’s much easier than that.

Brown your onions. Even after the onions come out of the pan, they’ll leave some of the brown behind in the pan. Your other stir-fry vegetables, as long as you don’t let them become watery, will add to the brown in your pan. If you’re brave enough not to be afraid of a little monosodium glutamate near the end of the stir-fry of your vegetables, it will triple the amount of brown (as well as the amount of umani). Remove the vegetables from the skillet or wok, then add the rice. The rice, as you toss it, will lift the brown off the bottom of the skillet. Not only is the rice now brown, it’s glazed with umami. If you can avoid it, never waste umami by leaving it in the bottom of a pan!

This deglazing is the same thing that cooks do when making gravy in a pan that was used to cook meat. Pour off the grease, and make the gravy in the roasting pan such that the brownness is recovered from the bottom of the pan. That brownness is a cook’s gold.

Orchestras hate it, too


Jörg Widmann thrashes to try to help the orchestra detect a beat.

Why would anyone pay up to $90 a seat to listen to someone beat on the back, the sides, and the neck of a violin, tunelessly sawing and scraping the poor thing when not beating it?

Lots of people won’t, which is why there were so many empty seats in the house for yesterday’s concert by the Berlin Philharmonic. (The concerts are live-streamed to online subscribers in the hinterlands such as me.) Those who did buy tickets at least knew that, if they could survive a violin concerto (plus some silly but virtuoso solo noodlings on the clarinet) newly composed by Jörg Widmann, then after intermission and a few drinks they’d be compensated with a Mendelssohn symphony.

The truth is, orchestras hate new music as much as audiences do. Some years ago, an old friend of mine was in the San Francisco Symphony (he’s now in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra), and he used to complain mightily about having to play new music. Orchestras have to play it, though, for political reasons. Else orchestras would be accused of playing only “museum music” and failing to support living composers.

It may be apocryphal, because I read it years ago and can’t verify the story anywhere on line today. But I believe the story was about the American composer Aaron Copland, who was in the audience for some new music — maybe Arnold Schönberg or something. Copland noticed that the man sitting next to him was fidgeting and squirming. At intermission, Copland said to the man something like, “What’s the matter? You don’t like it? Sit up and take it like a man!”

Copland, bless him, wrote quite listenable music, not least because he unapologetically borrowed from the late Romanticists rather than resorting to mere noise to rebel against them.

By the way, the soloist for Widmann’s violin concerto was his wife. And Widmann himself conducted. No further comment.

I believe the Berlin Philharmonic has a very successful business model, so no doubt they’re well aware of what sells tickets and what doesn’t. Looking over their schedule for the 2023-2024 season, it seems to me that they clear the decks of the new music early in the season (September). And then, come October, November, and December, when the people of Berlin are much more in a concertgoing mood, the programs change — Mozart piano concertos! Mahler symphonies! Mozart’s 40th! Brahms’ 4th! Beethoven’s 4th! A Beethoven piano concerto! Wagner overtures!

If there are valid political reasons why orchestras have to play new music, fine. But nobody should have to pretend to like it — except maybe the composer’s wife, if even she does.


Carolin Widmann

A new edition of Tolkien’s letters

A new edition of Tolkien’s letters (from William Morrow in the U.S. and HarperCollins in the U.K.) will be released in the U.S. on November 14, and in the U.K. on November 9. The new edition, in hardback, contains 150 new letters since the previous edition of Tolkien’s letters in 1981, bringing the total number of letters to 500.

The book can be pre-ordered from Amazon.

Look at that tweed jacket! And I’m still waiting for the Tolkien Society to do something about my suggestion of an article on Tolkien’s typewriters.