Watching a bewildering world from the middle of nowhere
When I started this blog sixteen years ago, one of my rules was that every post would include a photo. That hasn’t always been easy, especially when writing about current events. Free online image generators driven by AI create a whole new range of options. I’ll try not to overuse it!
You can try out Bing’s free image generator here: Bing AI image creator.
The young farmers from whom I bought vegetables this summer are now getting their fall crops. On Friday I picked up carrots, sweet potatoes, and curly kale. The carrots had been pulled that same morning. I’d never before heard of carrots being grown in this area, and I’d never had fresh carrots with the tops intact. It seemed like a crime not to use all those green leaves, so I made pesto.
My basil is almost gone, but there was enough to give the pesto a hint of basil. I also used extra garlic in case the carrot tops had any flavor that needed overpowering. But there were no off-putting flavors in the carrot tops. The carrot tops made a dense, hearty, very green-tasting pesto.
Saturday’s live stream from the Berlin Philharmonic was all Mozart. It was thrilling — the overture to Così fan tutte; Symphony No. 35 in D major (the Haffner symphony); the Concertone for two violins and orchestra; and everybody’s favorite Mozart symphony — the Symphony No. 40 in G minor. The conductor was Riccardo Minasi.
Is something going around in Berlin? I’ve never heard so much coughing from the audience. But it wasn’t because they were bored. In fact they were on their feet at the end of the 40th. I know most of that symphony by heart. The first classical recording I ever owned, age about 11, was Mozart’s 40th. I listened to it over and over, and I’ve continued to listen to it over and over all these years. Though the 40th is in a minor key and is often described as dark, I understand why so many people in the audience were smiling as they listened. It was because the performance was so superb, and maybe because it was the first time they’d ever heard it performed live.
It was a very warm day with sun streaming in the windows, so I listened with headphones so that Lily could snooze in the sun.
I finished reading Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley last week. There is much that I could say about it, but I’m at risk of becoming a Walter Scott boor. But for anyone who is curious about the odd sort of readers who still read Sir Walter Scott, I recommend the lecture below. It’s the literary historian Jenni Calder speaking to the Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Club. Look at all those gray heads in the audience! I had a look at their web site. They hold black tie dinners. Princess Anne attended one of their meetings. I can only say that it makes me happy to know that somewhere in the world (though probably only in that one place) there is a Sir Walter Scott club.
Once you’ve got some cooked pumpkin goody in the refrigerator (it’s October, so you do, don’t you?), then pumpkin bread is easy. Probably any recipe for banana bread would work, using mashed pumpkin instead of mashed bananas. And there are many recipes for pumpkin bread on the web.
This pumpkin bread was made with barley flour from organic hulled barley. Plain barley bread would be a heavy bread. But the pumpkin makes the bread very soft and moist. I used date sugar instead of sugar-sugar. Not much sugar is needed. There’s also an egg, some olive oil, cinnamon, and nutmeg. The proportion of pumpkin to flour is such that the pumpkin, egg, and olive oil are the only moistening ingredients needed for a thick batter. That’s lots of pumpkin. And of course don’t forget the baking powder or soda. Bake it at 350F. The bread is done when the internal temperature reaches 200 degrees F.
Pumpkin is sometimes listed as a super-food. The combination of pumpkin, barley, and date sugar is a feast for the microbiome. I need to go get more pumpkins while they’re still easy to find. I’d like to have enough to last most of the winter.
As I’m sure I’ve said before, every kitchen should have a means of grinding flour. I use a vintage Champion juicer with a mill attachment. One of the easiest ways to go would be a KitchenAid mixer with a mill attachment. Amazon sells organic hulled barley and date sugar.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
