sainttoad's smokehouse

Back during WWII everyone was glued to their radios, following along with their own maps of Europe and North Africa and the Pacific, working nights and weekends to arm their husbands and fathers and wives and mothers, praying for peace. Now we finally have it and we keep inventing enemies that don't exist, and scaring ourselves into thinking that invading Guatemala and Nicaragua and Lebanon and Cuba and Iraq and Afghanstan and Iran will somehow prevent violence, when those nations lack the capability to invade even their next door neighbors. Most of them lack what can be considered an air force and navy.

Show me how a nation that doesn't have a single aircraft carrier poses a threat to the American military.

i do.

apparently these days that means sticking your finger in his face and shouting.

let's hear it, voters: do you want

New Gingrich War With Iran®
or
Mitt Romney War With Iran®

?

or shall we all just settle for more handouts to the banks? choices, choices!

by DOSing the websites of democratic congresspeople who support SOPA, you make it difficult/impossible for their constituents to contact them and change their minds.

so desperate for a candidate that, as long as he said he believes he's made peace with God, they wouldn't care if Newt had strangled his second wife with his first wife's intestines.

also: Oh, hey, looks like wee little Ricky Santorum might have won Iowa. And? The real story is that eight precincts lost their votes and can never be recounted. If that had happened during a Democratic caucus, Fox "news" would already be screeching about voter fraud and produced scary black people who did it.

listening to the radio yesterday, i heard some interviewees talking about the horrid newt gingrich. they were being asked something along the lines of "how can you, as a conservative, vote for someone who was having an affair while impeaching the president for having an affair? doesn't the immorality and hypocrisy make your head explode and thus render you physically incapable of voting?"

the answer was typical: the poll-ee said that she was pretty sure the execrable newt gingrich had repented to jesus for his sins, and she was pretty sure he did it authentically, and she was pretty sure jesus forgave him, and thus, he had a clean bill of spiritual jesus health and moral authority to run for president of the Conservative States of America.

this is the problem with the forgiveness myth: a person of obvious moral ineptitude can run on a platform of morals quite easily. in fact, the more turpitude in their past, the better. all they have to do is get the voters to believe that they sincerely "came to jesus", and not only does this anoint them in sinlessness, it grants them an even higher moral high ground -- after all, like all of us, they're just a poor sinner, only they've found the path to righteousness and can lead us there, too.

it's all nonsense, of course, especially in the case of the hideous newt gingrich. there's no evidence whatever that he's particularly christian. he certainly doesn't love his neighbor (willard mitt romney, for example) as he loves himself. his second ex-wife (have to be specific, mister family values the repugnant newt gingrich had a bunch of them) is now explaining that he asked for an open marriage, just like jesus and the pope had. classy!

but even though the intolerable newt gingrich himself isn't particularly running as a jesus candidate, his supporters, being nominally jesus followers (until faced with the prospect of applying the Golden Rule, of course. after all, Jesus himself said to Paul, "nuke Iran, slaughter their children, and make war on their homes") simply presuppose since they are going to vote anyway for whomever they've managed to randomly pick, such candidate must be a devout christian, just like them. projection, in other words. you pick a candidate that you like for whatever reason, then project your values on to them, then vote for them. anyone who has paid attention to the left blogosphere in the past four years will recognize this pattern.

but the danger with this pattern is that it is totally permissive. it allows behavior of any kind.

there is only one jesus candidate, and as much as i dislike him in every way, santorum appears to live what he believes. there's no need to project religious adherence on to him, he seems like the real deal (of course, that's probably just image management and if he gets to the general we'll be treated to the gay sex tape). but my point is simple: if morals and values are really important to you (and if they're not, why are you voting GOP?), then the herpetic serial-philandering but presumably forgiven newt gingrich is too complicated of a choice. why not keep it simple and cheer for the frothy mixture, who has nothing to apoligize for, no need for forgiveness?

after all, jesus himself was born without sin. he lived without sin. if you're so big on jesus, why follow a monster like the squamous horror newt gingrich? jesus defined a set of values, not economic or foreign policy principles. if jesus is a big in your life as you say he is, shouldn't you pick a candidate based on his similarity to the sinless so no-need-for-forgiveness jesus?

the answer is no, because the sort of people who would vote for the reptillian newt gingrich aren't actually christians any more than their candidate is. they just need some way to justify their voting habits within the framework of their socially-mandated religion. just like the disgraced speaker likely needs some bullshit self-justification for why it was okay for him to cheat on his wife while impeaching the president for cheating on his wife, the rubes who vote for him need to believe he was forgiven, so they can vote for him and still consider themselves good people.

so, i've turned into the anti-me as a runner. i'm wearing shoes, and today, i took my new garmin gps running watch for a spin. i had a forerunner 210, which is total crap. it refuses to get satellite lock and i'm not exactly in downtown NYC. so i ordered a 410 from REI, fully expecting to return it after a couple of infuriating failures.

nope. it has a really stupid user interface, for which i was fully prepared. it's also heavy, but it's a supercomputer on my wrist, so i must be reasonable. but in the functionality department, i'm impressed. it got satellite lock under my awning, and by the time i got to open sky across the street, it was at 15 foot accuracy. once i got moving, it went to 10 foot accuracy, which is about as good as it gets for civilian GPS.

so, that was surprising. garmin has figured out how not to suck. as far as i could tell it did not lose satellite lock during my run (but we'll see if that remains true once i start running under overpasses. the 210 would absolutely freak when the sky is lost for 2 seconds worth of overpass). but here's the surprising thing: over a whopping 2.25 miles (working on it, thanks) my pace was 8:25. that's great! the last time i measured my pace, last year in 5fingers, my pace was... 11:00. that's more like walking.

if i can manage to keep that pace for 5 or 6 miles, i will beat my speeds of last decade. old-me will be faster than young-me. that's something.

President Obama Will Accept His Nomination at a Stadium Named After a Giant Multinational Bank

this weekend provided me with a great example of the extreme difference between the service you get from an enormous corporation and a small business. our society is barreling down the road toward a future comprised only of gigantic corporations. it is possible for a well-run corporation to provide good customer service -- if the corporation makes that its goal. in my personal experience, apple has made customer service a priority, but a quick google search will reveal that many others have had the same horrible giant-corporation service experience that I have had.

people in my parents' generation have noted the effects of increasing corporatism in our society, but i don't think it's well understood that the sheer size of giant corporations guarantee the impossibility of customer service, at least in the sense that my parents grew up with. my two stories from this weekend will illustrate what I mean.

on Sunday, I went for a bike ride. 25 miles from home, my shifting cable broke. this meant that my bike was reduced from 30 gears to 3, and as a bonus, they were the three hardest gears. this meant, in my hilly home, i was basically stranded. i probably could have biked home over the hills in the hard gears, but i very likely would have injured my knees.

like an idiot, i had no money on my person. still, i took a chance and rode an extra 3 miles to a bike shop. i walked in, explained to the mechanic that i had no money but did have a broken cable. he was already working on a bike. he took it off the rack, put mine on the rack, replaced the broken parts, and fixed my bike. he told me i could pay when i got home. we'd never met before, i had never bought anything at that bike shop. i rode home on my perfectly fixed bike, showered, then brought my money and my bike back to the shop. i paid for the repairs and gave them my bike to perform additional expensive, non-emergency maintenance.

the bike mechanic (who was not the store owner, and did not ask anybody for permission for extending me credit) treated me like a human being and took a risk on me. like a good member of society, i rewarded this shop with my business.

starting last Monday, our home internet was failing for 1-2 hours every night, beginning at 9PM. it was entirely predictable and repeatable. on Thursday we called Comcast and reported the outage, while it was in progress. they acknowledged the outage, said they didn't know the cause, and scheduled a technician visit for Saturday morning. the technician arrived on Saturday and said he had no idea what the problem was, and that he could not see it. of course he could not see it, we said, because it happens at night. Comcast will not send a technician at 9PM. we confirmed with the technician that there was no way for them to put a technician at our location when the problem was happening.

he said we had a very old modem, which is true, but he also said it was extremely unlikely that the very old modem would cause a scheduled outage. he also said some of our coax wiring was faulty, which also was not the cause of the problem. he rewired the house anyway, to satisfy some urge of his own. he apologized for not seeing the problem, and left. that night, at the regularly scheduled time, the internet went out. we spoke to 4 different Comcast service reps, and each one told us a different thing. one claimed that he could not fix our outage because our very old modem was not supported by his database. this didn't seem to present a problem for the subsequent technician. one tech asked for my social security number, the other three did not.

after a lot of frustration, Comcast reset something, and our service was restored -- for another 24 hours. the problem occurred, as scheduled, Sunday night. We expect it to return tonight. We have a new modem that will arrive on Tuesday, not because we have any great need for a new modem, but because until we have a new modem, Comcast will keep blaming our "unsupported" modem for the problem. When our internet goes out Tuesday night, with our shiney new "supported" modem, what options will we have? They won't send a technician at the time the problem occurs, and when the problem is not occurring, there's nothing for the technician to see. So we're stuck.

Now, out of the 6 Comcast personnel we've talked with in the last week, 5 of them were very nice, and as helpful as they possibly could have been. But not a goddamn one of them spoke to any of the others. Nobody properly took notes on our problem, and nobody read the notes. They didn't even have a proper standard procedure for dealing with customers (social security number? why?). They did useless, unasked-for repairs. They blamed my hardware for the problem, and offered absolutely no plan for resolving this problem. In the end, we may have no choice but to take our business elsewhere.

Unfortunately, as a gigantic corporation, Comcast is able to buy up all the bandwidth in a region and squash small startups. This is "capitalism" according to some. What it means in practice is that a customer of Comcast may expect overall entirely incompetent "service" from the company, while each individual person may actually be very pleasant. The problem is that the corporation is so huge, decentralized, and isolated from its actual infrastructure and customers that communication -- and thus competent problem resolution -- is not possible. It is possible to solve common "we've seen that a million times before" problems. But real debugging of complex problems, in a timely fashion that would actually satisfy customers, is entirely impossible.

It is the very size of the company that causes this problem. It is why I quit Bank Of America after being a customer for a decade and a half. BofA is "too big to fail" and they're also "too big to be competent".

The constant, cancerous growth of corporations into giant corporations is going to make our future a nightmare. Imagine a future where all bike shops are organized like Comcast or BofA. when my shifter cable snaps, I have to make an appointment for between 8am and 12am, and the technician says he's not sure what the problem is but he's going to replace my handlebar wraps because that can't hurt. where every time I call "customer care" to ask them to fix my shifter cable, I have to explain from the beginning what happened, and they tell me that my shifters are unsupported and I need to purchase a whole new bicycle. Imagine that this is the only bike shop within 10,000 miles.

this is where we are heading. the notion that "capitalism" means unchecked growth and consolidation fails totally to consider the unpleasant consequences. it is simply untrue that gigantic corporations can be dealt with like the small businesses in my parents' memories. when BofA "accidentally" arranges the order of your transactions so that you incur a major fee, there is no person you can talk with who gives a shit. when Verizon charges you a thousand bucks in overage fees because you forgot to turn off your phone before checking it to Australia, who is going to help you out? you signed away your rights as a human being when you entered your contract with them.

there are solutions to these problems. capitalist solutions, in fact, as jefferson and washington understood capitalism. the sort of capitalism that was destroyed by the railroads and our first American monopolies.

infrastructure is owned by the people. the highways and freeways of the USA are publicly owned (or used to be). the same for bridges, waterways, airwaves, and aquifers (again, used to be). the infrastructure is licensed to companies which can then compete on quality of product and service. there are no monopolies, no duopolies, no false competition like we have between the 3 mobile carriers or 2 internet providers that americans can "choose" between.

i have roughly 30 bike shops within 20 miles that I can choose from. i don't need scare quotes around the word. i can truly choose. and as a middle class person with a reasonable wage, my choice can actually be based on something other than price. i don't have to choose the closest, cheapest bike shop. i can choose one that provides the best service. and in this way, i can promote good service.

poor people don't have this luxury. they must choose based on price. and thus, a growing pool of poor people promotes cheap service, not good service.

this is the crucial broken part of our "capitalist" system. as more and more people become poor, as more and more of our collective national wealth, resources, and infrastructure are handed over to the Comcasts and ATTs and BofAs of the world, there are fewer people who are able to promote good service with the tools of capitalism. As the giants grow and consolidate, as competition is killed before it can get a foothold, the giants have less incentive to provide service. soon, good service is a forgotten memory, with nobody wealthy enough to demand it, and nobody left to provide it.

that is where we are heading. until we start caring, large scale, about living in a society and stop pretending that we're all isolated islands of total self-sufficiency, we'll keep sliding into the united states of comcast.

out for my friday walk, i pondered what i would do with the skinless chicken thighs in the fridge. i decided i wanted a sticky sweet glaze. i had lemons. so i figured i'd to a sweet/sour thing with lemons and honey. unfortunately, i didn't know if i had honey. and the lemons are meyers. and i have no idea how to do a fry-pan glaze.

but that didn't stop me. i thought a little more and realized i had, if not honey, then cane syrup. and while meyers are too sweet, i had a lime. and if i'm gonna use 2/3 the ingredients of a ti' punch, why not just make a ti' punch in the pan?

so that's what i did. i cubed the chicken thighs, did my best (not good enough) to sear them in hot butter/corn oil. then i deglazed the pan with a double shot of rhum blanc de martinique. it wasn't boiling off quickly enough for me so i set it on fire. twice. on purpose! then i squeezed a couple of lime wedges into the pan, and dropped them in (ti' punch style). at last, i doused everything with some cane syrup and stirred it a bit to caramelize things. salt, pepper, finishing salt, and that was it.

we both agreed the chicken itself wasn't great, and the sauce didn't work at all once it cooled. but while it was hot? it was like a chickeny ti' punch. a total success. i won't say i'd make this recipe this way again, but it MIGHT make both a good marinade and a good barbecue sauce for grilled chicken. it's not often i make a sauce that comes out exactly as i was hoping. this time, i surely did.