Americans of a certain social class love nothing more than an “authentic” food experience. It is the highest praise that they can heap on a restaurant. The ideal food is one that was perfected by honest local peasants in some picturesque locale, then served the same way for centuries, the traditions passed down from mother to daughter (less occasionally, from father to son), with stern admonitions not to dishonor their ancestry by making it wrong.
These American diners are constantly in a quest for their own lost heritage, along with the traditions of other peoples they don’t know very well. We live, the lore says, in a fallen state, victims of Big Agriculture and a food industry that has rendered everything bland, fatty and sweet. By tapping the traditions of centuries past — or other, poorer places — we can regain the paradise that our grandparents unaccountably abandoned.
And who could be against wanting a more authentic, genuine food experience? I’m so glad you asked.
In fact, authenticity is an illusion, and a highly overrated one. Most of the foods we think of as “authentic” are of relatively recent vintage — since capsaicin-containing hot peppers are native to the Americas, any spicy cuisine like Szechuan or Thai is by definition a Johnny-come-lately invention. Or take artisanal breads, like that crusty, moist peasant bread that most of us eat too much of at restaurants: Nathan Myhrvold, the mad genius of the cookbook world, says that this is a new invention. Our peasant ancestors, who got a large portion of their calories from bread, did not make these richly hydrated doughs, because they’re a pain in the butt to work with. Ciabatta, another bread that America likes because it sounds very authentic, was invented in the 1980s to compete with the baguette. (Itself a product of Industrial Revolution bakeries, not the proud local peasant.)
Megan McArdle, “‘Authentic’ Food Is Not What You Think It Is”, Bloomberg View, 2017-02-24.
March 10, 2017
QotD: Most “Authentic” cuisine is anything but authentic
March 9, 2017
“… we’re psychologically training an entire swath of the population to be crazy”
At Ace of Spades H.Q., Ace talks about the huge rise in reported personality disorders among Millennials:
Therapeutic behavioral conditioning trains people how to de-trigger themselves from triggers that cause panic, anxiety, depression, or bad behavior (drinking, etc.) That sort of behavioral conditioning teaches people to be mindful of their triggers, to understand that the trigger is just a tic with no real world purpose, and to train themselves to associate the trigger not with an adverse behavioral pattern (being in crowd triggers claustrophobia-like panic) but to train the trigger to lead to some other more benign consequence (being in crowd triggers recitation of the Ode to Joy).
The idea is that your brain has miswired itself to connect an input (too many people close to me) to an undesirable psycho-somatic reaction (heart racing, extreme anxiety), and that it takes a determined attempt to reprogram the brain and untangle those wires so that the triggering input leads first to a benign output and, ultimately, no particular output at all.
This works. Allen Carr’s How to Quit Smoking the Easy Way taught me how to re-wire the trigger (the anxiety/stress one feels when one’s 45 minute nicotine clock runs down to 0) into a different behavioral pattern (go outside, gulp in some fresh air, pace around a little bit like I used to do when smoking). It also taught me that the stress of not smoking was irrational, and that it would be helpful to view the addiction as a malignant parasite inside of me trying to manipulate my brain into keeping it fed while it ruined my body.
Works.
[…]
He realized that the process could be reversed. As brains with bad triggers could be un-triggered to be healthy, so too could completely healthy brains be deliberately taught to be triggered by harmless things and bring about various mental ailments, panic, anxiety, irrational emotional outbursts, a compulsion to violence, tantrums, etc.
And he brought this theory to a social psychologist named Haidt and asked him “Is this possible?” And Haidt said, “Damn it, not only is that possible, I think you’ve hit upon a very real malapplication of psychological techniques — we’re psychologically training an entire swath of the population to be crazy.”
Okay, he didn’t really say that. But that’s kind of the gist.
Definitely read it.
There’s no great mystery to what’s going on. People who train themselves to be cool and clear of mind will find themselves becoming more cool and clear of mind.
People who train themselves to go to pieces over every damn thing will find themselves getting better and better at going to pieces over every damn thing.
When you valorize a mental disorder and turn it into a virtue to be cultivated, guess what you’re gonna get? More mental disorders.
Words & Numbers: Women Prosper When Markets Are Free
Published on 8 Mar 2017
This week, in honor of International Women’s Day, Antony & James discuss the strong correlation between economic freedom and gender equality found across the world. They argue that if you want to see a world of increasing equality and opportunity for women, you also want to free the economy from central planning and control.
Adrian Peterson reportedly feels disrespected that the Vikings haven’t extended him an offer
In a move that will undoubtedly endear him even more to the Minnesota Vikings and their fans, Adrian Peterson is upset at the team for not offering him a new contact after they declined his ultra-spendy $18 million option for 2017. At the Pioneer Press, Chris Tomasson got the latest Peterson rant details from the disgruntled running back’s father, Nelson Peterson:
Peterson’s father said his son remains interested in returning to Minnesota. However, he said the Vikings “would have made him feel more appreciated’’ had they given him a contract offer rather than let just let him test the market after passing last week on his $18 million option for 2017.
Nelson Peterson said his son is very interested in the Seahawks because they are a Super Bowl contender and their offensive coordinator, Darrell Bevell, held that position with the Vikings in Peterson’s first four NFL seasons.
“You look at the connections in Seattle, so there’s definitely interest there,” Nelson Peterson said in a phone interview. “Those are some pretty good years (Peterson had under Bevell).”
Peterson had rushing seasons of 1,341, 1,760, 1,383 and 1,298 yards from 2007-10 under Bevell.
[…]
Although Peterson’s dad said his son remains open to re-signing with the Vikings, he said he was displeased they never gave him an offer after deciding not to pick up his $18 million option for 2017.
“The Vikings should have come back with a number if you truly want him back,’’ said Nelson Peterson. “I listened to (general manager Rick Spielman say last week at the NFL scouting combine in Indianapolis that), ‘We’ll have to see what the market is?’ If you do want him back, give him a number. Is it $9 million? Is it $8 million? That would have made him feel more appreciated. … He’s done too much for the organization to be treated like (that).”
If Peterson honestly thinks his services are going to be worth $8 or 9 million to any team in the league, I strongly suspect he’s got a lot of disappointment in his immediate future. If the Vikings do offer him a deal, it’ll be after he’s got a better idea of what his actual market value is. And after all that the team has done to stick by him during his legal and medical issues, it’s hard to believe that they’re suddenly “disrespecting” him … it’s more that the team has much bigger issues to address and only so much money available to do that.
At the Daily Norseman, Christopher Gates clearly shares my feelings on the matter:
Over the course of his career with the Minnesota Vikings, Adrian Peterson has been the highest-paid running back in the history of the league. Of all of the players that have ever played the running back position, nobody has ever had more money deposited into their bank account by their employers than Adrian Peterson has. Yes, he’s won rushing titles. Yes, he won a rushing title as recently as 2015. In the two years that rushing title was sandwiched between, he ran for a grand total of 147 yards in four games. He made $12 million in each of those seasons. Yeah, he had to pay a fine in 2014. That was nobody’s fault but his, so I don’t care. He still got $12 million from the Vikings.
To say nothing of the way this team stood by Peterson in the wake of everything that happened in 2014. This team could have done a lot of things with Peterson … and what they ultimately did is to give him a contract extension that gave him more money. Now that they’ve decided that, at this point, a 32-year old running back coming off of knee issues isn’t worth (literally) twice as much as any other running back in the National Football League, suddenly the Vikings are unappreciative?
Fuggouttahere with that. Seriously.
Look, it only takes one team to have a General Manager lose their minds and give Adrian Peterson more than he’s worth at this stage of his career. It doesn’t appear as though the Minnesota Vikings are going to allow that team to be them. There’s certainly the possibility that Rick Spielman and company told Peterson to shop around and come back with his best offer to see if the Vikings were interested in matching it. But, if that was the case, why would Peterson’s camp (specifically his father, apparently) let something like this get out there?
Perhaps the best summary of the state of play so far:
Ap's Dad:
– We like NE
NE: We good– We like Seattle
Sea: Haha no– Oakland has good Ol
Oak: You'd be rb3– Mn?
MN: New phone who dis— Injured QB Fan (@JoshMenschNFL) March 8, 2017
Simon Phillips & Protocol + Ndugu Chancler + Billy Ward: Biplane to Bermuda
Published on Jan 21, 2014
Simon Phillips & Protocol + Ndugu Chancler + Billy Ward
– Andy Timmons – Everette Harp – Steve Weingart – Del Atkins: Biplane to Bermuda – MD Drumfestival 2008
H/T to ESR who said “I had a very powerful experience recently. I found my love of jazz again. Here’s the recording that did it”.
QotD: With age comes unfashionable opinions
Once you have passed fifty it gets harder and harder not to notice that you are being left behind. Styles and manners change, of course: that you can cope with, if you are willing to put forth a little effort. Thinking changes too, though, and for that there’s no coping. You can change the outer man, just as you can buff up at the gym, if you follow a few sensible precautions. The inner man, though, is fixed by middle age (if not much earlier). As you lip-sync your way through the new manners, the new fashions, the new cant, the inner man will be whispering inside your head, louder and louder as the years go by: This is all so bogus! These kids don’t know squat!
You may drop the facade at last and just let the inner man speak out, succumbing to “Elderly Tourette’s Syndrome,” saying things that can’t be said any more (but which you know to be true, and which you further suspect that the canters also, at some subliminal level, know to be true), scandalizing and horrifying all the young fools within earshot. You might even — I’ve some way to go yet, I’m glad to say, so this is hearsay testimony from an ETS-afflicted geezer known to me — you may even find that you have righteous fun doing so, though you get invited into polite society less and less.
John Derbyshire, “Flashman, Ron Paul, James Kirchick — And Liberty”, Vdare.com, 2008-01-15.
March 8, 2017
Soonish, coming later this year from Kelly & Zach Weinersmith
I’ve been reading (and occasionally linking to) Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal webcomic for years. It combines a Far Side sense of the zany with actual science (well, sometimes). Zach and Kelly have combined their talents (she’s a scientist who “studies parasites that manipulate the behavior of their hosts”) to produce a book that will be published in October that I’m eager to read as soon as it’s available:
You can click the image to go to the Amazon.ca pre-order page. More information on the book here.
History Of The Cossacks Until World War 1 I THE GREAT WAR Special
Published on 7 Mar 2017
The Cossacks are surrounded my myths and legends. For some they were the “Tsar’s dogs” for others they were more comparable to the cowboys of the Wild West. In any case, their history and culture is unique and is deeply intertwined with the rise and end of the Romanov dynasty. And that’s why we are taking a look further back than usual to introduce to the Cossacks.
“…the anti-fascists look a lot closer [to] Nazi brownshirts than the people they’re trying to stop”
Megan McArdle on the sudden willingness — even eagerness — on the part of progressive activists to move from agitation to literally beating up the objects of their hatred:
Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words will never hurt you. Or so we were told by our mothers. But events on both sides of continent in recent weeks seem to belie that old adage. A new generation of protesters has come to the conclusion that words do hurt — and that therefore, extreme measures, up to and including physical force, are justified to keep them from being spoken.
At Berkeley last month, a riot broke out over a speech planned by Milo Yiannopoulos, a sort of professional conservative troll who worked for Breitbart until a scandal over some hebephilic remarks cost him his job and his book contract. This was not simply setting things on fire or breaking a few windows (though those would have been quite bad enough); multiple people seem to have been beaten by the “antifas” (anti-fascists). In the videos that have been released so far, the anti-fascists look a lot closer [to] Nazi brownshirts than the people they’re trying to stop. There was further violence this weekend in Berkeley at a pro-Trump march.
Then a few days ago, a speech by Charles Murray at Middlebury College in Vermont also turned violent, and a professor was injured as she walked with Murray after his speech. Murray has given his own personal account of what occurred, and a lengthy video of the proceedings is available on the web. They are not as frightening as what happened at Berkeley, but they are plenty horrifying enough: they shouted him down, refusing to allow him to speak, then banged on the building and pulled fire alarms when he was transferred him to a private room to do a streaming talk they were unable to disrupt. Finally, they tried to physically prevent him from leaving.
The fact that two different speeches triggered violence at two different campuses within the space of a month suggests that we may be entering into a new and more dangerous phase of the anti-free-speech movement. Free-speech advocates, particularly the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, have done a great job pushing back against overweening college administrations that try to curtail the speech of students and professors. But these are actions coming from the students. Who do you sue to keep a mob of students from resorting to the heckler’s veto, or their fists, to combat ideas they don’t like?
As more than a few folks on the right have pointed out, if the “antifa” activists continue translating their distaste for certain words and concepts into actual violence, the right is significantly better armed and nobody in their right mind should want to provoke a descent into reciprocal violence when the other side has all the weapons.
Why can’t trains go uphill? – James May’s Q&A (Ep 30) – Head Squeeze
Published on 19 Jul 2013
James May looks at why trains can’t go uphill
QotD: Canadian attitudes to America
Canadians’ views on American politics are generally fairly predictable. Being Canadian means a degree of smugness blended with a drop or two of envy and a fairly constant need to assert moral superiority. In a very polite, but persistent way.
The candidacy, nomination and election of Donald Trump gave the better class of Canadian plenty of opportunity to show each other just how intelligent and enlighted they were. The Coynes and Kinsellas competed with each other in the political snobbery sweepstakes. Trump was Hitler, the Republicans the Nazi Party, Steve Bannon was a badly dressed Göring or, more likely, Satan himself. Breitbart News was Der Stürmer, the alt-right was universally the SS, the Trump regime overnight transformed America – save for the brave “Resistance” – into an anti-semitic, racist, fascist, misogynistic state in which freedom of the press and human rights in general were crushed under the jackbooted heels of Trump’s evil to a man (and pretend woman) Cabinet.
It has been tons of fun to watch ostensibly rational, intelligent, people reach immediately for the white supremacist smear tool kit in the face of the unthinkable occurring in our neighbour to the South. The fact that, one month into the Trump Presidency, the worst he seems to have done is be rude to CNN and the New York Times doesn’t deter our good and decent Canadians one bit. They just know that Trump is an evilton and, at any moment, will open the concentration camps and start rounding up Mexicans, Jews, Blacks, Muslims, Women, Queers, NYT reporters and anyone else the human Cheeto and his henchmen find objectionable.
And, to make the entire thing even more ominous, there seems to be a belief that Trump was put into position by none other than Prince of Darkness, Vladimir Putin and that Trump is simply following orders. Or something.
Jay Currie, “Trump and the Canadians”, Jay Currie, 2017-02-25.
March 7, 2017
Russia Before the 1917 Revolution I THE GREAT WAR Special
Published on 6 Mar 2017
Russia’s history in the decades leading up to World War 1 where a time of great turmoil and social changes. The Romanov tsars held a tight grip on the country which remained an autocracy even though the people requested change. And by 1917, three years into World War 1, the people demanded change again.
Senator Charles Schumer
L. Neil Smith calls for an investigation into Senator Schumer’s “connection to this remnant Stalinist core, here in the West.”
Following the inglorious collapse of the old Soviet Union back in the late 20th century, without a doubt the new capital of world collectivism has come to be centered somewhere between Washington, D.C. and New York City. (It had already been observed and lamented that, at a moment in history when communism was shriveling and dying all across its native Europe, the evil legacy of Marx and Engels was alive and well in most American universities.)
New York and Washington, D,C, are both both the familiar stomping grounds of a dangerously deluded Democratic Senator who apparently has come to believe that he is the divinely-appointed rightful Chief Executive and Commander-in-Chief, and is presently leading a vicious assault on what might be termed “The Peoples’ Presidency”. One can be forgiven from wondering what stone he pulled his sword from.
Judging from his unbrokenly statist legislative record, he has always believed that the “peasants” (that’s you and me) need a Leviathan to tell them what to do, where to go, how to live their lives, even how many gallons their toilet-tanks may hold. Under no circumstances, in his dementedly Draconian view, must the American electorate be permitted to choose their own leader, especially a leader pledged to lift the burden of authoritarian government from their weary shoulders. Their duty, in his view, is simply to be born, obey their masters, pay a lifetime of taxes, die and get out of the way, not to determine the course of the Ship of State (albeit, a sinking ship, aboard which he occupies the highest crow’s- nest—as it stands now, he’ll be among the last to get his feet wet).
However what needs to be investigated is not some entirely fictional collusion between the Trump Administration and Vladimir Putin’s thoroughly post-Marxist, patently anti-communist Russia, repeated over and over and over and over again by the news floozies and gentlemen-of-the-evening of the compliant news media until we’re expected to believe it, but Charles Schumer’s deep connection to this remnant Stalinist core, here in the West.
I will repeat that, because it’s important. What needs to be investigated is not some fictional—mythical—collusion between the Trump Administration and Vladimir Putin’s post- Marxist, anti-communist Russia, repeated over and over again by the round-heeled news media until we’re expected to believe it, but Charles Shumer’s own connection to this remnant Stalinist core, here in the West.
Lois McMaster Bujold’s ongoing series of novellas in “World of the Five Gods”
I’ve been remiss in mentioning some recent works of Lois McMaster Bujold … partly because they’ve been released in ebook format before eventually making it to print, which means I’m already two books behind the current one, because I wait for the hardcover to become available (I’m really not much of a fan of ebooks, except for “emergency” reading on my phone when I’m caught without a dead-tree book to read).
If you’re not averse to ebooks, the first in the series is called Penric’s Demon:
Part of the blurb from the Amazon.ca description:
On his way to his betrothal, young Lord Penric comes upon a riding accident with an elderly lady on the ground, her maidservant and guardsmen distraught. As he approaches to help, he discovers that the lady is a Temple divine, servant to the five gods of this world. Her avowed god is The Bastard, “master of all disasters out of season”, and with her dying breath she bequeaths her mysterious powers to Penric. From that moment on, Penric’s life is irreversibly changed, and his life is in danger from those who envy or fear him.
Set in the fantasy world of the author’s acclaimed novels The Curse Of Chalion, Paladin Of Souls and The Hallowed Hunt, this novella has the depth of characterization and emotional complexity that distinguishes all Bujold’s work.
A limited edition hardcover was published by Subterranean Press, and I believe either a trade or mass-market paperback will be released at some point in the future (perhaps as an omnibus edition).
The second book in the series (and the one I just finished reading last week) is called Penric and the Shaman:
Amazon’s description:
In this NOVELLA set in The World of the Five Gods and four years after the events in Penric’s Demon, Penric is a divine of the Bastard’s Order as well as a sorcerer and scholar, living in the palace where the Princess-Archdivine holds court. His scholarly work is interrupted when the Archdivine agrees to send Penric, in his role as sorcerer, to accompany a “Locator” of the Father’s Order, assigned to capture Inglis, a runaway shaman charged with the murder of his best friend. However, the situation they discover in the mountains is far more complex than expected. Penric’s roles as sorcerer, strategist, and counselor are all called upon before the end.
The third novella is called Penric’s Mission and I haven’t read it yet, as the limited edition hardcover has not been announced (but I anticipate it will be coming out later this year). The latest in the series is Mira’s Last Dance, which went live online just a few days ago.
7 Things To Get You Started Using A Table Saw | WOODWORKING BASICS
Published on 15 Jan 2016
If you want to make things out of wood, a table saw is one of the most useful tools you can own. If you are new to woodworking, this video will help get you started.
Kickback caught on camera video: https://youtu.be/u7sRrC2Jpp4
