OCTOPUS’ MOST AMAZING SEAFOOD CHOWDER (A SECRET RECIPE)

(Click on image to enlarge.)

Your faithful cephalopod should have posted this recipe a few days ago to give you ample time to shop for the holiday weekend.  Better late than never, as human folks say.  All told, this recipe is expensive and will set you back a few (s)quid but is well worth it. Why not enjoy a seafood feast now while supplies last (before BP and other slagging indicators deprive you of the pleasure).

Ingredients:

1/2 pound bacon
1/2 cup butter (or margarine)
2 cups chopped onions
2 cans chicken stock
2 cups chopped celery
2 medium carrots – chopped (alternate: red and yellow peppers)
3 medium potatoes – diced (or 2 cans of cooked potatoes that don’t mush like fresh potatoes)
3 teaspoons Old Bay Seafood seasoning
1/4 teaspoon fresh ground pepper
4 cups whole milk
2/3 cup all purpose flour
1/2 pound fresh cod or haddock – cut into bite size pieces
6 ounces (or more) fresh crabmeat
3 cans baby clams (if you don’t like clams, substitute with 16 ounces of crab chunks)
1 pound medium size shrimp
1 cup (8 ounces) lobster chunks

Method to my madness:

1 - Cut bacon into 3/8 pieces and slowly fry until crisp. Drain on paper and set aside.

2 – Melt butter in a large saucepan, add onions and celery (and chopped peppers), and cook over low heat until tender.

3 - Mix Old Bay spice and flour to about half the milk. Add to saucepan (above) and sauté.

3- Add chicken broth, carrots, and black pepper. Reduce heat and simmer uncovered for 5 to 6 minutes.

4 – Add diced potatoes and simmer until carrots and potatoes are tender.

5 – Add fish and simmer for a minute or two.

6 – Add crabmeat. Stir in the remaining milk and simmer until the mixture begins to thicken.

IF MAKING A DAY AHEAD OF TIME, STOP HERE AND REFRIGERATE OVERNIGHT.

7 – Reheat the previously prepared saucepan. Stir in the clams (if using), shrimp, and lobster. Taste and adjust seasoning.

8 – Ladle into cups or bowls and sprinkle with crisp bacon chips.

Notes: Overnight refrigeration lets the flavors blend. Honorary cephalopods never overcook the shrimp. When shopping, select only white crabmeat (and save the grey matter for blogging). If dietary restrictions apply, substitute margarine for butter and reduce the amount of salt. Serves 10 people or less (usually much less).

The Best News I've Had All Day

Patricia Murphy of The Capitolist, reports that Senator Lindsey Graham is the New Maverick in Congress.  The man's accent makes this S. Carolinian crazy and don't get me started on the haircut, but I'm really grateful that somebody in The Palmetto State occasionally backs the POTUS--it's a miracle, when it happens, but I'll take it!  Especially when he pronounces the demise of the Tea Party: "The problem with the Tea Party, I think it's just unsustainable because they can never come up with a coherent vision for governing the country. It will die out."  Lindsey, my main man!

Compared to most of the quotable moments that come out of the state, Graham will sometimes sound like an intelligent guy; so, how come on the gay subject he sounds as dumb as Jake Knotts?  

"I know it's really gonna upset a lot of gay men -- I'm sure hundreds of 'em are gonna be jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge -- but I ain't available. I ain't gay. Sorry."

I don't get it.  He knowed how to talk real good t'other day with Elena Kagan, and he dumbs down on affectional orientation.  It's not a new rumor, by the way; calling a politician gay is a frequently used ploy in SC--they're pretty sophomoric that way.  And Graham's response, in which he dignifies the accusation as only a South Carolinian can, indicates that he takes that old tactic way too seriously when it's applied to him.

Come on, Lindsey.  Be a real maverick and ignore stuff like this.  

“It Is What It Is”: Why So Few Americans Follow Soccer

Whenever the subject of soccer comes up – usually around World Cup time – one is sure to be treated to a Snark Parade on all sides.  Some Americans brusquely dismiss the game as frustrating, slow-paced and boring to watch, while Europeans and others counter that Americans are too [insert your favorite cosmopolitan putdown here] to appreciate the game’s virtues: unless there’s lots of scoring  and/or violence, they insist, Americans can’t fix their attention on a game.  The one thing I can’t recall having read about the matter is the most obvious: the good old US & A has long been saturated with a variety of sports and just doesn’t find it a worthwhile proposition to get passionate about another one.  We already have baseball, football, basketball, tennis, and golf (along with a few others – auto racing, horse racing, etc.), each with lots of participants and followers.  Soccer is more popular than it used to be, but it isn’t now and, as far as I can opine, probably won’t become as mainstream as the others. 

And this is where the unflattering (if unfair) characterization of the game as boring comes into play: soccer might catch on better in a saturated field of games if it were more fast-paced and less grounded in the perpetual spectacle of watching each team frustrate the other’s efforts.  It’s a hard sell, in other words – not something you’d expect to catch on like wildfire with people who already have lots of faster-paced options to which their sensibilities are attuned.  My own attempts to watch a few soccer games are probably typical of American attitudes: I appreciated the athletic skill involved in the matches, but just couldn’t get into them enough to make a habit of following the sport.  I prefer basketball and baseball when I’m in the mood to watch a game, which isn’t often – I usually just watch the playoffs and finals of those two sports.

Europeans and others outside the USA grow up watching and playing soccer – I get the sense that it’s their main game and that they don’t have as many major sports as we do.  The Brits have rugby and tennis, but mostly they’re soccer fanatics, right?  It’s probably similar with a lot of other countries: for them, soccer is the sport.  So of course Euros and Africans and Latin Americans are going to develop a feeling for the finer points of the game, and will perhaps draw a life lesson from the showcasing of frustration built into a typical 0-0 or 1-0 match where we Americanos only see paint drying or milk turning sour.  We don’t have the intimate, youth-up connection to soccer that they do, so it makes sense that we don’t appreciate it and don’t see why we should bother learning to appreciate it, either.  The game isn’t deeply rooted in our consciousness, and I doubt that its popularity with recent immigrants and their kids is enough of a phenomenon to tip the scales in its favor nationwide.  It will probably always seem somewhat of an implant here, and any national interest occasional.  Perhaps over decades that will change -- one cannot know for certain, of course.

In sum, there’s no need for all the snark on either side: the game is a fine one, and it’s neither inferior nor superior to American sports; people outside the USA aren’t fools for following it with a passion, and Americans aren’t grands imbéciles for not much caring about it.  The whole situation, as participants in those ridiculous post-game press conferences say when they have nothing to say, “is what it is.”

The Constitution comes to Chicago

"Liberal anti-gun groups are already fuming" says Raw Story's report of the Supreme Court's decision that the Second Amendment constitutes a restraint on State and local government's ability to abridge the right to keep and bear arms.

"People will die because of this decision" says Washington, DC's Violence Policy Center, but the question is really about how many died because of the blanket ban on hand gun ownership, isn't it? Perhaps since suicide is the leading cause of handgun death, some will choose Beretta over barbiturates or the window or driving the wrong way on the expressway.

"It is a victory only for the gun lobby and America's fading firearms industry. The inevitable tide of frivolous pro-gun litigation destined to follow will force cities, counties, and states to expend scarce resources to defend longstanding, effective public safety laws. The gun lobby and gunmakers are seeking nothing less than the complete dismantling of our nation’s gun laws in a cynical effort to try and stem the long-term drop in gun ownership and save the dwindling gun industry."

I don't know about the authoritarians we keep insisting on calling "liberals," but I'm starting to give off some steam here myself. If there is in fact a long term drop in gun ownership, it's a surprise to me, seeing as there are lines outside of gun shops and sales of guns and ammunition are booming. Prices of ammunition are soaring. If the domestic arms industry is suffering, the lawsuits by cities like Chicago are certainly part of it and the ability of foreign makers to sell more cheaply has hurt every American industry.

If these long standing blanket handgun bans have made the few cities that enacted them safer, it's never shown up in any statistics that I've seen. In fact as gun laws have liberalized nationwide, gun related crimes have decreased.

Yes, I've seen the posters, heard the slogans, listened to the blather: show me the numbers. I suggest that just as there was a lot of sound and fury and learned diatribes about the bloodbath that would follow the demise of the National Speed Limit, the facts contradicted that idiot's tale quickly and continue to do so. Facts however, are the enemy of zealots; whether they're anti scary-thing activists or the profiteers who perpetuate the War on Drugs that never worked and which has been responsible for the majority of violent murders.

Show me the effectiveness of the Chicago or Washington DC handgun bans. Show me that these cities have been any safer than cities without them. Tell me I'm part of a gun lobby, tell me I'm trying to dismantle gun laws -- it may convince the choir you preach to, but you certainly are stretching the truth with the intent to deceive. Nothing less than dismantling all gun laws? Hell no, I don't want minors to own guns. I don't want to remove most of the restrictions on where you can carry them, where you can display them openly how you can transport them and certainly not on where and when you can use them. Call me cynical, but in the years since you told me someone was going to "shoot the Avon Lady " if we allowed someone to shoot an armed home invader, invasions have decreased and the Avon lady is still alive and well. It's all been a pack of lies you told to generate revenue and get votes -- and sorry, if you're attacking my freedom, you're sure as hell not a Liberal and if you disagree, you don't speak English very well either. Call me cynical, but it's you willing to ignore the constitution for your own ends, not me.

" We know the facts prove the opposite and that areas of the country with the highest concentration of gun ownership also have the highest rates of gun death"

34,000 gun deaths? What about the fact that 83% of the gun deaths in households containing guns are suicides. Why aren't you mentioning that most of the 'people who will die' if Chicagoans can keep a gun at home are just as likely to have died otherwise. Why is that a danger to me or you? Perhaps the incomplete facts support the argument, but the complete facts suggest that banning rope or prescription pain killers or alcohol or windows that open or razor blades will be as stupid an exercise and of course none of those can protect your life, now can they?

Since the handgun ban never had any effect on the gangsters who use handguns in crimes, except to make burglars a bit bolder, restoration of rights to home defense just isn't going to create that bloodbath, but proof of failure has always been seen as evidence for success and a demand for continuation of policy by authoritarians.

LIFE

Sunday Octopus Edition

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Ron Paul and my rights

Non pudet, quia pudendum est;
prorsus credibile est, quia ineptum est;
certum est, quia impossibile.*

I really want to like Ron Paul. There have been times when I felt we needed Ron Paul, even if only to keep the others honest. I concur wholeheartedly with many of his ideas about leaving people alone in their homes and private lives; about transparency in financial matters. I share the loathing of surveillance, of being forced to carry papers. I agree about the wars that are useful only to increase government power over domestic affairs. I agree about the importance of the Bill of Rights that neither Party seems to care much about -- and so on, but I am constantly reminded that I really don't know how he can say what he says, nor can I understand his motivations without postulating entities sufficient to send Occam running down the street screaming.

Two years ago he told us that

"Congress refuses to allow reasonable, environmentally sensitive, offshore drilling."

They did, of course allow drilling, but they allowed unreasonable, unsafe and reckless drilling, free of unbiased oversight, which according to Libertarian doctrine should have magically resulted in safe and reasonable results: they allowed the drillers to tell us what was safe enough and what was too expensive to do. They allowed the rig operators to determine what the lives of the workers were worth relative to profits and they allowed them not to give a damn that my grandchildren may never see a clean beach in Florida or eat Gulf shrimp.

It wasn't reasonable, environmentally sensitive drilling that got us into the current mess, now was it? It could have been all that if the laws had been enforced. The blowout might have been prevented if the people in charge of oversight hadn't been on the oil train and had done their jobs; if the regulations themselves hadn't been written by oil men and largely in secret -- if government hadn't been made to look the other way because of a philosophy teaching that government should look the other way. Eleven good men, many of whom saw this coming, would still be alive had we had some very basic oversight -- if we didn't have people insisting that the people who profit write the rules and the people with everything to lose keep silent or be called Communists.

Yet Dr. Paul says it was because of too much government that BP cheated and lied and people died -- that vast tracts of land and sea were destroyed, important industries were ruined, property made worthless -- and old fashioned as it may sound, I think contradictions in logic and fact weaken an argument. Is it a contradiction that oversight in an industry that has the capability of doing unprecedented damage is "too much government" while giving tax breaks and incentives to companies making tens of billions in profits is not?

Yes, it is a contradiction! Are we really so afraid of Communism that we're willing to accept what is by definition, giving state supported irresponsibility to state supported industries while calling it "limited government?" Or is it that the rather insignificant benefit of allowing a foreign corporation to pump American oil and sell it abroad in amounts that really don't matter either in terms of conservation or the price of crude, is a consummation so devoutly to be demanded that risking the end of the world is not worth talking about?

"We still need oil, and a lot of good jobs depend on oil production,"

he advises us. But do we need that oil, from there and do we need it so much we'll gamble our country's future on it, people's lives and livelihoods on grabbing a tiny bit more of it. We should be held hostage so that foreign corporations who pay hardly any taxes yet have a bigger vote than you do can add to their already obscene profits: so that they can play while we pay -- and pay forever.

It's a bad argument, a very, very bad argument, even coming from someone not smart enough to see that -- and Paul certainly is smart enough, so why is adding an insignificant amount to the current supply of oil so desperately important? Why are oil jobs more important than the countless other jobs destroyed by oil spills? Are today's fishing jobs, logging jobs, more important than making sure that there are fish and trees next week? Libertarianism would seem to say so. Libertarianism would seem to promise that passenger pigeons will return now that they were hunted to extinction, that we'd still have the American Bison and the Bald Eagle if we'd been allowed to shoot as many as we liked, but you know -- it's not true.

Look, I don't think I'm channeling Marx when I say that we don't have crime simply because we have too many police, that Enron destroyed lives and fortunes because the Government looked at their books; that people wouldn't rob banks if banks had no guards and robbery weren't illegal. I don't think it's communism to have a government say: no dammit, you can't build a fireworks factory next to that school and if you build it anywhere, you'll install sprinklers and put up no smoking signs, but that's just what people calling themselves libertarians are saying.

I don't understand and I'm quite sure I don't understand because it's not to be understood, it's to be believed. The pieces of the puzzle don't need to fit, the ideas don't need to work. In fact they have a history which proves it so. It's the logic of emotion; the argument from anger and the special pleadings of selfish solipsism: I don't care what happens to my country if oil is a penny a barrel cheaper for two weeks. I don't care if it's a Ponzi scheme because I'm making money. I don't care if I poison the river, my property rights are my property rights. I don't care if your grandmother can't ride my bus -- it's my bus and my right. I don't know if I'm more disturbed by the fact that I don't understand or by the fear that I do understand.

*There is no shame because it is shameful;
it is wholly credible, because it is unsound;
it is certain, because impossible.

(with apologies to Turtullian)

MEET CHARLIE

This poor, skinny little creature stumbled out of the woods and into my life several days ago. He spent two days at the vet’s (I have had so many strays, my vet and I are on a first name basis!) who determined that he doesn’t have any terminal illness. But he did have several ticks embedded around his head, ears impacted with ear mites, hook worms and lung worms. And, as you can see from the photos, Charlie is also severely malnourished.

We have estimated his age at about 8-9 months and suspect Charlie is the victim of casual cruelty, having mostly likely been dumped in the woods or left behind when his people moved out of some house nearby. While he looks pretty pitiful still, this is a great improvement from that first day.

I named him after Charlie from the Willy Wonka movie; two tow headed boys who didn’t have much going for them but still remained sweet and hopeful. Charlie the cat wants only to be with others, cuddled and petted although it is difficult to pet him much for all the exposed bony prominences.

Whoever did this will not pay the price for such cruelty under the newly minted NC Susie’s Law, named after this poor pup who was tortured and burned by her owner. His lenient sentence of probation sparked such outrage, Susie became the poster pup for the law to offer stiffer sentences for this kind of evil. Susie has patches of bare scarred skin and most of her ears are gone but she has new owners who say she remains a sweet, loving animal. You have to ask yourself WTF is wrong with someone that they would do this to a helpless animal?

Charlie on the other hand would not be seen as tortured but merely abandoned. I would cut his former owners some slack except for the fact that there are at least two animal shelters and several veterinary offices in the area where they could have put him in a box with holes and left him on the doorstep.

I have long been of an opinion that with our advanced technology too many people live that shouldn’t. So we have these pus bags walking on the same earth and breathing the same air.

Lock them up in a deep dark hole and throw away the key, please!

Loonies, Moonies and Republicans - oh my!

I remember reading Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon many years ago. It's about an old Soviet apparatchik fallen from grace and thrown into one of Stalin's prisons to await some miserable and sordid fate in the Lublyanka cellars. It came to mind because there's a mention in it of group photos of the Old Guard, the early, idealistic, committed Communists out to make a better world and how one by one, the official photos on the office wall were replaced by newer ones with certain people missing, certain others added.

It was long before digital photography and before it made it so easy for unscrupulous, devious, dishonest, America hating, indecent propagandists to produce photos of John Kerry and Jane Fonda, for instance, or Barack Obama saluting improperly -- and do it far better than old Ivan in the back room could with a razor and some glue. It is far too easy for the kind of trolls who work for right wing rags owned by foreign born lunatics like the Washington Times to produce photos of Elena Kagan in a black Turban so as to insinuate perhaps, and without any sense of journalistic integrity, that she's a terrorist supporter as well as a probably homosexual cross dresser and part of an "ominous plot" to insinuate Sharia Law into this country.

It's far too easy for an American public so insanely desperate, so grossly, childishly irresponsible that they will get into bed with the Moonies just to have one more idiotic piece of dung to fling at the opposition. It's so easy for a public who never reads to miss the parallels between what they do and what the people they claim to hate did. It's so easy for an infantile America to dismiss someone for having Communist cooties because they simply haven't the brains to do much more and certainly can't be expected to discuss her actual qualifications and record.

It's so hard for a person who likes to see people get their just desserts when those people are the country he so wishes to be proud of.

ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS OF THE PLANET

Octopus Edition

Credit Tom Tomorrow.
Click on image to enlarge.

It's Not Personal, Sir

Back in March, in a post entitled "Into The Fog", I requested, "...if any of you can think of a convincing argument in favor of continuing the war in Afghanistan...something other than the reason most of the kids who are there give, which is 'to look out for my buddies here'...by all means, fill me in." Today, I just finished the Rolling Stone  article by Michael Hastings.  You know, the one that will likely cost General McChrystal both his job and his spot in history; hereafter, he'll be known as the general who actually believed that a friendly Rolling Stone journalist would be one of the guys, first, and a journalist, second.  I wasn't buying our chances in Afghanistan in March, before our commanding generals buckled so publicly under the strain, and I'm not buying them now, either...for the same reasons.


We will leave Afghanistan because we can't afford to fight that war no matter how many good reasons we find.  It's the economy, sir.  It isn't personal.


 In my opinion, Michael Hastings should not have published that article; that might make me look hopelessly old school, but I don't care; Hastings had to have understood that journalists who are given personal access to war commanders still have some modicum of responsibility to national interests.  Nor, of course, should McChrystal have given Michael Hastings access to his inner circle; that was the failure of judgment that puts all the general's other, possibly better, decisions in a different light.  Once that access was granted, I don't think McChrystal, who's known for his swagger and his hard-ass humor, should have been so trusting of Hasting's judgment--or so lacking in self-restraint or restraint of his staff--because journalism has its priorities; they are well-known and they are not personal.


My husband, who's had some exposure to military hubris, thinks the general must have been really pissed at somebody, that he must have known what he was doing.  I don't have that much faith in hubris.  McChrystal's a four-star; he's got exactly one commanding officer, whether he agrees with that commander or not...whether he agrees with the commander's choice of vice commander or not.  That's the chain of command.  Is this a war, or isn't it?  This isn't about Stanley McChrystal, although he's the guy who now needs to fall on his sword.  It isn't personal. 


While I don't agree with Hasting's choices of what to include and what to exclude from his story, "The Runaway General, " (odd choice of words), I have to agree with his concluding paragraph.

After nine years of war, the Taliban simply remains too strongly entrenched for the U.S. military to openly attack. The very people that COIN seeks to win over – the Afghan people – do not want us there. Our supposed ally, President Karzai, used his influence to delay the offensive, and the massive influx of aid championed by McChrystal is likely only to make things worse. "Throwing money at the problem exacerbates the problem," says Andrew Wilder, an expert at Tufts University who has studied the effect of aid in southern Afghanistan. "A tsunami of cash fuels corruption, delegitimizes the government and creates an environment where we're picking winners and losers" – a process that fuels resentment and hostility among the civilian population. So far, counterinsurgency has succeeded only in creating a never-ending demand for the primary product supplied by the military: perpetual war. There is a reason that President Obama studiously avoids using the word "victory" when he talks about Afghanistan. Winning, it would seem, is not really possible. Not even with Stanley McChrystal in charge. 

And not even when he's not.

Stanley McChrystal made the mistake of getting personal with the people he disagreed with in front of a journalist who owed him no allegiance. That's the kind of mistake that you and I might make weekly, which is why they don't hand those stars out to just anybody--which is why we expect more from any four-star general. However it goes when the general meets his CinC, it will be about the mission, the war, and the nation's capabilities.  It will absolutely not be personal.