mercredi 17 août 2011
Eating and Drinking Sydney Guide
Who said food blogging didn't get you anywhere?
I was pretty taken aback when I was approached to be one of the editors for the new Eating and Drinking Sydney guide earlier this year. It's the kind of offer a food writer dreams about, and then freaks out over, when you realise the magnitude of responsibility this position entails.
As editor for the Cheap and Cheerful section, I was entrusted
Even King Bill of Bon Temps, Louisiana is more accessible than this
In the mythical creature-land of Bon Temps, Louisiana as set out in the HBO series True Blood, there are hard and fast rules for vampires. Vampires can't enter a human's home without being invited. Vampires are subject to the laws set forth by their sheriffs, who in turn owe allegiance to their king or queen. You have to do some pretty badass stuff to become a vampire king or queen, such as vanquishing an all-powerful Evan Rachel Wood so she can go off and play Kate Winslet's viper of a daughter in Mildred Pierce. But as badass as vampires in leadership roles are in this fictional universe, they're one hell of a lot more accessible to their subjects than Paul Ryan is:
In what appears to be an effort to avoid the free-for-all town halls that have plagued recent contentious congressional recesses, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and other Republican members of Congress have chosen to charge admission to their home-district appearances.
Ryan will speak September 6 to the Whitnall Park Rotary Club in Greenfield, Wisc. Admission to the event is $15 per person and includes lunch.
Ryan has no free public town hall appearances scheduled during the recess.
The last time he held a free town hall, in Milton, Wisc. in April, Ryan was booed while trying to explain his proposal for the federal budget, which included drastic cuts to entitlement and benefit programs. Other Republicans around the country were on the receiving end of similar heat from their constituents. Ryan even had police remove one heckler from a town hall event in Racine, Wisc.
Considering the backlash that Ryan, the chairman of the Budget Committee, faced for proposed financial legislation this spring, it's no surprise to some that he is avoiding open public events during the continued turmoil of the debt ceiling crisis.
Yes, folks, this isn't Bon Temps. When a Congressman faces a high level of public outrage at his legislative proposals, he doesn't have to listen anymore. All he has to do is charge admission to make sure that only those who agree with him are allowed in his presence.
I wasn't kidding about the heretics' pyre
I've been posting about the dangers of the Christian Reconstruction/Chritian Dominionism movement for years. But now that two of the three top candidates for the GOP nomination for the presidency are adherents to this movement, it's time to start shouting what this movement is from the rooftops. Unfortunately the larger urban papers are too "genteel" to allow its columnists to cover this 13th century lunacy, but the Pittsburgh Post-Gazetta isn't:
Do you honestly believe that a Republican Congress, populated by men and women who cannot control their own impulses and so need a punitive religious structure to keep them on the straight (in all senses of the word) and narrow and cannot imagine not needing one, would stop an authoritarian president and the followers who regard him or her as a quasi-Messiah, from implementing such mass killings and exile of heathen by executive order if they believe they were told to do by God?
If you don't already know about Christian Reconstruction, it's time to change that.
(via)
The first time I ever heard of the Christian Reconstruction movement, now known as Dominionism, I thought it was a gag.
Who in their right mind wanted to live in a world where the Old Testament civil and ceremonial laws would become the template for local and national politics? It was a profoundly dark theology even by the standards of the dour Calvinism I considered reasonable at the time.
According to the tenets of Christian Reconstruction, it was up to Christians to bring the whole world into submission to Jesus Christ. Once that was accomplished (with God's help, of course), the Old Testament laws that guided ancient Israel would be dusted off and applied to civil societies across the globe, including America.
The motivating idea behind Christian Reconstruction was that Christ would never consider returning to an Earth consumed by spiritual decadence. The world needed to be "cleansed" to attract a procrastinating Jesus who was already 2,000 years overdue. It was up to Christians to take over and make him feel welcome.
In a world made more acceptable to Jesus, homosexuality could not exist and all non-Christian religions would be outlawed. Women would be restricted to managing the home and raising children, leaving millions of jobs to be filled by once-unemployed men.
Disobedient children would be subject to execution if they didn't repent, taxes would be light and slavery would be allowed as long as safeguards were included so that it didn't become an abusive or racist institution again. A stint in slavery would be limited to seven years.
All legal disputes would be settled by consulting the Ten Commandments or the Pentateuch. The irony is that many of the people who advocated this nonsense are some of the most vociferous critics of Shariah law in America today.
[snip]
I didn't take Christian Reconstruction as a political philosophy seriously until I met an actual Theonomist (follower of God's Law) in the real world.
"Oscar" was in his early 20s, as was I, when we met. He was a Jewish convert to Christianity, so he was always on the defensive. As a young believer, he fell in with a mob of Theonomists in San Diego before moving to Pennsylvania for college. The primacy of the Old Testament in Christian Reconstructionist thought appealed to his sense of cultural identification.
Since I knew he was from a family of Holocaust survivors, I asked him what he thought of the mandate that all non-Christians would have to convert or die. Oscar said that if his relatives refused to become Christians or submit to forced exile, then they would suffer the civil penalty for practicing idolatry. He would carry out the execution himself if called upon to do so by the Christian state.
Do you honestly believe that a Republican Congress, populated by men and women who cannot control their own impulses and so need a punitive religious structure to keep them on the straight (in all senses of the word) and narrow and cannot imagine not needing one, would stop an authoritarian president and the followers who regard him or her as a quasi-Messiah, from implementing such mass killings and exile of heathen by executive order if they believe they were told to do by God?
If you don't already know about Christian Reconstruction, it's time to change that.
(via)
mardi 16 août 2011
Next!
Now that Rick Perry has only been running for President for 72 hours and has already accused Fed Chair Ben Bernanke of treason and said he could expect some bodily harm if he ever went to Texas, the Money Guys of the Republican Party appear to be already looking out for an alternative to The Mormon, The Beard, and The Cowboy.
The latest name to be floated? This guy:
Yessirree, the Undead Austerity wunderkind himself:
I don't know about you, but if I'm going to vote for a Creature of the Night, it's going to be this one:
The latest name to be floated? This guy:
Yessirree, the Undead Austerity wunderkind himself:
Bill Bennett, from somewhere in the West, e-mailed me: “There are many talented candidates in the race already, but there is always room for a man of Paul Ryan’s intellectual depth, temperament, talent, and conviction.” Bennett and Ryan go way back. In a piece in the Weekly Standard from January, Fred Barnes recounted:Ryan came to Washington after graduating from Miami of Ohio in 1992 to work for Republican senator Robert Kasten of Wisconsin. When Kasten lost later that year, he recommended Ryan to [the late Jack] Kemp. As Kemp’s assistant, Ryan met the intellectual leaders of supply-side economics, including Larry Kudlow, Art Laffer, Alan Reynolds, and Jude Wanniski. He sounds starstruck in talking about them today.Bennett says Ryan hasn’t changed. “He was the exact same person then, only younger.” Bennett remembers Ryan asking him, “Dr. Bennett, I’m thinking about running for Congress. Does this pass the laugh test?” Bennett thought it did. Ryan, elected in 1998, still addresses Bennett as “Dr. Bennett.”
It sounds like Dr. Bennett is prescribing a presidential run. Whether Ryan will oblige remains to be seen. But Bennett is on to something: There is still an opening in the field for a conservative Republican with smarts and a broad electoral reach, especially one who has already successfully engaged the president. For those who think President Obama can be beaten on his policies not by personal quips, Ryan remains an attractive figure.
I don't know about you, but if I'm going to vote for a Creature of the Night, it's going to be this one:
Meet Rick Perry
A country that has its act together, and it isn't the US
Last weekend Mr. Brilliant and I sat in a restaurant and mulled over the prospect of "What if we have to leave the US?" Neither of us are going anywhere while we're still working, as there isn't any more demand for age 50+ professionals elsewhere than there is here. But if you watch a couple of episodes of House Hunters International on HGTV, you discover that it isn't only people with a million dollars to spend on a vacation home that appear on this show; that some places afford a nice little dwelling on about what we expect to take out of this house even if we just break even.
We ruled out Asian countries that aren't islands whose names end in "i". Then we ruled out tropical islands because they're likely to be increasingly under water in the coming years. We ruled out the Middle East for obvious reasons. We ruled out anyplace too cold because if Mr. Brilliant could take the cold, we could just as easily spend our declining years in Vermont. That ruled out Scandinavia. We ruled out Russia and any of the northernmost former Soviet republics. We ruled out Central America because it's too hot, and South America. The "PIGS" countries -- Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain -- are all as much of a mess as we are. The south of France is tempting, but it's expensive and France isn't in great shape either. That left us with Slovenia and Germany.
Slovenia is an intriguing thought. Mr. Brilliant (who is half Italian, so it falls under the "It's OK To Knock Your Own Team" rule) thinks Slovenia has all the advantages of Italy only it's not full of Italians. I have an online friend in Slovenia, so if we were to decide to scope it out, we could get a nice tour of Ljubljana and environs. It's certainly something to think about, but it's difficult to imagine that it would ever go beyond that.
That left us with Germany.
I spent two weeks in Germany in the summer of 2009 for work, and I've been to Berlin, and while I realize that actually living in a place is far different from spending two weeks at the Hilton, I really, really liked what I saw of Germany. Here was a country that wasn't trying to whitewash the less-than-savory aspects of its history. There is a Holocaust memorial right outside the Reichstag building in Berlin, just in case anyone ever forgets. While the Germans with whom I've had conversations about it become impatient with the "sins of the fathers" taint they live with and wonder when the statute of limitations is up and they can stop being blamed for things done two to three generations ago, they know that what happened in their country in the 1930's must never be allowed to happen again (unlike in the US, where it's perfectly OK for right-wingers to say on national television that black people were better off under slavery). But once you get past World War II and the Cold War, life in Germany has many advantages for my colleagues who live and work there.
The cities are rich with social and cultural activities. They're highly livable cities that don't require a fortune to live in them. It's expensive to drive a car, but many people can walk or bike to where they're going, and if you can't, there is reliable public transportation. The 8:37 AM S6 train out of the main train station in Cologne shows up at precisely 8:37 every single day. On Track 10. Every single day. The cities are immaculate, the trains run on time, and if you don't like knuckles and schnitzel, well, the best Thai restaurant I've ever been to is in the former East Berlin, I've had great Indian food in Cologne, and a large Turkish population means you can get a plate of sensational adana kebab with rice and salad for about eight euros. This is a place where you can be on a street corner where the "Don't Walk" sign is up, and even if no cars are coming from either directions, YOU WAIT TILL THE LIGHT CHANGES.
It could be that over time, the anarchic way we tend to live here could find this highly ordered universe to be stifling. But sometimes I wonder, if when I'm old, such order could be comforting rather than stifling. I'm especially aware of it while in teleconferences. Here in the New York area, we become highly animated when we talk. It sometimes makes us seem abrasive to our German colleagues when our voices raise while on teleconferences, not because we're angry but it's just what we do. I work closely with an Italian-American woman who grew up in Clifton, New Jersey. We often say that we're sisters of different mothers because in many ways we're a lot alike in how we work and how we communicate. We have a colleague here from Germany, and I invited her into this woman's office while we were discussing something, because I wanted ther to see that the way we talk on these teleconferences isn't unusual or directed at them -- we talk like this with each other even when we agree.
But these days, Germay seems to be the only country in Europe, perhaps in the world, that has its act together (NYT link):
There's no doubt that Germany is helped immeasurably by not having the kind of massive military that the U.S. has, but given that no other country in Europe does either, that doesn't explain all about how Germany has emerged from the financial crisis not only relatively unscathed, but with low unemployment in a country that has strong worker protections and a good quality of life for its workers. The major concern for a country that seems to have done everything right is just how much it's going to have to pony up to bail out the countries that haven't.
(Joe Nocera also mentions Germany as what to do RIGHT during an economic slowdown.)
We ruled out Asian countries that aren't islands whose names end in "i". Then we ruled out tropical islands because they're likely to be increasingly under water in the coming years. We ruled out the Middle East for obvious reasons. We ruled out anyplace too cold because if Mr. Brilliant could take the cold, we could just as easily spend our declining years in Vermont. That ruled out Scandinavia. We ruled out Russia and any of the northernmost former Soviet republics. We ruled out Central America because it's too hot, and South America. The "PIGS" countries -- Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain -- are all as much of a mess as we are. The south of France is tempting, but it's expensive and France isn't in great shape either. That left us with Slovenia and Germany.
Slovenia is an intriguing thought. Mr. Brilliant (who is half Italian, so it falls under the "It's OK To Knock Your Own Team" rule) thinks Slovenia has all the advantages of Italy only it's not full of Italians. I have an online friend in Slovenia, so if we were to decide to scope it out, we could get a nice tour of Ljubljana and environs. It's certainly something to think about, but it's difficult to imagine that it would ever go beyond that.
That left us with Germany.
I spent two weeks in Germany in the summer of 2009 for work, and I've been to Berlin, and while I realize that actually living in a place is far different from spending two weeks at the Hilton, I really, really liked what I saw of Germany. Here was a country that wasn't trying to whitewash the less-than-savory aspects of its history. There is a Holocaust memorial right outside the Reichstag building in Berlin, just in case anyone ever forgets. While the Germans with whom I've had conversations about it become impatient with the "sins of the fathers" taint they live with and wonder when the statute of limitations is up and they can stop being blamed for things done two to three generations ago, they know that what happened in their country in the 1930's must never be allowed to happen again (unlike in the US, where it's perfectly OK for right-wingers to say on national television that black people were better off under slavery). But once you get past World War II and the Cold War, life in Germany has many advantages for my colleagues who live and work there.
The cities are rich with social and cultural activities. They're highly livable cities that don't require a fortune to live in them. It's expensive to drive a car, but many people can walk or bike to where they're going, and if you can't, there is reliable public transportation. The 8:37 AM S6 train out of the main train station in Cologne shows up at precisely 8:37 every single day. On Track 10. Every single day. The cities are immaculate, the trains run on time, and if you don't like knuckles and schnitzel, well, the best Thai restaurant I've ever been to is in the former East Berlin, I've had great Indian food in Cologne, and a large Turkish population means you can get a plate of sensational adana kebab with rice and salad for about eight euros. This is a place where you can be on a street corner where the "Don't Walk" sign is up, and even if no cars are coming from either directions, YOU WAIT TILL THE LIGHT CHANGES.
It could be that over time, the anarchic way we tend to live here could find this highly ordered universe to be stifling. But sometimes I wonder, if when I'm old, such order could be comforting rather than stifling. I'm especially aware of it while in teleconferences. Here in the New York area, we become highly animated when we talk. It sometimes makes us seem abrasive to our German colleagues when our voices raise while on teleconferences, not because we're angry but it's just what we do. I work closely with an Italian-American woman who grew up in Clifton, New Jersey. We often say that we're sisters of different mothers because in many ways we're a lot alike in how we work and how we communicate. We have a colleague here from Germany, and I invited her into this woman's office while we were discussing something, because I wanted ther to see that the way we talk on these teleconferences isn't unusual or directed at them -- we talk like this with each other even when we agree.
But these days, Germay seems to be the only country in Europe, perhaps in the world, that has its act together (NYT link):
Germany may be the only European nation that is large enough and rich enough to cover the debts of its struggling neighbors, but its citizens are reluctant to be the source of the bailout. Germany is in many ways in the eye of the storm, with barely a hint of the winds swirling nearby. There is no tear gas, as in Athens; no tires burning, as in London; no chanting crowds packing public squares, as in Spain. While much of the rest of Europe is struggling to pass harsh austerity packages, Germany is in the midst of a debate over cutting taxes by as much as $14.2 billion.
“It’s as if there’s this black cloud floating overhead but nothing has fallen on us,” said Markus Ponick, 38, a teacher in Berlin, who on Monday was strolling down a tree-lined stretch of Bleibtreustrasse with a cup of coffee in his hand. The government had made cuts, Mr. Ponick said, but they had been “cleverly chosen” to spare the public pain. “The effects of this crisis are imperceptible here,” he said.
The only major protests to strike Germany have been over tearing down an old train station in Stuttgart or calling for the end of nuclear power. Animal rights and affordable Internet, rather than jobs and spending cuts, are more likely to cause people to take to the streets right now, and even then not in terribly great numbers.
The simplest explanation is jobs.
By one government measure, 706,000 more Germans were employed in May of this year than the year before, of which 415,000 were full-time positions and 289,000 part time. In terms of relative size, that would be roughly comparable in the United States to nearly 2.7 million more people with jobs in 2011 versus 2010.
With strong unions and legal protections for workers, Germany’s labor market for years was compared unfavorably with the more flexible American one. Even after embarking on painful reforms, it suffered from high structural unemployment. In July, German unemployment was 7 percent, compared with 9.1 percent in the United States.
As Germany’s population shrinks, some economists and policy makers are more concerned about a shortage of qualified workers than joblessness.
As for the young, the unemployment rate is the third lowest in Europe, behind only the Netherlands and Austria. Only 9.1 percent of people between the ages of 15 and 24 are unemployed here, less than half the 20.5 percent average in Europe.
“I wouldn’t protest because I’m very content with my situation,” said Kristina Kuhn, 21, a student out shopping on the upscale Kurfürstendamm boulevard on Monday afternoon. “Young people can study, find jobs on the side and have opportunities for careers.”
A recent report in the daily newspaper Bild said that government experts expect the job boom to continue for another four years. In a survey of 1,800 Germans prepared for the business magazine WirtschaftsWoche by the Allensbach Institute for Public Opinion Research, a majority spoke of an era of increased insecurity, but a full 53 percent said they were optimistic about the next 12 months. Only 12 percent were pessimistic.
“They hear it on the news but for most Germans what they experience in their lives is completely different. The crisis is virtual,” said Renate Köcher, the institute’s director. “What’s decisive for most people is their own situation and for many people that has improved noticeably in the past three or four years.”
There's no doubt that Germany is helped immeasurably by not having the kind of massive military that the U.S. has, but given that no other country in Europe does either, that doesn't explain all about how Germany has emerged from the financial crisis not only relatively unscathed, but with low unemployment in a country that has strong worker protections and a good quality of life for its workers. The major concern for a country that seems to have done everything right is just how much it's going to have to pony up to bail out the countries that haven't.
(Joe Nocera also mentions Germany as what to do RIGHT during an economic slowdown.)
lundi 15 août 2011
Wouldn't it be easier to just say you don't want to do it anymore and go home?
I'm really starting to get pissed off at Barack Obama for his insistence on wasting our time with running for re-election when it's clear based on his actions that he's trying to sabotage his own presidency so he can go home.
I'm finding it increasingly difficult to find a reason to go to the polls next year, and "Ooh, Scary!" in the context of an executive-ordered Christian Dominionist mandate by President Perry or President Bachmann just isn't doing it for me the way it used to. Maybe it's just that I see this kind of theocracy as inevitable, so we might as well get it over with now. Why should I plan to bust my ass for another decade or so when I'm just going to be burnt at the stake as a heretic anyway?
I don't know if he's embraced the Washington bubble so much that he really believes that 80% of Americans are teabaggers who want to see Social Security and Medicare eliminated and a nation still reeling from recession to be subject to an austerity plan that will make 1933 look like 1995, or if he doesn't give a shit because Lloyd Blankfein has promised him an eight-figure job when he leaves office and he doesn't care whether it's in January of 2013 or January of 2017 (but would prefer it to be earlier.
But it's become increasingly clear that this guy at best has no clue on what to do to improve this nation's prospects and is listening to the wrong people, and at worst he truly does not care. And the rest of his party, while turning its back on him, isn't exactly doing a great job of fighting the good fight.
When poll after poll shows huge majorities of Americans wanting the New Deal and Great Society programs kept, and the teabag coalition consisting of the same 18-19% of dead-enders who still think George W. Bush was a great president, there are eimply no other explanations for the kind of boneheaded adherence to austerity to which the Obama Administration insists on clinging.
And now the polls show just how disgusted the public is with this man's utter refusal to take a stand on their behalf:
The first thing this president's team did upon taking office was to throw his entire base under the bus, branding us all as "the professional left." Instead, they've tried to focus on a bunch of low-information ignoramuses who vote based on "Ooh! Shiny!" But even those who don't pay attention to politics DO pay attention to the fact that they no longer have a paycheck because their job has been outsourced to a low-wage country, and that the cost of heating oil has tripled in the last five years, and that even an "inexpensive" college for their kid is going to set them back twenty-five grand a year, and that without a paycheck they have to find $20,000 a year to pay for health insurance that will deny every single claim. And when they start to see what "less government" means, they don't much care for it.
Maybe the "Ooh, shiny!" crowd is still interested in what this man has to say, though I doubt it because he isn't shiny anymore. But those of us that at one time could have been relied on to be good soldiers have tuned him out.
Prepare the public heretics' pyre, Mr. Perry. I'm ready.
More good stuff on the preposterousness that is the Obama re-election campaign at Sardonicky.
I'm finding it increasingly difficult to find a reason to go to the polls next year, and "Ooh, Scary!" in the context of an executive-ordered Christian Dominionist mandate by President Perry or President Bachmann just isn't doing it for me the way it used to. Maybe it's just that I see this kind of theocracy as inevitable, so we might as well get it over with now. Why should I plan to bust my ass for another decade or so when I'm just going to be burnt at the stake as a heretic anyway?
I don't know if he's embraced the Washington bubble so much that he really believes that 80% of Americans are teabaggers who want to see Social Security and Medicare eliminated and a nation still reeling from recession to be subject to an austerity plan that will make 1933 look like 1995, or if he doesn't give a shit because Lloyd Blankfein has promised him an eight-figure job when he leaves office and he doesn't care whether it's in January of 2013 or January of 2017 (but would prefer it to be earlier.
But it's become increasingly clear that this guy at best has no clue on what to do to improve this nation's prospects and is listening to the wrong people, and at worst he truly does not care. And the rest of his party, while turning its back on him, isn't exactly doing a great job of fighting the good fight.
When poll after poll shows huge majorities of Americans wanting the New Deal and Great Society programs kept, and the teabag coalition consisting of the same 18-19% of dead-enders who still think George W. Bush was a great president, there are eimply no other explanations for the kind of boneheaded adherence to austerity to which the Obama Administration insists on clinging.
And now the polls show just how disgusted the public is with this man's utter refusal to take a stand on their behalf:
President Obama's summer woes have dragged his approval rating to an all-time low, sinking below 40% for the first time in Gallup's daily tracking poll.
New data posted Sunday shows that 39% of Americans approve of Obama's job performance, while 54% disapprove. Both are the worst numbers of his presidency.
Obama's approval rating has hovered in the 40% range for much of 2011, peaking at 53% in the weeks following the death of Osama bin Laden.
But Americans' view of his job performance continued to tick downward as the debt-ceiling debate heated up. By the time he signed legislation averting a federal default, he was mired in the low-40% range.
The first thing this president's team did upon taking office was to throw his entire base under the bus, branding us all as "the professional left." Instead, they've tried to focus on a bunch of low-information ignoramuses who vote based on "Ooh! Shiny!" But even those who don't pay attention to politics DO pay attention to the fact that they no longer have a paycheck because their job has been outsourced to a low-wage country, and that the cost of heating oil has tripled in the last five years, and that even an "inexpensive" college for their kid is going to set them back twenty-five grand a year, and that without a paycheck they have to find $20,000 a year to pay for health insurance that will deny every single claim. And when they start to see what "less government" means, they don't much care for it.
Maybe the "Ooh, shiny!" crowd is still interested in what this man has to say, though I doubt it because he isn't shiny anymore. But those of us that at one time could have been relied on to be good soldiers have tuned him out.
Prepare the public heretics' pyre, Mr. Perry. I'm ready.
More good stuff on the preposterousness that is the Obama re-election campaign at Sardonicky.
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