Input Junkie

I made a pretty successful peanut soup.

Beef cubes, beef broth, onion, tomato, peanut butter, horseradish, hot pepper, hot paprika, navy beans, peanuts for garnish, with the big win being putting in a bunch of sage.

Sauteed the beef, onions, spices, and hot peppers in olive oil, then simmered that and the rest of the ingredients for something like half an hour.

As always, the hot flavors are optional.

I don't like jello. I think I can tolerate the texture now, but it was off the menu for me when I was a kid.

We were given a pamphlet of jello recipes to choose from. I still remember the one which had slices of cream cheese with pimento symmetrically arranged for ornamentation embedded in it, but since I wasn't planning to eat it, I chose the best-looking one-- green jello with canned pineapple and mint extract. Thinking about it now, I'm a fairly adventurous eater, but I'm not sure mint and pineapple would be a good combination.

As many of you might know, you can't use fresh pineapple with jello, it won't set.

Here's where I learned the thing I will never forget-- I assumed the mint extract would have a top with a little hole so that it would come out in small quantities. It didn't. Half the small bottle went into the jello. I made it anyway. It didn't occur to me to even ask if I could start over.

It was so strong I sat upwind of it.

But, and here's the other thing worth knowing, a few classmates came around for seconds and thirds. One of them said it tasted like chewing gum. So the thing worth knowing is that there are outliers. Maybe you can connect with them.

It's funny that I couldn't even take the smell, considering that one of the quests of my youth was finding stronger mints. Altoids curiously strong mints are false advertising for me. Vick's ice blue cough drops were the best.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59x8eeB1bYk&ab_channel=tonebasePiano

A remarkable piano lesson-- master teacher, advanced student. There's just tremendous trust and respect.

It made me realize that yelling at people is showing a lack of trust that they're listening. (Cue up people explaining that's not the only thing it means.) I'm not saying you can always trust that people are listening.

At about 19 minutes, there's a discussion of why it's hard to play softly on the piano and what helps. The challenge is that the key still needs to be pushed down fast enough or the string won't sound, and relaxing the hands too much makes it not work-- the hands need to be at least as firm as when you're playing loudly.

reposted from Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nancy.lebovitz/posts/10221519403996940


(There are good comments there, some talking about friendly teasing, some pointing out longterm pain from unfriendly teasing. Another post turned up that sometimes anti-bullying policies work and sometimes they don't.)

I'm going to tell a little more truth than usual. When I was a kid, I was teased a fair amount, and a lot of it was about my height. I was in my 30s or later before I calmed down relatively speaking on the subject.
Teasing isn't harmless fun, no matter what excuses people who like teasing make.

The situation is confused by the advice people who get teased are given. "Just ignore them" may be impossible, and in any case, it took me quite a while to realize the injustice of expecting the person being teased to have unusual psychological control while the person who teases them can be as incontinent as they please.

I've gotten the impression that when people who like teasing are asked to stop, they react as though their air is threatened.

I've been told a lot of times about friendly teasing relationships, though I can't say I've heard it from both/all sides of the relationship.

I grant that it can be hard to tell when teasing in unwelcome since people are told to just ignore it and there's always the risk of being teased more (it's good for you, it will toughen you up, and besides, people feel like doing it) if you say you don't like it. I suggest that if a person doesn't tease you back, they might not be liking it.

This didn't apply when I was a kid, but I've seen "insults everyone" as a way of taking edge off of particular insults. I'm not convinced anyone manages that, and why would it be a good thing if they did?
Not to make this about Dave Chappell, but if he doesn't insult cis people for being cis, he isn't insulting everyone. (I'm not sure what the insult would be. Maybe lack of imagination?)

Part of it may be that people (on a lot of issues) don't see how their behavior adds up, especially when it's not just them doing it.

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/frank-lloyd-wright-edith-carlson-untold-story/

She's very clear about what she wants. He makes a plan, but hasn't paid excessive amounts of attention.

They never achieve a meeting of minds.

I treasure this:

"I looked first for the windows which Mr. Wright told me he would put in the southeast wall of my house. I could not find any! And I am not building a house without windows on the southeast!! (The first exclamation mark I used to register disappointment; the second to indicate emphasis.) My house must make sense to me and a house in Superior without windows in the southeast is silly."

I've never disambiguated exclamation points, but perhaps someday I will have the opportunity.

She did so much research. I wonder whether she ended up designing her own house.

Successful cooking: Lamb cubes cooked on high with olive oil in an electric wok for maximum heat.

Black pepper, salt, and vinegar with some honey (Bragg brand) until the lamb is cooked.

Then lemon juice, peppermint (Burlap & Barrel Euphrates mint, which is very strong and sweet, but any peppermint leaves would be good), and chopped parsley.

These flavors are a good combination. I think they'd work with beef, chicken, eggs, fish-- and you could probably go vegetarian or vegan with rice and beans or pasta Or kasha or quinoa . Suggestions for meat substitutes are welcome.

It would probably work to flavor ice cream.

I made a spicy fish soup which could help take your mind off your problems, at least if you like spicy food.

I bet a mild version would be good, too.

1 1/2 pounds mahi-mahi, sliced thin
sour mustard (Chinese pickled greens)
good-sized can of crushed tomatoes
medium pile of button and shitake mushrooms
some Chinese chives (about equivalent to a medium onion)-- any onion would do
1 habanero pepper
butter
some Penzey's Arizona Dreaming spice mix (any medium hot pepper would do)
a tablespoon or two of raw ginger
half a head of garlic
most of a tablespoon of Penzey's fish base

Melt the butter, and saute the garlic, ginger, habanero, chives, and Arizona Dreaming on medium heat until the onions and mushrooms are cooked.

Put the crushed tomatoes, the cooked veggies, and the sour mustard (including the liquid it was packed in) together in a good-sized pot. When they're heated up, add the mahi-mahi. When the fish is cooked, the soup is ready to heat.

This is a good lively-tasting soup, but not viciously hot.

The sour mustard had saccharine and aspartame-- read the label before you buy it. I don't think it needed to be sweetened.

Crushed tomatoes strike me as being pretty much like an tomato sauce base-- they're a smooth puree.

Originally posted on Facebook

https://www.facebook.com/nancy.lebovitz/posts/10217634219309751?__cft__[0]=AZV1wUVUDPhNIZY6vDC5yRqhGsUWUkJ-ZUCnnCqgeLod5LX5FSHt6DbHuZ90oCs1jngBeq9-T50x5ftUpqgmHHapSLPNsT7L6xxLISJ9-eFCRNWiDM155xjZlFH31zU0nKU&__tn__=%2CO%2CP-R

Comment from Chastity Sheepie:

"So sour mustard is a literal translation and will get you into trouble as there is a condiment of the same name. You want sour mustard greens. Which is different from preserved mustard greens. Both are fermented. Both are commonly served chopped, on opposite sides of a plate, with a five spiced fried meat in between them. That's the standard Taiwanese hot lunch, with a bowl of noodles or rice. Some fancier places have chopped sauteed vegetables."

An excellent essay about different degrees of putting pressure on a government. It's by Orion.

*****

I have an intuition that one of the most important things for a functional society to do is to get everyone on the same page about who the legitimate authorities are, or if that's impossible, at least prevent them from literally fighting about it. Conflicts over leadership or state legitimacy have pretty much unlimited stakes and can thus escalate almost without bound. I have a much more relaxed attitude toward conflicts over policy. I think that a society can withstand a great deal of conflict over which policies the authority ought to adopt. People sometimes use illegal or even violent means to try to stop the authorities from implementing a policy they find objectionable, but even when it comes to that, the conflict still has limited stakes to prevent it from escalating uncontrollably. Accordingly, my analysis of various ways people act on their disagreements with government involves a look at both the immediate damage or consequences involved, but also at the extent to which it undermines state legitimacy or consensus about who is in authority. I think pretty much all the options that citizens have when they're angry with their government can be categorized as some combination of protest, resistance, and challenge. I'd characterize the riots we had over the summer as a particularly sustained and destructive form of illegal resistance. I'd describe Trump's people storming the capitol as a relatively mild and unserious form of illegal challenge.

Protest: "Pure" protests are not really a thing that can exist in the wild, except maybe when you post an open letter to your government on your personal blog. More or less all actually-existing forms of protest are in fact also a form a resistance. I think of protest qua protest as communication. You address the authorities, express your displeasure, and request a change of policy. On the damage/consequences side protest in itself can't really do any harm. When it comes to legitimacy, I tend to think that properly-addressed protests* actually strengthen the system. The more we cultivate the habit of calling our senators to complain about their decisions, the more we reinforce and normalize the idea that the senators get to decide. For these reasons, I think protest is clearly the least problematic option.

Resistance: Resistance is any attempt to prevent or deter the authorities from implementing their policies. Resistance can come through legal means like malicious compliance, or private actions that mitigate the impact of a policy, or through illegal means like civil disobedience. Resistance can mean stopping the objectionable policy directly, like surrounding a house to prevent an eviction, or it can mean causing chaos or damage elsewhere as deterrence, like gathering in large groups to shut down major roads or to block access to important buildings. Most public "protests" are really primarily about resistance. Gathering a a bunch of people to yell and wave signs outside a government building makes it more stressful and time consuming for the authorities to go about their daily business, doing it in a commercial district suppresses the economy and effectively takes businesses hostage, and so on. Looting and burning a target is a more extreme application of the same principle: impose costs wherever you can impose costs in hopes of getting leverage over your policy interests.

I'm obviously using "Resistance" to cover an extremely diverse range of activities here, from the legal and innocuous all the way up to certain types of domestic terrorism, so it's hard to generalize about the category. Obviously some acts of "resistance" are very bad indeed. Nevertheless, I feel that it is still valuable to distinguish between resistance and challenge, even when looking at more extreme resistance. As far as I'm aware, the left-wing violence this summer was all or almost about violent resistance, not violent challenge. Some "abolish the police" people are willing to burn and destroy to achieve their goals, but their expressed goals are to get city council to vote to dissolve the police. Some are willing to go to an elected officials house and intimidate them to achieve their goals, but their goals are to get that official to change a policy they dislike. In Seattle they were willing to occupy a whole neighborhood and set up an "autonomous zone," but AFAIK there was no suggestion of erecting a People's Hall and selecting a People's Mayor to overturn the real mayor's edicts. Which brings us to challenge.

Challenge: Challenge, in my view, is any activity that denies that the authority is an authority, or seeks to destroy or deprive them of the trappings of their office, or personal violence targeting authorities; also anything that proclaims or supports alternative authorities or tries to enforce their edicts. Like "resistance," "challenge" is a broad category that includes things legal and illegal, violent and non-violent. Challenges probably also have an effective/symbolic axis that's analogous to the protest/resistance distinction. A plot to assassinate the president is an illegal violent challenge, stealing a podium or ceremonial mace would be illegal but non-violent, filing an election lawsuit or holding an impeachment hearing is legal and potentially effective, wearing a "not my president" t-shirt is legal and purely symbolic. For any permutation of these properties, you could create a challenge and an analogous act of protest or resistance, and in all cases I think there is something more reckless and potentially corrosive about the challenge.

I think Democrats have become way too cavalier about legal and symbolic challenge. I've spent 4 years fuming about how "not my president" is a dumb and destructive slogan. I've pointed out to many Democratic acquaintances that even if it were true that all of Trump's voters were duped by fake documents distributed by foreign hackers, they wouldn't forfeit their right to vote, and Trump would still be the legitimate winner. The whole thing is childish and destructive. Also: Democrats are too cavalier about violent resistance, as has been covered extensively on this board. But there's one line that I can still comfort myself by saying mainstream Democrats haven't crossed, and that's encouraging violent or illegal challenges for authority. (We've have had a gut-wrenching series of lone-wolf terrorists, the kind I was always told only came from the right: the guy who tried to shoot Trump, the guy who did shoot Steve Scalise, the neighbor who assault Rand Paul, and so on; we probably have not done enough to try to discourage that, either) I'm sure that the various right-wing bogeymen the media trots out to scare me with (sovereign citizens, boogaloo boys, militias, q-anon, "posse comitatus," whatever that is) objectively did a lot less damage this year than left-wing rioters, but despite that they do scare me more viscerally. Because the far-left may say "we will burn cities until the government does what we want," but the far right appears to say "the government is not the government," and in the unlikely event that they got anywhere with that it could get much worse than mere riots.

I would agree that objectively speaking, a few hundreds people storming the capitol and then milling around until dispersed would not ordinarily be a big deal. If they had done this on a day when Congress was scheduled to pass some left-wing bill, I'd be about 1000% less concerned. Same if they did it the day after Biden's inauguration just to put him on notice that they don't intend to be pushed around. That would be a fairly harmless bit of good illegal-resistance fun. But doing it to prevent his election from being certified converts illegal-resistance into illegal-challenge. Was it effective enough to call it an attempted coup? No, that seems hyperbolic. But I think it signals coup-friendliness, creates common knowledge that people are thinking positively about the idea of a coup, tests the waters, and could function as a dress rehearsal. I'm reminded of Scott's line about being nice until you can coordinate mean-ness, and I think it's reasonable to look at this as one step toward building capacity to coordinate meanness.

EDIT:
*I forgot to come back to the idea of "properly addressed" protests in the original version of this post. Basically, calling on an official to do something is good for the system if the official actually has the authority to do the thing, but if they don't have that authority, it's effectively not a protest but a challenge -- an attempt to proclaim an alternate authority. Protesters demanding that Mike Pence or Mr. Raffensberger overturn the certified election results are undermining the integrity of the system, whether they realize this or not.

Art dominates reality.

This classic is about a boy who desperately wants a Daisy Red Rider BB gun with a compass and a sundial in the stock even though every adult within range tells him he'll shoot his eye out has a side story.

That model with the compass and the sundial doesn't exist, but under pressure, Daisy built the gun.... and then offered it later as a limited edition.

Is this hyperreality or what? The story is about intensity of desire amplified by advertising-- and then the story invades the real world.

https://zeynep.substack.com/p/small-data-big-implications?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=cta

Airflow matters a *lot* for virus transmission. Eating in indoor restaurants is quite risky. So are events where people are talking loudly or breathing hard. Movie theaters seem to be pretty safe.

Zeynep Tufekci is a very thoughtful person and this is a look at some meticulous research.