Take the floor, TaMara:

Tonight is about taking advantage of what is plentiful in your garden or local farm stand. So take the listed vegetables as a guideline only and use whatever makes you happy. My tomatoes are slowly ripening, about one every other day. This is better than green everyday, so I am grateful for whatever I can harvest. There is already a chill in the air- though the holiday weekend is predicted to be in the 90’s (hurray!) – but that chill means I’ll start looking at those fall menus. Let me know if you have any fall menu requests.

On the board tonight:

1. Pasta w/ Marinated Vegetables
2. Tomato & Olive Oil Bruscetta
3. Grapes

Recipes and shopping list at the link.

Deep Thought: Scrapple was invented so the Amish would not overpopulate and take over the earth.

Microloans are very hip. For Christmas last year, my aunt gave money in my name to some kind of microloan non-profit, and she’s usually very up on what the totebaggers are doing. It all seems like a great idea to me, and when I look at my own city, I sure wish there was some way to use the same principles here in the US —I sure wish local government could help out with small amounts of money to small business people instead of going for high-cost home runs. I’ve had conversations where “microloan” (temporarily) became one of those buzzwords like “tipping-point”.

All of which makes me worried about where the whole concept might be headed:

Indian microfinance lender SKS goes public, raising $358 million and making its founder dynastically wealthy. The decision was controversial, and was largely responsible for an entire non-profit organization, Unitus, disappearing. When that kind of money is at stake, noble non-profit principles have a tendency to evaporate.

Steven Schwarcz of Duke University, has a bright idea: why not use the magic of securitization to provide funds for microfinance lenders? “Such disintermediation,” he writes, “would enable microfinance loans to be funded directly from low-cost, and virtually limitless, capital market sources”. What could possibly go wrong?

[....]

My feeling is that good non-profit microfinance organizations do exist, and that they should be supported with grants first, with technical expertise on things like underwriting and growth strategies second, and with local-currency funding third. If someone tells you that you can help bring millions of people out of poverty while still making a profit on your investment, your first reaction should be that they’re selling something which is too good to be true.

People like to make money and feel morally superior at the same time. I throw up in my mouth thinking of western investors patting themselves on the back for turning third-world small business people into debt slaves, and I hope that’s not where this is all headed.

Over the next couple of days, let’s try to figure out who we should try to raise money for in the fall. I’m of the opinion we need to do the money bombs in the next couple of weeks so that campaigns can spend appropriately, but what do I know.

I guess the first thing to do is figure out the name of the Democrat running against the teahadist in Alaska. We should definitely do something for him/her.

Over at Think Progress, Ben Armbruster points to the explosion of an oil and gas rig 80 miles off the Louisiana coast today, noting that just yesterday one of the senior employees at Mariner Energy, the company which owns the rig, had this to say about the offshore drilling moratorium:

“I have been in the oil and gas industry for 40 years, and this administration is trying to break us,” said Barbara Dianne Hagood, senior landman for Mariner Energy, a small company. “The moratorium they imposed is going to be a financial disaster for the gulf coast, gulf coast employees and gulf coast residents.”

Of course, the many gloom and doom predictions about the moratorium have not come to pass:

Unemployment claims related to the oil industry along the Gulf Coast have been in the hundreds, not the thousands, and while oil production from the gulf is down because of the drilling halt, supplies from the region are expected to rebound in future years. Only 2 of the 33 deepwater rigs operating in the gulf before the BP rig exploded have left for other fields.

While it is too early to gauge the long-term environmental or economic effects of the release of 4.9 million barrels of oil into the gulf, it now appears that the direst predictions about the moratorium will not be borne out. Even the government’s estimate of the impact of the drilling pause — 23,000 lost jobs and $10.2 billion in economic damage — is proving to be too pessimistic.

So the costs of the moratorium have been minimal – much less than predicted – and already we’ve seen a second rig explode in the Gulf this year. The oil industry should realize by now that cleaning up after a disaster is a far more expensive, messy process than ensuring that it doesn’t happen in the first place. It’s also terrible PR. But, of course, the oil industry does not realize that. Until each rig is inspected and safety on these rigs is ensured, I don’t see how the government can do anything but impose a moratorium. Of course, activist judges think they know better. I wonder how many more spills and explosions need to occur before we implement sensible safety and precautionary measures in our oil rigs? Kicking the costs down the road until something really bad happens is certainly not the answer, even if it is the likely outcome even of a disaster the size and scope of the BP oil spill.

Unlike the Deepwater Horizon, this explosion occurred in shallow water, operating at about 340 feet instead of 5,000 which makes any complications from a spill much more manageable. This, and the fact that no workers were killed, make up the story’s silver lining.

More on the explosion here.

What gives with the wingnut fixation with beheadings, e. g. Janet Brewer?

Is beheading one of those things that just naturally fascinates people?

That’s what Dave Weigel asks at end of an article explaining why he thinks teatardism is good for the GOP. One answer is pretty obvious: when that active, powerful base consists entirely of people from a shrinking demographic and blocks efforts to reach out to other demographic groups. BurlingtonGate and the Arizona law make it clear that the Tea Party will make it damned near impossible for the Republican party to get on the smart side of the inclusion/exclusion debate on immigration and other related issues. And that’s probably the whole ballgame, in the big picture, for the next 30 years. You’re not going to win national elections getting less than a third of the Latino vote. I just don’t see how you can do it.

Teatardism may help this fall, it motivates the base, and, even if the candidates are nuts, they at least adhere to the Derek Sanderson “Hit, fight, do something” philosophy of hockey/politics, which, as any former Eric Massa volunteer can tell you, is at least half the battle in House races (in Senate races, teh crazy is more problematic). But having Republican Congressmen and Senators ranting about anchor babies and the amero for the next 20 years isn’t something that’s good for the GOP.

I don’t know why smart people like Dave Weigel ignore the GOP’s obvious demographic challenges and the ways in which teatardism exacerbates them long-term.

One of our crack correspondents from Alaska forwards this:

This is apparently right near Fairbanks, so you know what that means, doncha!

You can see Russia from my road!

I would like to blog about things to do with urbanism and transportation and development, but I seem to be afflicted with a learning disorder that prevents me from understanding anything about basic geography or construction. I am still able to talk about these issues, locally at least, by repeating things that I have read on this excellent local urbanist blog.

The one place you can go in Rochester and feel like you’re in a real city is our Public Market, which was just named (admittedly via online voting) “America’s favorite large farmers market“:

“This is a nice distinction for Rochester and another way to sell our community as a great place to live,” Jim Farr, director of the Public Market, said Wednesday. “We know we’ve got the best market in the country and a huge pool of shoppers every week.”

Farr said the 105-year-old market attracts upward of 40,000 shoppers on a Saturday during the summer. “I like to say it’s the most diverse place between New York City and Chicago on a Saturday morning.”

The Public Market, which has space for more than 300 vendors, won in the category for markets with at least 56 vendors. Winners in the smaller categories were markets in Falls Church, Va.; King George, Va.; and Urbana, Ohio.

What’s great about the Rochester public market is that there is all the high-class organic heirloom stuff along with various cut-rate crap (substandard lemons and limes, cheapo bread and English muffins) and stuff (batteries, especially) that might have fallen off the back of a truck. There aren’t quite enough fast food vendors, though there is a good pastrami sandwich (shipped in from Brooklyn) place along with an excellent-but-too-crowded empanada stand and an Indian guy who sells something he calls “slumdogs”, which I haven’t tried yet.

Everyone says the Reading Market in Philly is better, but I haven’t been there yet.

Do you have a public market/farmers’ market near where you live? Are they real ones or just places where people sell candles and pink Himalayan salt (our smaller ones locally tend towards this)?

Since I got the blu-ray player and have been streaming videos, I’ve noticed that my wireless isn’t that great. I guess I never noticed before because it did everything I wanted for a laptop only. I’m thinking right now, the weak link is my wireless G router. Considering I am now using a laptop, streaming videos for the tv, and intend to eventually add a gaming console, should I think about saving up and getting a new Wireless N router?

Via the Washington Monthly, this Jan Brewer opening statement is terrifying:

It’s the Palinization of politics. Sharon Angle, Jan Brewer, just go down the list. Ignorant know-nothings who spew the right-wing talking points, refuse to take questions from the press, and when off-script, are seen for the train-wreck that they are. Yet half the country embraces these clowns. It’s terrifying.

As usual, he gets it about right:

So the Americans are bowing out, having achieved few of the ambitious goals articulated in the heady aftermath of Baghdad’s fall. The surge, now remembered as an epic feat of arms, functions chiefly as a smokescreen, obscuring a vast panorama of recklessness, miscalculation, and waste that politicians, generals, and sundry warmongers are keen to forget.

Back in Iraq, meanwhile, nothing has been resolved and nothing settled. Round one of the Iraq war produced a great upheaval that round two served only to exacerbate. As the convoys of U.S. armored vehicles trundle south toward Kuwait and then home, they leave the stage set for round three.

Call this the War of Iraqi Self-Determination (2010–?). As the United States removes itself from the scene, Iraqis will avail themselves of the opportunity to decide their own fate, a process almost certain to be rife with ethnic, sectarian, and tribal bloodletting. What the outcome will be, no one can say with certainty, but it won’t be pretty.

One thing alone we can say with assurance:As far as Americans are concerned, Iraqis now own their war. “Like any sovereign, independent nation,” President Obama recently remarked, “Iraq is free to chart its own course.” The place may be a mess, but it’s their mess not ours. In this sense alone is the Iraq war “over.”

He concludes by saying that we leave Iraq, “having learned nothing.” Isn’t that right? If we had learned something, would we be continuing our folly in Afghanistan? And if we were capable of learning from wars, why did we enter Iraq with an unclear, always shifting mission, too few troops, and strange, unrealistic ideas of the influence of Iraq on our battle with Al Qaeda? Clearly, some lessons from Vietnam were either forgotten or were never learned in the first place.

Of course, this makes some war boosters uncomfortable, so we get this:

But honestly, does anyone out there see a U.S. administration ever embracing the kind of neo-isolationism that Bacevich is apparently demanding? And is it just me, or is he crankier than normal lately?

I don’t know if any administration will ever embrace neo-isolationism, but it’s worth trying. And after almost a decade of wasted lives and the amassing of more than a trillion dollars in debt, we should be pretty goddam cranky. (via)

Most people are content with one field, but not the Business and Economics Editor at the Atlantic. She has decided to branch out and be wrong about multiple fields of scholarship:

But still, every party has the red-faced, humorless, easily-offended type. Yesterday, at The Atlantic web site, Megan McArdle provided a stellar example. Her comments begin strangely, with the admission that she’s “in the middle” of the book. Note the urgency to condemn it publicly, even before reading the damned thing! And boy, does she lash out:

• “It reads like horsefeathers . . . like an undergraduate thesis,”
• “breathless rather than scientific”
• “cherry-picked evidence stretched far out of shape to support their theory,”
• “they don’t even attempt to paper over the enormous holes in their theory.”

Ouch! And that’s just the first paragraph. But wait, it gets worse. The second paragraph is worth quoting in full, as it’s really a perfect expression of the bug-eyed panic the book provokes in some people:

“For example, like a lot of evolutionary biology critiques, this one leans heavily on bonobos (at least so far). Here’s the thing: humans aren’t like bonobos. And do you know how I know that we are not like bonobos? Because we’re not like bonobos. There’s no way observed human societies grew out of a species organized along the lines of a bonobo tribe.” (emphasis in original)

Got that? Humans aren’t like bonobos because we’re not like bonobos. No way! So there! Case closed.

I’m sure if Sully weren’t on vacation, he’d link to McMegan’s analysis and call it “interesting.”

I finally watched You Don’t Know Jack, a relatively sympathetic Jack Kevorkian biopic, last night. Perhaps that’s why the crazy twists and turns in the Julian Assange story make me think that he and Kevorkian have something in common. Both are loners and misfits who relied on the kindness of believers to get on in the world, they’re fanatical about their cause, and they’re both a bit paranoid, though probably with good reason.

The point man for Wikileaks, or physician-assisted suicide, isn’t going to win any popularity contests. It takes a bit of a strange duck to be hated by many, sneak around like an outcast and risk prison. It’s not surprising that the same personality traits that allow Kevorkian and Assange to succeed as advocates for their respective causes also makes their personal stories fairly odd.

In the end, Kevorkian was undone by his eccentricity—he moved from assisted suicide to euthanasia. Because he was the prime mover and actor for his cause, it lost a lot of public attention once he went to prison. The difference with Assange is that Wikileaks exists as an independent entity. He’s not a one-man band like Kevorkian, and the site will probably continue to exist whether or not Assange is in the picture.

Dave Weigel at Slate suggested that the Koch brothers should embrace their new notoriety and strut their anti-populist, anti-progressive, anti-environmental credentials proudly. What’s the point, Weigel seemed to think, of spending hundreds of millions of dollars on everything from climate-change denialism at the Smithsonian to astroturf “Tea Party” groups if you’re too shy to stand up and take pride in your achievements? Especially once all hope of obscuring your connections to everything from your daddy’s role in founding the John Birch Society to your own success in bankrolling every glibertarian outlet from the Cato Institute to Reason magazine to the teabagger-flavored Americans for Prosperity Foundation has been exposed for all the New-Yorker-reading world to examine?

Later that morning, Weigel posted on his blog, under the title “Kochs Keep Tossing Bricks at New Yorker Profile”:

Here’s more on the story I published this morning—a letter that the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation is sending around arguing that Jane Mayer’s New Yorker profile treated the Kochs unfairly.

“The New Yorker article, and those pieces that have echoed it, rely heavily on innuendo and unsubstantiated assertions,” writes foundation president Richard Fink, who is the public face of the brothers’ ideological work. “Unnamed sources and those with a strong philosophical opposition to the Kochs – many of whom have no current or first-hand knowledge of Koch Industries, Koch Family Foundations, Charles Koch or David Koch – go unchallenged. Supporters of the Kochs are largely ignored (as evidenced by the fact that the reporter chose not to include the vast majority of supportive comments made by a number of people familiar with the Kochs and the organizations they support). On the other hand, those who reinforce the reporter’s preconceptions are given a free pass.”

This letter is a fine exemplar of the Squid-Cloud of Butt-Hurt, but there is a detail here no decent novelist would allow to pass unedited: Are the billionaire “Kochtopus” brothers really being defended (for money) by a man who calls himself… Rich Fink?