A party in name only

The Republicans have lost their way. Today’s party is nothing but a boring fund-raising apparatus, instead of the Grand Old Party it should be. We need to return to our roots, rediscover the foundation of legitimacy. We need to be a party again – a real party, with a club house, beer, and hot wings.

It all went wrong during the Roosevelt administration, when we let the government define what a party should be, instead of the other way around. We put the cart before the elephant, and now the donkey is pulling the bandwagon.

Rebuilding

First, we need membership cards. How can anyone be a card-carrying Republican with no card to carry? Negotiate a deal with some local merchants so the card gets the bearer 10% off chicken wings and pistol ammunition.

Next, buy the old Ungulate’s Club. Charge modest dues, and have steak night on Tuesdays. Get local businesses to subsidize it in exchange for good will. “All you can eat for $4.99, thanks to the guys at Megatrode, who hope you’ll vote for Smith.” What’s the point shaking down the corporations if we just spend it all on ads to persuade the rank and file to vote? Just spend it on the rank and file.

Taking money from corporations and giving it to other corporations is a fool’s game. Leave it to the Democrats. Corporations don’t vote at all, and when they move production to Malaysia, the former employees vote Democrat. The money needs to flow from the Corporations to individual Americans, not the other way. The reform politician will lie and betray us, the new tax-subsidized plant will move off shore, and the shareholders’ equity will be lost in the bail out, but at least we’ll have the free beer.

Finally, sports. Nobody cares about policy debates anymore. It doesn’t matter if they promise us gay Marines or secure borders, because we know it’s a lie. How excited can anyone get about the next talking point? We need to expand the leagues so every town can have a team. It won’t really cost anything, because the budget is already busted.^* Building the arena will employ people. After they finish the job, they can sit there and watch a game where the outcome makes a difference. And a little sports hooliganism encourages party solidarity.

The path to victory

The payoff comes when we translate this grass-roots organization into electoral success. Having secured the beer and hot wings, we have built a clubhouse and stadium, and we’re watching the game. Now as we map the value stream, it’s essential to keep the focus on gembutsu. But the andon is flashing – we need to make kaizen everyone’s job. As volunteer overtime squeezes out muda, Ohno’s continuous improvement cycle starts. Spinning up to speed, centrifugal force drives out operations that don’t add customer value. The kanban system functions just in time. Certainly 5-S is the key, but how does all this translate into electoral politics? No idea, but we got beer, wings, a clubhouse, and a stadium.
—-
^*“It won’t really cost anything, because the budget’s already busted.” This is insufficiently recognized, and absolutely awesome. We’re borrowing and China’s lending; both know there’s little chance of it ever being paid back but both are afraid to do anything else. We should use the opportunity to build up national infrastructure instead of blowing it on plastic junk, but if we were able to do that we wouldn’t be where we are today.

Targeted killing?

“[T]he U.S. may, with executive approval, deliberately target and kill U.S. citizens who are suspected of being involved in terrorism.”

Good thing this is happening while the Democrats are in charge, otherwise it would mean the death of liberty. Really – There would be giant puppets, and swastikas, and photoshops of the fanged and demonic George Bush stabbing the Statue of Liberty.

“It appears to allow for the deliberate targeted killing of American citizens far away from any active hostilities, as long as the executive branch determines unilaterally that they meet a secret definition of who the enemy is.” — Intelligence Official Acknowledges Policy Allowing Targeted Killings Of Americans

Fortunately Nancy Pelosi, Harry Ried, and Joe Biden are providing careful oversight, so it’s merely a troubling policy about which more information needs to be made available.

Does this mean Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s trial is optional, and they could just take him out back and shoot him in the head? I mean, we might have to make him a citizen first.

Labneh

I made my second batch of yogurt from two quarts of whole milk and one pint of half-and-half, refrigerated it in pint jars again, and then the next day started some labneh – strained yogurt. The only hard part was the mechanics of hanging it in a cloth, over a bowl, in the refrigerator.

The shelves in my refrigerator are solid glass, so hanging them from the shelf above wouldn’t work. After a few false starts, I spotted a big plastic bottle, about ten inches tall by eight inches in diameter (good thing I kept that – just saying). I drilled a small hole in the lid, ran through the string from the filter cloth, and tied it off on a pencil. This was way better than trying to rig something out of Tinkertoys. It’s just a big bottle, and the draining cheese is fully enclosed, so there’s no danger of misapprehension, like the unfortunate incident with the pickled tongue.

After draining for twenty-four hours I unwrapped the cloth and put the cheese in yet another pint jar – good thing those come in dozens, because I’m using a lot of them. The cheese was very sticky. Next time I’ll have a bowl of olive oil on hand; maybe mold the cheese into balls and pack it in oil. Certainly I’ll use a quart of yogurt next time. Draining off the whey reduced the volume by between a half and a third, so two pints in should give one pint out, if I eat some immediately.

Since I have the bottle rigged up, it will be easier next time. Even so the result was worth the trouble – this is tasty stuff. It spreads on toast, with or without a little olive oil, and it would make a good cheese cake, as Jenna says in an earlier comment.

Is Google making us stupid?

Show, don’t tell, they say.

Seen here.

Zombie Hitler

Zombies are boring. Vampires too. Really, the whole undead trope should have ended two years ago. It’s appalling how it keeps stumbling along, impervious to… Anyway, this is pretty funny:

“…an intrepid Catholic blogger infiltrates the zombie-leader-group and films the zombie leaders engaging in a secret meeting featuring liturgical dance, workshops about incorporating the four elements into the liturgy, Sophia-goddess worship, and the Feng Shui of felt banner creation. All doubt is thus removed and the indiscriminate destruction of the zombies commences.” — Create your own Zombietopia

Just read that part though, not the whole thing. The rest is more of that boring zombie shtick that otherwise-smart people unaccountably find amusing. Instead, watch this hilarious video where Hitler finds out Scott Brown won the Massachusetts senate seat.

Everybody loves those Hitler parody videos.

Stalin is envious.

Smart guy

Too smart

“We are partially blocked in China and other places and we were in Iran as well,” he said. “The most productive way to fight that is not by trying to engage China and other governments whose very being is against what we are about.” — Evan Williams, Twitter CEO — Twitter working to thwart censorship

We need men who understand that in the government, but those men are too smart to enter politics.

Life in a small town

Not a panacea

The phrase meth mountain was new to me, but immediately clear. Rod Dreher expands on the idea:

“…I’m unwilling to talk about small-town life as a refuge for kids. When I was a teenager there (late Seventies, early Eighties), there was a lot of binge drinking, for precisely this reason: nothing to do. Kids would drive down to the Mississippi River, sit there and get plastered. (In those days, there was a rough division between the working-class kids and the middle-class to preppy kids; the former’s drug of choice was pot, while the latter stuck to booze; I’m sure pot is far more common now). If you weren’t into that, you were socially ostracized…
…
“I remember going off to a public boarding school where I became friends with high school juniors from Louisiana cities, and being startled that they had had little to no peer pressure to drink or do drugs. Why? Because their schools were big enough to sustain a number of social groups, and there was lots for kids who didn’t want to drink to do. Really, this shocked me, because I was under the illusion that as bad as it was in our town, it was far, far worse in big-city schools. But that wasn’t true at all.” — Why small town teenagers do drugs

On the other hand, I had to think for a minute what a Big Rita glass might be, so my life is somewhat sheltered.

Polyamory

If gay marriage is okay, why not polyamory? John has the answer.

Democrats lose in Massachusetts

Now that the Commonwealth is full of bitter gun-toting Bible-thumpers, they’ll have to stop looking down their noses at the rest of us.

“I think [Juan] Williams is right, and Obama will double down, because he’s too stubborn not to. But I think [Sean] Hannity is right, too; many Americans would like to see the drawing board re-emerge, and a healthcare bill written with the co-operation of both parties, and as transparently argued as Obama promised it would be, in the 2008 campaign. People want what they voted for; they don’t like the bait-and-switch.”

Scott Brown ran against the health care plan. He got more votes than Martha Coakley not because people don’t want health care, but because they don’t want this plan; and because Coakley’s let herself seem like an elitist snob.

“‘The strongest dynamic in politics today is not about Democrats vs. Republicans, it’s about outsiders vs. insiders,’ said Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster, who said the truck-driving Brown skillfully portrayed himself as the political outsider and Coakley as someone who would do little to change Washington.”

Rich man, poor man

This rude, crude, but socially acceptable video is an English ad for Strongbow Cider. Bankers aren’t quite this unpopular in America. To succeed here, the ad should condemn politicians. Of course the danger with appealing to the working man is there may be too few actual working men left to buy the product, whatever it is.

“…the massive blunder of Obama and the Democrats was to delude themselves into thinking the people had voted for them in the last general election when, in fact, they voted against George Bush and the Republicans. The next scenario to unfold will be for the lifelong political hacks in the Republican party to make the same mistake – to interpret the results of yesterday’s vote in Massachusetts as a vote for them, rather than what it was – a vote against the Dems.”

President Obama has a big obstacle to overcome, and it isn’t the Republicans. They won’t come to his aid, but then he shouldn’t need their aid. He won, just last year – the Democrats hold both houses and the Whitehouse.

But the Democrats in congress aren’t a monolith. Having watched Coakley lose Massachusetts, enough Democrats – including some liberals – will hunker down, and as a result keep Washington generally from doing anything but spend money. That may let some Democrats keep their jobs. It will invite people to ask what’s the point of voting Democrat if the Democrats can’t, won’t, or anyway don’t, do anything you want, even with overwhelming control of the government. That’s only fair. I asked myself that about the Republicans a few years ago, and I haven’t heard a good answer, certainly not from Michael Steele.

Homemade yogurt

What I want is an 8-ounce cup of Dannon full-fat yogurt for 50 cents. Dutch apple, boysenberry, or blueberry would be great. That’s not available, at least not around here. “They quit making those.” Instead, there are 6-ounce cups of non-fat yogurt for 75 cents. This may be a result of the continuing feminization of America, or else it’s George Bush’s fault. Either way, the other day I made my own yogurt, following the recipe in How To Make Homemade Yogurt, and referring to Fermenting Yogurt at Home.

I followed the recipe pretty closely – you don’t fool around with fermented milk products – except I cut the amount in half, and let most of the batch incubate four hours instead of three. I took out one jar after three hours.

For the starter I used a 6-ounce cup of plain Dannon – non-fat, inevitaly.

It comes in pints

The yogurt went into pint Mason jars to incubate, and for storage. The yogurt isn’t canned; the Mason jars are just used as containers. With these jars, ‘one pint’ means ‘to the top thread.’ I didn’t fill them full enough, and had some mixture left over. Not having an extra sterilized jar, I put in in a covered bowl, and ate that first.

It’s good yogurt, if not quite Dannon fruit-on-the-bottom. Next time I’ll use a quart of whole milk and a quart of half-and-half. I hope yogurt with that much butterfat is legal. If I have to start bootlegging cream for midnight yogurt parties, I’m just going to go all the way and take up hunting.