Stromata Blog

How a “Brat” Reacts to Bad News

Here are the opening paragraphs of this morning’s begging letter from the Harris-Walz campaign:

 

Edward, do you remember how you felt the day after Donald Trump was elected?

 

I do. It was election night for me as well.

 

It was incredibly bittersweet. When I took the stage for my acceptance speech – to represent California in the Senate – I tore up my notes. I just said, “We will fight.”

 

Then I went home and I sat on the couch with a family-sized bag of nacho Doritos. I did not share one chip with anybody. Not even Doug. I just watched the TV with utter shock and dismay.

 

Here, incidentally, is the text of newly elected Senator Harris’s actual word-salad victory speech, delivered on Tuesday evening, November 8, 2016, well before the outcome of the Presidential race was known. She did indeed talk a lot about “fighting”. Then, by her own account, she went home and, when she learned that Hillary Clinton would not become President, fought a bag of Doritos.

 

Yeah, there’s a fighter: React to disappointment by gobbling junk food. That’s the brat our country needs to stand up to Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping and the Iranian mullahs and the other villains who have grabbed more and more of the world stage during the Biden-Harris years.

 

I wonder what she will do when the shortages created by her price controls make it impossible to find Doritos at her local market. Switch to Cheetos?

Irony in Chicago

Walmart opened its first Chicago store in 2006. Progressives had resisted its entry into the city for years. Less than a month before the chain’s debut, then-mayor Richard Daley fils vetoed a City Council bill that tried to throw up a last-minute roadblock, a minimum wage hike for “big box” stores.

Last Tuesday Walmart announced that it is closing four money-losing Chicago locations, including one where I frequently shopped before I escaped to Washington State. (The reason for its closure was undoubtedly competition from a much larger Mariano’s; the others are most likely victims of Chicago’s increasingly unsafe environment.) Instead of cheering victory over the Walmart menace, progressives denounced the exodus. Outgoing Mayor Lori Lightheadfoot:

All communities in Chicago should have access to essential goods and services. That is why I’m incredibly disappointed that Walmart, a strong partner in the past, has announced the closing of several locations throughout the South and West sides of the City. Unceremoniously abandoning these neighborhoods will create barriers to basic needs for thousands of residents. While near-term arrangements will be made for workers, I fear that many will find that their long-term opportunities have been significantly diminished. I call on Walmart to ensure that these soon-to-be-closed stores are repurposed with significant community engagement so they can find a new use to serve their neighborhoods. Walmart also needs to ensure that our residents in these communities that have been left behind will continue to have a reliable source for their everyday necessities. We as a City will do everything in our power to do the same.

The vision of businesses as eleemosynary institutions that are duty-bound to provide “essential goods and services” without regard to whether they make or lose money comes through loud and clear. Absent, unsurprisingly, is any suggestion that the city of Chicago might have a duty to protect businesses from rampant theft or otherwise maintain conditions in which profitable operations are possible. Inverting Adam Smith, progressives disregard, in fact deprecate, the self-interest of the butcher, the brewer and the baker and rely instead on extorted benevolence, which is no benevolence at all and cannot continue for very long.

Why Do Leftists Hate Uncles?

The White House has twitted (why hasn’t it yet migrated to Mastodon?) a list of “some talking points when ‘that Uncle’ comes ‘at you’ about @POTUS”. I leave mockery of the substance (and it is eminently mockable) to others. What immediately strikes me is the assumption that “Uncles” (capitalized to emphasize the menace, I suppose, like “The Thing”) are particularly prone to start disruptive arguments at family gatherings.

I am an uncle myself, several times over, and I can say with confidence that the most disruptive thing I’ve ever done at a Thanksgiving feast is hog more than my fair share of the stuffing and dark meat. I also know scores of uncles, some of them my own, who are models of gentlemanly conduct on all occasions. No doubt there are fathers’ or mothers’ brothers who are rotten apples in the kinship barrel, but so too does the barrel contain annoying sisters and cousins and aunts.

So why do uncles get singled out when progressives send around their festal sound bites? The superficial answer is that most uncles are persons who were “assigned” to the male “gender” at birth and have stuck with it rather than celebrating fluidity. There’s also the fact that paradigmatic uncles are exemplars of toxic masculinity (Uncle Sam), the unequal division of wealth (Uncle Scrooge and Rich Uncle Pennybags) and racism (Uncle Tom, Uncle Remus, Uncle Ben).

Still, those explanations seem to me inadequate. Doesn’t the real offense lie in the fact that, in a world where humankind is a cancerous growth that aggravates Climate-Related Disasters and thus threatens the planet, no uncle is an only child. They are, by definition, brothers and hence unnecessary to the Utopia where birth will be the rare exception to abortion. Progressives who glimpse uncles are, I surmise, overtaken by rage against these despoilers of Gaia. Uncles are ideal villains for a day marked by such evils as meat consumption, carbon-emitting travel, homage to English colonizers and inattention to the urgent need to save our democracy by outlawing misinformation and hanging Donald Trump.

By the way, I killed a few excess brain cells reading “President Biden’s Top Accomplishments” as proclaimed by Chief of Staff Ron Klain. Under the heading “Despite global challenges, WE’RE MAKING PROGRESS”, one sees, “And NO taxes on people making above $400K – he kept his promise”. Maybe Slow Joe isn’t alone in his dotage.

Feasting in the Davos Dystopia

The New York Times e-mail promoting “best vegetarian Thanksgiving recipes” bore the subject line, “This vegetarian Thanksgiving feast looks as good as it tastes”. Here’s the accompanying photo:

It probably tastes exactly as good as it looks. At least, it doesn’t feature a diverse variety of insects.

The Immorality of Vegans

Once in a while, I’ve had the thought that human consumption of meat is good for cattle, pigs, sheep, chickens, turkeys, geese, etc., because otherwise the few survivors of those species would be condemned to wander in the wilderness during their brief, unhappy lives. But I never developed the thought. Now Nick Zangwill, a British philosophy professor, has done the thinking for me and has has laid out the reasons underlying “Our Moral Duty to Eat Meat”.

To summarize his argument in lower-falutin and less abstract terms:

Laments about the sufferings inflicted on food animals overlook the fact that the animals also experience pleasure. If humans had no use for them, many fewer of them – perhaps none – would exist to enjoy anything, and the lives that they led in the wild would be far harsher. Quite simply, the practice of eating meat benefits animals and can be justified on that ground, leaving to one side the corresponding benefits to mankind. Only if one believes that the animals’ suffering, which occurs, for the most part, for a few moments at the ends of their lives, outweighs years of ease is there a case against carnivorism. The mere fact that meat animals are killed is no objection at all: They were mortal; they lived longer and got more pleasure than if they had never been born. Being useful in death is the price of living.

It’s time to demand to know why vegans and their ilk advocate genocide against cattle.

A tip of the beret to Steven Hayward.

The Educational Value of SF Conventions

At Capricon, the Reno in 2011 bid party was serving wines from the Basque region of Spain. I didn’t even know that there were any Basque wines, and my first assumption was that a penny pinching party organizer had found some real cheap bottles at Binny’s.

But, no. I was informed that western Nevada is the center of Basque immigration to the United States. The University of Nevada’s Reno campus has the country’s only Basque Studies program, and there are Basque restaurants in the city. We shall hope that there is not also a local chapter of the ETA.

“Depression” Is Now the Right Label

To my e-mail box this morning came a link to news from New Haven that convinces me the economy truly is in dire straits:

Mory’s eating club is closing its doors today for winter break — and staying closed for several months as it rethinks its future, the club announced Friday. . . .

“The Club has recently been facing a ‘perfect storm’ of economic issues, including operating losses driven by the business declines faced by virtually all restaurants, and a decline in the value of its endowment due to the market,” wrote the Mory’s Association in a press release Friday.

“Aggressive steps to address the problems, such as staying open later hours, revisions to the menu and other measures to cut costs have not been sufficient,” the release read.

To my mind, Mory’s, where I passed so many happy days as an undergraduate, is a worthier candidate for a bailout than the Little Two in Detroit. Now that I think about it, the President surely agrees, though it may be impolitic for him to say so.

There is, as it happens, a parallel to the auto industry. The factors that made Mory’s vulnerable to recession are, in broad terms, the same as for GM and Chrysler: government constraints on its product and overmighty labor unions. In lieu of CAFE, it must cope with minimum drinking age laws, which Connecticut’s neo-Puritan left-wing government enforces with increasing rigor. At the same time, the cost of its unionized labor is over twice as high, as a percentage of sales, as the restaurant industry average. Without that burden, the place would be showing a hefty profit. An article in the Yale Alumni Rag Magazine summarizes the grim facts:

[I]n 2006, according to the club’s 990 tax form, Mory's took in $1,224,340 in revenue and spent $1,392,576, of which $904,942 went to salaries, benefits, and other payroll-related expenses. “That kind of labor cost would bury just about any operation,” says Patricia Dailey, editorial director at Restaurants and Institutions magazine. Labor costs for restaurants typically equal about a third of gross sales; at Mory’s, even when dues and other income are added to gross sales, labor costs came to 78 percent in 2006.

The article goes on, in the spirit of political correctness, to attribute the club’s difficulties to inadequate conformity to the zeitgeist, viz., “stuffiness”, a vestigial dress code and remnants of Old Blue traditions. A simpler explanation lies in the numbers just cited. Were labor costs 50 percent of revenue – still substantially above competitors’ – a $170,000 deficit would be a $120,000 surplus. If it were also possible for underage Yalies – three-quarters of the student population – to buy a drink, the outlook would be rosier yet.

Alas, the Age of Obama is unlikely to extend its toleration to such remedies. And there is a thought more depressing than any economic slump.

Cleanliness Is Next to Ungodliness

Washington State, a center of Gaia worship and the Cult of the Goracle, has banned dishwashing detergents that contain more than 0.5 percent phosphorous. Rather, it has banned their use by individual households. Restaurants and other institutions can still suds up with whatever brand they like. Ordinary housewives are stuck with low phosphorous products that won’t get dishes clean without the assistance of vigorous washing by hand (and are more expensive, too).

The excuse is saving lakes from eutrophication. The reason is the enforcement of Green Shari’ah, as this excerpt makes clear:

At a June 9 Bellingham City Council meeting, council member Terry Bornemann took issue with the idea that the water output of places such as Western Washington University and St. Joseph Hospital probably equal that of the city, yet they are not affected by the ban. [Okay, the reporter should be arrested for cold, bloody murder of the English tongue, but you get the drift.]

[State Department of Ecology spokesminion Katie] Skipper said this ban is about individual responsibility, reducing phosphorus on a house-by-house level. She did not know if the ban would ever be directed toward commercial or industrial use.

The Law must be obeyed for the sake of The Law. Whether the obedience does any good is a question only the godless would ask.

For the time being, only two unlucky counties are affected. The rest of the state gets hit in two years. I imagine that smuggling rings are already laying plans to smuggle Cascade and Electrosol across the border from Idaho.

Sad News from New Haven

When I arrived in New Haven yesterday for the festivities surrounding the Yale Tory Party’s annual banquet, I leaned of the closing of the Yankee Doodle. A little later, Instapundit posted the story. Like many beloved traditions, this one gets attention only as it passes away.

When I was a Yale undergraduate, pigs-in-a-blanket from the Doodle were standard fare for late night Yale Political Union cabals. Nowadays, I suppose, health conscious students favor bean sprouts and tofu.

I may as well mention that last night the Tories debated, “Resolved, that the best things in life are free”, which was agreed to, at nearly one o’clock in the morning, by a vote of 17 to 13. Somehow a pro-Ron Paul resolution had also slipped onto the agenda (“Resolved, that this house prefers Ron Paul to John McCain”). Perhaps there had been an Internet poll? Whencever it arose, it was soundly crushed, 6 to 23 with one abstention.

Tonight is the Banquet itself, always a jolly occasion. A pity that there will be melancholy strains in the background.

Take That, Wesley Mouch!

While I never went through a period of teenage infatuation with Atlas Shrugged, one element of that bloated novel/tract instantly won my affection: its scorn for soybeans. The villainous bureaucrat Wesley Mouch advocates making soy the main constituent of the public’s diet. Thwarting his plans is one of John Galt’s many achievements (along with repealing the Second Law of Thermodynamics). Having from a young age been conscious of the odor of soybeans processing plants in rural Illinois, I regarded anti-soy sentiment as the most attractive feature of Objectivism.

Now comes news that medical science confirms my youthful prejudice:

At the very least, the journal of the American Heart Association reports, there is neither an indication that soy significantly lowers cholesterol, nor is there evidence that it mitigates the effects of osteoporosis or reduces hot flashes.

At the very worst, soy may do things like increase “toxicity in estrogen-sensitive tissues and in the thyroid,” according to FDA scientists Daniel Doerge and Daniel Sheehan. It could bind zinc and other minerals crucial to the body’s immune and autoimmune function, and increase inflammation and the risk of autoimmune diseases, according to NewsMax’s Dr. Russell Blaylock, author of the Blaylock Wellness Report.

In fact, the Royal Society report on Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals in 2002 stated that soy milk should not be given to infants, even when they had cow’s milk allergies, except on strict medical advice, according to the Guardian UK newspaper.

Dr. Mike Fitzpatrick, a New Zealand toxicologist estimated that babies fed a strict diet of soy milk “ingested the estrogenic equivalent, based on body weight, of five birth control pills a day.”

U.S. infants are at particular risk since 30 percent to 40 percent of them are sustained by soy, partially due to the fact that it is provided by welfare programs.

In the interests of honest reporting, I should note that NewsMax, whose e-mail newsletter is the source of this information, is vastly more reliable on politics than medicine. I’m not going to start a campaign against soy for infants on its say-so. Still, I hope that the Mouches of the world are a little less happy this evening.

David Cameron's “Potatoe” Moment

Dan Quayle and the spelling of the name of an edible root; Al Gore and the invention of the Internet; Bill Clinton and “I never had sex with that woman”; Howard Dean and The Scream; John Kerry and the “Global Test”. Now: David Cameron and the Chocolate Orange Menace (gleaned from Best of the Web (last item)):

Outlining a new Tory approach to health, Mr Cameron asked why WHSmith sold chocolate oranges instead of real ones. . . .

“Why? As Britain faces an obesity crisis, why does WHSmith promote half-price chocolate oranges at its check-outs instead of real oranges?

“So many consumer businesses could do more to promote healthy diets and lifestyles. It simply requires corporate responsibility to be matched by marketing creativity.”

Not only is this risible nanny state thinking, but it suggests that, for all his straining to win the hearts and minds of ordinary Englishmen, Mr. Cameron doesn’t often set foot in any outlet so plebeian as WHSmith. They aren’t the sort of places where one can “creatively” install a produce department.

When the Conservatives chose Mr. Cameron as their leader, a lot of British right-wingers were delighted. Iain Murray called him “a breath of fresh air in Tory politics, having a charisma and communication style well-suited to the early 21st century”. Once in office, he turned out also to have a natural list to port, leading Mr. Murray more recently to lament that he had not “expected that at the same time as improving the party’s PR Cameron would also junk about half of conservative thought”.

The Cameron we have seen as leader is not, it appears, the Cameron we were advertised during the leadership election. I wonder how many of the senior, genuinely conservative figures that backed him in the contest following the unfortunate defeat of Liam Fox’s bid feel the same way. If Cameron is as conservative as many of us were assured he was, he needs to make that apparent soon.

The riposte by Cameron defenders is that his tactics are the path to victory: “So Tory activists – calm down dears, its only modern politics. Don't you want to win?”

Until the chocolate oranges came up, my only answer to that question was that I define winning as putting good policies into place, not as getting jobs for the boys. Now I can add, What makes you think this scolding buffoon is going to win anything except, perhaps, a kiss on the cheek from Ralph Nader?

Any Time-Traveling Restaurants in Glasgow?

Since this year’s World Science Fiction Convention will be held in Glasgow, I was interested to see on the invaluable Cronaca an item on Glaswegian cuisine. The city is famous for the unhealthfulness of its denizens’ typical diet, so much so that one would have been, according to this report, better off dining there six centuries ago.

Glaswegians in 1405 had a better diet than the citizens of 2005, eating their “five-a-day” 600 years ahead of its time.

Even their light beer was healthier than sugar-laden fizzy concoctions that are today's favourite, according to new archaeological evidence. . . .

By analysing cesspit material, archaeologists discovered medieval citizens ate a healthy diet of fruit, vegetables, cereals and fish. It is a long way in time and culture from modern Glasgow, where obesity is so commonplace because of a junk food diet of pizza, burgers and fish suppers that the Scottish Executive is considering opening an NHS-funded stomach-stapling clinic in the city.

Professor Stephen Driscoll of Glasgow University’s archaeology department, said: “Around 100 bodies examined showed good health and the teeth were worn rather than decayed.

“The diet was healthier than today, with porridge, a little meat, fish, milk, cottage cheese and vegetables and fruits.”. . .

Frankie Phillips, of the British Dietetics Association, said: “There wouldn’t have been too many obese people in medieval times. We could certainly learn from some aspects of the diet that was uncovered.”

I’m not all that sentimental about the “healthy” medieval diet, which was seasonally deficient in vitamins and generally accompanied by a hundred hour work week, but the current “Glesca diet” may not be ideal for the well-being of science fiction fandom. If only a few 15th Century pubs would appear, Brigadoon-like, to supplement the chips-and-lemonade shops.

Not Drinking Is Good for You, Too

When I expressed my solidarity with the President by retiring from drinking on January 20, 2001, several friends were concerned about the health risks involved. As evidence mounts that a glass of wine a day keeps the doctor away more efficaciously than a bushel of apples, it becomes clear that teetotalers have adopted a risky lifestyle that threatens to raise their insurance rates, steepen their declining years and delight any greedy next of kin.

Naturally, I have occasional doubts about the prudence of defying sound medical advice out of motives that may strike many people as arbitrary or even absurd. Nonetheless, in the darkest days of November 2000, when it seemed almost certain that the Florida Supreme Court was going to override the voters of Florida and hand the Presidency to Al Gore, I vowed that, should George W. Bush be inaugurated, I would abstain from alcohol, except for communion wine and Mory’s cups (which barely qualify as alcoholic, unless ginger ale is ale in more than name), for the duration of his Presidency. Regardless of the peril to my personal well-being, I feel bound by that oath, which may, for all I know, have played some minuscule role in keeping a raving moonbat out of the White House.

Hence, it is a great relief to read this item in the current issue of New Scientist:

Some cancers are caused by heterocyclic amines, DNA-damaging chemicals found in cooked meat and fish. When Sakae Arimoto-Kobayashi's team at Okayama University in Japan fed these chemicals to mice, the DNA damage to their liver, lungs and kidneys was reduced by up to 85% if the mice drank non-alcoholic beer instead of water. [emphasis added]

While the real stuff will probably turn out to be more effective yet, I now look forward to four more years with greater personal equanimity.