Open thread. Looks like we need one!
Bonus picture of my tropical hibiscus that bloomed this week. (indoors, of course)
What’s everybody up to?
Open thread.
This post is in: Open Threads
Open thread. Looks like we need one!
Bonus picture of my tropical hibiscus that bloomed this week. (indoors, of course)
What’s everybody up to?
Open thread.
This post is in: Food, Something Good Open Thread
"My dream is to become local everywhere, but the world is too big to do that, right?" @chefjoseandres tells us what he's learned: https://t.co/ihHrOkDW6E
— Esquire (@esquire) March 26, 2023
From Esquire, a mood-lifter for a Sunday morning:
José Andrés got his big start as a chef at Ferran Adrià’s elBulli in Spain, the original temple of molecular gastronomy. He immigrated to the U. S. from Spain in 1991. Today the José Andrés Group operates more than thirty restaurants including Jaleo, minibar, and several Bazaars, a kind of Spanish cuisine wonderland—Washington D.C. and New York get theirs this year. World Central Kitchen, the relief organization Andrés founded to help feed people in crisis, is the biggest food-aid organization in Ukraine.
Moving has been very important for me, discovering new places, realizing that the more you know, the more you know that you know nothing—especially cooking.
The rituals that go into the process of cooking and enjoying the meal are a gigantic ritual of feeling. Feeling is the most important thing we do from the moment we’re born to the moment we die. Next to breathing, it’s the thing we have to do all the time…
Luck is luck. It happens sometimes even when you don’t wish it. But everything else in life needs to be more than luck. It needs to be effort. It needs to be hard work. It needs to be repetition and error.
My favorite Spanish saying? “No le pidas peras al olmo.” Don’t ask for pears from the elm tree…
My father would invite everybody for a Sunday paella once a month or whatever and not keep track of who he invited, so it was very random who would show up. And my mother was always like, “What happens if more people show up?” And my dad would say, “Well, we add more rice to the pan.” It’s always the way. It’s always the way.
Sunday Morning Open Thread: Chef José AndrésPost + Comments (155)
This post is in: Garden Chats
Thank you, commentor Glidwrith:
Orchids are a blog favorite. I usually have around twenty, though not all will re-bloom for me.
I choose my orchids for not just the flowers, but for the structure of the plant. If it never blooms for me again, at least I have something interesting to look at…
Sunday Morning Garden Chat: Living With OrchidsPost + Comments (32)
This post is in: Open Threads, Republican Venality, Trump Indictments, Trumpery
How are so many people confidently claiming that Trump is simply too important to go to jail. https://t.co/HNHyPZnAtW
— Franklin Stove Expropriator (@agraybee) April 1, 2023
Upon news of The First Indictment, Dave Roth re-upped one of his excellent Defector essays:
… The basic premise of Trumpism and the fundamental promise that Trump has made during his political career is that those who are with him will be treated one way, and those who are not will be treated in another, much worse way. Because of how Trump is—because of how avaricious and joyless he is, and because of how fearful and paranoid he is, and because of how unrelentingly aggrieved he is—this promise is fundamentally negative. Only the most powerful of the people that fell into formation behind him will receive any positive benefit from anything that he does; this is axiomatic, as Trump doesn’t do anything for anyone other than himself. Everyone that follows him understands and accepts this to some extent, and the less influential of those who lined up behind him either out of perceived interest or some rote and sour habit or pure servile instinct surely know as much. They also know that they will receive a more diffuse but still quite valuable dividend for their service, which is the certainty that they will never be treated as badly as the people on the other side.
That certainty is false, of course, but that doesn’t mean it’s not valuable. Trump has lived his life inside a curdled and childish belief that he can do and take and keep whatever he wants, without consequence, forever. As a sort of tabloid cartoon of a rich person, an adult Richie Rich that had somehow figured out how to use a smartphone and commit adultery, this delusion has served him decently well; the realities of his wealth and the structural forces that the country has built to protect people of similar fecklessness and similar means conspired to sustain it for decades. The version of this impunity that Trump sells to his audience is a cheaper reproduction, not sold in any store and available exclusively through this limited-time television offer, in which they can feel as invulnerable and unaccountable as him, and be just as lazy and just as cruel, without actually being anywhere near as well-insulated from the consequences of their actions. “I play to people’s fantasies,” Trump “writes” in the ghostwritten Art Of The Deal. “People may not always think big themselves. but they can get very excited by those who do.”
“That,” Trump continues, “is why a little hyperbole never hurts.” When it comes to building a brand or a public image, the utility of this sort of theatrical dishonesty is at least debatable. But the open secret with Trump is that there is nothing underneath all of this—not just no actual values beneath the pretend ones or actual product behind the pitch, but nothing at all. There is just bottomless idiotic appetite and unstinting demand, the urgency and endlessness of which makes any number of outlandish cruelties not just possible but inevitable. Trump is not the only person who is like this, but it may be that no one is more like this than him. Discernment isn’t on the menu, but it also fundamentally isn’t an option—admitting any kind of error or demonstrating any kind of vulnerability would mean not just defeat but a sort of death. The nature of this country and its economic and political depravities guarantee that such a person—someone rich enough and determined enough, stupid enough and frightened enough and selfish enough—can go a very long way. The idea of being that way is something that can be sold, because the shiny false certainty of it is something that people want to display, and feel themselves. It is a poisonous lie, but an aspirational one…
Late Night Open Thread: Same Bullsh*t, Different DecadePost + Comments (94)
by Adam L Silverman| 75 Comments
This post is in: Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Military, Open Threads, Russia, Silverman on Security, War, War in Ukraine
(Image by NEIVANMADE)
Here is President Zelenskyy’s address from earlier today. Video below, English transcript after the jump:
War for Ukraine Day 402: Putin Has Signed a New Foreign Policy Concept.Post + Comments (75)
This post is in: Open Threads
I loved this image the second I saw it. I don’t know the original context for the photo, but when I saw it earlier this week it was obviously supposed to be Hillary hearing about the indictment.
The fact that both Hillary and Al Gore didn’t shrivel up with anger and bitterness after each respective election was stolen is absolute proof that we have the best people.
Speaking of all the best people, we have 25 RSVPs for tonight’s zoom at 7 pm Eastern.
Anyone else want to join us? Send me an email, and include your nym please, and I will send you a link.
If you haven’t received the zoom link I sent out, please drop me an email and I will try again.
Doors open at 6:45.
What’s everyone up to on this fine Saturday?
Saturday Afternoon Open Thread (and reminder, BJ zoom tonight at 7 pm)Post + Comments (121)
This post is in: Excellent Links, Republican Politics
How did freedom-loving Florida fall for an authoritarian governor? @helenlewis traveled from England to Ron DeSantis’s magic kingdom in search of an answer. https://t.co/1yOGpIUPeX
— The Atlantic (@TheAtlantic) March 28, 2023
A view from elsewhere — longish, but it’s the weekend:
… Internet memes sometimes refer to Florida as “the America of America,” but to a Brit like me, it’s more like the Australia of America: The wildlife is trying to kill you, the weather is trying to kill you, and the people retain a pioneer spirit, even when their roughest expedition is to the 18th hole. Florida’s place in the national mythology is as America’s pulsing id, a vision of life without the necessary restriction of shame. Chroniclers talk about its seasonless strangeness; the public meltdowns of its oddest residents; how retired CIA operatives, Mafia informants, and Jair Bolsonaro can be reborn there. “Whatever you’re doing dishonestly up north, you can do it in a much warmer climate with less regulation down here,” said the novelist Carl Hiaasen, who wrote about the weirder side of Florida for the Miami Herald from 1976 until his retirement in 2021.
But under the memes and jokes, the state is also making an argument to the rest of the world about what freedom looks like, how life should be organized, and how politics should be done. This is clear even from Britain, a place characterized by drizzle and self-deprecation, the anti-Florida.
What was once the narrowest swing state has come to embody an emotional new strain of conservatism. “The general Republican mindset now is about grievances against condescending elites,” Michael Grunwald, the Miami-based author of The Swamp, told me, “and it fits with the sense that ‘we’re Florida Man; everyone makes fun of us.’ ” But criticism doesn’t faze Florida men; it emboldens them.
It is no coincidence that the two leading contenders for the Republican nomination both have their base in Florida. In one corner, you have Donald Trump, who retired, sulking, from the presidency to his “Winter White House” at Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach. (When Trump entered the 2024 presidential race, the formerly supportive New York Post jeered at him with the front-page headline “Florida Man Makes Announcement” before relegating the news story to page 26.)
In the other corner stands the state’s current governor, Ron DeSantis, raised in the Gulf Coast town of Dunedin, a man desperately trying to conceal his attendance at the elite institutions of Harvard and Yale under lashings of bronzer and highly choreographed outrages. In his speeches, the governor likes to boast that “Florida is where ‘woke’ goes to die.” In his 2022 campaign videos, he styled himself as a Top Gun pilot and possibly even Jesus himself. You couldn’t get away with that in Massachusetts…
For so many who choose to live here, arriving in Florida feels like a relief: a liberation from cold winters, from COVID mandates, from the paralyzing fear of political correctness, from the warnings of climatologists and guilt trips by Greta Thunberg. “This is an irresponsible place,” Grunwald told me—a counterweight to Plymouth Rock and the puritanism of the Northeast. When I drove across the border into Georgia, a battery of signs greeted me, warning against speeding and littering, as if to say: Look, we’re relaxed here, but not Florida relaxed. In freedom-loving Florida, you presume, every warning and restriction has been reluctantly imposed in response to a highly specific problem. (Exhibit A, the hotel swimming-pool sign: No swimming with diarrhea.)…