Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

In after Baud. Damn.

Jack Smith: “Why did you start campaigning in the middle of my investigation?!”

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

Giving up is unforgivable.

T R E 4 5 O N

Bad people in a position to do bad things will do bad things because they are bad people. End of story.

If you don’t believe freedom is for everybody, then the thing you love isn’t freedom, it is privilege.

Mediocre white men think RFK Jr’s pathetic midlife crisis is inspirational. The bar is set so low for them, it’s subterranean.

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

Today’s gop: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

Roe is not about choice. It is about freedom.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

Good lord, these people are nuts.

This fight is for everything.

So many bastards, so little time.

The words do not have to be perfect.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

White supremacy is terrorism.

I have other things to bitch about but those will have to wait.

It’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.

The “burn-it-down” people are good with that until they become part of the kindling.

If you thought you’d already seen people saying the stupidest things possible on the internet, prepare yourselves.

The arc of the moral universe does not bend itself. it is up to us to bend it.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

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Hillary Rettig wrote for Balloon juice for about a year from 2016-17.

Hillary Rettig

Exploit Your Children Well

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As a former foster mom (of four Sudanese teenaged refugees aka “Lost Boys”), I know it’s possible to use the foster parent stipend to help pay your mortgage or other household expenses and still do right by the kids. But it’s not easy because the stipends are usually low. Ours barely covered food and other essentials, and many months we paid out-of-pocket for things like sports gear or a computer for homework. (And we were in Massachusetts, a generous state.)

Many people who view fostering as an income stream wind up shafting the kids.

Leave it to one of the Y’all Qaeda macho men to take things to a new low, however. Robert “LaVoy” Finicum and his wife have apparently fostered more than fifty boys over the past decade, many from “mental hospitals, drug rehabs and group homes for emotionally distressed youth.” Not only did he use the stipend to support himself, he also made them work on his ranch.

In my view this comes close to human trafficking. Sure, foster kids should do chores, but to use money that is supposed to support them to support yourself AND to use them as free labor on your ridiculous macho-man massively-government-subsidized nonstarter of an animal-exploitation business? NOPE.

More details will undoubtedly emerge, and perhaps they’ll cast a sunnier light on the situation. Perhaps Finicum paid the kids for their work. Or perhaps the ranch was a really wonderful experience compared with the institutions the kids came from. None of that changes the fact that these kids were vulnerable, and exploited. I wonder what else they could have been doing if they hadn’t been conscripted into the ranching business. Studying? Seeing a counselor or visiting with their sponsor? Getting some actual relevant-to-the-21st-century work experience?

Or, how about just plain goofing off and being kids?

Based on this quote alone I would be very surprised if any facts emerge that exonerate Finicum:

“[Fostering] was my main source of income,” Finicum said. “My ranch, well, the cows just cover the costs of the ranch. If this means rice and beans for the next few years, so be it. We’re going to stay the course.”

Sounds like every grieving parent I know!

Dickens himself couldn’t have created a better villain.

The mystery is why the child-welfare authorities in Finicum’s state of AZ acted now. My guess is that they noticed the media interest surrounding all things Y’all Qaeda and decided to act pre-emptively to avoid getting spotlighted. “Hey Marge, remember those homeless kids we keep giving to the rancher for free labor? Maybe we shouldn’t be doing that.”

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Baby, You Can’t Drive My Car

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On Wednesday the White House announced that it wants to spend $4B on “research and infrastructure improvements” for driverless cars. They’re promoting it as a driver (so to speak) for “innovation” and a public safety measure: “[Transportation Secretary Anthony Fox] estimated that as many as 25,000 deaths could have been avoided last year if driverless technology had been in widespread use.”

Yeah for innovation and safety! But do you know where else $4 billion would help create innovation and save lives—not to mention, save the climate? Mass transit.

Driving sucks, and dealing with other drivers sucks more, so I really do kinda want a driverless car. (Although I want a robot butler more.) But, do you know who REALLY wants a driverless car? The trucking industry, which is growing as online commerce grows, and whose goal is, “to reduce, and eventually eliminate, the role of the human.”

There go 1.5 million trucking jobs.

Oh, and the Wired article says they will “platoon”:

Trucks could platoon: one leading the way, with others in a line copying its every move, separated by as little as 30 feet. Having one driver lead seven trucks means significant savings on labor and fuel efficiency, says David Carlisle, chairman of the board of auto industry consultancy Carlisle & Company. Even if you still need a human in each as a backup, all the vehicles benefit from reduced wind resistance, like a Tour de France cyclist team.

I feel safer already! (The ongoing militarization of our language and culture is perhaps a topic for another time.)

Hayabusa (Peregrine Falcon) or E5 shinkansen train at a mainline railway station in japan

Seriously, I’m all for R&D and infrastructure and even business/government partnerships but why driverless cars for industry instead of supertrainz for you and me? We were in Japan last year and every form of transportation was amazing in exactly the ways you’ve heard: clean, convenient, fast, quiet, and exquisitely, precisely, on time. The 200+ mph Shikansen bullet trains look like snakes and are like a ride—whee!—into the future, even if you don’t happen to pass the 3x-football-field-sized Solar Ark.

Plus, the trains and train stations were all abundantly staffed with people who actually seemed to want to help a tourist.

Amazing what a country can accomplish when it decides to invest in infrastructure for people instead of a perpetual war machine or corporate bailouts.

And is there anyone who thinks that a parallel road system for driverless trucks wouldn’t cannibalize resources from the roads that actual hoomans drive? I picture us all wheezing along like bumpkins from pothole to pothole to occasional sinkhole while our Robot Truck Overlords whiz past us on pristine asphalt.

Then again, maybe this guy can help.

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The Kids Are All Right

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Yesterday started sadly so I thought I’d post something fun and tender to start the day today. We saw Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle over the weekend. (Thanks Alamo Drafthouse!) Tati was a postwar French amalgam of Charlie Chaplin and Samuel Beckett. (Seriously, they played a short before the movie featuring David Lynch saying so.) His movies are sweet and weird and moving and funny all at the same time.

The scene that elicited the most guffaws needs no explanation:

I can imagine our H. erectus ancestor kids pulling the same prank a million years ago, and whoever succeeds us a million years from now doing the same.

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Bill the Chill

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Please meet Billy, a.k.a., Chucklehead, Coconut Head, Silly Billy, Billy Bananas, Young Fur (Call the Midwife reference!), and The Dog With Too Many Nicknames. He’s a pom mix–basically, the world’s biggest pom. (Or at least Kalamazoo’s.)

We adopted him as a rescue two years ago when he was twelve. He is deaf and down to one tooth but otherwise in pretty good health for a senior.

billy_pumpkinhead2At right is the “punkinhead” picture that got him adopted.

Billy’s not one of those dogs who gets all sloppy and emotional on you. He’s chill, an impartial observer. He keeps his distance. He’ll only smooch under duress. Basically, he’s 40 pounds of attitude in a 20 pound dog.

There’s only one exception: kids. Billy loves kids. All kids, from preschool on up. When he sees a kid, he drops all pretense and turns into a wagging, grinning, kissing bundle of OMG C’MON LET’S PLAY!!!!!

I love this behavior, but it also obsesses me. Like many rescue parents, probably, I’m haunted by Billy’s unknown past and how he wound up in a shelter. I’m guessing he lived for many years in a household with kids. Did he run away? Did they dump him for the crime of getting old? Or is it another story entirely? These are unanswerable questions that, if I think about them too long, will drive me crazy. So I try not to.

Anyhow, back to the ‘tude. I asked him to model, and this is what I got:

billyrefusingto pose

I told him it was for Balloon Juice, and he responded accordingly:

billy refusing to pose

Oh yeah, I forgot one of his nicknames: Stinkerbelle.

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Five Ways to Go Invisibly Vegan in 2016

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Dear Juicers,

Here’s to a healthier, kinder, and more environmentally sustainable 2016! Okay, let’s not talk about bacon or cheese. Let’s talk about chili, stir fries, and muffins. Below are five ridiculously easy things you can do to invisibly veganize your cuisine. By invisible I mean that, in a blind taste test, you wouldn’t know the dish is vegan.

1. Join Harvard, 7-Eleven, and many others and dump the mayonnaise: use Hampton Creek’s vegan Just Mayo instead. Winner of a Serious Eats blind taste test, it’s clearly freaking out Big Mayo (a.k.a., Unilever, maker of Hellmann’s/Best Foods), which stupidly sued teeny weeny Hampton Creek to try to force them to change the name—a move that epically backfired.

2. Replace eggs in baking and cooking with apple sauce, flax seeds, a banana, or one of these. If you want a twofer, also swap in nondairy milk for the dairy. And by the way, pancakes and waffles work just fine sans eggs—you don’t even need a substitute. (Add some nuts or vegan protein powder for more oomph.)

gardein and beyond
Hillary’s freezer!

3. Try meat substitutes. Seriously, the new generation, like Gardein and Beyond Meat, is amazing: great taste, texture, and appearance; also, not too much salt and relatively straightforward ingredients. They are often soy- and gluten-free. The Clever Housewife did a blind taste test of Beyond Beefy Crumbles with her family and neither spousal unit nor child units noticed; and Bill Gates invested in Beyond Meat after he couldn’t tell the difference between the company’s chicken product and real chicken.

Most supermarkets now carry these products, so…check out our freezer! At the end of a busy day we pop one of these babies into a stir fry, chili, casserole, or sauce with a bunch of veggies, and we are there. Here’s a giant page of meat (and other) substitutes.

4. Swap out the superfluous. Many breads, snacks, condiments, and other packaged foods contain superfluous dairy or egg. Check out PETA’s ginormous list of “accidentally vegan” foods to see if there’s a swap you can make.

5. OMG, TRY THE DESSERTS. Vegan. Desserts. Rock. You get all the sweetness and flavor, with less grease and weight (and calories, cholesterol, etc.) That means you can eat more of them! Check out the vegan dessert page of Chloe Coscarelli, winner of Food Network’s Cupcake Wars; and non-bakers should know that you can buy premade vegan desserts at many supermarket bakeries. Also, there’s a lot of fabulous nondairy ice cream out there. My favorite brand is Coconut Bliss, and of course we’re all waiting to see what Ben & Jerry’s does with their new vegan line.

For more ideas, check out one of the bazillions of vegan cookbooks out there, or Google “vegan _____,” filling in the name of your favorite ingredient or dish. You will probably find some surprising equivalents. I once randomly (ahem) searched for “vegan Tootsie Rolls” and found that they exist in the form of TruJoy Choco chews. In the service of my cause (ahem), I did a taste test and found them to be good and true.

Speaking of cookbooks, allow me to introduce my friend and role model Mistress Ginger, author of one of my favorites, Mistress Ginger Cooks. Take it away, Mistress G, and on behalf of vegans everywhere thanks to our noble blogmeister John Cole for the invite. The Mistress and I will be hanging out in the comments to answer any questions or just talk about all things vegan. – Hillary

Mistress Ginger front coverHello everyone! I’m honored to be offering my high-heeled brand of plant-based cookery to the Balloon Juice blog. Thanks for having me!

Here we are in the middle of winter, and to me that means comfort food, including moist and delicious baked goods.

Now, just because I’m a vegan showgirl doesn’t mean that I have to do without such decadent treats. Au contraire! At the same time, without anyone knowing it, I’m able to infuse these scrumptious morsels with some wholesome goodness. In the end, you get to satisfy your midwinter indulgence while meeting all of your New Year resolutions for a healthier you. Aren’t you a lucky duck?

I hope you enjoy my recipe for Blueberry Stud Muffins, straight from my cookbook. Be sure to try the variations, too, as we all need a little variety in our stud muffins, don’t we? – Mistress Ginger

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