Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

These days, even the boring Republicans are nuts.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

Hi god, it’s us. Thanks a heap, you’re having a great week and it’s only Thursday!

Baby steps, because the Republican Party is full of angry babies.

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

Fight for a just cause, love your fellow man, live a good life.

The lights are all blinking red.

Dead end MAGA boomers crying about Talyor Swift being a Dem is my kind of music. Turn it up.

Republicans can’t even be trusted with their own money.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

Maybe you would prefer that we take Joelle’s side in ALL CAPS?

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

Imperialist aggressors must be defeated, or the whole world loses.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

It’s easier to kill a dangerous animal than a man who just happens to have different thoughts/values than one’s own.

Republican speaker of the house Mike Johnson is the bland and smiling face of evil.

Republicans: slavery is when you own me. freedom is when I own you.

“woke” is the new caravan.

The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

Oh FFS you might as well trust a 6-year-old with a flamethrower.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

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My Holiday Kitchen Guide

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I, too, have struggled to meet my culinary needs, so I thought I would help you all out with my helpful guide of items that might be useful in the kitchen. First, let’s conquer the salt challenge. As we all know, salt is vital and goes in almost everything we cook, so who wants to waste time hunting for it, shaking it out of a shaker, fiddling with the top, and all that other hassle? To solve this existential kitchen crisis, I’ve decided to use the following item:

I call it “bowl.” I place it on the counter next to my other spices, and when I need salt, I know exactly where to go. The best part of this item is that it can multi-task. It can also hold pepper, spice rub, melted butter- hell, you name it. It really is a must have in every kitchen.

The next item I have on my guide that you might find useful is the following:

That is a “knife.” With one of those, you can basically do anything you want in a kitchen. Yes, if you must, you can spend thousands of dollars on a knife for every occasion, but really, that is the only one you really need. It slices, it dices, it chops, it peels, it deveins, it skins, it carves- you can do pretty much everything with it, including slitting your wrists after reading the Atlantic.

Finally, the must have item, far better than some ridiculous 1500 dollar piece of machinery, is the following:

I call this one “hand.” It can make a flawless bechamel or hollandaise, it kneads, it peels garlic, it stirs, it transports. It really is the miracle tool. Best of all, barring a freakish accident, you should probably already have a matching set of them. You would be shocked what you can do with them.

You can even separate eggs with them. It’s fucking amazing.

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Cooking with gasbag

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Somewhere in Massachusetts, a cold shiver just ran up Tom Levenson’s back, for Megan McArdle has published her “Holiday Gift Guide 2011: Kitchen Edition“.

Now, I love cooking (my old English Fruit cake with propofol icing has won several awards) and I love gadgets (particularly the sort that are made by Germans out of latex and make the lights dim in three states when I turn them on), but McMegan’s list is truly terrifying.

Megan says that “Space is somewhat limited in our kitchen“, and given that she appears to own every piece of crap that has ever been flogged to the gullible and the taste-free, I’m not surprised. I have visions of her dessicated corpse being found some day, trapped between the piles of old copies of the New York Times that line the walls of her apartment, smothered beneath an avalanche of chicken-shaped spoon holders and fish spatulas, all liberally lubricated with rancid butter (salted and salt-free!) that has spilled out from her (now water-depleted) butter boats.

It’s hard to pick favourites from her list, but I’m particularly enamoured of the Salt Pig, which may be the ugliest piece of kitchenware I have ever seen:

At least it matches the colour of her salt.

Helpfully, Megan suggests several solutions to those global problems which bedevil us all, including the Kuhn Rikon Egg Separating Set because:

Separating eggs by hand is not hard, but it’s tedious…

and the Swivel Store Spice Rack because:

Like most people who like to cook, I am obsessed with finding a solution to The Spice Problem.

Thankfully, this last apparently flouts the laws of physics by holding all her spices:

happily (and neatly) over the microwave, where they’re paradoxically easy to get at, and safely out of the way.

If only Zeno had known about that he wouldn’t have had to do all that messing around with tortoises and arrows.

Megan even recommends not only a gravy separator, but also a warming gravy boat. Starving children in Eritrea can rest easy now, knowing that Megan’s guests will never be exposed to cold, fatty sauces.

She (of course) triples down on the fucking Thermomix, in its third mention in as many weeks. I’m pretty sure she’s angling for a freebie, so she can wedge herself between two of them and have them rhythmically whirl, whirl, whirl her towards orgasm.

The thing that stands out most of all for me, however, is this:

I’ll frequently make a pot of rice at night and melt some cheese on top, eat some for dinner, and the rest for breakfast.

Despite all Megan’s crapping on about her fantasy world of “shiny chocolate glazes” and custards and foams and perfect bechamel, buried in the middle of the article we get one solitary glimpse of the truth – sad, pathetic Megan, surrounded by her shelves and drawers and hills of tat and rubbish, shovelling cheese and rice into her face in a futile attempt to fill the aching void in her soul.

[H/t to commenter Trentrunner, who got there first.]

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Megan McArdle Orders the Burlwood Dash For Her Tumbrel

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Blogger’s Note: Zandar (apologia pro vita sua and all that) and Asiangrrl goaded me into diving once more into the swamp that is Megan McArdle’s prose.  But this is it.  There’s real and much more interesting work to be done out there, good stuff to read and (I hope) write.  And it’s clear that I can’t do what folks like TBogg and DougJ have mastered — the precision strike, 300 words and out, that leave the divine Ms. MM’s latest smoking in the ruins.  There’s no “I can handle just one more toke” self-delusion available to me.

So I’m quitting. Cold turkey.

This is the last McArdle post for at least six months — and I’ve empowered my colleague, Seth Mnookin, to tase me if I slip.

Also:  to steal Cosma Shalizi’s customary phrase, here is an attention conservation notice.  What follows is about 2,700 words vivisecting a 1,000 word or so book review.  It’s John Foster Dulles-scale overkill. It’s just me lancing a boil.  That’s all.  Read it at your own pleasure — but don’t come complaining to me that you’ll never get those minutes back.  We cool?

_______________________

My uncle, the ex RA officer, once told me the grim term-of-art British soldiers coined adapted to describe IRA bomb-makers inept enough to blow themselves up.  They had scored, it was said, an own-goal.

So it is, (without bloodshed, thankfully) that we must read the latest from our favorite Marie Antoinette re-enactor, Megan McArdle, writing in last weekend’s Wall St. Journal.  (And yes, I know DougJ got here first, along with all you would expect from the Balloon Juice commentariat, but what good is snark without oversnark, I say.  Charlie Pierce too.  (Update: and, of course, the invaluable Susan of Texas.) Well, say I, a feast is as good as enough, is it not?

Just to recap:  last Saturday, McArdle wrote what was ostensibly a book review that devolved rapidly into a celebration of McArdle’s own purchasing habits and the particular form of her pursuit of happiness.

There’s a lot that could be said about the miserably parched self-and-world view that informs that defense, but the rest of the column is equally egregious, so, in my usual succinct fashion, I decided to have a whack at it:

McArdle begins by announcing that she has bought herself a $1,500 food processor/cooking robot, a Buck Rodgers gadget called a Thermomix. This machine’s claim to fame is that it combines a chopper/grinder/stirrer function with a precision scale and a heating element.  Toss stuff into its mixer bowl in the right order and in what the machine tells you are the right amounts, press some buttons in the correct sequence, and standardized results accrue.

Now, contrary to the outrage in DougJ’s thread, I’m going to say up front that I have no problem with McArdle lusting after this, buying one — it’s her money to blow, after all — and concluding that this kind of automated cooking satisfies her urges.  I’ve dumped most of my sideways snark on this question to the footnote, for anyone that cares.*

No, what gets me, pretty much as always with this writer’s stuff, is her ferocious disregard for basic craft, and what I think is the essential bargain journalists make with their readers.

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Way I feel is, you don’t own a mixer

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Guess who wrote this:

A few months ago, I became the proud, and slightly sheepish, owner of what must be the world’s most expensive food processor. The Thermomix costs about $1,500. It not only chops the food but weighs the ingredients and cooks them for you while stirring constantly. Perfect hollandaise and flawless béchamel can be produced in minutes with virtually no effort.

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Why, Knock Me Down With a Feather: Megan McArdle is Still Always Wrong, Climate Science Edition

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Warning:  This post is way too long.  I mean, really.  You have been warned.

I’ve been off the McArdle beat for a while.  I find I need to take breaks if I’m to have any hope of (a) retaining sanity in the face of unanswerable questions implicit in our current media ecosystem, and (b) getting work that actually matters to me done that would otherwise be derailed by overloaded outrage circuits tripped by reading McArdle’s…musings are, I guess, the kindest way to describe them.

But a BJ commenter (name now lost to a hyperactive “delete” finger on my email…sorry) pointed me to this bit on climate science from a week or two ago, and it’s been sticking in my craw ever since.  In it, she quotes at length from a post at the Volokh Conspiracy by Jonathan Adler, an environmental law specialist with a libertarian and wingnut-thinktank background.

The post McArdle endorses is Adler’s defense of Chris Christie against charges of being soft on global warming.  Adler denounces the GOP fundamentalism that damns to the 9th circle those Republicans with the temerity to hold such views. His fear, he writes, is that such orthodoxy will lock that party into “anti-science know-nothingism” (his phrase).  To which I would reply, “ya think?” — or rather, “that train long since left the station, pilgrim.”

There’s plenty to argue with in Adler’s formulation of Christie’s alleged connection to the reality based community — but this post is about McArdle’s follies, not any intellectual sins Adler may have committed.

And follies there are in plenty when McArdle decides to amplify Adler’s plaint about pre-Copernicans in the GOP.  Why don’t we take a look?

McArdle begins her gloss in classic form:

I don’t think that science denialism is the exclusive province of the GOP, but it’s extremely disappointing whenever either side does it.

Both sides do it!  Who could have predicted such a claim?  And who could have anticipated that McArdle would offer no examples of denialism by any mainstream Democrat?

Did I miss the part where President Obama asserted that the Apollo missions were faked, Tranquility Base rather existing only on a Hollywood backlot?  While I was off the grid for a couple of weeks in August, did Chuck Schumer suddenly announce that Democrats must all sign a pledge asserting that π = 3?

Come on, oh Business and Economics Editor of the Atlantic:  inquiring minds want to know what Democrats’ sins you think compare to a near-unanimous denial of the reality of climate change and the theory of evolution by natural selection by the current slate of candidates for the GOP nomination to serve as President of the United States?  Anything?

Onwards!

As longtime readers known, I have been extremely critical of the attitude that some climate scientists seem to have developed towards dissent, and what you might call the PR aspect of their work.

I beg  your pardon. It is not the climate science crowd that has been out using state power  in an attempt to crush all opposition.  Rather, climate scientists have faced real and consequential assaults, from Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s witch hunting to the real damage done by all those who piled on to the Breitbart/O’Keefe-style selective quoting from stolen emails in what was called the “Climategate” non-scandal.  Did anyone notice that every inquiry into this false controversy has come up with…nothing?

All of which is to say that there are indeed views that are being shouted down by a contemptuous opposition incapable of accepting anything that contradicts their cherished worldview — and those authoritarian assaults on reasoned debate come from the so called “skeptic” crowd.

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She Just Can’t Help Herself

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McMegan is bright enough to figure out what the S&P nonsense is about (BECAUSE S&P TOLD US), and in a post pointing her fingers at the Republicans for their stupidity, we get this instant classic in beltway “Both Sides Do It”:

And yes, the Democrats had their own role to play–both in starting this monstrous game of tit-for-tat that we’re now all trapped in (liberal pundits moaning about partisanship and norms seem to have wiped the name “Bork” from their consciousness), and in getting the progressive caucus to make tea-party like noises.

Megan was 14 when Robert Bork was nominated. TWENTY FOUR YEARS AGO. But that, and apparently the 12 members of the progressive caucus kvetching helplessly about the deal equals the entirety of the Republican instransigence.

I think the Democrats started it when Lincoln was shot.

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Under pressure

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It’s time for James Fallows, TNC, and every other self-respecting employee of the Atlantic (there are others, right?) to say the words “I am ashamed to work with Megan McArdle.” The truth will set you free.

Her latest idiocy, on why she thinks it’s wrong to say Bush is primarily responsible for the debt problem:

When Obama extends the Bush tax cuts for the rich under pressure from Congressional Republicans, that disappears from his side of the ledger, because after all, he didn’t want to do it. When Bush enacts Medicare Part D under pressure from Congressional Democrats, the full cost is charged against his presidency.

Jon Chait on this:

The notion that Bush passed his prescription drug bill “under pressure from Congressional Democrats” is bizarre. Republicans controlled both houses of Congress at the time, and exerted massive pressure to pass the bill. The coalition that squeezed the bill through after the vote was held open for hours consisted of 207 Republicans and 9 Democrats. Some pressure!

How many fucking factual errors does this moron have to make before she is fired?

I only hope the Chinese have “economics bloggers” of the same quality. That’s our only chance.

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