perfidy

This is good:

One of the most useful aspects of the cartoon controversy is the clarity it has given to liberal ideals. It's become abundantly clear since the beginning of the month that separation of church and state, free expression, and making demands on the government are not disparate concepts randomly yoked together in the first amendment of the United States constitution. They are mutual dependent and essential rights.

Nor are these rights simply offshoots or happy byproducts of a functioning democracy. They are prior to a functioning democracy. That is a hard teaching, and as Secretary of State Rice demonstrated with her idiotic expression of surprise at the results of the recent Palestinian election, even many high-flying Americans don't fully grasp it.

This from Tim Cavanaugh at Reason. Although the whole thing is a bit of a word salad, there is a lot of insight in there.

Boy, do I hate it when people put up a post basically saying "me too!" Now I need to go kick my own ass.

Hank Williams III wants you to know he doesn't give a damn what you think. It's a sort of coping mechanism. When you are the country-singing grandson of the greatest country singer of all time, and the son of a man who himself has had dozens of top-ten country hits and remained until this year the face of NFL football, I imagine it's important to stake out your own territory as a man.

Whatever you could say about children of famous people goes triple for Hank III, whose gaunt visage and nasal voice more than a little take after the founder of his noble line. It was his family who gave us hard living songs like "I'll Never Get Out Of this World Alive" and "Whiskey Bent and Hell Bound," not to mention two of the more memorable substance-abuse biographies in a country music history full of great contenders.

To try to live up to this would be a hard burden to carry for even the steadiest person, and Hank Williams III is definitely not steady. He didn't even really want to do country music until child-support payments forced his hand. And ever since he made his first recordings - a disc of Natalie Cole-style "duets" with his father and grandfather that he quickly disavowed - he has been fighting with the past and dealing with the pressure others put on him, by jettisoning mannered country stylisms in favor of a juiced-up country/punk hybrid.

Hank Williams III's live shows are reportedly something else; a night that starts with a set of hard-bitten country ballads gradually revs up to a thrashing punk finale. And while plenty of groups have tried to marry punk and country to varying degrees of success (see: Mojo Nixon; The Reverend Horton Heat; Social Distortion's Mike Ness), Williams' balls-out I'm-an-asshole nature takes him over the top and into brand-new territory. His music sounds for the most part like it could have been recorded in 1963, but in its execution it is rougher and rowdier than country ever has been- if Johnny Cash's Tennessee Three was a long sip of Jim Beam, Hank III is a slug of Rebel Yell straight from the bottle.

His new album, Straight To Hell, is the first I've ever heard that straddles the hallowed ground between Bill Monroe and Mötörhead, between "Blue Moon of Kentucky" and "Ace of Spades."
At some point on your first run through Straight To Hell, it will hit you that you haven't once heard a distorted guitar. The album is so punk-rock in attitude and execution, and the tempos are so headlong, that you are sure that at some point somebody plugged a Gibson into a cheap fuzz pedal. But that never actually happened. Instead, Williams' band chases his rough whine of a voice with keening country fiddle, a driving tick-tack beat, plenty of tasty Martin and Telecaster guitars, and a nice helping of steel guitar and Dobro just like all those old country albums I grew up on. The playing is raucous but clean - as fiery and precise as anything I've heard that raise a storm without needing overdriven amplifiers.

Straight To Hell, starts off with about thirty seconds of a scratchy, plaintive country-gospel ballad called "Satan Is Real," which quickly degenerates into basso-profundo laughter (presumably from the dark lord himself) as the band kick into the real album opener, a honky-tonk barnburner called "Straight to Hell." That's not just a name - it really is the theme of the album. Like Hank Williams Sr., Jerry Lee Lewis, and Little Richard before him, Hank III is one of those artists who sing about a life of pills, whiskey and madness but constantly lament that all this fun means they will burn forever in hell. This tension between gleeful dissipation and crushing depression is what gives Straight To Hell its kick. On the title songs, Williams tears into lines about "looking for trouble" with the same fury as he sings the chorus, "I'm going straight to hell, ain't nothing slowing me down / I'm going straight to hell, so you just better get me one more round." Meanwhile the band kick up an electrifying honky-tonk mess.

Since this is an old-school country record, and since Hank Williams III is maybe a tad too eager to take after his forebears, better than half of the songs on the album hoe this same row. "Pills I Took" is a wide-eyed story of destruction and mayhem, and it's not perfectly clear whether Williams' narrator (Williams?) is more proud or ashamed about the blood on the carpet and the broken mirrors. "Thrown Out of the Bar" gives a shout-out to country maverick David Alan Coe and is the first of about half a dozen songs on the album that take predictable but well deserved swipes at the neutered shiny 'stars' who pass for country music royalty today. But more than that, "Thrown Out of the Bar" is just another of ten or so excellent songs the joys and perils of excess. Whether the joys or the perils are the point, well, I guess that's your call.

Williams seems to instinctively understand that this dance with the dark side it what gives a lot of the best country music its power. On the bleak "Country Heroes," he takes the standard country song story about drinking with your elders to a creepy level, singing "sometimes I feel like I'm out of control... and I'm here getting wasted, just like my country heroes." Considering that is grandfather drank himself into his grave at age 29 and George Jones, prominently namechecked in the song, has consumed tragic-heroic amounts of booze in his time, it's a little unsettling that Hank III is so intent on getting plowed. Similarly, "Crazed Country Rebel" is about an interstate drink and drugs spree that doesn't sound so much fun as frantic, as if he's not doing whiskey, pot, 'shrooms, and coke for fun, but because they just might finally kill him.

The thing that really sets Hank III apart from the pack is his anger. The same anger that gets him "thrown out of the bar" and high on "them pills I took," or that he numbs down while "drinking with all my country heroes" also shows up as a fierce defense of traditional country against well-scrubbed newcomers and Yankees. He dedicates "Dick In Dixie" to the high purpose of putting

The dick in Dixie, and the cunt back in country
'Cause the kind of country I hear nowaways is a bunch of fuckin' shit to me.
They say I'm ill mannered, they say I'm gonna self-destruct
But if you know what I'm thinkin,' you know that pop country really sucks."

We are then invited to kiss his ass. As he states again and again, Williams can't stand the new breed of country musicians "kissing ass on Music Row" who have replaced the "outlaws that had to stand their ground" and he can't listen to country music in the same room as "some faggot looking over at me."

There is even a takedown of Kid Rock (of all people) on "Not Everybody Likes Us." Williams is deeply proud of his Southern heritage and his family and can't stand it that a Yankee like Kid Rock is dabbling (poorly) in country and claiming a redneck background. I can grant him the fact that Kid Rock's country experiments aren't too great, but goddamnit, I'm a Yankee too, a country-raised briarhopper from Ohio, and my heritage is George and Johnny and Willie and Chet and Waylon. And if you don't like that, well brother, you can kiss my ass too.

In a great book called High Lonesome: The American Culture Of Country Music Cecelia Tichi writes about how country music became popular in part because it served to re-invent a shared (if largely fictional) down-home shared heritage for an increasingly displaced rural population in the middle of the 20th century. Tichi argues that during the Great Migration of the 1930s, when it seemed like half the population of the grain belt washed up in California, songs like "The Old Folks Back Home" became a lingua franca that brought together migrants from Oklahoma and Alabama alike in a new culture that they could share, built from shared impressions of an ideal America they had left behind and that they still held out hope of returning to.

That is to say, a major job of country music has always been to tie listeners back to a more perfect, even idyllic past that they can share even if they have never even been to, say, Texas or Tennessee. Examples of this sub-genre might be the Carter Family's "Clinch Mountain Home," Dolly Parton's "Tennessee Mountain Home," Loretta Lynn's "Coal Miner's Daughter," the standards "The Yellow Rose of Texas" and "Home on the Range," and even newer songs like Alan Jackson's "Chattahoochee." In a way, Hank Williams III is the just end point of a long trend in outlaw country away from idyllic stories about church and simple folks in favor stories about toughness, hard living, and defiant integrity. Home is the bar and church is, well, where you go to meditate about the hell waiting for you.

Hank Williams III has a stronger claim than most to the actual roots of country music, and Straight To Hell amounts to a 13-song defense of a reconstructed outlaw country past. To make this claim eerily explicit, the album comes with a second disc that contains a 42-minute bonus track, a druggy medley that includes train sounds, pig snorts, other found sounds, and bits of performances including a recording by his grandfather's. It is definitely self-indulgent, but that goes just as well for the whole album.

The sound of Hank Williams III wallowing in inherited misery makes for great listening. In fact, his self-indulgent tendencies give his new album a focus and power that any other set of new-old songs about drinking, drugging, and women would probably lack. Whether Hank Williams III's preoccupation with his own legacy manifest as a rant against Yankee 'faggots' crowding up Music Row or a creeping (and slightly creepy) obsession with walking in the footsteps of his idols, it makes for seriously compelling music.

Straight To Hell is a fascinating and feckless record, raw and rambling and full of piss and whiskey. I've heard punk rockers go country before, but I've never heard real country, old school country music get punked up from within. Hank Williams III is country's ragged edge, and it sounds like he's trying to find a way to live there for good. Straight To Hell is not an easy album, and it's not a perfect one, but it'll do just fine.

For the last two years or so, I have been carefully feeding and nurturing a collection of wild yeasts and bacteria that I call "Herman" and that other people can more comfortably call my sourdough starter. Kept in the refrigerator and taken out for occasional feedings, he's strong, hard-working and makes delicious bread. And writing about Herman in this way suddenly makes me feel like a bit of a creep.

Anyway. Any manservantish strangeness aside, I have developed a recipe for whole-wheat sourdough that I'm very fond of, and that's well suited for people who are new to working with sourdough cultures and the stickier doughs they create.

Johno's Miche

This large loaf is deeply flavored and rich with sweet, grainy and sour notes, and keeps for about a week at room temperature. It is modeled on French country loaves of past centuries, which would of course have been made with a nearly whole-grain flour and natural leavening. If you have trouble wrangling a 4-lb loaf, you can divide into two or three smaller loaves (reducing the baking time accordingly).

The recipe is based loosely on the famous pain Poilane of Lionel Poilane as adapted by baker Peter Reinhardt. Enjoy!!

Firm starter:

7 oz. well-fed and active barm (loose sourdough starter)
4.5 oz bread flour
4.5 oz whole-wheat flour OR 2.5 oz whole-wheat flour plus 2 oz medium rye flour
4 oz water, room temperature

Mix together and knead 2 to 3 minutes until all ingredients are well incorporated. Let rise about 4 hours at room temperature in bowl covered with plastic wrap and then put in refrigerator for up to 24 hours. This time in the fridge has two effects - to let enzymes in the flour go to work breaking out complex sugars from the starches, which gives immense depths of flavor, and to promote the growth of acetic-acid producing bacteria in the starter, which will tend to give a sharper sour flavor to the finished loaf. A full discussion of sourdough cultures and how to manipulate them will have to wait for another time - for now just do as I say and everything will be juuuuust fine.

Main dough:
16 oz bread flour
16 oz whole-wheat flour OR 12 oz whole-wheat flour and 4 oz medium rye flour
3 1/4 tsp (.8) oz salt
about 2 1/2 cups water (20-22 oz), lukewarm (about 90 degrees)

Cut the starter into about 10 chunks and let come to room temperature covered with oiled plastic wrap, about 1 hour. Combine flours and salt in a large bowl and combine thoroughly. Add starter chunks one by one and coat with the flour mix. Add 20 oz of water. Mix well in the bowl, then turn out onto a counter and knead for about 15 minutes until dough is tacky and supple and more or less passes the windowpane test*. This is not a sticky dough, but it at first should be decidedly clingy; adjust water and flour if necessary to achieve the desired texture. Your target dough temperature is 77-81 degrees.

If you have a large and powerful stand mixer at home, you can also use this to mix the dough. Begin with the paddle attachment, and switch to the dough hook just as all the ingredients come together roughly. I say again -a large and powerful stand mixer: one of six quart capacity and a big engine that won't burn up under the strain. I have a KitchenAid Professional 600, and it's up to the task though not without some thrilling engine noises.

Transfer dough to a lightly oiled large bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and let rise 3-4 hours or until about 1.5 times its original size. Wild yeasts work much more slowly than commercial yeast, but the extra time results in much more flavor in the finished product.

When dough is fully risen, remove to a lightly floured counter, press down lightly on it with your flattened hands to de-gas it a bit, and shape it into a large boule (round loaf). This is a great time to work on your shaping skills, with a loaf that is large but forgiving.

Line a large mixing bowl with linen or flour-sack towel. Sprinkle liberally with flour. Place the boule in this bowl, bottom side up. Cover bowl with plastic wrap or another bowl and let rise for 2-3 hours or until nearly doubled.

Preheat oven to 475 degrees for at least 45 minutes. For a gas oven, put one rack in the lower half of the oven, and place a pizza stone on it. Remove the other rack; it'll be in the way. For an electric oven, place the racks on the two lowest levels, placing the pizza stone on the upper rack. Heat an old cast iron skillet or cake pan you never plan to use again on the floor of the oven, or on the lowest rack if using an electric oven.

When dough is ready, turn out carefully onto a full sized half-sheet pan (measuring about 18x13 inches, not a little cookie sheet) lined with parchment paper or a silicone liner. Let stand 5 minutes as you heat 1 1/4 cups water on the stove. Slash the dough in any pattern you want; the traditional way is a box cut - four slashes in a square, almost at the edges of the loaf. (Use a sharp knife, and make confident cuts that go about 1/4 inch deep into the dough - no more.)

When the water is boiling, transfer to a pyrex or plastic measuring cup and don your oven mitt.

Place the sheet pan on the stone, and pour the boiling water into the waiting pan. Be careful! - steam burns are bad news. The steam this produces will keep the starches in the crust from gelatinizing (hardening) while the loaf rises in the intense heat of the oven. If you are afraid of pouring water into your oven, you can use a few ice cubes instead, placing them in the pan when the loaf goes in, though this does rob the oven of heat. You can also use a spray bottle to mist the dough with water prior to going in the oven, and then spray the oven walls quickly with water at two-minute intervals for the first eight minutes or so of baking. This method also leads to great heat loss, so tack a few more minutes of baking time on the end.

Close the oven door and immediately reduce heat to 450, unless using the spray-bottle technique, in which you turn the oven down immediately after the last spraying. Start a 25-minute timer when the bread goes in the oven.

After 25 minutes, rotate the loaf 180 degrees. Reduce heat to 425 and bake another 30-40 minutes. If the bottom is browning too much, put an upside-down sheet pan underneath. If the top is getting too brown, tent some aluminum foil over top.

Remove from oven and cool on a rack. Do not cut for three hours.

This bread is phenomenal. The crumb is a bit dense and chewy, and full of subtle flavors that change in the mouth and linger for a good half hour after eating. Better yet, the flavor changes day by day, so week-old miche, which will still be fresh if stored properly at room temperature (NEVER refrigerated), will taste discernibly different from its first-day counterpart.

* The windowpane test: with relatively clean hands, cut off a walnut-sized chunk of dough from the main mass, and form it into a disc with your fingers. Then, holding the edges of the disc, pull it apart so that the center becomes thinner and thinner as the surface area increases. If you can achieve an unbroken membrane that's translucent all the way across, your dough passes the windowpane test, and for most recipes can be considered sufficiently kneaded. For this recipe, you'll have trouble getting a perfect windowpane. This is because the bran in the whole wheat flour and the optional rye flour tends to cut the strands of gluten that hold the dough together, sabotaging your nice windowpane. Don't worry about it - close to a windowpane is perfectly sufficient. This a rough, ugly country loaf, not a refined effete persnickety bourgeois baguette dough we're making here!

Welcome to the 79th edition of the Carnival of the Recipes, hosted by your friends and eventual overlords here at the Ministry of Minor Perfidy.

This Carnival is a bit of a departure for us. For more than thirty centuries, the Ministry has been the leading institution for Eschatology (end-times studies) worldwide. We have been monitoring man's inhumanity to man and measuring the potential for pan-species disaster - especially the threats posed by zombie invasion and giant fighting space robots - since before Hammurabi was in short pants. We spend our days in the John of Patmos Memorial Library and Gift Shop staring into the chthonian depths of human depravity, and our nights in the Carl Sagan Observatory scanning the heavens for the sinister telltale glint of diffuse starlight on titanium skin.

All this gloom and doom does tend to wear on the soul. It is easy to lose perspective. As they say, when one stares into the abyss, the abyss looks into you. This is actually literally true, by the way; when one is involved in tendentious cross-dimensional profit repatriation negotiations with elder powers, you don't have much time for pizza and beer. When Dread Chthulu is your opponent's lead counsel these things don't seem to matter as much as girding your psyche against gibbering madness from beyond.

However, it is important to remind ourselves that to most people things like pizza, beer, and volleyball do matter. When the apocalypse comes and the select few among you who we allow to take shelter in our Catastratorium, the nerve center of our global operations, need to eat, it is crucial that we have more than protein pills and MREs for you.

To that end, I have been leading a task force dedicated to perfecting the art of eating well under duress. Ancient crafts like brewing, baking, cheesemaking and animal husbandry are being adapted for long-term viability in underground caverns. Our best gnostic chirurgeons have teamed with our most elite scientists to make stunning advances in vat-grown meat and high-yield hydroponic farming. I think you will be well impressed, those among you who survive, when you are sipping a fine Dortmunder-style lager as the atomic bombs pound the surface far above.

For this, you see, is my stock in trade. My compatriots are stockpiling arms and radiation medication as we speak. And though I certainly have made sure I know where my 12 gauge, .45 revolver, and Louisville Slugger are, I also feel it is crucial to remember the finer things that buff the rough edges off a painful existence. If we met on the Serengeti, I would be the man in the impeccable linen suit with a camp table and a shaker of ice-cold gin. If we met in deepest space, we would dine in fine casual luxury on pizza margherita preserved indefinitely in hard vacuum and baked in the intense heat of fusion engine exhaust. And when the zombies roam or the robots maraud at will, when humankind must stand side by side with our greatest allies, the dolphin and octopus, to fight a proxy war against the menace that threatens to end us all, you (some of you, at least) will take some solace in the small homely comforts we provide.

For to live on in the face of disaster is merely animal. To live well, with panache and élan in the face of the grimmest apocalypse, well, that is human!

So come! Cross the threshold of the great double doors of the Catastratorium!

Come! Don a grey guest tunic and take a seat at the polished obsidian slab in the main cavern!

Come! See what elite guests have gathered for stimulating conversation and nonpariel apres-doom cuisine!

Come! Admire the unique and curious artifacts we have collected over three millennia! But don't touch that! It would be better if that statute of Yog-Soth-Oth didn't instantly cast your mind into insanity , don't you think?

Come! Taste what toothsome delights our kichen staff have concocted, marvel at the astonishing variety of potluck the guests have brought!

Come! Raise your glass and toast the indomitable spirit of humankind!

To the future!

Now... what have we to eat??

Amuse gueles, hors d'oeuvres and lighter fare:

Marsha Hudnall of A Weight Lifted brings us a sort of Napoleon, a stacked dish of foccaccia, grilled vegetables and scrambled eggs that they call Veggie Egg Foccaccia.

Jacqueline Passey sends along a Costa Rican recipe, Gallo Pinto, which is a rice-and-bean based dish good for breakfast, side dish, or hangover cure. Salud!

Accompaniments and sidekicks of the primarily taterific variety:

The BBQ General gives us his first submission ever to the Carnival, with The General's Home Fries, an exacting and detailed recipe for delicious-sounding fried potatoes full of sound advice and culinary information. Moreover, the General seems a resourceful and detail-oriented type, the sort who would do well in a secret underground lair. Lucky for him, it is easy to maintain oil at a steady 375 degrees Fahrenheit when your heat source is a small fusion generator.

The Blog d'Elisson sends a dinner postmortem run-down that includes a recipe for oven-fried potato wedges. In my youth in Ohio, we called these jo-jo potatoes, only G-d knows why. You may call them anything you want, as long as you call them delectable.

From the Glittering Eye we get a recipe for the great French classic pommes Anna. I can offer some advice for aspirants to this culinary height: wait. Having wrestled with this recipe a few times, I have learned that the most important thing you can do is go read a book and wait, wait, wait for the timer to go off. Trust your skills. Trust your stove. Pommes Anna takes time and patience, and both are rewarded. À votre santé!

The Course Where We Get Down To Business and Dispose Of the Quisling Spy Among Us (Main Dishes)

Once our servants have cleaned up the mess (our apologies...), sit back and enjoy a dish of Ad-Lib Indian Lentil Stew from Allan at AllanThinks. It's simple, it's cheap, it's easy. And, knowing lentils like I do, I know for a fact that this recipe is infinitely extensible. Kale; tomatoes; cinnamon, cardamon, turmeric, and cumin; peas. Whatever, really, you like. Apki Lambi Umar Ke Liye!

The Technogypsy gets back to his rural roots with Bambi Loaf and Bambi Stew, two great-sounding venison dishes. You kill it, you eat it; Dick Cheney nearly feasted on long pig.

Shawn Lea of Everything and Nothing proffer a very quick, simple, and tasty Mexican chicken soup. Salud otra vez!

The Physics Geek increases the thermal energy underneath a kettle of continental bean soup. Physics Geek gets it; soups and stews are perfect candidates for fusion-exhaust cooking. After the meal, please follow the green line on the floor to your new assignment. I trust you will find it... amenable.

Triticale, the Wheat/Rye guy, gives us a bifurcating recipe which is first a simple chicken breast in salsa, and can be turned into the spectacularly delicious Thai soup, Tom Kha Kai. Asian food is the key to happiness; I know this to be true.

Ever the resourceful sort, Minister Buckethead has found a number of recipes made with the contents of US Military standard-issue MREs (Meals Ready to Eat). Here is Pizza, several desserts, a number of fairly involved recipes, an old post from Blackfive, the paratrooper of love on this topic, and this page on survivalist food in general. The McIlhenney company has a book for sale of MRE recipes using the little bottle of Tabasco Sauce that comes in some versions. To be honest, we at the Ministry aspire for greater things than this, but we acknowledge that sometimes keeping body and soul together means doing what you must.

Breads, the Love Of My Life

Sun Comprehending Glass has a great-sounding recipe for honey wheat rolls made with sourdough starter. After the robots come, all bread will be naturally leavened. She will do well to perfect this recipe.

third world country submits a bread machine recipe that is both hearty and delicious. I am reminded of Ezekiel bread, but without all the hectoring righteousness.

I myself submit a recipe for miche, a rough country French sourdough loaf of impressive size. It is based on the famous bread of Lionel Poilane, but I like to add a little rye flour for extra dimension. Get used to this one. It will one day be your daily bread.

Degustational denouments:

Annamaria of Bunny? submits a recipe for Cherry Cobbler Upside-Down (or How To Take Care Of Sick Husbands) that apparently has curative powers. Impressive... she will do well on our team of chirurgeons.

Mensa Barbie has a Rum and Berry Danish Tart. The Danes really do know their stuff.

From The Headmistress at The Common Room comes a wheat-free egg-free orange and chocolate chip pound cake for the wheat allergic among us. There are many fine people in this land advancing the cause of alternative cuisine. Whether motivated by celiac disease, veganism, or Biblical mandate, they are making great strides in perfecting toothsome recipes that, though they lack what we commonly understand to be the necessary culinary requirements, are just as (if not more) nutritous) as the originals and display an amazing ingenuity. Support your local organic farmers, craft brewers, bakers, and cheesemakes, and your local homeschool association! When the zombies come, they will be the foundation on which we all stand.

In The Headlights has one of my favorite simple desserts, a French country confection called clafoutis. She makes it with cherry, which is the classic choice. It is also wonderful with blueberries, apricots, peaches, and (seriously now...) stewed prunes.

KeeWee's Corner has brought a perfect capper to the evening: Bailey's Irish Cream Cake. I am not normally a fan of boxed baked goods mixes, but they do definitely have their place. One of these places is liquor-soaked bundt cakes. Slainte!

Next week, things get a bit brighter as Sun Comprehending Glass hosts the next edition of the Carnival of the Recipes. Send your submissions to recipe.carnival@gmail.com by noon Saturday for inclusion. If you wish to host a future edition of the Carnival of the Recipes, send an email to the same address with the word "host" in the subject line.

As the meal comes to an end and you, our esteemed guests nibble on nuts and sip digestifs, it is time to reflect on what we have accomplished. You are reading this thanks to a stupendously complicated set of cooperating technologies nearly inconceivable twenty years ago. Yet, no matter how much our world changes in superficial ways, some things abide. Lentils are still cheap, fried potatoes are still delicious, and all of us put on our pants one leg at a time. Except our dolphin readers; they don't wear pants.

Thank you all for coming; I do regret to inform you that you cannot leave. The areas not converted to radioactive glass by the robot's first attack are crawling with brain-eating zombies. There is no escape, but there is hope. Through that door you will find your new quarters, and Ministers GeekLethal and Buckethead are waiting to show you to them. Later, Minister Patton will give you your new assignments. Life is simple here; pitch in or feed the zombies. When Minister Ross returns from the surface, we will have a better idea just how long we are going to be here.

Our problems are all behind us. It is now up to us to fight the future.

Did anyone bring a guitar?

Despite our catchy moniker (Moniker... that's also how my Bay State neighors pronounce the name of GeekLethal's wife...), the Ministry of Minor Perfidy doesn't report much on actual acts of minor perfidy. That is because we are much busier behind the scenes actually perpetrating such, and preventing others, but the details of that we shall save for another time.

But it has recently come to our attention via Loyal Reader #0016, EDog, that Netflix are committing an actual act of petty betrayal. You see, they have structured their business so that their very best customers lose them money. When people use their service a lot, say returning 15 movies a month, the shipping costs eat up all the profit.

So Netflix did what any good perfidian would, and rigged the system. Now, heavy users are automatically bumped to the back of the line for access to the most popular titles, and the company will delay shipments in general for a day or few so as to put an involuntary cap on account activity.

That would be all well and good, I suppose, had the company put that in their policies from the start. But instead, people paying $18 a month for ostensibly unlimited rentals were getting in return shoddy service and prevarication if they liked the service too much. Although Neftlix now mentions this in their terms of use, I would have expected more (why? Because I'm stupid) from a company that has tried so hard to democratize and distribute their business model.

I guess we're all just lucky that Dick Cheney didn't have the rocket launcher or railgun power-up yet.

[wik] Ok. I'm done with the jokes now; Cheney has finally taken responsibility and apologized. Two days too late, but at least he did it. And, since we were all wondering, now we know exactly how drastic a situation has to be for a member of this administration to own up to something.

The Japanese have invented a transforming robot just like the ones you used to watch on afterschool cartoons, only smaller.

It is, of course, only a matter of time before this goes horribly awry.

Slashdot is reporting on a story about a group of British researchers who have created a robot piloted by a slime mold.

While our usual mode of robot reporting here at the Ministry is one of shock and alarm at the continued efforts of humanity to enslave itself under the titanium thumb of our own creations, this is actually kinda cute. For now.

A bright yellow slime mould that can grow to several metres in diameter has been put in charge of a scrabbling, six-legged robot.

The Physarum polycephalum slime, which naturally shies away from light, controls the robot's movement so that it too keeps out of light and seeks out dark places in which to hide itself.

. . . .

Physarum polycephalum is a large single-celled organism that responds to food sources, such as bacteria and fungi, by moving towards and engulfing it. It also moves away from light and favours humid, moist places to inhabit. The mould uses a network of tiny tubes filled with cytoplasm to both sense its environment and decide how to respond to it. Zauner's team decided to harness this simple control mechanism to direct a small six-legged (hexapod) walking bot.

. . . .

As the slime tried to get away from the light its movement was sensed by the circuit and used to control one of the robot's six legs. The robot then scrabbled away from bright lights as a mechanical embodiment of the mould.

The idea of a simple aggregate life form using its six claws to cower in darkened corners is touchingly cute, if ever so slightly macabre. But get this:

Eventually, this type of control could be incorporated into the bot itself rather than used remotely.

The thing to fear here is not that handi-capable slime molds will break free and begin marauding for stray humus to feed upon, but that the technology exists in the first place. Much like the jet-flying rat brains, the disembodied monkey-brain robot controllers and the robots that can recharge through eating, this technology is like placing a loaded gun in the hands of our future enemies.

Well, it's more like placing a loaded gun in a safe deposit box and putting the key and directions to the Ministry Catastratorium and Gift Shop in an envelope marked "To: Future Enemies" with delivery instructions for 2025, but I find that metaphor ultimately a bit encumbered, don't you?

When dealing with robots, it's not the present you need to be vigilant against. It's the future. Today slime molds, tomorrow, um, why not sharks? Sharks with six steel-clawed legs? Brilliant! I'm sure that cobras could use a hexapod platform too, the better to get around!

Note to Ministers: check the robot-shark-proofing around the Catastratorium's surface lagoon.

[wik] See a picture of the cute little terror behind the cut:

In a perfectly ironic twist for an author whose works tested the limits of perception, paranoia, and self-identity, an animatronic robot in the form of reclusive and visionary sci-fi author Philip K. Dick has disappeared.

The Ministry is happy to report that Mr. Dick's simulacrum is currently resting comfortably and snacking periodically on engine oil and madelines. It recently requested a word processor; our clinicians suspect it intends to begin writing once again.

The new Carnival of the Recipes is up at Physics Geek.

Next week, the Carnival will be hosted by yours truly, the Ministry of Minor Perfidy. Come and see what foods we will enjoy when the apocalypse befalls us.

I don't frequently post about politics, much to your collective relief. I don't usually have much to add to the bloviations and insights that whiz around the internet, and when I do I just can't really be bothered. I pay attention to politics, sure, but I don't have a deep grok of policy the way I do, say, the behavior of bread dough. And even if 99.99% of the people that happen past this website don't give a flying crap about how a certain recipe for bread behaves when refrigerated overnight prior to baking, I still feel that my sharing that information is more of a net good to the world than chiming in with a "me too!" when somebody posts a particularly insighftul nugget about energy policy.

But not today. I have been watching the flapdoodle over the NSA spying thingy with mounting alarm. It quickly became clear to me that Bush's people were doing their best to deflect attention from the full implications of their theories of law, and that investigators were becoming too wrapped up in the niceties of FISA law. When the Vice President can pull a jiu jitsu move on his questioners by merely stating, "we have an interest in knowing why an American citizen is talking to terrorists, said questioners have clearly not thought deeply enough about what they are doing. The salient questions are not really about FISA warrants, but about whether domestic spying, supra FISA, is happening, and under what legal authority.

Going all the way back to the detention of Jose Padilla, an American citizen, by a military tribunal without trial, charge, or habeas corpus, I have worried about the fragility of our way of life. This is especially so when defenses of the Padilla dentention, or Hamdi, or Abu Ghraib, etc., amount to "don't you know there's a war on??"

I am currently reading an absolutely fascinating book by Tom Reiss called The Orientalist. Ostensibly about a writer named Lev Nussimbaum who published bestsellers set in Persia in the middle part of the last century under the names Essad Bey and Kurban Said, the book is much more. Nussimbaum was born in Baku, Azerbaijan, the son of a Jewish oil magnate. He spent his teenaged years fleeing war and rebellion as World War I, the Russian Revolution, the flight of the White Russians, the counterflights of Azeris, Armenians, Gypsies, Turks, and Jews, pogroms, the collapse of Germany's "democracy," the descent of Berlin into chaos under the rule of the Freikorps, buffeted him and his family across Europe.

Along the way Reiss gives us a staggering array of capsule histories: of the last days of the Ottoman Empire; the rise of Baku as the first big oil boomtown in the world - there was (is?) so much petroleum there that the ground sometimes burst into flame spontaneously, not surprisingly making the city a major stronghold of Zoroastrianism (not to mention Islam and Judiasm); the assassinations that brought down the Czars; the spread of Bolshevism; vignettes about strange peoples like the warrior mountain Jews of Azerbaijan and an enclave of German speakers in the middle of southern Georgia; the fall of the Habsburgs; the rich multiculturalism of pre-20th century Persia, and more.

One recurring theme is that of fragility. The great empires of the 19th century fell quickly; once permanent, immutable and terrible, they turned practically overnight into scared collections of aristocrats stuffing priceless antiques into carpet bags as they fled revolution. The scrim between placid civilization and barbarism is tissue thin, it seems.

Which is why I worry that, in their zeal to prosecute the War on Terror, Bush & co. are doing something very harmful to the Republic we cherish. By now we've all been reminded that past Presidents suspended civil liberties for this reason or that. The difference is, those wars ended. This war, if it is a "war" in any recognizable sense, doesn't have an end-point. What... the last terrorist on earth waves the white flag and we're done? That is what makes any invocation by the President of "wartime necessity" as a defense for his actions very perilous. There will always be terrorism, and there will always be threats. So wartime necessity becomes mere "necessity."

All of this is to say: I have become increasingly convinced that the sum total of all the small gestures the Bush administration makes that signal a disregard for established procedure or finding wiggle room in Constitutional clauses come distressingly close to creeping authoritarianism. I am well aware that the notion that Congress runs the nation died the day John Adams signed the Sedition Act, but do we have to throw out the baby with the bathwater?

And now for the obligatory concilation. I am well aware we are at war, and even if I don't agree with Roger Scruton, Roger Kimball and Mark Steyn's alarmist and alarming essays in last month's New Criterion (short version: Islam terror fall of Rome; Bread and circus, decadent soft complacent. Liberals concilation, immigrants angry hatred xenophobia, Islam Islam Islam, demographic time bomb, our children will wear the chador, gays and Hollywood lead the way.), I acknowledge and agree that we have to be serious about confronting threats to our way of life.

But again, do we have to throw out the baby with the bathwater?

Much of what I hear from ardent hawks reeks to me of desparation, the cries of people who have looked to long into the abyss and gone mad. Sites like Little Green Footballs (no link from me) have as their stock in trade a shreiking denunciation of people who won't accept that sometimes hard times call for stern measures or whatever. Torture, spy, bomb, and nuke, if we must, and if you disagree you clearly hate our freedom.

But that's all crap. When the talk turns from "shall we, as a society, condone the waterboarding of prisoners as a policy" to "when is it appropriate to waterboard prisoners," from "shall we condone the dentention of American citizens without warrant" to "when is it appropriate to detain..., " from "should the government read our mail," to "when should the government be allowed to read our mail," we edge closer and closer to abandoning for expediency's sake the very principles we hope to export to countries we libervade. Any one of these sets off my alarm bells, but as long as any one of these occurs alone, I'm not going to man the barricades. But a whole bunch of similar stories all unfolding at once isn't a curiosity, it's a trend.

Hate our freedom? I love it! And unlike the torture-hawks, I'm not so afraid of a few splodeydopes that I think we need to abandon ship in orde to save it. I'm all for winning the War on Terrorism, whatever that means. But I'm dead against winning at all costs.

What brought all this on? Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings has a long and rich discussion about what we don't know regarding what the President has done with the powers he says he now has, with long excerpts from the Gonzales hearing earlier this week, and it depressed me.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled blogging on robots, food, beer, music, and fart jokes.

My esteemed coperfidian Buckethead recently reprinted a couple of the most tasteless Norwegian slanderings of the Prophet that have the least hingeful elements of the Muslim world feeling all smashy and burny of late. While the images in question are terribly offensive - a fact which ought to be obvious to anyone who wasn't raised by wolves - I feel I must point out that smashing and burning are not the solution. This goes double if your grievance is partly that Islam is frequently depicted as a violent and xenophobic belief system.

However. If you must burn our embassy in redress for our crimes against your (curiously delicate) way of life (if cartoons are a dire threat and all), our embassy is conveniently located at 161st Street and River Avenue, Bronx, NY, just steps from the 4, B, or D subway lines.

[wik] Link changed and made less funny because Google Maps is teh suck.

This video takes me back a little to my days playin' the Dungeons and Dragons in high school, and it turns out that memory lane is girded about by ouchy thorns and stuff.

Although I was certainly never quite that geeky - not compared to this - I probably shouldn't disavow my role-playing gamer past too loudly, consideratin' that I have been named dorkiest Minister by popular acclaim. But still, that video is teh funny. LOL and whatnot.

Thanks to texasbestgrok's JohnL, who is also way beyond this kind of thing.

It's only a matter of time before the moon is a giant red and blue yin-yang urging us to drink Pepsi. A new company on Cape Cod, Roofshout.com, is trying to monetize the experience of getting your house's picture on satellite-image-driven services like Google Earth. You could help pay your mortgage with a small tasteful rooftop ad for, say, GOLDENPALACE.COM or POKERPARTY.COM or

PRICEWATERHOUSECOOPERS

that just happens to be visible from space.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you... the future. Use it wisely.

This week's chocolate-themed Carnival of the Recipes is up!!

In a couple weeks, the Carnival will be coming through the Ministry... check in and see what evil lurks in the hearts of artichokes.

Loyal Reader #0016, EDog, forwards this priceless discussion board in which new doctors discuss the crazy things they see in the ER.

I tell ya, no matter how many times you hear a story about some guy needing a pickle jar fished out of his cornhole, it just doesn't stop being funny.

I like the one about the guy who got a script for Vicodin and got on his cell phone right there in the ER to sell it, in full earshot of the doctors what gave him the script.

How to clean up a hopelessly corrupt Congress, one suffering from a surfeit of greed and venality and plagued by scandal after scandal after scandal such that the actual business of governing is pushed aside?

Who, indeed, could have the probity and experience necessary to cut earmark spending, clean up messy ethical violations, and return Congress to honor and dignity?

What could you possibly do to ensure that the stink of corruption, the taint of self-interest, is washed away for good?

Well, you sure as shit stinks don't put a g-d d-mn Ohio Republican in charge.

You have to be kidding me. John Boehner?

Boner?

A croneyfied, Hammer-huggin', earmark-lovin', backslappin', pork poundin', backstabbin' representative from the most bumbling party in the second most bumbling state (hello, Florida!) in the union? That's your reformer? Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, indeed.

Any way we can ask Parliament nicely if they'll have us back?

[wik] I mean, okay. The guy is better than Blunt, by a country mile. And I know we get the government we deserve, we being the kind of country we are, but by the Flying Spaghetti Monster's noodly appendage what did we do to deserve all this?!?

[alsø wik] Does anybody else remember the long-gone lamented series "Sledge Hammer"? 'Cos I recently had opportunity to watch a few episodes on DVD, and I gotta tell you, it's still funny.

James Lileks thinks this piece should be taught in J-school, and I think so too. An amazingly well written story about, well hell, a down on his luck $300-an-hour children's entertainer in the Washington DC area. Yeah, yeah, you say. Whatever. Bo-ring! Ooh! Seinfeld's on!

Wrong. Just go read the piece. If they ("they") were to make me an offer, my right arm for the ability to write a piece that good, I'd consider it a bargain.

Recently, antiwar activists in San Francisco proposed a measure that would ban all military presence from the city - recruiters, bases, what have you. Which is of course their right, no matter how stupid it is. It is also my right to flatten my testicles with a hammer.

Last year, that city's supervisors voted to not bring the USS Iowa to town to serve as a floating museum for the same reason: miltary bad. But that proposal is now being revisited. A group of interested citizens are trying to get the Iowa docked in San Francisco Bay, but only if it's a museum about the history of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered troops in the US military.

As a gay-loving liberal, I have to say... if the city of San Francisco is so coddled and complaisant in their absolute certainty that their freedom and security (including, importantly, the right to kiss who you want in public without fear of public execution) is a diety-given eternal guarantee free of obligation, vigilance or sacrifice that they want the military out out out, and not in the gay way, let them have it.

And if the Iowa does come to San Francisco Bay, I ardently hope that some interest group doesn't strong arm it into being some floating testament to diversity. Bending over backwards to celebrate the diversity of every damn group from hare-lipped citrus growers of Korean descent to... frigging Baptists, who have fuck-all to complain about but still have some bullshit *persecution complex* that makes them feel holier or something (that's what it is with everybody... suffering is holy, ennobling in some vaguely defined and mealy mouthed way)... makes a mockery of the best and brightest tenets of our society. I suppose the story of gays and lesbians (and transgendered folk! Don't forget the transgendered folk!) in the military does need to be told, but does it need to be told in that fuzzy Barney-voiced good-for-you!! fight-the-power way that it undoubtedly would be in the suggested museum? Or can we just have a cool little low-key museum somewheres that covers the gamut of gender/sexual identity matters in the military, from women who fought as men in the Revolution and Civil Wars, the issues or lack thereof of foxhole companionship in the Great War, etc., the effects of the sexual revolution, the fallout from the post-Vietnam drawdown, don't-ask-don't tell on to the present day? That could actually be interesting. But I bet you a million dollars whatever exhibit they would put aboard the Iowa won't be. Not at all.

Wait... which one of you crapped in my Wheaties?

[wik] Not that it's any of my business or anything. And not that this museum is anywhere near being established. But I've had about enough of holding hands and singing kum-by-yah as if it's some sort of public statement of ideological purity, and this little damp squib was enough to set me off again. A few years ago I stood among a group of earnest white wealthy Birkenstocked New Englanders with their fists in the air shouting "Amandla! Owetu!" and other misappropriated slogans from actual struggles in which people died for their freedom, looked around, and realized that celebrating diversity very often amounts to a condescending pat on the head. So eff that.

[alsø wik] If you haven't seen the documentary "Murderball" yet, you just have to. Try to tell one of those wheelchair rugby guys that you feel his pain and celebrate his whatever, and he's likely to punch you in the nuts and throw you off a tall building.

[alsø alsø wik] Via Reason's hit and run, comes news of a new law in Washington (the state) banning private-sector discrimination based on sexual orientation. Julian Sanchez points out the delicious helping of cognitive dissonance in the deliberations leading up to passage:

Sen. Dan Swecker, R-Rochester, said, "Discrimination against anyone is unacceptable, and it is wrong."

"Unfortunately the bill before us today is not the magic tool that will end discrimination in our state," he said. "In reality, it takes us in the opposite direction.

"The passage of this legislation puts us on a slippery slope towards gay marriage. The two are linked. ... Are any of us naive enough to think the court won't take notice?"

So, if private discrimination is banned in the name of diversity, this means that the right of people to freely associate in homogenous groups has been abridged. Which is funny, as well as unconstitutional. But the real threat is that someday gays might associate for life with the buttsex and the stubbly kisses.

Guh?

[wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?] And don't kid yourself. There are several compelling and trenchant arguments for approaching allowing gay couples to marry gradually, letting public opinion and time iron out the objections and unintended consequences. But you don't hear those too often in the popular (read: dumbified and soundbyted) debates thereon. What you hear instead is a lot of pretty language about sanctity and tradition and nature that boils down in large part to "ewwwwwww."

[see the løveli lakes...] See what I mean!? This WorldNetDaily piece is incensed that the new AOL Instant Messenger slogan is "I Am." Because it's blasphemy, see? God told Moses his name is "I Am." And AOL's marketing guys, remembering their days of Sunday School, thought it would be a lark to take the name of God in vain in a product name designed to appeal to the very broadest dialup using Churchgoing segment of the population. Because that's what evil corporations do.

[the wøndërful telephøne system...] I wonder what the WorldNetDaily people are gonna do when they hear about my friend Dan. After he got his wife pregnant for the first time, he renamed his cock "The Supreme Creator."

[and mäni interesting furry animals...] It's like our national sport isn't baseball anymore, but drawing fouls. You know, like that move they do in NBA basketball where someone's jersey brushes you and you leap backwards ten feet as if hit by a truck, stagger, and fall to the floor with a crash, all the while screaming "Ref! Reeeeeeeeef!"

Which is pathetic.

The Carnival of Personal Finance #33 is now up at Fat Pich Financials, who is apparently an ardent devotee of Warren Buffett's and Seth A. Klarman's value investing philosophies.

The 76th Carnival of Recipes is up at Triticale, the Wheat/Rye guy. The theme is potluck, so make up a tuna hotdish and head on over. (Wait... you're not from the Midwest? Then bring mac and cheese.)