Ethel the Blog

Some non-traditional stuffing recipes:

• Spam Stuffing
• Sourdough Stuffing with Apples and Bacon
• Green Tex-Mex Stuffing
• Dirty Rice Stuffing
• Cajun Corn Bread Stuffing
• Artichoke, Sausage and Parmesan Cheese Stuffing
• Shrimp and Cornbread Stuffing
• Rye and Apple Stuffing
• Black Bean Stuffing
• Pineapple Stuffing
• Vegan Pumpkin Bread Stuffing
• Vegetarian Quinoa Stuffing
• Pear Hazelnut Stuffing
• Zucchini Barley Bulgur Stuffing
• Wild Rice and Mushroom Stuffing
• Italian Sausage and Grape Stuffing
• Sauerkraut and Apple Stuffing

A just discovered gem on Google Books is The Photographic History of the Civil War in Ten Volumes.  The volumes are:

1. The Opening Battles
2. Two Years of Grim War
3. The Decisive Battles
4. The Cavalry
5. Forts and Artillery
6. The Navies
7. Prisons and Hospitals
8. Soldier Life/Secret Service
9. Poetry and Eloquence of Blue and Gray
10. Armies and Leaders

This set should have any civil war buff reaching for the nitro pills, especially when they see what the hardcopy versions are going for on Amazon.  For a post-modern, post-Burns experience play a copy of the Bad Livers’ Delusions of Banjer while you peruse the pictures.

Chris Floyd minces no words in a piece on the New Gulag.

Punitive incarceration has been turned into a lucrative resource for private profit (and public corruption), and a political tool by which ambitious poltroons in both major parties establish their “toughness,” their fitness for power in an aggressive empire. The size and the harshness of the America’s domestic gulag have very little to do with the actual level of dangerous crime; they are instead tied far more closely to the agenda of money and power than any reality.

He quotes David Cole’s recent NYRB piece at length.

With approximately 2.3 million people in prison or jail, the United States incarcerates more people than any other country in the world—by far. Our per capita rate is six times greater than Canada’s, eight times greater than France’s, and twelve times greater than Japan’s. Here, at least, we are an undisputed world leader; we have a 40 percent lead on our closest competitors—Russia and Belarus.

…For one group in particular, however, these figures have concrete and deep-rooted implications—African-Americans, especially young black men, and especially poor young black men. African-Americans are 13 percent of the general population, but over 50 percent of the prison population. Blacks are incarcerated at a rate eight times higher than that of whites—a disparity that dwarfs other racial disparities. (Black–white disparities in unemployment, for example, are 2–1; in nonmarital childbirth, 3–1; in infant mortality, 2–1; and in net worth, 1–5).

In the 1950s, when segregation was still legal, African-Americans comprised 30 percent of the prison population. Sixty years later, African-Americans and Latinos make up 70 percent of the incarcerated population, and that population has skyrocketed. The disparities are greatest where race and class intersect—nearly 60 percent of all young black men born between 1965 and 1969 who dropped out of high school went to prison at least once on a felony conviction before they turned thirty-five. And the incarceration rate for this group—black male high school dropouts—is nearly fifty times the national average.

…

…Until 1975, the United States’ criminal justice system was roughly in line with much of Europe’s. For fifty years preceding 1975, the US incarceration rate consistently hovered around 100 inmates per 100,000; criminologists made careers out of theorizing that the incarceration rate would never change. Around 1975, however, they were proved wrong, as the United States became radically more punitive. In thirty-five years, the incarceration rate ballooned to over 700 per 100,000, far outstripping all other countries.

This growth is not attributable to increased offending rates, but to increased punitiveness. Being “tough on crime” became a political mandate. State and federal legislatures imposed mandatory minimum sentences; abolished or radically restricted parole; and adopted “three strikes” laws that exact life imprisonment for a third offense, even when the offense is as minor as stealing a slice of pizza. Comparing the ratio of convictions to “index crimes” such as murder, rape, and burglary between 1975 and 1999 reveals that, holding crime constant, the United States became five times more punitive. Harvard sociologist Bruce Western estimates that the increase in incarceration rates since 1975 can take credit for only about 10 percent of the drop in crime over the same period.

Much of the extraordinary growth in the prison and jail population is attributable to a dramatic increase in prosecution and imprisonment for drug offenses. President Reagan declared a “war on drugs” in 1982, and the states eagerly followed suit. From 1980 to 1997, Loury tells us, the number of people incarcerated for drug offenses increased by 1,100 percent. Drug convictions alone account for more than 80 percent of the total increase in the federal prison population from 1985 to 1995. In 2008, four of five drug arrests were for possession, and only one in five was for distribution; fully half of all drug arrests were for marijuana offenses.

African-Americans have borne the brunt of this war. From 1985 to 1991, the number of white drug offenders in state prisons increased by 110 percent; the number of black drug offenders grew by 465 percent. The average time served by African-Americans for drug crimes grew by 62 percent between 1994 and 2003, while white drug offenders served 17 percent more time. Though 14 percent of monthly drug users are black, roughly equal to their proportion of the general population, they are arrested and imprisoned at vastly disproportionate rates: 37 percent of those arrested for drug offenses are black as well as 56 percent of those in state prisons for drug offenses. Blacks serve almost as much time in prison for drug offenses (average of 58.7 months) as whites do for violent crimes (average of 61.7 months)

…

Our addiction to punishment should be troubling not only because it is costly and often counterproductive, but because its race and class disparities are morally unacceptable. The most promising arguments for reform, therefore, must appeal simultaneously to considerations of pragmatism and principle. The very fact that the US record is so much worse than that of the rest of the world should tell us that we are doing something wrong, and the sheer waste of public dollars and human lives should impel us toward reform. But as the authors of these three books make clear, we will not understand the problem fully until we candidly confront the fact that our criminal justice system would not be tolerable to the majority if its impact were felt more broadly by the general population, and not concentrated on the most deprived among us.

If there’s an upside to the current financial crisis created by the criminals who will be incarcerated when the winged pigs fly over the snowdrifts in hell, it’s that the orgy of prison building that accompanied the orgy of gittin’ tuff is no longer affordable.  It costs a metric buttload of money to build enough prisons to house all of the off-white folks shaking the foundations of the commonwealth - and, of course, joining the terr’ists at least in spirit - by smoking dope and possessing sufficient picograms to be considered big-time dealers under the brain-dead git tuff laws.  Basically, the pinheads constituting Generation Dumbass are contributing to their own financial tragedies - e.g. not being able to afford a new Beemer every two years, having to settle for faux gold leaf on the chandeliers, etc. - by convincing themselves that they and their budding genius chilluns are safer when all those nasty, smelly, overly-tanned people are locked up for smoking the same shit that they do when the chilluns are off at soccer camp.  The chilluns are, of course, worshipping the spirit of Bob Marley at soccer camp.

For such a supposedly educated lot, Generation Shit-for-Brains has as carefully considered a concept of risk as this pug at my feet does of string theory.  Billions and trillions for locking up people for toking while unwhite, to cure maladies invented by the snake-oil salesmen at pharmaceutical companies, to remodel their McMansions so they won’t miss out on the 100% guaranteed yearly markup, and to invade and occupy countries that might pose a genuine threat to Lichtenstein during the post-Octoberfest hangover week.  And yet they can’t put down their fucking cellphones while driving their ratbastard-laden Ford/Chevy Titanics/Lusitanias down to soccer/violin/etc. practice, yammering the whole time to their fellow Generation Cranial-Rectal Inversion Boneheads about how hard it is to guarantee the safety of them and their budding Einsteins.

Anyhow, if you want to ponder the reality of the prison/military/industrial complex, ask yourself just who’s doing the money laundering for all those drug busts inevitably described as involving a quintillion bucks worth of illegal goofballs. Last time I checked, the ghettos and barrios weren’t exactly equipped to launder that kind of cash.  Just ask yourself which non-drug-related news items you hear involve monetary quantities described with words ending in “illions”.

The BOTD - with the title of the month - is Frank Peel’s The Risings of the Luddites, Chartists and Plugdrawers (1888, 354 pp.). In the preface he writes of tracking down the still-living participants in these movements, with most having reached the age of expecting the next knock on the door to be that of a gaunt, ebony-garbed chap.  He remembers two of them:

One of the principal of my informants, a bright eyed garrulous old lady of four score and upwards still lives, but the veteran to whom I was most indebted has years since gone over to the majority.  This interesting old man who had stood as a stripling in the Luddite ranks, and had often joined in their wild defiant songs as they plied the sounding sheers, called himself an “old rebel,” and not without cause, for he had been mixed up with every movement against constituted authority that had sprung up in the West-Riding during his life-time.  His Luddite hero was John Baines, the Halifax leader, and as he repeated to me with wonderful fire and energy the impassioned speech made by that staunch old democrat at the St. Crispin Inn, I was much impressed by the proof of his retentive memory, and also by the feeling and enthusiasm he threw into the recital.

In chapter three, Peel provides a summary of the political situation that led to the Luddite uprisings.  The uprisings weren’t merely violent thuggery perpetrated by the ignorant digital watch haters of the time.  They were getting boned by the usual suspects and seeing their livelihoods and lives vanishing so those suspects could build bigger castles.

Great events were occurring at the time of the Luddite risings. George III had again succumbed to his mental malady, and his son acted as Regent of the kingdom. Napoleon was at the zenith of his power. A son had been born to him, who was crowned ” King of Rome ” in his cradle. The struggles between Wellington and the French Marshals in Spain and Portugal were getting more and more desperate. The weary war which the aristocracy of England undertook, to crush French Liberalism and to force a king upon the French nation which that high-spirited people would not have, seemed as far from its conclusion as ever. To crush Napoleon we had not only sent our own armies, but we had also in our pay all the hordes of the despots of Europe.
Truly it was a revolting and humiliating spectacle. The hard - earned money wrung from our own working people, till they rose in their misery, and even threatened king and government with destruction, went to be divided among a host of despots and slaves. The commercial difficulties of Britain were such as might have filled the most sanguine with dismay. Closed ports on the Continent, and defective harvests at home, had caused grain to rise rapidly, until 1812, the year when Cartwright’s mill was attacked, the average price of wheat was 155 shillings—a price which it had never attained before, which it has never reached since, and in all human probability will never reach again.
Bonaparte had issued his famous Milan degree, by which Britain and its islands were declared in a state of blockade, and also its colonies and dependencies in every part of the globe. The mercantile crisis, so often dreaded as the forerunner of national bankruptcy, had arrived, and such was the alarming state of commercial and manufacturing interests that parliament interposed by decreeing a loan of six millions to tide over the difficulty. Our foreign trade during the whole of the century had never been so low, and our home trade had dwindled into the narrowest limits, the starving population being scarcely able to purchase enough to keep soul and body together of the damaged flour at eight shillings per stone, which ran from the oven as they tried in vain to bake it. Encouraged by the high prices of grain, farmers and landlords speculated largely and gained considerable sums, but the commercial part of the community suffered dreadfully, and a more alarming account of bankruptcies was never known, their number amounting in one year to no less than 2,341, of which twenty-six were banking-houses. In the great towns of Yorkshire, Lancashire, Cheshire, and Nottinghamshire, the poor were seeking for work.

The impassioned speech of Baines mentioned in the preface is found in chapter six:

“Amen!” responded Baines, fervently, and his raised voice became tremulous with excitement. ” I too say down with the bloody aristocrats! Oh that the long suffering people of England would rise in their strength and crush their oppressors in the dust! The vampires have fattened too long on our heart’s blood. Let the people now rise in their majesty and rid themselves for ever of the vile brood who have flung upon them the sole taxation of the country and reduced them to the condition of galley slaves in the land of their birth. They have filched from us our natural inheritance, and by usurping the House of Commons, have got the purse strings of the nation into their hands also. They have provoked wars and lived and fattened upon them. They have sent us to fight anybody and everybody, to crush French liberalism and to maintain despotism all over Europe. They swarm over everything and cover it with their slime —over the state, over the House of Lords, and over the people’s house, over the army and navy, over everything. All the offices in the land are held by them and their friends ; salaries and pensions are showered upon them from the national treasury, and still like the horseleech they stretch forth the greedy, ravenous maw, and cry ” Give ! give !” For thirty years I have struggled to rouse the people against the evil and, as some of you here know, have suffered much for my opinions in body and estate. I am now nearing the end of my pilgrimage, but I will die as I have lived ; my last days shall be devoted to the people’s cause. I hail your rising against your oppressors and hope it may go on till there is not a tyrant to conquer. I have waited long for the dawn of the coming day, and it may be, old as I am, I shall yet see the glorious triumph of democracy.”

With minor modifications, that speech could be made today.  I suspect the “salaries and pensions” bit would especially resonate.

Carlton Hayes’ British Social Politics (1913, 580 pp.) is a collection of documents detailing the fate of the social legislation attempted by the liberals when they were swept into power in Great Britain in 1905, a situation not unlike the present situation in a land west of England.  The aristocracy never wants to give up an ounce of privilege, and will spill lots of blood - always that of others - to maintain the status quo.  In his introductory note, Hayes reminds us that not much has changed in a century.  For example, on the conservatives:

The interested conservative classes have always had their many apologists, whether of the obscurantist type who seek to justify opposition to change by reference to the mysterious workings of a Divine Providence, or of the so-called scientific turn who aim to clothe existent inequality and injustice in the language of the economic schools.  In fact, many clergymen and other ethical teachers, and political economists with their laissez-faire theories, and lawyers and judges with their juristic explanations of the Englishman’s right to freedom of contract, all contributed support, directly or indirectly, throughout the greater part of the nineteenth century, to that compact conservatism which, in the name of law and order and security, or of sound economic doctrine, or even of God, checked the growth of the social democracy and prevented the application of its remedies.

Or the two-party system:

The two-party system, whatever may be its advantages, has certain defects, as we in the United Stares known only too well, - a devotion to names rather than to principles, a traditional, almost hereditary, alignment of voters on important questions, and a loyalty to party often transcending loyalty to the nation at large, - and evidences of these defects are not lacking in English history.  When one thinks of the parthy squabbles over protection and imperialism and Irish Home Rule, and of the time and energy spent in gaining some slight tactical advantage for a political party, he wonders whether the most successful operation of real democracy will not be through channels other than the two-party system.

Or of the supposed liberals being as opposed as the conservatives to real change:

But the liberals…appeared far more anxious to rid their brethren of black slavery beyond the seas than to check the growth of white serfdom in their own factories at home.  The free-trade agitation of Cobden and Bright was the extreme radical plank in the Liberal platform of those days; the party failed utterly to appreciate the aggravated distress of the working classes, or, if they did appreciate it, their self-interest or economic principles restrained them from applying remedies; and it was the Liberals quite as much as the Tories who ridiculed and suppressed the Chartist movement.  In their repugnance to a wider democracy and to state action for the improvement of the general welfare, the Liberals of the mid-century held fast to the faith of their forefathers, the Burkes and the Pitts.

Or of the typical strategery of the conservatives:

While that remarkable leader [Disraeli] never lost an opportunity, in novel-writing or in parliamentary debate, to keep alive the Tory tradition of exalting the prestige of the landed aristocracy and the Anglican Church, and of proclaiming them as the bulwarks of English liberty, he was moved by the same Zeitgeist which supplied political theories to a Napoleon III and to a Bismarck.  Disraeli, like his great contemporaries on the continent, declared that something definite should be done for the poorer and working classes in the community and that they should be educated to a proper sense of what they owed to the crown, the lords, and the church; and in the meantime, a vigorous foreign and imperialistic policy would distract public attention from the graver domestic ills.

Or the emasculation of any legislation that might effect real change useful for those not amongst the oligarchs:

The Workmen’s Compensation Bill [of 1905], an extension of employer’s liability to several classes of workmen not enumerated in the Act of 1897, was amended out of any semblance of its original form and at length failed completely.

In my continuing search for pretty pictures in Google Books, I’ve thus far encountered three books containing spiffy art from some very old skools:

• Hopi Katcinas Drawn by Native Artists (1903)
• Designs on Prehistoric Hopi Pottery (1919)
• Mexican and Central American Antiquities, Calendar Systems and History (1904)

I’ve extracted the images from each of these books and have made them available in JPG format at:

• Hopi Katcinas
• Hopi Pottery
• Mexican Antiquities

As far as I can tell, DisneyCo hasn’t yet perfected their time machine and bought out the Hopis and Aztecs, so the images are in the public domain. Enjoy.

On NPR this A.M. I heard the results of a study showing that babies tend to cry in a manner that mimics the sound patterns of the native language of their parents.  The study, published in the Journal That Publishes Such Things, involved recording the newborn howls of 100 French and German houserats and listening to them to discern patterns…sort of like being on the airplane from screeching hell but being paid for it.  The howls of the French screechers tended to inflect upwards towards the end, with the German howlers inflecting downwards as per their respective languages.  In a related study, the same researchers are looking at the nascent crawling habits of the same groups of batrastards.  Seems that while the French tots tend to move about at random as per the classic “drunkard’s walk”, the German tyros almost inevitably begin moving towards the east.

The White House recently released the names on their visitor logs.  When the usual pack of frothing-at-the-mouth boneheads combed the list in a fine-toothed sort of way to detect the sort of hidden ideological crimes that can temporarily substitute for that little blue pill, they found such names as Michael Jordan, William Ayers, Michael Moore, Jeremiah Wright and Malik Shabazz.  The White House enraged the schauzers even further by adding that although these names were indeed notorious, they belonged to those who weren’t the notorious ones.  There’s the even funnier possibility that some wag of a visitor named, say, John Smith, decided to liven things up a bit by not signing up as John Smith.  An even funnierer possibility is that someone in the White House just made the names up to see how much more spittle it could produce from the RNC’s loyal toadies at Fox News and in the blogosphere.  I suspect that even if they’d included Heywood Jablome, Mike Hunt, Amanda Huginkiss and Joe Stalin the knuckle-dragging self-abusers wouldn’t have gotten it. Given that even he gets it eventually, all the usual suspects are accomplishing via their panty wadding is proving themselves more pathetic than Moe on the Simpsons.  The closest the mouth-breathers are going to get to a Holocaust equivalence here is that some low-level White House functionary might be goofing off a tenth as much per day on the taxpayer dollar as the immediately previous occupant of the oval office.