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Tortilla Soup

Published by Jenny Dreadful May 20th, 2008 in recipes. 0 Comments

I just made this tonight, and it fucking rocked. It was mad cheap, too, and it can easily be made vegan or vegetarian.

You’ll need:

5 corn tortillas
Corn oil
1 or 2 jalapenos
4 or 5 red ripe tomatoes
summer squash
8 cups of chicken or vegetable stock
chili powder
cumin
about half a bell pepper
1 yellow onion
Juice from 1 lime
3 or 4 cloves of garlic
2 or 3 bay leaves
salt and pepper, to taste

First, heat up a few tablespoons of corn oil and fry each of the tortillas individually until they’re nice and golden brown and crispy. Season them with salt, blot the excess oil off and set them aside. Chop the onion, bell pepper, and jalapeno, sautee them in oil until the onion starts to get transparent. Then add your chopped cloves of garlic, your diced tomato, and your summer squash. Add the lime juice, bay leaves, and ground cumin, too, along with the chili powder. This should start to smell heavenly in a few minutes. Once the squash starts to get tender, add the vegetable or chicken stock. Bring this to a boil and then rip up the tortillas and toss them in. Turn the heat down to a simmer and cook for just a few more minutes. Voila! It’s done. And you know what? It’s fucking delicious. And pretty healthy, too, if you don’t go all crazy with the salt and the oil. Enjoy!

Deported For Lack Of Insurance

Published by Jenny Dreadful May 17th, 2008 in assholes, racism, immigrant rights and arizona. 3 Comments

This is a very sad story.

A woman from Honduras, who has been in the US for over 17 years and whose visa is legal, is at risk of being deported for lack of insurance. She recently awoke from a coma in an Arizona hospital after complications resulting from delivering her baby. Now the hospital is trying to send her back to Honduras, where she has no family. Let me reiterate, this woman is IN THIS COUNTRY LEGALLY.

From the article:

McBride said that at St. Joseph’s, where about $25 million in charity care was applied to uncovered patients in 2007, all options are discussed with patients who need long-term care. Facilities such as community health centers, which provide a sliding scale for payment, are available.

“If they can’t afford that, typically, is when we’re forced to send a patient back to their home country, where they’re usually eligible for health care. This is not an easy decision at all,” McBride said. McBride said about eight patients a month are sent to their home countries.

Curtin said that Iscoa, now the mother of seven children, has been taken out of the intensive-care unit. Iscoa has a brain injury, non-functioning kidneys and is being tube-fed. A neurological assessment has not been done, Curtin said.

Iscoa has been in the country legally since 1998. She works in a carpentry shop and as a house cleaner.

A family spokeswoman said earlier that St. Joseph’s was planning to transfer Iscoa to a facility called Hospital Escuela in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, that treats indigent patients.

Don’t read the comments at the source unless you’re a masochist. The complete lack of empathy those people have for this woman, or for people in general, is pathological.

UPDATE: There’s a fund set up to help with medical expenses. Here’s the info. Donate if you can, and send the link around if you can’t. Thanks!

Huckabee “Jokes” About Obama Getting Shot

Published by Jenny Dreadful May 16th, 2008 in election, crazy conservatives and racism. 0 Comments

Not funny, Huckabee. Not funny at all.

How could anyone EVER think it would be appropriate to make a joke about a presidential candidate getting assassinated? ESPECIALLY a historic candidate like Obama? Let’s hope that the media makes this foulup a difficult one for Huckabee to forget.

What an asshole.

Via Wonkette.

Detainees Are Being Drugged Against Their Will For Deportation

Published by Jenny Dreadful May 16th, 2008 in world news, torture and immigrant rights. 1 Comment

This story is one of the most frightening things I have ever read. According to the Washington Post, the US government has injected literally hundreds of immigrants with potent cocktails of anti-psychotic drugs and sedatives against their will to help facilitate deportation. These are people who, by and large, don’t have a history of ever becoming violent and have no history of mental illness. And they’re using drugs that were used by the Soviets to medicate political dissidents during the Cold War. It’s scary shit. Here’s a brief excerpt, but please, read the entire thing:

The first time immigration agents tried to deport Michel Shango, he slammed his head, hard, against the outside of the van that had come to pick him up at Atlanta’s city jail. Instead of being driven to the airport, then flown to the Democratic Republic of Congo, he was brought back to the jail so his wound could be tended to.

“I asked him why he feared being returned back to his country,” an immigration officer wrote of the incident. Shango, now 42, replied that he had been a journalist and had written articles critical of the Congolese government. “Detainee stated . . . that he might as well die trying to avoid deportation,” a second officer wrote, “because they will kill him as soon as he gets to the D.R. of the Congo.”

Until early 1996, Shango worked in Congo, ghostwriting articles and supplying information to foreign correspondents about the repressive administration of President Mobutu Sese Seko, he said in telephone interviews from locations in Congo, Gabon and Equatorial Guinea, where friends are now helping him hide. Eventually Shango was arrested, he and two of his lawyers said, but he escaped to Canada, then settled in North Carolina, where he started a limousine business with a cousin in Charlotte. He married an American, who at first offered to help him become a citizen. The marriage dissolved. He applied for political asylum. He was turned down.

He was remarried to a Congolese woman by the time immigration officers came to his house at 4:30 one morning in May 2006. As his wife and their three American-born children cried at the frightening scene, the officers led him away at gunpoint.
In their own words Deportee describes sedation drugs’ effect
Glossary/Cast of Characters Michel Shango describes more of his deportation experience.Press play to listen.

On Feb. 28, 2007, three months after the first deportation attempt was aborted because of the head-banging incident, seven guards arrived at the Atlanta jail to make a second attempt. Shango glanced at his watch and noted that it was 1:45 p.m. “They pushed me against the wall,” he recalled. “They pulled my pants down.” His medical log shows that he was given seven shots in his right buttock and right shoulder before he boarded the airplane.

The log says his only psychological problem was “anxiety disorder.”

By the time Shango reached Congo, records show, he had been injected with 32.5 milligrams of Haldol and 7.5 milligrams of Ativan. As he was thrown into a prison after he got off the plane, and even as friends helped him escape, he was so disoriented, he said, that he did not fully know where he was. For two weeks, Shango said, “It was like I was dreaming. . . . I started crying, crying, crying all day long. . . . I was like crazy, because [of] the drugs, knocking me down.”

Via Wonkette.

California Legalizes Gay Marriage!

Published by Jenny Dreadful May 15th, 2008 in gay rights and world news. 0 Comments

This is great news!

I Told You So.

Published by Jenny Dreadful May 13th, 2008 in the environment, other blogs, psychology and interesting stuff. 0 Comments

If you look at people as self-rationalizing beings and not rational beings, then it explains a lot. Amanda recently wrote about how high gas prices are impacting all of the suburban SUV owners who’ve been rationalizing purchasing these gas hogs with nary a peep of regret until pretty much now. People are more likely to retroactively try to justify a bad decision they’ve made than they are to admit that hey, they’ve made a mistake. That’s because most people have an image of themselves as intelligent and kind and forward thinking, and when they get information that contradicts that, they’re more likely to make up an excuse and rationalize their bad decision than they are to essentially re-write themselves as fallible. We’re all susceptible to this sort of self-rationalizing behavior and we all do it. In fact, as Amanda points out, if you ever meet someone who claims to be immune to the self-rationalization loop, then they’re probably extremely susceptible to exactly the sort of thinking that they deride. The more convinced you are of your rationality, the less likely you are to see your choices as irrational and hence, the more likely you are to justify them instead of admitting you’ve made a mistake.

Like that damn Activia yogurt. It’s marketed as a very special yogurt because it has live active cultures in it, when, in fact, almost every brand of commercially available yogurt has live active cultures in it already. All you have to do is look at the container and it will say whether or not it has live active cultures in it. Activia does not have the bifidus market cornered. So let’s say you go to a friend’s house and she’s eating this Activia yogurt, and she says to you, “Man, these live active cultures in this Activia yogurt are making me feel great.” If you then said to her, “That’s great, but there are lots of brands of cheaper yogurt that have live active cultures in them, too,” then I BET YOU A HUNDRED DOLLARS SHE WOULD SAY THIS TO YOU—“Well, I really like the way this Activia tastes, too. It tastes better than other yogurts.” She will dig in her heels and claim that she liked the yogurt for some other reason, rather than admit she didn’t know about the cultures being in pretty much every damn yogurt. There are a few people in every situation who will listen to what you have to say, but most of the time, even if the stakes are very low, like regarding yogurt, people will do what they have to do to avoid being “wrong.”

I think most people don’t want to be “wrong” because it opens themselves up to ridicule, and most people, given the chance, love to say “I told you so.” Everyone has this self-image where they’re so capable and smart, and what that does is make people a.) increasingly likely to refuse to face situations where they’ve made a mistake and b.) increasingly likely to make fun of and try to humiliate someone who they know who’s admitted to making a mistake. This loop has got to stop. Seriously. It’s not helping anyone.

People find themselves so goddamn frightened to back out of a worsening situation that they dig in their heels to stave off criticism. I’m just as guilty of this behavior as anyone else. I’ve remained in poisonous relationships for longer than was reasonable because I didn’t want to admit to my friends that they were right and that I’d had a lapse in judgment. I suggest that we all make a special point of NOT rubbing our friends’ noses in the mistakes they’ve made. I suggest we all start admitting when we make mistakes and learn than refusing to acknowledge our own fallibility is not only arrogant, it’s insane. Maybe we can slowly break the self-rationalizing feedback loop that keeps people living beyond their means, or in shitty relationships, or participating in pyramid schemes, or driving SUVs or voting Republican.

Pervasive Mediocrity. In your face.

Published by Jenny Dreadful May 9th, 2008 in media, culture, other blogs and people that suck. 0 Comments

This thread at Pandagon about the intersection of Christian and secular pop culture was really interesting. The fact that Christian pop music, which purports to connect its listeners with the infinite, always sounds so bland and uninspired has long been a source of amusement for me. Basically, what’s interesting is the fact that Christian pop culture hasn’t developed so much into its own subculture as it has borrowed from its crappy secular counterparts. Evidently, a market exists for Christian My Little Pony knockoffs, Christian techno music, and Christian light switch covers. That people see a need for a Christian version of all of these innocuous products is pretty amazing on its own, but what’s really interesting is how crappy, and yet, how ubiquitous, the original secular versions of all these items are. It’s schlock I’m referring to—Hilary Duff records, Thomas Kinkade prints, and TGI Fridays shot glasses. All of this stuff is the providence of people who, Amanda says, “never bothered to develop tastes.” That phrasing turned on a million light switches in my head. It suddenly occurred to me that this, THIS, is the reason why I become so crestfallen when someone describes Garth Brooks as their favorite country singer, or Chili’s as their favorite restaurant.

I grew up in the Inland Empire in California, and a few years back the Press Enterprise newspaper ran a “Best of Inland Empire” section. They surveyed thousands of people about their favorite taco joint, their favorite hamburger stand, their favorite breakfast place, and so on. When the results came back, it was a bleak picture. Taco Bell, McDonalds, Denny’s. There are so many great places to get a taco in the IE that if you list Taco Bell as your fave, then you are functionally retarded. Tacos Mexico in Norco and Highland serves up the most delicious, and the cheapest, Mexican fare this side of the border. Their horchata is so light and refreshing that it is as if moonlight were somehow whipped into it. And the drive-thru is 24-7! Come on! The idea that so many residents of the Inland Empire fail to ever wander off the path laid out for them by multinational corporations and get breakfast somewhere interesting is sad and frustrating. Why do these people let the voices on the TV and the radio make all their decisions for them?

It’s not that I demand everyone share my tastes in everything. But never developing an enthusiasm for anything that’s not solidly in the mainstream is not the same as having tastes. At all.

Meat, meat, meat.

Published by Jenny Dreadful April 11th, 2008 in veganism and food. 0 Comments

So everyone’s favorite spinster aunt Twisty has jumped back on the vegan bandwagon, as I almost simultaneously backslid into omnivoria. That’s right, folks, I’ve been consuming animal products. At first I consumed them guiltily, occasionally, and with many excuses. Now I’m back to buying chicken breast at the grocery store and and eating it in a white wine sauce with roasted asparagus, just like old times.

I gave up meat about a year after I left college. The sanctimonious preaching of many bedreadlocked upper-middle-class white kids in skinny jeans didn’t sway me to the vegan cause during my tenure at a mostly upper-middle-class liberal arts college in California. In fact, I found those kids annoying, judgmental, and classist. As I’ve written about here extensively, I grew up in a family that didn’t have a lot of money, and having little else to pride myself on during college, I prided myself on my working-class roots. The only tangible manifestations of this were my collection of old country records and my ability to throw together a delicious meat-based meal on a shoe-string budget. I may have just been another white kid studying comparative literature in a sea of white kids studying comparative literature, but man, at least I had culture. I had country music and meat! I grew up in a trailer! You should try my carne asada! These small things were important to me, and I invested more of my identity in my meat-eating than I probably should have. I equated it with toughness, with resilience, with adaptability.

Then, after leaving college and learning how goddamned terrible industrialized farming is for the environment, I gave up meat and animal products. I learned to use quinoa to stuff portabella mushrooms and I bought some nutritional yeast. I made tasty equivalents of my favorite meat-based recipes and I tried a lot of new food. I’m sure I inadvertently consumed butter here and there during my visits to several all-you-can-eat Indian buffets, but for the most part, I was pretty stringent. It seemed pretty clear to me that claiming to care about the environment while simultaneously subsisting upon beef and dairy wasn’t a tenable position.

Basically, after about two years, I failed to thrive on a vegan diet. I gained about twenty-five pounds, and got sicker with more frequency than I ever had before. Wounds took longer to heal than they normally did. My hair thinned out a little and my skin, oh my god, my skin broke out worse than it had during puberty. It’s obvious that my diet wasn’t as well-planned as I thought it was, and basically, I failed. It was a combination of laziness, which resulted in a heavy reliance upon convenience foods, and a general inability to get my ethics to align nicely with what I wanted to eat.

I think the first dilemma I came across that really made me think was this: I was at a locally owned Mexican food joint called Tacos Jalisco. I thought to ask them if their beans were vegetarian, and of course, they were made with lard. I knew I could go to Taco Bell and have them omit the cheese and meat from any item on their menu and have it be technically vegan, but was that any more ethical than just eating the lard beans from Tacos Jalisco? Taco Bell is owned by the Yum-Yum corporation, which is pretty infamous for its shitty track record on immigrant rights. But Tacos Jalisco is owned by a local family, not some evil exploitative company. So I can either help Taco Bell save money on their bottom line by cutting cheese and meat costs, or I can eat at Tacos Jalisco, with their lard beans and their juke box that plays banda music exclusively.

As you can imagine, it didn’t take long before I was eating the caldo de siete mares at Tacos Jalisco as well as the death burritos. Then it was organic, free-range chicken. Then for St. Patrick’s day, I bought a corned beef. And now I’m just a regular meat-eating person again, I guess. I’m not opposed to giving veganism another try, but I think I wore out my food-ethics muscle, at least for a while. Has anyone else gone vegan and come back again? Would you go vegan again? Any successful, long-term vegans care to chime in?

The politics of food, and of meat in particular, are very interesting. Twisty makes some good points for going vegan in the post I linked to above. She also makes some great points about the intersection of animal rights and human rights. And somehow, I’m just having a hard time making myself feel guilty about stuffing mouthful after mouthful of dead animal into my mouth every night. It’s sad and strange to have your compassion muscle give out like that. I’m rather confused about it all, to be honest.

Lynchings Motivated By Economics

Published by Jenny Dreadful March 29th, 2008 in racism and violence. 0 Comments

This is very interesting.

You always hear that lynchings occurred either as an overreaction to a petty crime or as a response to Reconstruction or just as a particularly violent manifestation of your run-of-the-mill racist hatred. But apparently, many of the black men who were lynched in the South were the wealthier members of their community, and the lynchings were orchestrated in order to seize their property, money, and other assets.

It’s always important to remember that being racist, or sexist or what-have-you has tangible benefits–even monetary benefits–and that’s why it continues.

On Being Bullied

Published by Jenny Dreadful March 29th, 2008 in assholes, crazy conservatives, violence and bullies. 2 Comments

Has anyone else read this heartbreakingly sad article in the New York Times? It’s about a 15-year-old kid named Billy Wolfe who gets beaten up, psychologically abused, and otherwise tortured by some shithead bullies at his school. What’s worse is that in typical fashion, the school administration has failed to do anything about it, and in many cases has even tried to implicate Billy as a guilty party in his own bullying.

As a kid, I was bullied, which is still somewhat shameful to admit, because kids who are bullied are a minority of people who are basically targeted by everybody else, including, in some cases, administrators and teachers. I was picked on my fellow students to a pretty extreme degree from about the 4th grade to the 9th grade, and during this time, I can name at least four teachers and two administrators who helped to perpetuate it.

The way that it works is this: people who share a common social bond can reinforce their own social power and strengthen their bonds by targeting and disenfranchising someone who is not part of their group. So the purpose of bullying isn’t sadism for its own benefit–it defines the borders of a group more explicitly, and everybody wants to feel like they’re a part of something, and so there you have it. As you get older, of course, poking at people who are essentially wounded animals in order to see if they roll over and show their bellies becomes less tolerated, and people have to find other ways to maintain the exclusivity, and hence, the intimacy, of their social groups. Fraternities, sororities, and lodges are good examples of this.

When I was in the 7th grade, I was sexually harassed by this piece of shit kid who was probably a junior or senior in high school. He used to barely hide his erect penis behind his school binder on the bus, level his eyes at me, and start jacking off, making sure I would know exactly what he was doing, even if nobody else did. He basically made my life a living hell for about 3 or four months, following me around campus, sending me obscene notes through his disgusting friends, and just generally insinuating that when and if he got the chance he was going to rape me. During this time, as you can imagine, I thought about killing myself pretty much every goddamn day. I was terrified for anyone to find out what was happening because I was afraid that if the police got involved it would shine a spotlight on some very personal family issues and it would just end up disrupting my life even more.

So one day when I’d finally had enough, I went to see a school administrator to tell him what had been happening and see if he could stop it. Let’s call him S. Nettles, to protect his privacy. No, wait, that would be too obvious. Let’s call him Scott N. (Simpson’s joke FOR THE WIN!) He was our guidance counselor/disciplinarian, which is about the worst combination of jobs for a person to have and expect kids to trust him, but there you go. Anyway, I told him that the kid had been bothering me, following me around, trying to follow me into the bathroom, asking me disgusting personal questions, always telling me how “sexy” I was and so on, and Mr. Guidance Counselor Disciplinarian told me, “Well, it sounds like he’s got a crush on you. That’s perfectly natural.” I think I stared in disbelief at him and he just said, “Well, what do you want me to do?”

You see, Mr. Guidance Counselor Disciplinarian saw that creepy kid was asserting his dominance over me. And by reporting the bullying to him, I had essentially extended him the opportunity to assert his dominance over me as well. People will fawn all over people who have power, even if they took that power by brute force, which is what the creepy kid had done to me. People want to align themselves with the powerful, and Mr. Guidance Counselor Disciplinarian, with his smug smile and his bald head and me weeping in his office, had done just that. Think of this whenever you hear some idiot bleating about how great President Bush is, or Napoleon was, or whoever.

Sexual harassment, to be clear, is a form of bullying. And when a woman is sexually assaulted it’s an attempt to take her power from her. And look what happens when she tries to report it! Everyone will wonder what she was wearing, or if she was drunk, or otherwise insinuate that she deserved it. It’s another attempt by people to align themselves with the powerful (ie, men) by jumping on the opportunity to disenfranchise someone else.

It’s obvious that in our culture, the default setting for the average person is considered to be white, male, middle class, Christian and heterosexual. And probably 75% of conservative bleating seeks specifically to further disempower people who don’t fall into that group. All of this hating against gay marriage, or women’s reproductive rights, or national healthcare–it’s all bullying. Gay bashing is certainly a form of bullying–and wanting to deprive gay people of the right to marry is a difference of DEGREE, not of KIND.

That’s why there’s this huge emphasis on how wimpy liberals and progressives supposedly are. People want to align themselves with a sneering, mean-spirited BULLY like Bush (or at least they did when he was elected) because they don’t care how big a piece of shit a person is, as long as they are powerful.

I say all this on the heels of my younger brother getting assaulted outside of a gas station for the crime of being (sorry Billy) visibly wimpy. No matter that he’s a wonderful person or a the funniest guy you’ll ever meet, let’s reinforce our manly social bonds by attacking somebody!!

Growing up with a hothead father in a slum of a town with few friends and fewer outlets for my horrible, horrible misery, I will say that in general, I am a person who is completely and utterly unimpressed with power. I may have been mean to one or two people, but unlike some other kids who were bullied, I didn’t just find the kid on the next rung down and make his or her life hell. No way. And even though years and years have gone by and some of the kids who’ve bullied me have sort of become my friends, I have to say that I distrust people who are enamored of power. I think that these are the same kind of people who will engage in torturing someone if everyone else is doing it, just to be part of the group. This is what happened in Abu Ghraib, it’s what happens whenever someone is gang raped, and let’s face it people, it’s what happens whenever a gay-hating douchebag with swagger in his step and penchant for cowboy hats and stripping women of their reproductive rights is elected to public office.

So fuck bullies, and fuck the dimwitted pieces of shit who stand beside them, throwing rocks at gay kids or making abortion illegal.

Read this post at Pandagon for Amanda’s take on the Billy Wolfe case and bullying in general.