sisu

"Fundamentally rendered insane by power"

The totalitarian instinct -- the will to control others' behavior -- has ancient roots amongst faunal and floral species that have survived the great winnowing process of evolution. Eat or be eaten. Defend your turf or lose your place in the sun. Or, in Baby and Tiny's case, above, apply the Think System to the "little people" -- that would be ourselves --  to get the cat food into the bowls. For visual resonance, see also "Lengthy sequences without dialogue."

"When the roots collapse from the acid, the plant loses its integrity and dies. It's like having a building with no foundation -- it's on its way to self-destruction," University of Delaware plant biologist Harsh Bais told a Live Science reporter re phytoterrorist Phragmites australis, "one of the known thugs of the invasive plant world," as Greenman Tim explains:

I have personally spent many seasons in the field combating the spread of this species in sensitive habitats and know it to be a fearsome adversary.  The introduced strain of this giant reed has out-competed native Phragmites in eastern North America, altered species composition and wetlands hydrology, and created virtual monocultures in the habitats it infests.  It has all the hallmarks that make a plant species an effective invader -- vegetative propagation as well as by wind dispersed seeds, thrives in disturbed areas, able to leap spatial gaps -- and now we learn that it has another arrow in its bristling quiver. Phragmites uses chemical warfare against its neighbors (GWB, take note).

We have seen the devastation wrought by the asymmetric warfare being waged against native marsh species all along Rte I 95 in our travels down east to Goomp's. Able to thrive in both fresh and brackish water, Phragmites has overrun vast stretches of the Great Bog in Portsmouth, NH, and is quickly crowding out the few remnants of saltwater marsh left in our own backyard along the Chelsea Creek. Gory details from the Live Science article:

Phragmites takes this cunning chemical warfare to a new level, using the strategy not so much to keep away other plants as to aggressively conquer them and invade new territory . . .

[Plant biologists] found both invasive and native Phragmites produced so-called gallic acid, a chemical humans use to tan leather. But the invasive plant released the acid from its roots at much higher concentrations than did natives.

Once exuded into the surrounding environment, the toxin targets a structural protein called tubulin found in the roots of neighboring plants. The protein keeps plant roots intact and helps them grow straight in the soil.

Within 10 minutes of exposure to the toxin in the lab, the tubulin of a marsh plant started to disintegrate. In 20 minutes, the structural material was gone.

Phragmites's insidious allelopathic destruction of the roots of native plant species called to mind -- what else? -- the Soviet Union's toxic targeting of our elite cultural institutions -- the government, the entertainment industry, the press and academia -- last century with memetic exudations of politically correct, multi-cultural Gramscian discourse designed to destroy the roots of the Tree of Liberty and replace the shining city upon a hill with the soul-deadening monoculture of a totalitarian state. The Barrister at Maggie's Farm has our number:

[The Totalitarian State] is what governments always tend towards, and it must be resisted by proud, strong free men and women before we all become serfs of The State. If you think that is hyperbole, then just watch, say nothing, and do nothing.

The "political class" isn't wise -- it's crafty and smart, but fundamentally rendered insane by power. It is a governmental disease, akin to alcoholism, and it seems to be universal. Our Founders feared this, predicted it, and made valiant efforts to prevent it.

As we ourselves are forever blogging, Gramscian infiltration or not, "the totalitarian instinct runs dark and deep in our species."  A couple of recent examples making the rounds of the blogosphere:

1. Steve Chapman at RCP [via Betsy]: Heady with their unaccustomed majority status, [the Democrats] have decided mere laws are not enough. They want to amend the Constitution . . . The amendment would give Congress complete authority to regulate "the raising and spending of money, including the setting of limits," for any federal campaign.

2. Mike S. Adams at Townhall: The University of Delaware has just become one of the most Orwellian campuses in America. Students in its residence halls are now being subjected to a re-education program that is actually dubbed -- in the university’s own taxpayer-funded materials -- as “treatment” for students who have incorrect attitudes and beliefs.

More elucidations from Perry de Haviland of Samizdata on "The mechanism by which the Total State is being built":

As a result my view is that we in the west are already well on the way to a new form of post-modern totalitarian state (what Guy Herbert calls 'soft fascism') in which behaviour and opinions which are disapproved of by the political class are pathologised and then regulated by violence backed laws "for your own good'' or "for the children" or "for the environment".

Totalitarians know what's best for the "little people," as we've blogged here early and often. From "It's the intellectual vanity, stupid" three years back:

Bubba's grating "What if you spend YOUR money WRONG?" and Hillary's equally condescending "We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good," blogged here, come to mind. They ought to stop talking and start listening to the voices of those they claim to speak for.  But whether or not they listen, those voices are speaking out and being heard, thanks to the new technologies.

"The leftist utopian dream was doomed from the start because it denied the economic logic of nature and human nature," we blogged in "Bloggers are 'cracking, popping, drilling and peeling their victims open'":

The long-repressed voices of opposition in a free society, now ringing loud and clear through talk radio, cable TV and -- of course -- the blogosphere, will force the left to rethink its arguments or go extinct.

Eat your heart out, Miss Hillary!

Update: For more animals who survived the great winnowing process of evolution, be sure to visit Modulator's Friday Ark #163 and Carnival of the Cats #188 hosted by Missy, KC and Bear.

Update II:  Bloggers really are "cracking, popping, drilling and peeling their victims open." For a pile of evidence, check out Dr. Sanity's latest Carnival of the Insanities.

NOW we have 5 to 7 perfect foods

Buttercream frosting -- flour, butter, milk [we used half and half] and vanilla  -- one of nature's perfect foods.

We: I had a Remembrance-of-things-past moment this morning. Made a batch of buttercream frosting -- straight off the Domino's Confectioner's Sugar box.

She: I'm relieved you decided against lardcream frosting.

We: As I mentioned in a recent post, sometimes only butter will do.

It was Tuck's inspiration to frost the Corny Cornbread and Suzi's insight to garnish with candy corn. We were the one who came up with the idea of making them into cupcakes/muffins and adding birthday candles.

She: I used to soften the butter, then whip it, then beat in the sugar.

We: Sounds like a good idea, but I, instead, had the butter out of the fridge perhaps a half hour and then cut into smallish cubes before adding.

She: As you said, the cornbread is sweet, yet has that nice bite-back texture of a muffin. Before you discovered lard and now buttercream, the perfect three were Mayo, sour cream and peanut butter. NOW we have 5 to 7 perfect foods.

If we could all be like spinach, weight loss would be a piece of cake.

Speaking of straight off the package, Spinach Italienne is where it's at. Heat a little olive oil and garlic -- in our case, roasted garlic -- over low heat in a large frying pan and add a package of picked-over spinach in batches till it all cooks down to next to nothing. Toss in some grated parmesan and a little lemon juice. Pour into a colander and press to remove excess liquid. Put into a small baking dish and reheat 15 minutes at 350° before serving.

As the Mother of All Sensible Eating -- our elegant, swelegant sis -- always says, if you have a lot of different savory and sweet things on the plate in small amounts, it seems like a lot of food but doesn't put on the pounds. And she's got the figure to prove it.

Having it all. Grilled rib eye, Spring Chicken Delight, brats, Potato Meltdown, Spinach Italienne and Sweet Potato with Marshmallows.

Potato Meltdown on ice before going under the broiler. So much good stuff to cook, so little time.

"Best piece of chicken I ever ate in 88  years," says the old salt.

Occupying forces

Put a cardboard box on the dining room table . . .

. . . and the cats will come. Tiny, top, tests the waters and then occupies the site early morning.

The Trucker's Full Moon

The view from the bottom of our front steps looking west this morning as the Hunter's Full Moon was setting and a Hannaford's truck was speeding by in the direction of the Boston Market Terminal on the other side of town to stock up on produce to take up to Goomp's local Hannafords down east, where we will be shopping around this time tomorrow in preparation for a birthday luncheon on Sunday. Full disclosure: Moon size exaggerated for dramatic effect by cutting and pasting from another, zoomed-in image taken moments earlier.

This one's for Elisson, who challenged us -- in comments to our recent post "When madness struck" -- to push our animated giffing up a notch by leaping into the perilous waters of "tweening" :

It's trickier to do a good, clean lap dissolve, but I figured out how, by using layer transparency and the tweening function.

Keep on truckin'.

So many posts, so little time

When it comes to felinosphere rankings, we have it from the Father of All Carnivals of the Cats, Laurence Simon himself: "Tiny [above plotting her next food-procuring move] and Baby rule."

"Which blogs should we read to avoid missing important stories?" asks a team of Carnegie-Mellon researchers in an award-winning paper -- "Cost-effective Outbreak Detection in Networks" -- that's been heating up the 'sphere. We first got wind of the story a couple of days ago in a link to the study in our Site Meter stats. Clicking over, we were quite surprised and not a little skeptical to find our own blog ranked #32 in a list of the 100 "most informative blogs." From the Introduction:

Our  goal is to select a small set of blogs . . . which "catch" as many cascades (stories) as possible. A naive, intuitive solution would be to select the big, well-known blogs. However, these usually have a large number of posts and are time-consuming to read. We show that, perhaps counterintuitively, a more cost-effective solution can be obtained by reading smaller but higher quality blogs, which our algorithm can find.

So many posts, so little time. The plot thickened this morning when the Site Meter revealed a trickling of visitors from the estimable Charlston Daily Mail columnist Don Surber's blog:

I might not be able to get my swelled head in the car today after reading that my blog is No. 2 in best reads . . . This is according to researchers at Carnegie-Mellon University who used algorithms and other stuff that I don’t understand to determine which blogs are the most efficient use of one’s time.

Don -- may we call you Don? -- had linked the Top 40 of the Top 100, and there we were, sitting pretty at #32 [Bats eyelashes]. Meanwhile, Instapundit at #1 lent further weight to the whole enterprise with his usual concise, terse, pithy prose:

CARNEGIE-MELLON RANKS THE MOST INFORMATIVE BLOGS, and their methodology is clearly sound.

As Don Surber said from his own lofty perch at #2:

Still it is fun and flattering to see one’s name ranked so highly.

Blogfriend Steve of Modulator -- AKA Noah of the Friday Ark -- weighing in at #7, emailed us this tasty tidbit:

BTW, have you checked out who is #1 on this variant of their study? No Insta... here!!

Indeed. Heh. And herewith, to save our readers time and keep 'em coming back for more, the list:

  1. Instapundit
  2. Don Surber
  3. Science & Politics
  4. Watcher of Weasels
  5. Michelle Malkin
  6. National Journal's Blogometer
  7. The Modulator
  8. BloggersBlog.com
  9. Boing Boing
10. Atrios
11. A Blog for All
12. Gothamist
13. mparent777
14. TFS Magnum
15. Alliance of Free Blogs
16. anglican.tk
17. Micropersuasion
18. Pajamas Media
19. BlogHer
20. MyPetJawa
21. Reddit
22. Soccer Dad
23. Nose on Your Face
24. Ahistorically
25. The Anchoress
26. AMERICAblog
27. sfist
28. TBogg
29. HorsePigCow
30. Why Homeschool
31. The Daou Report
32. Sisu
33. MetaFilter
34. Megite
35. LAist
36. Captain's Quarters
37. Shakesville
38. Guy Kawasaki
38. Lucy by Lucy
40. Blue Star Chronicle
41. Official Google Blog
42. The Glittering Eye
43. O Planeta Asterisco
44. Read/WriteWeb
45. Hullabaloo
46. The Conservative Cat
47. Phillyist
48. The Social Customer Manifesto
49. The Next Net
50. Gateway Pundit
51-100 below the fold

"A great list to have. I plan to visit each over time," imails Goomp, who adds:

Some blogs get tiresome because they say the same thing over and over even tho they are things that need to be said. Sisu is informative and innovative and refreshing.

Well, he IS our father. Thanks for your continuing support, Goomp.

Update: For more animals -- with and without backbones -- for your blog-reading dollar, head over to Modulator Steve's Friday Ark #162.

"The cat's gone viral"

Frame from British animation production company TANDEM's animated short "Flatworld. (2D, cut-out, stop-frame. Director: Daniel Greaves.) Tuck, who loves a real-world rubber-hits-the-road Los Angeles car chase as much as the next fellow, was enchanted -- as were we -- by the animators' prestidigitational manipulations of paper and light.

"The cat's gone viral" headlines the latest post at Random Tandem, news blog of the internationally-recognised, London-based animation production company TANDEM.

Detail of a frame from Tandem Director Simon Tofield's brilliant animated short "Cat Man Do" -- wherein the pussycat applies the "Think System on Steroids" to get his food source up and at 'em -- that has ailurophiles all over the internet rolling in the aisles. This artist knows how to draw -- the expressive elegance of his line is deceptively simple -- and as everyone who knows cats knows, he KNOWS cats.

We stumbled upon the TANDEM site and blog while tracking down the source of that totally awesome animated short that's been making the rounds of the ailurosphere in the last period of time. We first heard about it from Megan of Bad  Kitty Cats, who first heard about it from Strange Ranger. We also heard about it from blogfriends Annie of Ambivablog, who heard about it from her brother-in-law in Canada, and Teresa of Technicalities, who heard about it from her daughter. In related developments, Goomp and our sis first heard about it from ourselves. As Tandem's blog explains, word of cybermouth has legs:

Tandem director Simon Tofield's short film Cat Man Do is now officially a web phenomenon! Having roared past the half a million hits mark on just one of its numerous YouTube placings, that cat is a runaway success. Although appearing under several alternative titles e.g. Wake up Cat or Kitty Wake Up Call etc. some fans have correctly attributed Simon's work. Click here to see the film.

YouTube giveth -- can you say priceless free advertising? -- and YouTube taketh away -- Yes, you, Hillary!

"And it wasn't even Britney"

"And it wasn't even Britney," quips Tuck as the two of us giggle like schoolgirls over the recent soaring of our stats (screen shot above taken at 3:23 this afternoon) produced by a steady stream of curious visitors from Instapundit coming over to find out what had spooked the Professor.

Among the curious were a number of newcomers in the comments with good humor and good advice on how to improve our animated gifs. Thanks so much, guys. Next time we get it in mind to do an animation, we're going to google "sisu imageready animated gif" and head on over to "When madness struck" to review our own notes and try our luck with your excellent suggestions.

Instaspike as of 6 pm sign-off: 8K plus. Not to mention a lovely nod from the suet-swilling Bird Dog at Maggie's Farm:

Animal fats are good for you.

And another citation from the righteous Steve H of Hog on Ice:

Against Overwhelming Odds, I am Right Again.

Keep 'em coming. We can never get enough.

"Animal fats are nutritious, satisfying and they taste good"

The lard is in the larder. Crisp plastic containers -- a pound each -- of pure white non-hydrogenated leaf lard from Dietrich's Meats in Pennsylvania (610-756-6344) are stacked up in the freezer in anticipation of our next pie -- chocolate for Tuck's birthday? -- or batch of Chelsea Baked Beans. Lard isn't for everything you bake, of course. We tried substituting lard for butter in our experimental kitchen the other day for a batch of Ocean Spray's Classic Cranberry Nut Bread and found the result quite bland. Sometimes only butter will do. For flavor and flakiness, our pie crusts incorporate both butter and lard.

"Detailed research -- much of it done at Harvard -- shows that the total amount of fat in the diet, whether high or low, isn't really linked with disease," explains the Harvard School of Public Health's "The Nutrition Source," acknowledging the cascade of consensus fifty years ago that led the sheeple to accept the notion that fatty foods "were causing coronary heart disease and other deadly ailments." Instead, according to the latest thinking, "What really matters is the type of fat in the diet":

What is becoming clearer and clearer is that bad fats, meaning saturated and trans fats, increase the risk for certain diseases while good fats, meaning monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats, lower the risk. The key is to substitute good fats for bad fats.

And cholesterol in food? Although it is still important to limit the amount of cholesterol you eat, especially if you have diabetes, dietary cholesterol isn't nearly the villain it's been portrayed to be.

Not all would agree that saturated fats are "bad" per se (see below), but there seems to be no dissent regarding trans fats. More from Harvard SPH:

Most of the trans fats in the American diet are found in commercially prepared baked goods, margarines, snack foods and processed foods. Commercially prepared fried foods, like French fries and onion rings, also contain a good deal of trans fat.

Trans fats are even worse for cholesterol levels than saturated fats because they raise bad LDL and lower good HDL. [Saturated fats raise both LDL and HDL.] They also fire inflammation, an overactivity of the immune system that has been implicated in heart disease, stroke, diabetes and other chronic conditions. While you should limit your intake of saturated fats, it is important to eliminate trans fats from partially hydrogenated oils from your diet. (Manufacturers must now list trans fats on the food label, right beneath saturated fats.)

Today's poster child for what's wrong with the American way of eating, trans fats entered the nation's kitchens and restaurants just over a century ago -- as we blogged here the other day -- when Procter & Gamble introduced its all-vegetable shortening Crisco as "a healthier alternative to cooking with animal fats . . . and more economical than butter," Linda Joyce Forristal quotes P&G’s first ad campaign in a tendentious but persuasive telling of "The Rise and Fall of Crisco" -- "the quintessential imitation food" -- a classic the-business-of-America-is-business tale of ingenuity and enterprise spurred by market forces:

The story of Crisco begins innocently enough in pre-Civil War America when candlemaker William Procter and his brother-in-law, soap maker James Gamble, joined forces to compete with fourteen other soap and candlemakers in Cincinnati, Ohio. P&G entered the shortening business out of necessity. In the 1890s, the meatpacking monopoly controlled the price of lard and tallow needed to make candles and soap. P&G took steps to gain control of the cottonseed oil business from farm to factory. By 1905, they owned eight cottonseed mills in Mississippi. In 1907, with the help of German chemist E. C. Kayser, P&G developed the science of hydrogenation. By adding hydrogen atoms to the fatty acid chain, this revolutionary industrial process transformed liquid cottonseed oil into a solid that resembled lard.

Not content with using hardened cottonseed oil for soaps, and mindful that electrification was forcing the candle business into decline, P&G looked for other markets for their new product. Since hydrogenated cottonseed oil resembled lard, why not sell it as a food?

Americans' embrace of Crisco and other plant-derived fats was good for business, giving rise to powerful corporate lobbies and a cascading consensus of scientific opinion that drowned out dissenting voices, as Mary Enig explains in her own dissenting "The Oiling of America":

In 1956, an American Heart Association fund-raiser aired on all three major networks . . . Panelists presented the lipid hypothesis as the cause of the heart disease epidemic and launched the Prudent Diet, one in which corn oil, margarine, chicken and cold cereal replaced butter, lard, beef and eggs. But the television campaign was not an unqualified success because one of the panelists, Dr. Paul Dudley White [cardiologist not only to President Eisenhower, but to our own paternal grandfather as well], disputed his colleagues at the AHA. Dr. White noted that heart disease in the form of myocardial infarction was nonexistent in 1900 when egg consumption was three times what it was in 1956 and when corn oil was unavailable. When pressed to support the Prudent Diet, Dr. White replied: "See here, I began my practice as a cardiologist in 1921 and I never saw an MI patent until 1928. Back in the MI-free days before 1920, the fats were butter and lard, and I think that we would all benefit from the kind of diet that we had at a time when no one had ever heard the word corn oil."

Dissenter Enig would agree:

Animal fats are nutritious, satisfying and they taste good. "Whatever is the cause of heart disease," said the eminent biochemist Michael Gurr in a recent article, "it is not primarily the consumption of saturated fats." And yet the high priests of the lipid hypothesis continue to lay their curse on the fairest of culinary pleasures -- butter and Bernaise, whipped cream, souffles and omelets, full-bodied cheeses, juicy steaks and pork sausage.

Mmmmm. We WANT to believe she knows what she's talking about, and given our species' proven preference for cascading consent, we're taking anything Harvard SPH says with a grain of salt. Sea salt, of course.

Update: The Doctor is in at the all new Carnival of the Insanities.

When madness struck

This animated gif of the Babe working the room for his supper yesterday afternoon took us untold hair-tearing hours to complete. Nobody ever said working without tools was going to be easy. PLUS. Despite using our tripod for successive images, the background jumps around. See below for the story behind the story and suggested solutions.

"I wonder what percentage of Photoshop users do make use of ImageReady [a bitmap graphics editor designed for quick editing of web graphics]. None that haven't been classified insane," quips poster Hecate on GraphicForumZ, a question-and-answer forum we stumbled into during a bout of temporary insanity of our own yesterday evening and this morning as we struggled to create and save the above animated gif of the Babe using the Think System on us during the usual supercharged half hour of the countdown to supper. Three things [those of our readers who have zero interest in such things should skip ahead to Thing #3]:

1. Since we'd just created an animated gif of Tiny only a week and a half ago, what were the chances we would have already forgotten how? But we had. As usual, PhotoShop/ImageReady's built-in "Help" was of no use. [See our post "Photoshop not responding," the top result in a google search, for circumstantial evidence.] We ended up googling for assistance and eventually abandoned the results of several hours' work and started from scratch. Apparently we had unwittingly clicked on something or other that rendered our animation unsavable in the gif format required for publication on our blog.

2. How to make an animated gif in ImageReady. A step-by-step guide for next time we forget: In Photoshop create a multi-layered image of all the stills that will make up your animation. Switch to "Edit in ImageReady" and select "Animation" from the drop-down menu in "Window." Click on arrow in upper right corner of Animation window and select "Create Layer for Each New Frame." Click on "Duplicates Current Frame" to create the desired number of frames. Use the Layers window to select, copy and paste individual stills into the frames. Use "Save Optimized As" in the File drop-down. That was easy (see animation below).

'Glad the insanity was only temporary.

3. Even though we have mastered the tripod, the successive images in both animations above are jumpy. The camera is presumably moving ever so slightly when we manually click the shutter. Solution:

'Gotta get one of these, a Pentax Electronic Cable Release. Our old snail remote cable is incompatible with Optio 450 digital.

Ahhh. Now maybe we can get back to the "serious" post we were working on yesterday afternoon when madness struck, a classic Queen-of-the-Segueway linking of the lard-killing Crisco "big lie" with the unintended consequences of Al Gore's inconvenient prevarications amongst what Tom Borelli calls "CEOs who are under the corporate social responsibility (CSR) spell."

Update: Speaking of serious posts, don't miss Carnival of the Cats #187 with Zed Monster at Bad Kitty Cats.

Update II: Pajamas Media links.

Update III: Professor Reynolds is hiding under the bed: "CAT PHOTOSHOP MADNESS: Be very afraid."

The sounds of silence

"Ominous use of dark and light and lengthy sequences without dialogue characterize both Tiny and Baby's and Ingmar Bergman's films," we wrote a couple of years back, comparing the cinematographic style of the Chelsea Grays' "Want your supper?" with that of the great Swedish director's "The Virgin Spring." Last year, in the magic light of a setting sun, Baby and Tiny were at it again, inviting our camera's eye to explore the sounds of silence. More of the same this afternoon as the scene shifted from dining room and kitchen (above) to up close and personal on our computer desk and printer (below).

As the mystical moment of incantation -- Want your suppers? -- drew near, the brooding Bergmanesque mask of "Meows and whispurrs" slipped a little, Tiny's eyes glazing over and Baby's restive gaze and tilt of the head seeming to say "Come on, Grandma. Let's eat!"

Update: More meows, purrs, bow wows, grrrs, tweet tweets and a babel of sound and furry at Modulator's Friday Ark #161.