And some of them are already soup! This is a baby lima soup with charred red onion and orange pepper, zucchini, cilantro, tomato, smoked paprika, ground coriander, and black pepper, served with buttered pan-seared toast.
@Adam_Cadmon1 It's so loathsome. None of it is even about the testimony; it's hours and hours of amateur body language analysis. He lifted his head, he blinked, she touched her hair. Who cares??
@Adam_Cadmon1 During W's candidacy, the NYT started focusing exclusively on gestures and meta analysis of clothes and hairstyles. You couldn't even find coverage of policy proposals. Then everyone was like, oh, this is much easier than talking about proposed war crimes and civil rights abuses.
Someone in an office behind mine is trying to get an AI assistant to simplify a fraction and it's taking sooooooo many steps of miscommunication and correction. At one point, "OK. I'm looking up 'can you represent that as a fraction' on the web. I found some cool answers; check it out!"
New candidate for NYC mayor emerges! My excitement about this fact reminds me of when everyone was falling in love with Barack Obama, and everything we learned about him was better than the previous detail, and some friends of mine started tempering emerging unreasonable expectations with the slogan "Get disappointed by someone new!" (gift link)
Don't try putting an onion somewhere new. Just put the onions in the same place every time, so that you don't forget about them until they gradually liquify and mysteriously fill your home with a faint, untraceable odor, that, when finally exposed directly to the organs of sense, results in an hour of retching and cleansing and sorrow. Onions go in the onion place, every time!
I grew up in the 90s when you could talk back to police. I grew up talking back to police. Learning how to refuse to obey police was one of my earliest lessons. (Talk about white privilege!) After 9/11, every single moron with a badge suddenly became a little god who must be obeyed, and now they're carrying machine guns for some reason and wearing camo for some reason, and driving miniature tanks for some reason, and they bark "you're welcome" at you for some reason. They *march* now.
One of the many many lessons of Abu Ghraib that we refuse to learn is that when you give people no training, no oversight, no consequences, no ethical boundaries, and tell them to get 100% compliance, especially from people they hate, they will become sadistic torturers and murderers. Human beings are not compliant. Anyone who knows about human beings understands this, and most of us face consequences for exercising authority with violence. The police are making little Abu Ghraibs, everywhere.
The only excuse I've heard for increased police power that makes any sense at all is that our gun laws in the US are so lax and useless that police are genuinely frightened out of their minds at all times. Hey, I have a very cool and ingenious solution for this that does *not* require every single person in the country to own multiple machine guns to be able to leave the house. In fact, hear me out, what if NO ONE had access to thousands of military-grade weapons?
In 2024, the NYPD budget was doubled from last year to $11B. We pay an average of over $1K per person in taxes to have these assholes harass us and hold our city hostage. Our public pool can't open because we can't afford lifeguards, but there are crowds of tooled-up cops in every subway station playing Candy Crush on their phones and forcing unhoused people to do tricks for them. And if anyone says a word about defunding, they get even more useless and violent to retaliate against the city.
All I'm saying is, if I were a university president and some unarmed undergrads were disagreeing with me about where their tuition dollars are spent to support a side of an international conflict, the very last people I would call for consultation and support are the NYPD, the world's worst-trained, dumbest, cruelest, richest, most racist militia, who are sitting on a pile of war machines they are sad about never getting to use on soft-bodied civilians.
There are a lot of universities that are a few pesky undergrads away from becoming a hedge fund. Students endure hours of classes taught by local community members with no degree who like making $1000 to do improv stand-up at captive young people for four months. They create clubs for people who like to read novels or learn about history or discuss philosophy or learn languages. Students mentor each other in programming, finance, and grad school exams, as well as justice. 5/
That also means that they get most of their information and direction from the internet--this crumbling, shitty, corrupted internet full of misinformation, scams, conspiracy theories, and some desperately earnest people--rather than from the mentors they have gone into nightmarish debt to learn from. Remember that they are every single bit as smart and capable as any other young people who have ever existed. They just haven't been taught much, and some have taught themselves well. 6/
They have paid more and received less than any other college students in history. Faculty have been complaining for 20 years and longer about universities being run "like a business" because universities don't work like businesses. But for the past 10 years, it's admins that haven't run the uni "like a business." They're not interested in providing a service for a consumer, or marketing that service effectively. They are making purely financial decisions regardless of consumer experience. 7/
Lecturer at Yeshiva College in #18thC & #19thC #Literature. #Bentham & #queer #aesthetics (wrote Uncommon Sense, UVaP 2022), national #debt and #slavery, #Bronx #cats #boardgames #film Chair of Columbia Seminar in 18thC European Culture, Treasurer of the #Johnsonians, #philosophy reviews editor of JECS.#Admin of c18.masto.host, an instance for anyone with an interest or scholarship in any aspect of the global eighteenth century. All disciplines welcome!http://carrieshanafelt.com