Hello again! It’s primary day in the Granite State, which means I will finally get some respite from phone calls about the election, so that’s nice.
There are others much wiser and more plugged in than me who can give you the ins and outs of the primary, so I’ll be brief. From my vantage point, it’s been a boring one - decent crowds at the events and town halls but very little excitement out there. For some reason, the proximity of national news media gives me the willies whereas before it seemed like a neat bonus of living here. But enough about that, there’s more important (and delicious) ground to cover.
Food: Cheat Ingredient #1 - Smoked Salt
This will not come as a surprise, but salt is essential to cooking. While many home cooks use kosher salt, a little variety in your pantry can make a world of difference. I could go on about all the specialty salts from The Spice and Tea Exchange, but today I will restrain myself and focus on a workhorse in my kitchen, San Francisco Salt Company’s Applewood Smoked Salt. This stuff is so good, and such a welcome change for anyone who has tried to use Liquid Smoke and ended up with a steak that tastes like a dirty chimney. The smoke flavor from this salt is light and slightly fruity, courtesy of the applewood. I keep mine in this nifty little box I got in Georgia.
Everyone knows about sweet, salty, bitter, sour, and umami - smoked salt has the versatility to cover four of the five. It adds depth of flavor that can’t be beat to eggs, sauces, and big cuts of meat. Add some mushroom powder to the mix for another umami boost that takes dry rubs over the top. I’m recommending the applewood to start, but San Francisco Salt Company has a variety of different smokes that can give a subtle twist to whatever you’re cooking. If I had infinite money my pantry would be full of them.
Politics: Reports of The Death of Late-Stage Academic Marxism Are Greatly Exaggerated
As the all-consuming culture war rages on, higher education has become the battleground in the theater over the past few months. After a brief exchange of artillery fire (salvos of “plagiarism,” “free speech,” “a war on higher ed,” and “cancel culture”) took down some targets, the generals on Team Blue decided that we must declare all this weaponry ineligible for use. It’s just too dangerous to allow people to go around looking for plagiarism - they might have the wrong motivations! As the New York Times reports,
“The internet and software like Turnitin, which targets academic publishing and research, may make it easier to detect plagiarism. And plagiarism watchers are waiting to see what the future of artificial intelligence will bring — more plagiarism or better detection?
But until now, that software has been used more against students than against professors and administrators.
Many scholars are worried that attacks on research will be used by politicians, donors and even other scholars as a pretext to go after their ideological enemies.”
The fear of scrutiny in higher ed is about more than plagiarism - it’s about the outside world discovering the self-referential, inwardly-turned echo chamber that so many disciplines have become. For example, we’ve had several waves of scholarship concerning wealth and income inequality in America, and if you listen to most reporting, there’s no question among experts - we live in a uniquely unequal society far outside of historical norms.
But then you find out that academic researchers exclude 2/3 of government payouts to Americans in their studies, and don’t account for the reduction in income that taxes create for high-income earners. Thomas Sowell has written at great length about the statistical games that academic researchers play to create research that can be used to support changes in public policy. When you scratch a little bit, the whole edifice of modern social science is built on a wobbly foundation of Marxist-inspired mid-20th Century thinkers who turned the intellectual history of Western civilization into a palimpsest for their vision of the future.
I call this strange amalgam of Marxism, psychology/therapeutic culture, and post-modern literary/cultural critique “Late-Stage Academic Marxism.” If capitalism is “late-stage” (as it was first called about a century ago), then Marxism must also be reaching its senescence. If late-stage capitalism is the bewildering and confusing proliferation of goods and services that seem to serve no real purpose, Late-Stage Academic Marxism is the lumbering Frankenstein’s monster stitched together from the aforementioned intellectual traditions, moaning “STRUCTURAL OPPRESSION” and “HEGEMONY” and searching in every nook and cranny of the world for examples of their worldview.
There’s an old Robert Anton Wilson bit about how attention is magic - if you start to look for something real hard, suddenly you find it everywhere. Academia is full of very clever people who are rewarded for discovering that the world is in fact like they think it is. They’re looking hard to find instantiations of their worldview in data - and like magic, they find it.
So, no, accusations of plagiarism and some firings of University presidents will not bring about a cultural seachange that washes away the oppressed/oppressor-focused worldview so central to the identity of the intellectual elite. Nothing will replace those ideas but better, more vigorous ideas that center on individual agency, the value we can derive from the past, an appreciation of how historically lucky we are and how precarious that luck is, and a positive vision of the future. Right now, there are few to no institutions that exist to inculcate those values in young people. The dominance of Late-Stage Academic Marxism will continue until new institutions teach exceptional young people to think for and take care of themselves.
Music: A Song Whose Title is Generally Good Advice That Also Sounds Amazing
I remember buying Dweezil Zappa’s album Automatic at The Wiz when I was 16 - it was an odd mix of instrumental pieces and covers. I liked it well enough but it quickly fell out of the rotation. I didn’t really give instrumental bands a try again until my mid-20s when I had gotten into metal courtesy of the literary stylings of Mastodon and Blind Guardian, but that is a tale for another day. The instrumental guitar wankery of bands like Scale the Summit was interesting, but I’d never heard an instrumental band create dynamic songs that had a sense of structure that gave it the memorability of your average verse-chorus-verse song with lyrics.
And So I Watch You From Afar has been one of my favorite bands since I first heard them in 2011 - and there isn’t a single lyric on this album. It’s a showcase of every amazing guitar tone and trick from 90s indie rock and punk, and the band has just gotten better and better over the last decade. Spoiler alert, I’ll probably talk about their newest album Jettison (which is a masterpiece as far as I’m concerned) at some point in the future - but for now, enjoy “Don’t Waste Time Doing Things You Hate” from And So I Watch You From Afar’s eponymous debut album!
But what institution actually controls the world, and therefore the emotions, minds and bodies of the faithful every-person glued to their insanity machine. Which by the way instructs its faithful suckers to eat ultra-processed junk pseudo-foods which are almost completely devoid of any positive nutritional content
TV of course, which is itself the propaganda arm of the military/industrial/propaganda "entertainment" complex, the death-saturated "values" of which now pattern and control the entire world.
Speaking of "entertainment" it could be argued that a very well known TV personality was elected because of his high-profile brand name recognition due to his very popular long-running TV program.
The same said person is of course a religiously and culturally illiterate nihilistic barbarian. A pathological liar and a life-long professional grifter and con man.