With all the traveling I've been doing, I haven't kept up with the CSA blogging at all. I have been cooking with it, but everything's been so rushed that I haven't written much down. Here's some of the last things I logged in:

CSA Week #17

Dinner #1

There’s a million variations on dal (here's a typical recipe), but I used Bittman’s recipe because I have his cookbook.  His is not spicy enough, however, so I chopped up some hot peppers and put it in the dal. I also chopped up the radishes and tossed them in there.  And even though it’s unorthodox, I tossed the broccoli in there, too, because there wasn’t really enough of it to justify serving it on its own. Towards the end of the cooking cycle, I added parsley.

You usually eat dal with rice or naan, but I served it with leftover cornbread muffins, due to my “waste not” philosophy. This worked out well; it was delicious.

I served it all with a pear and spinach salad that had goat cheese sprinkles and the leftover basil dressing from last week.

For dessert, I made these pear cookies.

Vegetarian

Dinner #2

It was a super orange dinner. I looked for savory pear recipes to use up all these pears I have and found this amazing one that also uses butternut squash.  So I made a ton of butternut squash/pear soup, since soup is a perfect food to have around for lunches as well as quick dinners of the sort I often eat at home. Because I have an immersion blender, it was a lot easier than the instructions on this page.

I also made one of our favorites, sweet PLTs, a delicious variation on the BLT that uses backed sweet potatoes with smoked paprika instead of bacon, and goat cheese instead of mayo.   

Vegetarian.

Lunch stuff

I roasted the beets and cooked the collard greens in a skillet with garlic and salt, put it all in the fridge, and used it to dress my homemade veggie burgers that I ate alongside the soup for lunches. 

The next week will be, by my count, week 20! This week will be an interesting challenge, for two reasons. One, we're deep into fall vegetables right now, and there are simply fewer recipes for localvore-leaning recipes for these vegetables. In fact, one reason to have this project is to explore that issue and find solutions. Two, I'll basically have two weeks worth of veggies to cook instead of one. Marc collected the CSA last week and I'll collect this week's. I suspect I'll be making a lot of stuff for freezing. And soups/sauces, to work through some of the sad vegetables that have been sitting in the fridge for a week. The good news is I'm unlikely to run out of onions. In fact, in a minute I'll be going into my kitchen and pursuing what we've got, since last night all I wanted to do was crash out on the couch after flying all day. 

What are some of your favorite recipes for fall vegetables such as squash, greens, turnips and radishes?

I'm going to be traveling today, so I'll be in and out of Panda Party. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't have a Panda Party! The great thing about Panda Party is that it's grown into its own sub-community of Pandagon, which is exactly what I hoped for. A video to kick it off:

So party away, Friday people!

Update: August Pollalk is the best, seriously. He remembered Greenstreet, and had this to say:

So, my fun little Inside Baseball story: when Campus Progress (the nonprofit I used to work for in DC) first launched in 2004, one of the first things we did was try to promote a campus tour of a small documentary film made by Steven Greenstreet. We sent him to college campuses across the country to do a Q&A with students and put him up in hotels and expensed him. The relationship went sour when we started getting expense invoices back from him with hotel bills that included charges for pornographic movies. Then he called one of my female co-workers a "F___ C___" during a phone call. And that's the last time anyone at a major progressive organization ever worked with Steven Greenstreet again.

Hey, we all should take advantage of the masturbation opportunities on the road. But making Campus Progress pay for your fucking porn is bullshit. And pathetic---what, you can't work the internet?  Needless to say, calling anyone a "fucking cunt" doesn't do much in terms of convincing us you're not a man-child who is easily threatened by the thought that women might be more than semen-draining machines.

It's hard to add to what Jill says here about the stupid "Hot Chicks of OWS" situation. She criticized it before, of course. It should be obvious that it's sexist, because the whole point of it is that men's opinions are interesting in and of themselves, but women's opinions are only interesting because it makes stuffing a cock in it that more sexually exciting. But some men, sadly, refuse to see that. I think a lot of men think you can't be sexist to a woman whose opinions you're agreeing with, but what's interesting about Steven Greensheet and this "Hot Chicks" nonsense is that he neatly demonstrates how not-true that is. If anything, some men are even more threatened by women who they agree with politically, because they can see that these women are intelligent and self-sufficient, and that scares them. Thus, putting them in their place by insisting that their opinions are irrelevant except as spank fodder. Greenstreet's project is about stubbornly insisting that women are defined through men, and not as individuals unto themselves. I've seen similar stuff in the music world my whole adult life. The two main stripes are insisting that a woman who displays intelligence must be parroting what a man has told her and ignoring a woman's intelligence by making it all about how you'd like to stuff a cock in her mouth and shut her up.  I've often been to shows where the men could only discuss how sexy they find the women on stage, as if they were at a beauty pageant instead of a rock concert. Eventually, I've been driven to ask if they noticed the instruments they were playing, which tends to create the very reaction we're seeing Greenstreet display: anger at having their easily threatened egos called out.  Greenstreet is so pissed that someone noticed that he's an easily threatened child that he resorted to rape jokes. 

It's frustrating, to say the least, to continue seeing men who claim to be liberal be so easily threatened by intelligent women, and so quick to use sex as a weapon against women. (Sex really deserves better, I think. Sex is far too awesome to be used as a crude weapon for easily threatened men to wield against women.) The comment thread that exploded below Jill's post demonstrates the extent of the problem: so-called "liberal" men screaming and yelling and invoking sexualized threats (both of the rape variety and the accusations of sexlessness) in a pathetic attempt to shut women up. And for what? It's strange to me how so many men need to believe they're superior to women in order to feel good about themselves. Why not get a hobby or do some yoga instead? 

The good news is that calling this stuff out works. I've seen a lot of men engage intelligently with this issue, and how it's a problem. I think men actually have a better relationship than women do to the idea of finding intelligence in women threatening, and if they're willing to engage on the issue---instead of kicking a fit and insisting that their "erection" means they get to treat women like shit---they can do a lot of good when it comes to improving the activist experience for women. We need more men to speak out against this crap, because they've been socialized to treat women poorly and have overcome it, and so can bring that experience and understanding to the situation. Because stuff like this "Hot Chicks" video sends a strong signal to women that we're not welcome at events like Occupy Wall St.---and that men are going to use sexual harassment as a weapon to humiliate us and keep us away---and we need a countermessage from both men and women that this kind of sexual harassment and humiliation is not acceptable. 

Been traveling and not-blogging as much as I'd like, but that doesn't mean I haven't been writing. This morning, I have a piece up at the Guardian CIF about the conflict between Occupy Wall St. and the pathetic right wing response We Are the 53 Percent. I'm particularly proud of this piece because I address something I think has been under-addressed in liberal responses to the 53% nonsense: the fundamental incoherence of it. Most liberals have taken on their claims directly, which I think is important. We point out that there isn't a welfare state upholding the people who don't pay federal income tax. We point out that federal income tax is only a portion of federal income. We point out that a lot of people who don't pay federal income tax did so in the past or will so in the future. We point out that people who don't pay federal income tax still pay payroll taxes, property taxes, and sales taxes. These are all good points and interesting. But they also play into the bizarro right wing assumption that Occupy Wall St. has anything to do with federal income tax, or at least the majority of people who pay it.

It doesn't. Thus the "99%" language. From my piece:

The whole point of Occupy Wall Street is that we should increases taxes on the wealthy to pay for programmes that would benefit the other 99% of us, including the half of us who aren't rich but do pay federal income taxes. Erickson and his supporters clearly realise that they can't argue against the points actually being made at Occupy Wall Street, so instead they're inventing phantoms demanding middle-class tax hikes and fighting imaginary battles with them.

One thing I found interesting when a bunch of right wingers ganged up on me on Twitter, screeching incoherent nonsense at me in response to this bit of satire, was how most of them assumed that I don't pay federal income taxes. They coughed up the same crap about how those of us who support Occupy Wall St. are lazy parasites who don't want to work, and are playing victim. And that we hate people who do work and pay taxes. 

But of course I pay federal income taxes. I'm a 34-year-old woman who makes a middle class living. That I don't throw a fit about it and act like it's the greatest injustice in the world doesn't mean I don't pay federal income taxes. That's because I'm a fucking grown-up. The ready assumption that everyone who pays federal income taxes is a big, screaming toddler about it is what probably galls me more than anything about the "53%" nonsense. Screeching about your taxes just makes me assume you are in a constant tantrum because of other things in life that are less than pleasant: that you have to work for a living, that food has calories, that not everyone you want will have sex with you. Of course, you see a lot of Americans, especially right wing Americans, whine about that crap, too. So maybe that's the problem here. 

But it is interesting how much they project onto the left. Liberals are protesting real problems: unemployment, the foreclosure crisis, the war. And conservatives respond by saying, "Quit whining about real problems and listen to me whine about having to be a fucking grown-up. Wah!" And then say that liberals are "playing the victim". It's just one of the worst cases of projection I've seen in all the years I've spent observing right wing projection. 

I'm sure you've seen this story that's been passed around about the supposed "health" editor at xoJane who uses Plan B as her primary form of contraception. (Seriously, how rarely are you getting laid that this even seems like a remotely feasible plan of action?) There was much fail in that piece, including her casual assumption that condoms are only there if you sleep with a subjectively-defined "many people", as if STDs are the result of cumulative stranger-seed instead of exposure to contagious germs. This sort of thing might make you wonder---I know it made  me wonder---if younger people these days have been so poisoned by creeping prudery plus abstinence-only education that behavior like Cat's, which indicates a deep ambivalence about the morality of sexual pleasure, is common. I know it made me long for the days when Salt 'n' Pepa were talking about sex and TLC was flinging condoms around, and the pursuit of female sexual pleasure was taken as a right, instead of treated like some foul thing that requires self-punishment through repeated abortions. Or worse.

Well, I'm here to tell you that it may just be that Cat is an outlier, because the overall trend is towards more condom use, not less. 

As part of its National Survey of Family Growth, the CDC discovered that eight in 10 teen boys ages 15 to 19 reported they had used condoms during their first sexual experience. That's 9 percent more teenagers than the last time the CDC checked in, back in 2002. High school kids are still boning at the same rate they were 11 years ago—a little more than 40 percent for both genders—but they're getting smarter about it. Besides the rise of rubbers and the decline of teen pregnancy, the study also found that 16 percent of teen males "double up"—that is, use a condom in combination with a female partner's hormonal method—up from 10 percent in 2002.

As Nona notes, this shows that fears that better access to contraception will lead to more sex are ungrounded. Of course, the idea that "more sex" is some sort of bad thing to be opposed at all costs is what we in the biz like to call a problematic assumption. More bad sex is a bad thing, sure. But just more sex? If it's good sex, opposing it is like being opposed to sunny days and laughing with puppies. But even if you have a fucked-up way of looking at things and think that people feeling good has to bad, take heart. People don't have more sex because they use more condoms. Generally with young people who are already ready for sex, having it is a matter of people-based opportunity more than any other factor. The main obstacle to the fucking in the streets that conservatives worry so much about is getting people to do it with you. Since there's not a massive surge in people's attraction to each other, there really shouldn't be a surge in the havings of the sex. 

For those of us who actually like people and want them to be happy, this is just straight good news: Teenagers can be teenagers---that is, experiment and muddle their way towards adulthood---with a lower chance of getting sick from it. 

I was going to ignore this Dr. Pepper "bitches ain't shit" campaign on the grounds that it's just catering to the Tea Party-fication of America. It's clear the whole point of it is to convince sexist assholes that using this product will piss off the feminists, since they have empty, meaningless lives that can only be filled up with the hopes that they're somehow pissing off the liberals. Being angry about it just contributes to their disease, because it gives them a temporary fix and discourages them from developing lives with meaning that will keep them from wanting so desperately to piss off the liberals. But Scott highlighted this aspect of the website advertising Bitches Ain't Shit Cola, or whatever it's called:

This week, the company unleashed a new campaign on Facebook, including a “man quiz” and a shooting gallery that aims at girly things like lipstick.

Yeah, because the right way to react when your sense of masculinity is threatened is to whip out a gun. 

Obviously, Dr. Pepper rolled out this campaign before there was a mass shooting that left 8 dead, in which the murderer was apparently motivated to get revenge on his ex-wife over not getting his way in a custody battle. But if they'd done a little market research, they would have been able to predict the reaction from the very same misogynists they hope will buy up their soda. David Futrelle gathered some at Man Boobz. The theme of the comments he collected was, "Children are the property of men who create them all by themselves by ejacualating into incubators we call "women", and when you're done with your incubator, she shouldn't be able to get custody over your child-property, no matter what a judge says. And anyone who disagrees only has themselves to blame if they get shot in the face."  A sample:

E]nough of this type of offensive action might just start making women and their supporters* think twice, especially if they also become targets. (* Divorce attorneys, child services workers and counselors, family court judges, and other enabling cogs in the feminist legal system)......

Essentially men need to tell feminism to shut the fuck up, give it a vigorous slap across the face thus reminding it who is the biological superior, then order it back into the kitchen/bedroom.......

What options other than overt acts of physical violence are there for a man to deal with a shrew ex and corrupt family court system?....

Most men will just lay down and be resigned to the state-enforced kidnapping and extortion plot, but some are made of tougher stuff and for you to whine about this dead ex-wife or that is inconsequential and no loss to humanity.

I submit that women … are much more likely to pay attention when they’re being threatened.

So yeah, no matter how "cute" or "harmless" you may think misogyny is---or invoking violent misogyny---unfortunately, in the real world, it's not cute or harmless at all.

Shouldn't have too many problems updating the blog, but there will probably be some blips this next week. That's because, after today, I'll be traveling in West Texas to visit my folks, spending time in the one area that I don't think has much in the way of songs written about it---the Midland/Odessa area. (Though the fictional Dillion, TX from "Friday Night Lights" is based on it.) Then on to Lubbock, which has one of my most favorite recent country-western songs written about it.

I think it's interesting/telling that in the past decade plus's celebration of "bluegrass" and "alt country", the Dixie Chicks have been larger ignored, though they have such marvelous instrumentalists. 

I will try to pay attention to the local media there to get a general idea of how they're seeing things in West Texas and the Panhandle. Meanwhile, we're gonna Panda Party, amirite? Y'all will have to fill me in on how the last Panda Party went, since I wasn't able to make it. But I should be in there most of today, and am frankly looking forward to it, since I haven't had a lot of opportunity to listen to music this week. 

So, a brief thought I had about Herman Cain's 9-9-9 plan today: it sucks.  Pretty much everyone with a brain thinks that it sucks.  But I think I came up with a way that it sucks even more than it was previously thought to suck.  Walk with me, will you?

The 9-9-9 plan consists of three taxes: a nine percent income tax, a nine percent sales tax, and a nine percent "business tax".  The business tax is a receipts tax rather than a profits tax (as the current corporate income tax is). What this means is that you don't get to deduct anything except "investments, all purchases from other businesses and all dividends paid to shareholders." In other words, you're now taxed nine percent on all wages and salaries paid to employees.

Under the current system, an employee whose pre-tax salary is $50,000 actually costs an employer $53,825 once FICA taxes are added.  (For the purposes of this post, all we're concerned about is the employee's pre-tax salary and the employer FICA contribution.)  This is because the employee pays 7.65% of their income in FICA taxes, and the employer matches with another 7.65% contribution. The 9-9-9 plan would do away with FICA taxes, and one of Cain's promises is that your employer will pay you that 7.65%.  He claims to have worked in private industry before, but that statement makes me doubt this claim.

Anyway, there's no FICA tax under the 9-9-9 plan...but there is a business tax.  And the money used to pay your $50,000 salary is subject to a 9% tax.  That means the cost of paying you is actually $54,500.  Using powers of math, the cost of employing you is $675 higher under 9-9-9.  

Amazingly, the problem gets worse the more you're paid.  FICA tax is not assessed on wages over $106,800.  For someone paid $250,000 a year, the total employer-side FICA charged is $8,170.20, for an effective employer rate of 3.26% and a total cost of $258,170.20.  Under 9-9-9? Your employer would pay $22,500 in taxes on your salary for a total cost of $272,500.**

Not only do poor people get a drastic tax increase, but every single person in America would instantaneously become more expensive to employ!

...Pizza joke!

**Figures changed (I accidentally used the lowered 2011 FICA withholding rate).

I tried submitting this to Salon to help build their parody version of We Are the 53%, but the email servers don't seem to be working right. Oh well, gives me an excuse to post it here:

Please read the post below for more info on what this is about.

I'm sure you've seen Erick Erickson's response to We Are the 99%, which is a moving Tumblr created to support Occupy Wall St., where people explain exactly what it's like to not be rich in an America where inequality is expanding rapidly. Erickson responded by starting We are the 53%---the reference is to federal income tax, which wingnuts conveniently pretend is the only tax, even as they attack Medicare and Social Security, which have different revenue streams---a Tumblr dedicated to assholes mocking the pain of others, but in that self-pitying wingnut way. To sum up the tone of the Tumblr: imagine a wingnut walking down the street and seeing someone break their ankle so badly that bone is sticking out. In response to the person with a broken leg crying out for help, wingnut says, "Man, I stubbed my toe a couple hours ago and you don't hear me crying," before moving on and laughing about what a wuss that person is as they bleed all over the pavement. It's somewhat startling to see how much the contributors don't realize what monsters they come across as. I suspect it's because they get excited when they hear a complete asshole being a blowhard (see, Rush Limbaugh), and they forget ordinary people don't actually find it attractive when someone struts about how their puppy-kicking abilities make them a badass. This was Erickson's inaugural entry:

Three jobs? Like, he takes off from being a right wing blowhard and goes to work at the Dairy Queen? Well, not quite. Turns out he's counting the same job three times:

And it is not clear to me what Erick's three jobs are: his internet biographies mention (i) right-wing internet community organizer, (ii) CNN commentator, and (iii) radio host. Are these his "three jobs"? Most of us would say that those are three aspects of one occupation--not three jobs. People who work three jobs are people who teach elementary school in the morning and early afternoon, take a shift at the car wash around dinnertime, and work a pre-dawn shift at a 24-hour 7-11. That does not sound like Erick, Son of Erick to me.

Shit, all this time I described myself as a freelance writer/journalist, not thinking I could take each separate job responsibility and count it as a separate job: author, humorist, blogger, podcaster, columnist, op-ed writer, contributing blogger to XX Factor, freelance journalist, reproductive health care expert, social media maven, and media commentator on all things feminist. That's at least eleven jobs, using the Erick Erickson Patented Job-Counting Method®. And I don't have a wife to handle the housework and social calendar organizing for me, unlike this parasite. I can probably add "chef", "housekeeper", and "cat mom" to the list, using his method. 

Erick is also a sad panda because he owns one more home than he'd really like to. You don't understand how this man has suffered!  But you don't see him whining!

Oh wait, you totally do. What was I thinking? He's still ranting about how those broken-leg people don't know what it's like to carry around the fading memory of a stubbed toe. Why doesn't anyone care about Erick Erickson's suffering?!

It's a good thing Erickson is a pampered, spoiled white guy. If he wasn't, he would have starved to death for lack of other people catering to him and keeping him in a bubble so thick he actually thinks this routine of his makes him look like anything but the spoiled child he is. With these levels of stupid, I'm genuinely surprised he was able to figure out the steps to writing out a sign and taking a webcam picture. Just kidding! I know someone else operated the webcam for him, because if he did it himself, he'd add "webcam operator" to his list of jobs, bringing the total to four.

Scott's right; this is some old school-style Slate trolling.

More importantly, Is This It remains (takes deep breath, steels self for commenter rage) the single best album released in the past 10 years.

Being contrary and citing the existence of haters doesn't actually make your opinions more interesting. With this defense of The Strokes, it basically makes you sound like someone who reads a lot of mainstream music magazines but never actually listens to music. But hell, even if you require a record to be a mainstream breakout hit in order to consider it the best album of the past decade, there's an easy contender that makes the whole Strokes apologia sound exactly as sad and troll-y as it is: White Blood Cells by the White Stripes, which also came out in 2001. Oh yeah, remember them? I think you should put "Fell In Love With A Girl" on and then read this line, while cackling evilly:

Beneath the shaggy haircuts and puppy-dog eyes there lurked an idea for a crisper, more melodic rock album that would radically update the sound of its forebears—one that, crucially, went against the overproduced schlock then infesting the charts.

Yeah. Because really, the White Stripes were like Lady Gaga or something. Sure.

I thought it would be fun to just start listing rock albums from the past decade that are exponentially better than This Is It, just because what else can you do in the face of epic trollery like this?

Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Fever to Tell

Sleater-Kinney, The Woods

Le Tigre, This Island

The New Pornographers, Electric Version

The Gossip, Standing in the Way of Control

TV on the Radio, Return to Cookie Mountain

The Dandy Warhols, Welcome to the Monkey House

LCD Soundsystem: Honestly, all three records---LCD Soundsystem, Sound of Silver, This Is Happening---are classics

The Dum Dum Girls, I Will Be

Cansei de Ser Sexy, Cansei de Ser Sexy

The Dirtbombs, Ultraglide in Black

Wild Flag, Wild Flag: it just came out, but it's clearly better than the fucking Strokes, both in terms of rocking and in terms of not-sucking

The Vivian Girls, Everything Goes Wrong

Neko Case, both Fox Confessor Brings the Flood and Middle Cyclone

I could keep going, but you get the picture. And I'm trying to stick to stuff I think is just straight-up classic; not even talking about stuff I just really like for my own purposes but falls short of being one of the Big Records Everyone Should Own.

One thing that I think is worth noting that The Strokes have that none of these other bands I've listed have: a line-up composed strictly of straight, white men. Perhaps that's why it's easier to imagine they're the Greatest Band of the Past Decade, since they fit the image many people have in their heads about what a great band should look like. But what's been cool about rock music in the past decade is that strict rules about who gets to really be an awesome rock musician have been dismantled, put through the shredder and pissed all over. And I, for one, am thrilled. 

In a bit of news that will no doubt cause rejoicing amongst "men's rights activists", Topeka, KS has decriminalized wife-beating. In case that is hard to register, let me repeat: it is now basically legal to beat your wife in Topeka. If this fuckwittery isn't halted quickly, I expect that the Topeka airport will have to start booking a whole lot more flights to Russia and Thailand, as they experience a surge in new residents who have a strong interest in acquiring mail order brides. Just make sure not to have any more "Ladies Nights" at the bars, Topeka, because your new residents really hate to see bitches get half-priced drinks while they're in the club, trying to get with women half their age using tried! and! true! "pick-up artist" techniques. 

All jokes aside, this new decision by Topeka is intensely dangerous. The rationale for it is they don't have the money to prosecute domestic violence cases any longer, and because of this, they're basically letting abusers go home to their victims, no doubt filled with rage that said bitches dared called the cops on them in the first place. 

In the month since new prosecutions of domestic violence stopped in Topeka, there have been at least 35 reported cases of domestic battery or assault, and 18 people jailed have been released without facing charges.

What happened is that Topeka stopped enforcing misdemeanors, and as long as you make sure to beat your wife without a weapon, domestic violence is a misdemeanor in Topeka. Not that I'm weighing in on what kind of crime is should be classified as, of course, but when it comes to domestic violence, it's really a piss-poor idea to just ignore it when it happens in the early "no weapon" stages. As any expert on this could tell you, abusers tend to escalate the abuse over time. They see how far they can go without consequences, and if there aren't any, they up the ante, often with an end goal of basically beating any remaining will or autonomy out of their victims. The earlier in the process they face consequences, often the easier it is for a victim to escape. If there's one place where "broken windows" theory absolutely can be shown to work, it's with domestic violence. 

I realize that prosecuting domestic violence is a really frustrating thing to do. Often, victims refuse to testify and plead with the police to drop charges. But that's all the more reason to do it; often inducing a separation between abuser and victim gives the victim time to, for lack of a better term, snap out of it. Certainly, it keeps the abuser away from her while he's steaming with rage that she dared to call the cops (they often also feel it was her fault for "starting" it, an explanation that comes up frequently on "men's rights" forums). Being consistent with consequences works to stop domestic violence; according to Bill Scher's reading of the federal government's crime statistics, the Violence Against Women Act---which emphasizes outreach to victims and swift consequences for abusers---has led to a 50% drop in non-fatal domestic assaults, and a 20% drop in domestic murders. (This sudden shift towards real consequences for abuse is, I believe, just as much an instigator for the expansion of the "men's rights" movement as is the internet.) Interestingly, the drop in female-on-male murders was more dramatic, mostly because enforcing domestic violence laws gives victims the option to leave, and they don't get so desperate that they shoot their abusers. You rarely see such a stellar example of how enforcing the law can cause a dramatic drop in crime, and yet, here Topeka is giving up on doing what we know works. I can't help but think indifference to women's safety is feeding this, as is the heavy influence of fundamentalist Christian teachings that domestic violence is the victim's fault for being inadequately submissive, as well as so-called libertarian influences that would have the government butt out, allowing men to treat women like property.

From an intellectual, political perspective, I really loathe anti-vaccination nuttiness. Just like with anti-choicers, I will never completely understand what compels people to support choices and policies that will objectively create health problems where none need exist. I hate the shunning of evidence for woo, and I especially hate the way parents are encouraged to substitute their own dislike for getting their children vaccinated (kids hate shots!)  for intellectual assessment of the necessity of vaccination.

But now I have one more reason to loathe anti-vaccination nuts. They made me feel kind of hot---and not in a fun, sexy way---all damn afternoon. Though I imagine it will fade in a couple of hours, I am running a slight fever, and Jenny McCarthy and the sea of yuppie no-vaccination parents are to blame. 

You see, I agreed this morning to get a Tdap, which is a combination tetanus, diptheria, and pertussis vaccine. It used to be that adults getting a booster for tetanus (every ten years, people---keep up with your shots!) or tetanus/diptheria alone, but now they toss the pertussis in with it. Pertussis is better known by the name "whooping cough". Just last year, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices  recommended that adults, especially those with regular exposure to small children, start getting pertussis boosters along with their tetanus shots, in response to a surge in whooping cough cases, which have resulted in at least 10 infant deaths in California alone. The reason for the surge in whooping cough cases? Anti-vaccination activists. Yep, because of paranoia about vaccinations, vaccination levels for whooping cough have fallen below herd immunity levels, causing the disease to come back. And it's an ugly one even if you don't die, I'll tell you. From this handy-dandy cheat sheet debunking the nine most prominent anti-vaccination arguments comes this description of the hell that is whooping cough:

Whooping cough is much more than “just a bad cough”. Kids often turn blue from lack of oxygen during coughing fits, they may vomit after severe attacks, and even fracture ribs. There is no cure for whooping cough – antibiotics are given to help stop the transmission to others – you just have to hope your immune system can fight it. Severe complications such as pneumonia and brain damage occur almost exclusively in unvaccinated people and in babies under 6 months of age the symptoms can be severe or life threatening. Whooping cough is also known as the 100-day cough making it a chronic and potentially fatal disease.

Frontline showed a video of a baby with whooping cough who was coughing so hard he was unable to take a breath and nearly died. It took me days to shake that horrible image from my head. Terrible stuff. So when my doctor suggested I get a Tdap, I was like, "Where do I sign up?" I'm not someone who spends a lot of time directly around children, but it still seemed to my doctor and myself like I really should get vaccinated. I live right smack dab in one of the major areas where there are both a lot of young children and a lot of yuppie parents who buy into anti-vaccination nonsense, meaning that I'm simply in an area that probably has fallen below herd immunity levels. I'm somewhat surprised that Brooklyn hasn't had an outbreak to rival the ones in yuppie-thick areas of California, in fact. So getting a shot that helps raise that herd immunity, even by a little bit, seemed like the right thing to do. But I am kind of paying for it a little right now. So I'm blaming Jenny McCarthy and putting the word out there to the adults reading this blog to get your booster shots. If you're feeling like whooping cough isn't that big a deal, please watch that episode of Frontline. And then go get vaccinated. 

Of course, I may have just run a slight fever from a tetanus shot alone, to be completely fair. And that particular vaccine? That one is just for me, because dying of lockjaw seems scarier to me than being burned alive. 

Via Roy, I see the folks at National Review are openly longing to live in a society where the streets are clogged with beggars and families are forced to sell their children to traffickers to get enough money to eat. Julie Gunlock, writing for NRO, is ready to give hungry children something to cry about:

Sesame Street would be wiser to educate America’s children about the real poor and hungry — the 98 percent of the world population who live outside the United States.

I want to see that Sesame Street! "Hey kids, I know you mom put you to bed without dinner because she couldn't afford any food, but at least you aren't like this beggar, whose nose fell off from leprosy! Now pray to Ronald Reagan for forgiveness for thinking that you, a 4-year-old child, deserves to eat food. Get a job, you lazy welfare suck."

The truth is, 94.3 percent of American households are able to put enough food on the table every day to feed their families. 

Meaning that one in 20 Americans goes entire days without eating. Julie is unsatisfied with this number! If you took a random sampling of kindergarteners and put them in an average sized classroom, only 1 would be too hungry to behave or learn, and that number should be much higher. At least 5-6 children should be crying with hunger. Maybe they can grow up to be fashion models, so they shouldn't be so whiny. 

As I wrote on NRO back in January, the idiom “food insecure” — a term created by the U.S. Department of Agriculture — means one has either “reduced quality, variety, or desirability of diet” or “disrupted eating patterns and reduced food intake.”

So, far from hungry or starving, Lily suffers from a much less dramatic condition — unpleasant to be sure, but at its core, just a somewhat boring, irregular, and occasionally reduced diet.

I mean, she's not saying that they should go weeks without eating! Just days. Toughens them up, I'm sure. I mean, sure, living on a diet of irregularly accessed Ramen noodles sounds unpleasant for Julie, but we're talking about poor people here. They're not real people in Julie's eyes, and so needs like "nutrition" just don't register. We just need to get enough calories in 'em so they can clean Julie's house and office and harvest and prepare her food. Those things a diverse diet provides---such as vitamins or minerals---who gives a shit? Small children of poor people don't need the brain development of a properly fed child. What are they going to do with all that literacy? Probably vote or something, and we can't have that. And sure, not being fed a decent diet can cause major damage to your bones and internal organs, but how strong do you really need to be to push a mop to clean up after Julie? Strawberries aren't that heavy; you don't need a well-formed body to pick them. 

God, I can't even continue. What a monster. The lack of empathy on display is so outrageous that I have to wonder if Julie had a nutritional deficiency as a child that kept the empathy centers in her brain from forming. Of course, the fact that conservatives think this is acceptable and invigorating discourse tells me that this is more a cultural issue---they were born with empathy centers and fed properly, but they lost their sense of empathy from underuse. 

I'm just surprised she didn't suggest that if women don't want to see their children suffering from malnutrition, they should have kept their legs shut. But hey, there's still time and apparently, she writes about this topic a lot. 

I'm a religious reader and super fan of GOOD, but once in awhile they fall into some of the more annoying yuppie-left habits, forcing me to write complaining blog posts like this one. I only gripe because I love! The sin this time came, sadly for me, amidst a challenge you all know I'm going to support whole-heartedly, a "get healthy" challenge. But to my mind, a large part of being healthy is being evidence-based in your health choices, which can do two things for your health. One, it makes your choices more effective. Two, it saves you the stress of having to attend to a lot of things that are meaningless, like whether or not something is "natural" or "homeopathic", freeing up time in your day to do things that are genuinely good for your health, such as exercising, eating right, and sleeping 8 hours a night.

Day 8 of the challenge, therefore, is getting it from me. Cord Jefferson surprised me by writing an anti-soap screed, since he recently wrote an evidence-based explanation of why you should wash your hands every time you use the bathroom. That post made me even more cognizant of times I really should be more careful about washing my hands, and reminded me that I need to get a whooping cough vaccine update in order to be a good citizen who doesn't put physically weaker people in danger of catching germs off me. So I was surprised to see him dismiss soaps and shampoos as "chemicals" that are dangerous for their, well, chemicaliness.

In January of this year, prompted by the GOOD challenge to swear off soap for a month, I stopped using soap, body wash, and shampoo on my hair, face, and most of my body. My armpits and crotch still got lathered, but the rest of me was free of all the lab-made junk that goes into our hygiene products nowadays. Eight months later, I’m still not using soap, and my skin and hair have never felt or looked better. The moral of the story: You don’t need a bunch of nonsense dreamed up by chemists to stay healthy and be happy.

This might be a good time to point out that there's a great deal of variation in how much filth people have on their bodies. Some people are greasier and hairier than others, and some people have hormone levels that cause their sweat to be extra-smelly. Some people are up to stuff that gets them dirty. If a quick rinse does it for you, good for you, but individual results may vary. I'm not fond of heavy duty anti-perspirants, but I've come to realize how much of a godsend they are for people whose body chemistry isn't quite like mine. Plus, I just really like the feeling of being squeaky clean. Don't try to guilt me out of one of these little joys in life that harms no one. And that's my next point: the argument for why soap is "bad" isn't there.

Though most people eat, drink, and use dozens of foodstuffs and products per day, the vast majority of us never actually look at the labels and ingredients lists on most of our products. We’ll read countless blog posts, but not the little square on the back of our face wash that tells us we’re rubbing acid on our cheeks every morning.....

Should you actually be putting salicylic acid near your eyes? If the answer to these questions is no, try going a day without that product and see how you feel. If the answer is still yes, that’s fine, too. At least you’ll be far more aware of what it is your putting in and on your body day in and day out.

I get that he's trying to agree that individual choices may vary, but it's clear that the "correct" answer is that one shouldn't use salicylic acid because it's a Chemical. There's no actual argument here for why it's not safe, and certainly no producing of evidence for why one should hesitate to use this chemical; it's just unnatural-sounding and an acid to boot. This is just poor reasoning, plus a really unnecessary swipe at chemists, who are no more evil a group of people than anyone else. Honestly, they're probably better on average than we journalist types.  

I blame Michael Pollan in part. He crafted some food rules that were intended to reorient people to eating healthy in a way that was less work than going through elaborate processes of educating yourself about everything that goes into food, by simply trying to push people towards simpler food that wasn't crafted in a lab in order to maximize your calorie and fat consumption. But in doing so, he reaffirmed the Cult of the Natural, i.e. the belief that because something has a chemically-sounding name, it's automatically suspicious. And we're seeing that logic taken to an extreme here.

The funny part is that salicylic acid is "natural". If you simply called it "willow bark extraction", the naturalism cult people would be eating that shit up. It's also pretty safe if used correctly, and I can attest is very good at holding off adult acne problems. But even if it wasn't "natural", the problem here is simply assuming that something is dangerous because it sounds complicated. There's no reason to assume that. I'm sorry to see such poor reasoning being passed off as health advice at GOOD. I realize filling 30 days is hard to do, but a better use of their time would be to encourage people to do things like get up and walk around more, or add more fruits and vegetables to their diets.