The Dark Wraith Forums

President New Age Authoritarian

wraith@dark-wraith.com — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 13:25:51 -0600

After pandering to a failed school district and its failed parents for firing the teachers, President Obama and his thuggish Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, want to "overhaul" the No Child Left Behind abomination of the previous administration. What this means is more testing-testing-testing, and more pointing the fingers at the educators instead of at the parents and the administrators, especially the parents, where the whole child actually starts and ends.

Heaven forbid our New Age Neocon President would tell the parents to get off their fat, lazy asses and do their jobs, and tell the fancy suits running school districts to actually construct schools that foster learning.

No, it's better to terrorize the kids with ridiculous, "zero-tolerance" (for being human) policies and terrorize teachers with mass firings for trying to do something with children of self-indulgent parents who expect everyone (including the government) and everything (including brain-sucking pharmaceuticals) but themselves to do the work of making their children ready to learn and capable every day of doing so.

Go for it, Mr. President. Maybe all the failed parents like Sarah and Todd Palin and the tens of millions of others who want someone to blame but themselves will vote for you in 2012.

I won't, but that's just because I'm one of those failures of a teacher the system is purging, right?

NCLB · students · teachers · Duncan · parents · schools · fail

The Price of a Freebie

wraith@dark-wraith.com — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:25:38 -0600

The Federal Communications Commission is now offering a free broadband speed test so you can know how fast your home or business connection really is.

The problem, despite the FCC's vowed privacy claims, is that it and its two private companies partnering for this service actually are collecting information on you, and it's personal. Even though the test doesn't ask for your name, your IP address is collected, along with information you have to provide about your physical address.

Oh, you say you have nothing to hide?

Right.

Sure.

And even if you really don't (you very strange person), you don't understand how the Internet works. You also don't understand your own computer on a network and what can be done by people with big, powerful computers and the ability to carve through your machine, especially with your gullible permission.

Go ahead and use that FCC broadband speed test. After all, it's free.

So is stupidity.

privacy · cyberspace · ISP · data-mining · Internet

The Canvas and Brushstrokes of Nightfall

wraith@dark-wraith.com — Tue, 9 Mar 2010 22:49:11 -0600

Former Labor Secretary and perennial Leftist literary figure Robert Reich is calling for a bailout of the nation's public education system.

Mr. Reich is a professor at the University of California at Berkley, where he shares prestige and faculty doughnut deliveries with former White House counsel and unindicted war criminal John Yoo on the extreme Right and mealy-mouthed, obtuse, Paul Krugman pal Brad Delong on the Left. They and their fellow well-paid, tenured elites of academia must surely be feeling, at least in small ways, the catastrophe that is happening to public institutions of higher education in California and elsewhere throughout the nation, although the extent of the pain wafting to their lofty heights is measured in little more than slightly larger class sizes and slower upgrades to the nice computers in their big, professorially messy offices.

On my end, the catastrophe is quite personal, and I shall first address, in an admittedly rather non-linear manner, that minor matter before ending with a robust dose of macroeconomics. The macroeconomics portion is a follow-on to the years I have spent writing here about the consequences of our taxation and spending policies that were combined with years of allowing China and other Asian countries to undervalue their currencies against the dollar. Along the way, I will provide readers with further evidence of my toxic disdain for the Right-wing fools who got us into this mess and the whining, self-appointed Leftist Defenders of The Unprivileged like Robert Reich who perennially bleat for public money to be thrown at every problem, regardless of the fiscal consequences of uncontrolled federal spending and the social consequences of giving the government yet one more excuse for imposing its out-of-touch, overbearing expectations on constituencies already drained of essential freedoms.

First, though, I shall write about what I am seeing, what I am experiencing on the ground in real time, with very real, quite dire consequences for my life.

For the first time in my memory of 30 years of teaching, this Summer, I will not have the maximum of two classes I am permitted under law to teach. Summers are always a most difficult time financially for me, but with half my usual course load lost, I am facing wreckage.

Thanks to state and federal rules, I am never allowed more than 12 hours of teaching—that's four, three-semester-hour classes—at any given college since that would mean the school would have to extend to me a benefits package I, quite incidentally, neither want nor need. In the absence of any opportunity to get more than 12 hours at any one school, I have to run from one college to another every day. It's okay for me to teach more than a full-time "full load," but only if I do it the hard way, racing back and forth from one school to another, sometimes from one city to another. The sheer nonsense of the rules that place this burden upon me is palpable, yet no one in a position of legislative power will do anything about it.

I teach about one-and-a-half times the load of a full-timer, and I make less than a third to a fourth of what the privileged profs do. In the case of the top-paid professors, my yearly salary is less than a tenth.

During the Summer, though, only one school available to me ever has work, and the maximum load has always been two courses, given that the semester runs half as long and each class is compressed to be go twice as fast. That makes Summers rough for me financially, but I've always managed to make it through, one way or another.

The bad news was fairly evident before it arrived with my schedule for this Summer. The state had failed to pay three of its four quarterly contributions to the school, and the current president of the college, whom everyone had thought would stay until his dream of massively expanding the institution's infrastructure was completed, is leaving before the ribbons are cut. Notwithstanding his detractors' long-time assertions that he is a hard-nosed, uncompromising bully, he quite apparently is not stupid.

(Never mind his flagrant, years-long extra-marital affair with one of the school's employees; never mind that the building frenzy was done on a bond trick that required no approval from the voters whose property taxes sky-rocketed as a result; and never mind that the bond funding did not include debilitating, continuing costs of maintaining all those new buildings and a whole new athletic program, complete with its own fields, well-paid coaches, and facilities. When the mob is gathering to chase a scoundrel out of town, this is the soon-to-be pariah who not only gets in front of the mob like he's leading it, but also prints out a Google map to plan the parade route.)

The writing on the wall for me goes beyond mere budget cuts that will send me into a personal financial crisis in a few months. There are quite a few course offerings this Summer, but most of them are online, and I was decertified as an online teacher several years ago by the none other than the Associate Dean of Information Technology, a man reviled by at least a few old-school professors who deem him an incompetent twit. (I cannot comment on that assessment: I haven't taken the necessary training class.) He was angered that I had taken the abominable software called "WebCT," which used to be the love child of higher education's emergent high-tech activists, and customized it so it would be effective for me and inviting for my students. That did not fit with the one-size-fits-all, everything-must-look-the-same requirements (unstated, of course) of those in IT who have no skills other than to ensure compliance with their self-invented standards for how things should be.

The out-sized power of Information Technology departments in some schools comports with broader trends in higher education, though. The mania with what used to be called "Assessment and Evaluation"—now reduced to the catch-all word "Assessment"—has had, as one of its toxic results, a drive to standardize, routinize, and compartmentalize the scope and sequence of curriculum across each discipline. The phenomenon of "PowerPoint professors" has gotten so pervasive that many students are bitterly complaining to me that virtually every class they're taking is nothing but a daily exercise in sitting in a darkened room while some prof reads to them what is projected on a big screen at the front.

This trend works for "Assessment" standards, however, because every class in a given course is pre-packaged, with even the standards, themselves, already met and set forth (in standards-compliant form, of course) by the publisher of the chosen course textbook. The professors do not need to do any prep and really don't need to know, much less care about, what they are teaching. In the darkened rooms pervading the halls of academia, those professors need not even see their students' faces, perplexed, confused, beginning to understand, struggling to learn as they might be. Why have that kind of feedback when assessment instruments—pre-packaged and certified to standards by the publishers—can do the job, instead?

For the personal touch, and in line with yet another higher-ed fad sometimes called "Writing across the Curriculum," some online instructors have their students submit an essay or two, despite the pervasive, palpable lack of writing skills these learners possess and despite the dubious grammar and composition skills of those who are their "teachers" in these courses.

Online courses are enormously attractive to colleges, however. Publishers deliver each course as a fairly complete, out-of-the-box package, and the "teacher" can do little more than be a supervisory quasi-Webmaster, scheduling tests, collecting results, and overseeing the big "classes" that cost the school less than brick-and-mortar delivery media and modalities. Better still, the power center shifts to the school's information technology services, which then has legitimate claim to pose as the center of teacher standards, teaching expertise, and funding. I have seen this happen: at the college where I was decertified as an online instructor, the so-called "Faculty Academy," which runs teacher training, is under the authority of Information Technology, which is not an academic department, but which is run by that fellow who personally decertified me, despite the fact that I was named Faculty Member of the Year that very same year. (That was the same year I launched my own education Website, complete with all kinds of resources, including professional-quality podcasts of all my lectures, which are also available by free subscription on Apple iTunes.)

The Information Technology services division whose Associate Dean decertified me also runs such programs as the one that "trains" teachers in everything from ethics (yet another fad in higher education, right now) to "instructional development" (whatever that is).

As an aside, this is the same Information Technology services department that cannot maintain standardization across the PCs on campus, fails to keep the software even on faculty workstations current, and becomes righteously furious with anyone who points out critical flaws, security gaps, and uninstalled but necessary software on campus computers.

Returning for two final, somewhat broader points on the topic of those online courses that are now the cost-saving choice of cash-strapped schools, let there be no understatement about how bad they are for both students and educators. The department chairwoman whose decisions led to my looming financial difficulties, in defending the tilt toward these courses (while denying that any substantive shift is occurring), told me they are "popular," especially in the Summer when students want to go on vacations and do lots of other things that would preclude attending real classes. She is right about that: far too many students sign up for those online sections fully intending to get course credit for less effort than they would put into a classroom-based course. The downside is this: at least in my disciplines of expertise, especially in economics, virtually no online student can learn what I want that student to learn. I know this for a fact. In the cases where a student took the first of a two-course economics sequence online and then tried to take the second course in my classroom, almost never did the student pass unless he or she pretty much re-learned the material from the first course. In the past two years, students who had earned a course grade of A or a B in an online, first-semester section almost always failed or nearly failed my brick-and-mortar, second-semester class. Most of these students, in fact, dropped my course and eventually went back to the online way of getting their college credits in economics.

Finally, online courses certainly disserve students, but they also disserve educators who fall into the trap of getting work by agreeing to be "trained" to run online courses and then accepting online sections just so they can have a teaching job. The work might seem attractive at first, given that all it seems one must do is sit at a computer to deploy pre-packaged materials, then collect and report results; but the bad part comes if the "teacher" actually cares about student learning. A class of thirty-five students who have no means of communicating otherwise are going to be pounding that educator with written questions every day and every night, each question requiring some response of lesser or greater detail about subject matter. Considering the mode of communication, some of the most effective means of conveying knowledge will be completely unavailable. Even worse, at least in this state, there seems to be some kind of regulatory prohibition against online teachers using what are known in customer service as "standards" — canned answers that are the first pass at answering a question. This was barked at me in a department meeting by none other than a tenured professor, sitting as she was on her high pedestal dictating truth and consequences to those who do the dirty work she would not. Tenured professors, rarely willing to run online sections, themselves, are nevertheless sometimes veritable geysers of knowledge when it comes to the ghetto work percolating in the burgeoning, LCD-lit sweatshops under the ivy of Higher Education Hall.

I end this part of the article with an unqualified stipulation: what I wrote above was venomous, biased, self-aggrandizing, and parochial.

I have for myself no champions, save myself, and I have learned from too many personal experiences that reserve, resignation, dignity, understatement, and patience work only capriciously; too often, they are the ways of the dominant insisting upon safe passage through the enraged ranks of those they exploit. When the mainstream media whips hysteria in the wake of angry people who resort to violence, they give ever more power to those who make incomprehensibly large numbers of people fight progressively bleaker lives, almost all of them quietly, in despair, disillusionment, and surrender.

Therein lies the transition from my personal prospects of a degraded future to the large picture, which actually has nothing whatsoever to do with me or with anyone else in my position. What happens at the scale of the small is mere anecdote, offering neither affirmation or refutation of the grand scale. To hold otherwise is to go down a corrosive path all too common in the laws of this nation, where any and every incident has the chance of becoming a bloody red shirt to wave for yet another law, another regulation, another polemic's demand for a pogrom. American law is fast becoming a modern Lex Romana, so vast, so intricate, so complex, so detailed, that it serves no one but those who construct and enforce this or that set of provisions which advance an interest or protect a group at the expense of the body of the governed. In the case of the Roman Empire, by the time the Visigoths entered Rome in 5th Century, the wise generals had already made their alliances with the hordes, the most powerful of the city had in many cases already made their plans to the extent that they could, and the citizen commoners and others saw nothing but yet another unstoppable plunge into terrifying, if all too familiar, darkness. A barbarian and a centurion look pretty much the same to the man being put to the sword of one or the other hateful brute.

Nothing important remains of those who were already traveling the road with their backs to the sunset.

Nightfall then, nightfall now.

Professor Rubin wants a bailout of education. After all, the U.S. government has bailed out the economy and the banks, and it has engaged in decades-long, life-sustaining, wildly expensive support systems for everything from agriculture to the military hardware industry. Why not education now that the system is in a crisis of such proportions that courses are being canceled, teachers are being furloughed, and students are becoming restive enough to engage in public, vocal protests?

We bailed out a bunch of greedy, incompetent bankers.

We bailed out an economy with a huge number of people who had voted not once, but twice for the staggeringly incompetent former President and his equally incompetent minions who hauled us down an eight-year road to the economic and financial meltdown that finally got the people's attention once it slammed head-long through the info-tainment that masquerades as evening news into their own tunnel-vision lives.

Why not bail out the education system?

Professor Rubin (and anyone else who thinks this is a dandy idea whose time has come), allow me to succinctly explain why we should not, and I preface the emphatic words I write below by pointing out that I wear the hats of an economist, a financial analyst, a parent, and an all-around realist who does not care whom I offend. Read my explanation and imagine for yourself how bad it would be if I were actually leaning over your diminutive, Leftist head, sir, my voice thundering, my saliva flying, as happens all the time when I am teaching and when I am ranting on my talk radio show:

Mr. Rubin, we can't afford it, you Leftist academic airhead simpleton.

Again, sir, WE CANNOT AFFORD IT.

We are running unsustainable, unconscionable federal budget deficits, and our Congress is too cowardly to do anything about this madness other than to allow China and other countries to keep lending us literally trillions of dollars to keep our ludicrously low taxes and our bizarrely childish spending habits going, all while those countries peg their currencies at a half to a third of their purchasing power parity values against the dollar, thereby wrecking millions of American jobs and destroying billions and billions of dollars of our industrial base.

We can't get our tax structure put right because our President cowers to self-promoting clowns who squeal and bawl for even lower taxes.

We can't get our spending under control because our President and his Democratic allies are so obsessed with one-issue health care "reform" legislation that they'll sacrifice more important issues like antitrust law modernization and privacy law reform to some shifting vision of "fixing" a health care system that first and foremost desperately needs a hard dose of exposure to a real fist of antitrust law enforcement that includes no-exemption price transparency and, where necessary, government-sponsored, brutal competitive pressures.

More money for education, Mr. Rubin? Find it.

Go ask the Federal Reserve; for years, they've been printing money to keep the economy twitching through the slow death spiral of the Bush years and right on into the spending spree of the Obama Administration.

Oh, wait, that's right: all that money the Fed has printed in excess of the real growth rate of the economy is sooner or later going to create a massive tidal wave of inflation, isn't it? Or do you think clicking our heels and wishing real hard will make the so-called equation of exchange not come to bear in the long run with steel teeth? It's happening in China right now: our benefactor's years of currency exchange rate manipulation against the dollar (and against our interests) are now coming to a head with inflationary pressures that are scaring the living Hell out of those addled communist thugs running the show in Beijing.

Oh, just another minute, there: the Chinese are trying to pretend they can ratchet up their domestic interest rates to quell the inflation while still playing their currency rate manipulation games. Those are two mutually exclusive economic policies. The Chinese mercantilists' gambit is running into the long-run end result of years of spinning their yuan printing presses at near-light speed. Despite continued efforts to peg the yuan at a low level against the dollar to keep the growth of the Chinese economy high, the value of the yuan will rise as the People's Bank of China, with increasing fear of inflation expectations embedding into the Chinese economy, pushes their domestic interest rates up. The value of the yuan against the dollar will inexorably rise, and this will throttle down hard on the ability of the People's Bank to get American dollars by inducing its merchants to sell us cheap trash. Once the Chinese goods on American store shelves start getting expensive for us to buy, we will stop exporting greenbacks to China in exchange for their not-so-cheap-anymore stuff, which means the People's Bank of China won't have all those American dollars to lend back to our government (and consumers and businesses, by the way) so we can keep spending beyond our means like we have for so many years, now.

Nightfall coming: nightfall for them, nightfall for us.

Our government will no longer be able to get cheap money to squander on worthless war-making, which is the Right-wingers' favorite sport, or on some ridiculously expensive government solution for every sparrow that falls from the sky, which is the Leftists' preferred opiate.

The Federal Reserve can't keep printing money, not with the magma dome of inflation set to blow like Uncle Ed's trombone-oriented bowel after the Thursday night all-you-can-eat chili supper at the Second Methodist Church Jubilee Revival and Ladies Quilting Circle.

The government's gargantuan, out-sized demand for capital will push domestic and global interest rates upward, and the domestic economy, recently recovered from a pretty nasty recession, will teeter on the brink of an even worse economic crisis as those rising interest rates choke off private investment and consumer spending.

No, Professor Rubin, we can't afford to bail out another failed industry. We're going to need all the money we can just to postpone the end of yet another of history's failed empires.

Nightfall can certainly be forestalled, there's no question about that. All we have to do is close our eyes for a while longer.

The problem with that solution is sort of obvious, though: when we finally open our eyes—as eventually we will, if for no other reason than out of morbid curiosity—twilight will be over, and we will be entirely unprepared to see our way through the darkness.

Yes, morning will inevitably and someday follow this long and gathering night. It's just that we won't be around to see it.

college · finance · Obama · Bush · inflation · trade · deficit

Dark Voices Radio Program Note for 27 February 2010

wraith@dark-wraith.com — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 18:21:20 -0600

The Saturday, February 27, 2010, episode of Dark Voices Radio will air at 10:00 p.m. EDT instead of the originally scheduled time of 9:00 p.m. EDT. Please tune in, anyway, even though the show will run an hour later than it was supposed to.

Minor Notes for February 6, 2010

wraith@dark-wraith.com — Mon, 8 Feb 2010 19:20:00 -0600

Be sure to join me tonight for my Saturday edition of Dark Voices Radio at 9:00 p.m. EST. Note that the time has been changed to one hour earlier than before: air time is, again, 9:00 p.m. Eastern Time, not 10:00 p.m. as it used to be.

High on the agenda tonight is a speaker-melting rant about the arrest of a 12-year-old girl in New York City. Her crime? Making two little doodles on her desk expressing her love for her two best friends. She did it in erasable marker, no less.

Zero tolerance? You haven't heard about zero tolerance until you hear my flaming condemnation of this madness and the people ramming it down kids' throats like New York City Public Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and his buddy, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan. God! but I'm looking forward to tearing into those fiends this evening.

In other minor matters, readers may recall my January 2 article, "Personal Journey and Red Velvet Cake," which I began with a rather long-winded exposition on my personal revelation that, if I am going to bitch about other people's moral hypocrisy — Sarah Palin and a whole bunch of other Republicans come to mind, but so do some of Obama's disgraceful appointees, as well — I had best start working on cleaning up my own slothful life, first. On the physical side, my personal journey has included putting my health in order by losing weight, eating better, and dispensing with the woe-is-my-sorry-life attitude. I am not at all sure how the reparation of my mortal soul is going. On the bright side, in the next few months I will be formally announcing that I have at least secured a deal with a mainstream publisher for my first book. On the health side, I feel better now than I have in many, many years. As far as weight is concerned, from 190-some pounds, I now weigh 138 pounds.

Does that sound too low? Click here to see for yourselves. No, that isn't a Photoshop job. Photoshop was used, but only to render the original photograph black and white and to add graininess and more light gradient for artistic effect. Getting to this point wasn't easy, and remaining here never will be.

I cannot change the world, but I do presume to offer some advice, if perhaps only to an unusual breed of progressives: Republicans on the modern political stage of theatre and folly will not change; they are wholly committed to hypocrisy in their own lives and madness in their public discourse. Trying to reason with them is no more productive than accommodating their core of meanness. Stop wasting time. Find their weaknesses and feed them to the dogs of mainstream media's obsession with drool and scandal. More Republicans of the same ilk will come; they are locusts. Just keep wrecking their leading lights. They'll make it pretty easy for you; but you must have the guts to take glee not only in watching their self-immolation, but also in finding the accelerants of their demise.

But as much as you should rightfully take no quarter in wrecking any and every Republican, even those who pretend to some form or other of moderation, you are wasting every bit as much time hoping most Democrats who pretend to the call of leadership are anything other than craven shills for one or another parochial interest. Stop wasting your time thinking the salvation of this once-promising Republic is in the hands of Barack Obama or virtually any Democrat now in Congress. It is not, and the sooner you understand that, the more quickly you will look to truly progressive leaders waiting to be heard, to be elected, and to be trusted.

Tell me I am wrong, and I will tell you exactly what I think of anyone who continues to support a party that wants health care "reform" that includes fining me and putting me in prison because I will not be forced to buy the defective products of market-distorting, failed oligopolists. Neither will I support a President who feigns to competence by appointing and retaining demonstrably failed men and women.

Contrary to what millions believed in November of 2008, change begins within. Once it takes hold there, a person starts losing his or her fear of bad leaders, no matter how big their fist, no matter how attractive their promises.

Trust me on this. No matter how much the world around us needs to be reformed, change starts inside. From there, the rest might not be easy, but the road ahead is fairly clear.

So, too, are the roads that will lead to nowhere.

talk�radio · NCLB · reform · politics

How's School Going This Year?

wraith@dark-wraith.com — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 11:19:51 -0600

On a well-known social networking forum, I was just asked the question that is the title of this post: "How's School Going This Year?" My correspondent was a student of mine some years ago. I decided to answer her here:

Teaching is always a pleasure and a frustration: I am passing to my students shards and evidence of civilization, along with the ability to sustain it through the development of learning and other cognitives faculties; but I know the students are becoming less and less capable not only of learning, but more importantly of caring. The modern "solutions"—like "No Child Left Behind," "Zero-Tolerance" school policies, and even "Abstinence-Only" sex education—are worsening the situation. Failed generations are trying to craft policies and prescriptions to rectify failures magnificently evident in their own lives. All too easy is the noble task of repairing others compared to the tedious work of reforming ourselves.

I must stipulate that the lament of youthful ignorance, indolence, and sloth is as old as time, and few are the generations that can honestly claim their own moral, intellectual, or spiritual superiority over generations that followed. We are swift to condemn those whose youth reminds us of our own that we have lost, and we are even quicker to the judgment that we would do better if only we were once again young yet endowed with the wisdom of long lives, even if poorly managed as they have been.

Still, I see the end of America as empire of knowledge, craft, ambition, and abiding intellectual curiosity. If I am right, I must acknowledge that I have no one to blame but myself—not because I am a failed professor, though, because I am, in all honesty, a fine college teacher, one of the best of a vanishing breed of face-to-face lecturers with fiery oratory and unrelenting interest in his many disciplines of specialty. The blame I carry is that I am undeniably a member of a generation that failed, both in its whole and in far too many of its constituents. We failed in the leaders we chose, the policies we pursued, the self-indulgence we embraced, and the paths to rectitude we feigned.

Now, I must fail far too many students in my classes.

To that extent, I am, if nothing else, consistent.

youth · learning · college · culture · Empire

Dark Voices Radio Is on the Air Tonight

wraith@dark-wraith.com — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 19:13:54 -0600

Click on the graphic above to go to the showpage for the Saturday, January 23, 2010 live broadcast of Dark Voices Radio tonight at 10:00 p.m. EST. Politics, economics, and all manner of other troubling, infuriating, fabulous topics are always on the agenda. Listen to your host, the Dark Wraith, once again go into his trademark rant overdrive. Call in if you dare to join the howl-fest.

This is progressive radio the way it should be: fierce, intellectual, populist, uncompromising. This is Dark Voices Radio!

Dark Voices Radio Opening for January 23, 2010

Click on the link above to launch the one-minute audio file in your computer's default media player or use the shockwave player below to play it.

talk radio · progressive · news · opinion · politics · economics

Featured Grousing, Installment 1

wraith@dark-wraith.com — Fri, 8 Jan 2010 19:46:11 -0600

It is very cold outside.

Oh, stop it with the "How cold is it?" comeback. I'll tell you how cold it is.

It's cold enough to make me grouse. Never mind that there's nothing unusual about something making me grouse. Today, I groused about a driver in front of me who spun her car 360 degrees or so. She looked pretty shaken when she came to a rather sudden stop on the road where there wasn't any ice, so I decided not to share my annoyance with her.

Normally—and this is especially true if it's a younger, male driver—I'd go around the person and yell out the window, "Is that yer momma's car?!" I cut this lady slack, though. She didn't look too well after rotating in a big metal object that, I'm pretty sure, had never before so utterly disobeyed her.

I was grousing about my fellow shoppers in Walmart, too, today. It was the people who were on cell phones, completely oblivious to their random, meandering paths and the fact that they were slowing down to almost a stop as they engaged in what were not crucial conversations with their phone raconteurs.

I want one of those air horns, the ones that make an unexpected and thoroughly rude honk that snaps the heads of unwary people within 50 feet.

And that reminds me: have I mentioned lately how annoying those Website ads have become? First, it was the blinking, jerking, twitching ads trying to get my attention; those were bad enough. Now, it's that whole thing with those Flash ads that have something race into the picture, then slowly float around, then race back out of the picture. There are all kinds of variations on this, and they're all just infuriating. I've taken to the habit of simply leaving a Website where these ads are posted.

I go to a Website for content, not to see some ad embedded in the code by a hard-up Webmaster who actually believes he or she will make some money distracting visitors from the real reason they went to the site in the first place.

Hardly anyone in the normal cyber-universe makes money off Web ads. The few who do generally start talking about porn ads. That's really irritating because I won't post porn ads. The closest I've come is having affiliate status with Playboy and its sister company, Playboy Bunny, which sells degradingly skimpy women's apparel. I don't want to sell thongs and bust-lifting bras. They make me hurt just thinking about what they do to tender parts.

See? I can't even bring myself to post barely naughty ads.

Maybe I should sell posters of myself. Yes, that's going to sell like hotcakes.

Not.

So what ads do I run? Amazon.com, for one. And I try not to think about why on Earth anyone would click through to Amazon.com from any of my Websites when just about everyone knows how to get to Amazon.com without going to my sorry sites to do so.

"Oh, I'd better go to The Dark Wraith Forums today so I can click through and buy what I need at Amazon.com." Sure. That's going to happen.

Grr.

Now I've forgotten why I even bothered to start this article because I'm fully out on the tangent about Websites, ads, and revenue therefrom. This is where I get to mention my supreme annoyance with the people who actually do monetize their Websites.

Did you ever wonder how the guy who's behind Wikipedia is so filthy rich, even though there seem to be no prominent ads on Wikipedia pages? Did it ever make you wonder how those first-tier bloggers have gotten rich, even though the ads they post aren't really all that different from the ads you'd see on some loser's site?

You know how those people get all their money? Well, I do, and if you ever figure it out, you might be pretty bothered. Unless, of course, you're a blind Republican or an equally blind Democrat, in which case reality is a thing of beauty crafted from the whole cloth of fevered opinion without the complication of noticing that far too many of the leaders of the Right and the Left are nothing but sell-outs to the very institutions and people you loathe.

Most of you aren't stupid, though. I'll bet you're just tired: tired of the liars who sucker you into voting for them only to find out that your lives aren't getting any better, your rights—especially your rights to be left alone and not to be watched like you're a criminal waiting to happen—aren't coming back, and, even worse, this country isn't going to get any better. The Right-wing mobs cry for policies that benefit the rich even though the members of these mobs are working-class stiffs who are considered nothing but trash to the elite; and the Leftists still cheer Barack Obama even though he has demonstrated his willingness to continue prosecuting unwinnable wars, even though he caves to corporate and Right-wing interests, and even though he retains the services of failed and venal men like Timothy Geithner, Ben Bernanke, Robert Gates, Arne Duncan, and Robert Mueller.

Look hard into that darkening twilight: the sun is setting behind you.

No, big city Main Street and corporate media newsrooms aren't the only places where the commerce starts with a wink and ends with a meeting of minds and parts south in the company of ugly strangers and their fat wallets.

I've been pretty sure it wasn't always this way, but I'm beginning to suspect I've been wrong about that.

Yes, I'm just being overly cynical, though. It's not like that at all.

The world is good. First-tier, liberal bloggers are straight shooters. The government isn't still spying on you, and it deleted of all the databases you were in that were created during the Bush II era. Conspiracy theories are nonsense. The Democrats care about you instead of K Street lobbyists. The courts side squarely with the rights of the citizens over the claims of police and the privileges of corporations, and that promise of health care reform is about to be realized beyond your wildest hopes.

It's all good.

It's the 21st Century, we have a progressive—nay, a veritable liberal—in the White House, and our nation is at peace.

Yes, it's all good.

cynicism · fussing · crabbing · curmudgeonliness

Personal Journey and Red Velvet Cake

wraith@dark-wraith.com — Sat, 2 Jan 2010 11:08:38 -0600

I was in such decline.

I had become old before I should have, I was fat, and I was depressed. My health was poor. I was planning for my untimely death. Notwithstanding my defiant denials to the contrary, I was scared, scared of the world around me, scared of myself, what I had become, and where I was headed.

Not a person around me, even among those who might have cared, few as they are or should be, saw how bad off I was.

This is nothing new. It's been going on like this, off and on, back and forth, my whole adult life. With occasional bursts of vowed rectitude, I could always imagine that the side trips were the main road, but they weren't. The highway I was really traveling was big, wide, compelling, and most obvious if I hadn't been too blinded by self-excuses, fantastic voyages of delusion, and attempts at judgmentalism that didn't even fit my rather more live-and-let-live personality.

You've heard the terms, I am sure: "manic depression," "bipolar disorder," "obsessive-compulsive disorder."

I have a better one: "me."

How do I reach into the world of prominent people to make accusations of greed, hatefulness, and self-interest when I cannot bring my own house to persistent and self-evident order? The hypocrisy I see as others' glaring flaw parades in front of me as nothing other than the reflection of my own magnificently obvious defect.

I have lashed out in literary fury at people like George W. Bush; Richard Cheney; Sarah Palin; Al Gore; Paul Krugman; and now, with increasing frequency, Barack Obama. Their hypocrisy stuns me; yet, from what moral ground do I stand to cut through their false representations about themselves, their political positions, and their decisions?

This chasm between the desirable and the desired carves a broad scar through me every bit as much as it does them. We have our ideals that we wish for everybody, even for ourselves, but we cannot help but act out our lives at some lesser or greater difference from our expectations.

I am not sure of how much personal, emotional injury this causes any individual, although I suspect that I am not alone in suffering greatly inside for this hypocrisy; but I am most certain that the way we conduct our own lives at odds with our public expressions is of great harm to those who must suffer and fight their own battles in the shadow of social disapproval, laws, and other devices that project the desirable upon those acting for their own part on their desires.

Surrendering to license is no answer; I still have the call to a better nature in myself. Others do, too; but vows to be a better person, to live a cleaner, more genuine life are just so much talk in the few hours when the ill effects of living hedonistically become too obvious to ignore.

In some old languages, so-called "state of being" (or "copulative") verbs could be used in such a way that they became something like "action" verbs. In English, the classic state-of-being verb is "to be" since what comes after the verb is nothing but a description of what was put before the verb. "I am hungry," merely gives a description ("hungry") to the subject ("I"). Imagine how a verb like this could be made to convey a sense of action. It's not easy for speakers of languages that strongly distinguish what the subject is from what the subject does; but that's what could be done in some old languages. Translating into modern English what an ancient person had said when using this tense would be quite difficult and probably wouldn't be attempted at all. Most likely, the subtlety of that old sense of a copulative verb in active mood would be simplistically translated as some weakly related action verb.

Consider that when you hear the rather famous young rabbi from several millennia ago quoted as saying, "Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature."

"Go"? Try thinking of the quote instead using a state of being verb with the directive to action as that state. It helps bridge the chasm between the desirable and the desired. Whatever I intend to preach, the scar is first, foremost, and always in me, not in those whose hypocrisy is a parade that runs over my life.

The men and women who have inspired religions, sects, and cults have their moments, some more than others. Given that they have died, even they have passed the time of their actions, and only their lives matter much, if at all. State of being is, in itself and without even so much as the quality of animating life of the person, the entire action.

That's how it is with everyone, so I should get down to work. The world is becoming less free in the countries that preen themselves on their dedication to freedom. No matter what we do, this age of authoritarianism is pressing forward. From the Right, it wields the fist of ever-mounting, increasingly oppressive laws to replace individual choice with the fear of state violence through fines, imprisonment, and even death to ensure security against real, falsely magnified, and imagined enemies. From the Left, it wields that same fist of ever-mounting, increasingly oppressive laws to replace individual choice with the fear of state violence through fines, imprisonment, and even death to ensure compliance with group norms established beyond the counsel of individual conscience.

Nevertheless, my long walk to war with modernity must be from the inside out. That large highway of self-decline is so easy to use, but it leads — at least for me — to nowhere I need to go and to be.

A few months ago, I got rattled by several personal events that happened in short succession. I am hopeful that I am mature enough, now, to have seized those painful opportunities to put myself better and more permanently on a road that is good. What I know is that, with each cycle like this through which I have gone, I have stayed longer and found my way back more quickly when I drifted perilously away.

I have resolutely set aside my eating habits that had really been at the heart of some of the worst of my health problems. Instead of running to the medical establishment for promises wrapped in pills, procedures, and surgeries, I am eating well, in small portions, and without the obsessive glee of stuffing myself almost exclusively with meat until I am in sick pain.

I am still working on my addiction to nicotine, but in this cycle, I have brought it down to an allocation of nine ultra-light, short cigarettes a day. I will get it down further in the months ahead.

Instead of the random, miserable bursts of grueling exercise, I'm doing a moderate, 20-minute workout every day.

Within, rather than trying to will myself to stop obsessing about matters of loneliness, want for abiding and lasting love, greed for things, and want for expressed sexuality, I am thinking about creative ideas and the ways I can make them happen more consistently than I have in the past.

What is the payoff? As of today, I've lost 36 pounds. Gastrointestinal problems that had literally torn me up for years — for decades, in fact — have all but disappeared. Terrifying spells of what might be described as "silent heart attacks" that had been gripping me almost every day (at their worst, sometimes several in short succession) for the past three years have completely disappeared. My hair has gone from an old and elderly, lifeless look of almost gray to something much better, and my face looks noticeably better. You can see for yourself with this picture I took last week. (Those who know how my recipe posts work can click to see another at the end of this article.)

How long will all this last? Permanently, I hope. I'm sure I'll have setbacks, but it feels so good to feel better that I don't think the alternatives are all that attractive anymore. I still have so much work to do, though; but that's part of the journey, and this is the kind of road that is best because it is as long as the life lived traveling it.

It's almost time to start writing with fury, again. Readers will see that soon enough, but you will also see other kinds of writing, too. Only very rarely did I publish works of fiction, here, but I'll do more of that from now on. I like metaphorical narrative. I also like humor, and I will write more that is not so serious. I will also write more short articles, especially ones involving political and economic analysis. No normal person can frequently endure my detailed, gruelingly long-winded economic expositions, and I promise not to do those very often from now on.

I'll also be publishing some video work. Editorials, mostly, but I cannot promise that I won't try to get creative in a medium that is still quite new to me. Be patient; if the first couple aren't particularly good, that doesn't mean they won't get better as I master the craft and its technologies.

I've bleated long enough. It's time for the cake recipe.

Although I can usually remember all the details of how I make something, given that I had not made a red velvet cake in years, I had to go to one of my old recipe magazines to jog my memory. I have a nice little collection of recipe publications, mostly the ones you see on the shelves near checkout lines at grocery stores. I don't buy them there, though, because they used to show up all the time at flea markets, used bookstores, and places like that. They're not worth much to anyone else, but my collection is an invaluable resource, even though I have few opportunities to cook ambitiously.

This red velvet cake recipe, modified as I recalled from my version, comes from the November 30, 2004, magazine, Southern Living: Our Best Recipes (Birmingham, Alabama: Oxmoor House Special Editions). While the magazine version might take a little more than half-an-hour, rest assured that, unless you are a very efficient cook, the total preparation time will be more like an hour. In my case, the time is somewhat longer than that because I clean pans, dishes, and utensils as I go along so there's no big mess to clean up at the end of the food preparation phase of the project.

Here's what you'll need for this recipe.

Cake:

• 1 stick (½ cup) of softened butter
• 1½ cups of sugar
• 3 large eggs
• 2½ cups of cake flour
• 1 teaspoon of baking soda
• ½ of salt
• 2 tablespoons of cocoa
• 1 cup of buttermilk
• 1 tablespoon of distilled white vinegar
• 1 ounce of red food coloring
• 2 teaspoons of pure vanilla extract
• 2 greased, 9-inch round baking dishes

Frosting:

• 1 cup of milk
• 1/3 cup of regular flour
• 1 cup of softened butter
• 1 cup of sugar
• 1 teaspoon of pure vanilla extract

For those of you who are not familiar with ingredients for making food from scratch, let me tell you a couple of things about the ingredients, above. First, cake flour is not the same as what is commonly called "all-purpose flour." In the first part of the recipe, notice that you'll be using cake flour; in the second part, for the frosting, you'll be using all-purpose flour. Your cake will be a little sorry if you use all-purpose flour in that part of the recipe.

Second, when I write "softened butter," that means you should take the butter out of the refrigerator and let it set for about an hour so it warms up and mixes well with the other ingredients. No, leaving butter out of the refrigerator for that long will not endanger your health as long as the butter was good when you put it in the fridge. When I was growing up, butter was left out for much longer, and I don't recall any of my people dying from gastrointestinal upset.

Third, you might have noticed the two greased, round baking dishes in the ingredients. Yes, you can grease the dishes with that spray-on stuff if you like, but I won't do it like that. For one thing, I like to use butter; for another, I have this thing against inhaling aerosolized, fake grease into my lungs, where it will form a nice seal against efficient transport of oxygen to my bloodstream. (But that's just me.) The way I do it is to take a stick of butter and run the end side of it back and forth all over the inside of the baking dish. I do this until I see the dish become somewhat opaque from the layer of butter laid down. Later, not only will the cake come out of the dish intact, but the surface of the cake will be smoother and easier to frost.

Fourth, when I tell you to use "pure vanilla extract," I mean don't go using imitation vanilla. Just don't, okay? You're making good food; avoid using phony chemicals unless you must.

Fifth, when you buy sugar, buy cane sugar. Make sure it says that on the package; otherwise, you might be buying beet sugar. That's right, sugar can come from beets, but that doesn't mean you have to abide the nonsense.

Sixth, "baking soda" is not the same as "baking powder." Baking soda comes in those yellow Arm & Hammer boxes that people used to put in the backs of their refrigerators to absorb bad smells. It's used in recipes, too, like the one here. Baking powder is used in recipes, as well, but not the one here. You will be most disappointed if you use baking powder when a recipe calls for baking soda.

Finally, a word about using salt in recipes. I have to avoid salt as much as possible, and I would love to encourage you to do the same. I cannot eat even small amounts of fast food anymore because the salt content is so high that I will become incapacitated from swilling water starting about an hour after I've eaten the fare at McDonald's, Wendy's, Arby's, Burger King, and any other fast food restaurant. Sometime in the past couple of years, some grocery stores started selling their "fresh meats" laced with salt. The salt is ostensibly being put in as a "natural" preservative, but it has the effect, at least on me, of making the meats inedible unless I soak out the salt before cooking the food. Again, my aversion to salt is far greater than most people's, but you might be surprised at how good food tastes once you've stopped using salt to burn microscopic fissures into your taste buds to cut through the desensitization caused by all the previous salt you've run through your mouth. Try it sometime.

This recipe calls for some salt, and that's not unusual in cakes and pastries. I use it quite sparingly. Although I don't think it's necessary, salt added to batters is old, old tradition, and I'm not the kind of person who dispenses with an ingredient when I don't understand exactly why the tradition of using it first came about and then endured so tenaciously. Hence, in this recipe, I add half-a-teaspoon of salt. Why? Obviously, it's because that's how it's always been done, alright? (That's why I shall never be a liberal, even though most of my readers are, and I love you all more than I care for just about any conservative. But me? a liberal? Never. Progressive? Sure. Liberal? No. Life is too random as it is. Mostly, I blame quantum mechanics.)

Where was I? Oh, yes: making a cake.

The Cake Batter

Cake Batter Step 0
Preheat the oven to 350°

Cake Batter Step 1
Once the stick of butter is nice and soft, combine it with that half-cup of sugar and beat at medium speed. When those two ingredients are blended together, add one of the three eggs and keep beating until that egg is blended in nicely. Add the second egg and beat until you again have a smooth mixture. Add the third egg and beat until what's in the bowl has a nice, creamy look to it. This whole process shouldn't take more than five minutes. Once this step is finished, set the mixture off to the side while you get Step 2 finished. You might as well leave this in the mixing bowl with the mixer because you'll be running it again in just a few minutes.

Cake Batter Step 2
Take the two-and-a-half cups of cake flour, the baking soda, salt, and cocoa, and stir these dry ingredients together in a bowl. Use a big spoon to do this; it works well to lift and gather the separate ingredients.

Cake Batter Step 3
In another bowl or pan, pour in that cup of buttermilk, along with the tablespoon of distilled white vinegar, the red food coloring, and the two teaspoons of vanilla extract.

Cake Batter Step 4
This is where we bring everything together. You'll start with that mixture in the mixing bowl from Step 1. Put in a portion (maybe a third or a fourth) of the dry ingredients from Step 2, then run the mixer at low speed just long enough to get the dry ingredients cut in. Stop the mixer, put in maybe a third of the wet ingredients from Step 3, and run the mixer again just long enough to cut these ingredients through. Stop the mixer, put in some more of the dry ingredients, and run the mixer again (always on low speed) just long enough to get what you've just put in cut through. Stop the mixer and put in some more of the wet ingredients and then run the mixer just long enough to get it blended through. You should do this alternating addition and blending until everything from Steps 1 and 2 has gone into the mixing bowl. Make sure you begin and end with the dry ingredients from Step 2. Four additions with the dry and three with the wet is plenty. You will notice with each addition that what's in the mixing bowl gets redder and redder, but the resulting mixture looks more and more like an actual cake batter. By the time you've gotten everything mixed together, the batter will be quite red and fairly thick.

Cake Batter Step 5
Pour the batter into the two greased baking dishes, making every effort possible to get equal amounts in each because you're about to put them in the oven, and the baking time will be dependent upon the volume of batter in the dish, and you want the two, separate dishes to be done at the same time.

Cake Batter Step 6
Put the batter-filled baking dishes in the oven. Give them 18 minutes before you start checking to see if they're done. Put a toothpick in each, and when it comes out clean (it can look greasy, but no batter and no sticky cake should be on it), take the dishes out. My experience is that they'll need about 23 minutes, but this is highly dependent upon the oven and somewhat dependent upon the type of baking dishes (clear or colored) that you're using. Overcooking will be as bad for your results as under-cooking, so be diligent in this step.

Cake Batter Step 7
Once out of the oven, put each dish on a cooling rack for ten to fifteen minutes. At that time, take a butter knife and run it around the inside edge of each dish several times, pushing slightly in at the bottom to detach the cake at the edges of the underside. Once you've done that, put each rack on top of its dish and flip the contraption over. Pat the cake until it lets go onto the rack. Allow the cakes to finish cooling bare on the racks like that.

The Frosting

Frosting Step 1
In a smallish sauce pan, put the one cup of milk and the third of a cup of all-purpose flour. Using a whisk, stir the flour thoroughly into the milk. With the pan on a stove burner set to medium, keep whisking the mixture until it gets quite thick. It will get to the consistency of mashed potatoes as it approaches boiling. Take it off the burner before it actually boils and put it in the refrigerator to cool. It should take maybe 45 minutes for it to get properly chilly. You don't want it cold, just chilled.

Frosting Step 2
When the mixture from Frosting Step 1, above, is getting to just about the right temperature, put the two sticks of softened butter into the mixing bowl with the cup of sugar and the teaspoon of vanilla extract, and run the mixer on high until the ingredients have a nice, creamy consistency. Stop the mixer and put in that cooled mixture from Frosting Step 1. Run the mixer on high, but only long enough to get the ingredients well mixed. Avoid over-beating.

Put the Cake All Together

Put one of the cake layers, both of which should now be cooled to room temperature, onto your cake dish. This layer should be flat side up (in other words, the side that was at the bottom of its baking dish should be up). Spread the top and sides of this layer with frosting from the mixing bowl.

Now, put the other layer, flat side down on top of the layer you've just frosted. Spread the top and sides of this layer with the rest of your frosting, making sure to generously cover the seam between the layers with frosting.

You have now finished your cake, and it is ready to serve.

Be sure to cover and refrigerate whatever is left over of this cake from the first helpings. You can warm it up to eat some later, but be aware that this cake won't keep very well, so you should eat it all within 48 hours or so of preparation.

It also tastes better if served by the cook; so, for those of you familiar with the tradition of these recipes offered here at The Dark Wraith Forums, you may click here to see the proper serving manner of the gentleman who has made this wonderful, colorful dessert for you.

Enjoy your cake, good readers.

Christmas 2009

wraith@dark-wraith.com — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 22:00:00 -0600

Christmas · holiday · good�will · thank�you