Oh, to work for the government

Federal employees are generally overpaid and enjoy other advantages as well, such as higher job security.

What was the point again of all that nasty, life-negating crap I like?

--Carl Wilson

Fear of disorder

In Environmentalism and the Fear of Disorder, Ronald Bailey writes

...a lot of environmentalists experience many aspects of the modern world as chaotic and thus seek to compensate for their perceptions of disorder by engaging in ritual behaviors that make them feel like they are exerting more personal control. It is not much of a leap to conclude that by imposing those rituals on others, some environmentalists seek to reduce their dread of disorder even more.

Why call them rituals? Because it is not all that clear that they actually do anything much for the natural environment. For example, the costs of curbside recycling often outweigh purported benefits, and lower organic crop yields mean more land taken from nature. But as Meijers and Rutjens have shown, partaking in such rites is much like reciting the Rosary, in that they, too, reduce participant anxiety.

If someone asks: "Is there a god?"

Q: Is their a god?

A: No, it's an adjective.

— Cecil Adams

Braised pork belly 紅燒肉

3-4 lbs. pork butt

The day before:
Cut pork into large pieces, bring to a boil, cool and then rinse, refrigerate

Fry in a little olive oil:
chopped one pound shallots or several scallions
sliced ginger (a piece the size of two thumbs)

Add:
All the meat
In a spice bag:

2 star anises

2 one-inch by ½ inch pieces of chinese cinnamon

1 Tablespoon sichuan peppercorns

6 dried hot peppers

5-6 pieces rock sugar
1 teaspoon sea salt
½ cup rice wine for cooking （绍興酒 rather than 米酒）
½ cup soy sauce
1-2 teaspoon black pepper
1½ cups water; the mix of meat and spices should be about 7/10 covered

Stew over a low flame until tender (1½-2 hours)

Salmon fried rice

Use the leftover oil from frying salmon or salmon skin.

Chop about a cup cabbage, fry in the salmon oil, add half a cup of chopped cilantro, stir fry, mix in a couple of cups of cooked rice (adjust according to how oily you want it), sprinkle with salt, and you're done.

Salmon on rice wrapped in nori

That's about it. Salmon skin is good. Chop up the meat and skin and fry it up. (Save the oil and some of the meat for Salmon Fried Rice). Spread cooked rice at one end of a sheet of nori, spread on some salmon, sprinkle with furikake and wrap it in the nori; I don't know if it's genuine onigiri, but I like it.

Shiitake mushrooms with snow peas

Snap both ends off snow peas, slice about equal quantity of fresh shiitake mushroom caps (discard the stem) into thin slices. Heat oil, first dump in the mushrooms, then the snow peas, stir fry adding water whenever the liquid dries up. Don't overcook!

Chinese meatloaf

OK, it's not really a loaf, but it's meat.

½ lb. ground pork

Mix in a couple of teaspoons of:
soy sauce
rice wine
sesame oil

salt and pepper to taste.

Mince:
2 scallions
1½ teaspoon ginger
1 cup shiitake mushrooms (3 or 4)

Microwave the mushrooms a minute or so; they'll shrink to about half.

Mix all ingredients together in a low bowl, then put the trivet in the rice cooker, two cups of filtered water, put a plate on the trivet (in case of spills) and the bowl on the plate. Click it on and take it out when it's done. Eat with rice.

To what shall I

Compare this human life?

To the white wake

Of a boat rowing away

At the break of dawn.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it's this:
【世の中を何に譬へむ朝開き漕ぎ去にし船の跡なきごとし】
万葉集351、沙弥満誓の歌です。
 or:
世間を 何に譬へむ 朝開き 漕ぎ去にし船の 跡なきがごと
Yononaka o nani ni tatoen asabiraki kogiinishi fune no atonaki ga goto

Wisdom, of a sort

"Do not let these circumstances define you the way I let them define me."

"Revenge" Season 3 Episode 13 at 31:49,250

Dignity

In The War on Reason Paul Bloom writes,

In his recent book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker notes that a high level of self-control benefits not just individuals but also society. Europe, he writes, witnessed a thirtyfold drop in its homicide rate between the medieval and modern periods, and this, he argues, had much to do with the change from a culture of honor to a culture of dignity, which prizes restraint.

I had thought of "dignity" primarily in terms of just one of the American Heritage Dictionary's definitions, that is, "Stateliness and formality in manner and appearance", and #4 in the OED reads "Nobility or befitting elevation of aspect, manner, or style; becoming or fit stateliness, gravity" and refers us to "dignified": "Marked by dignity of manner, style, or appearance; characterized by lofty self-respect without haughtiness; stately, noble, majestic."

But that's not cited in the Macmillan English Dictionary, which instead only mentions "the impressive behavior of someone who controls their emotions in a difficult situation," whereas Merriam-Webster offers "a way of appearing or behaving that suggests seriousness and self-control" and "the quality of being worthy of honor or respect".

I did not know this. And even if the Macmillan English Dictionary gives the example "She faced her death with great dignity" for their above definition, restraint and control of one's emotions aren't apparently what "dignity" means in the Death with Dignity movement, which states,

The greatest human freedom is to live, and die, according to one's own desires and beliefs. From advance directives to physician-assisted dying, death with dignity is a movement to provide options for the dying to control their own end-of-life care.

So in "death with dignity", it's still control, but control of one's own future. I have the impression that it also suggests there's something undignified about living in an unpleasant manner, that is, suffering from the symptoms of illness and its treatment: pain or unpleasant side effects from medication or other life-prolonging measures.

But for me, life, and aging, and death itself are all pretty undignified.

Freedom of Religion But Not of Consumption

Yes, Americans have freedom of religion, of speech, of assembly, and of petition, but we don't have freedom to choose what we consume.

One of Ron Paul's defining moments on the national stage...was when, at the first 2012 cycle Republican presidential candidate debate in May 2011, he mocked the notion that legalizing heroin was a terrible idea that would lead everyone to do heroin.

"It's amazing that we want freedom to pick our future in a spiritual way but not when it comes to our personal habits," he said, and advocated leaving drug policy to the states....

On a related note, heroin overdose is apparently almost nonexistent.

Sounds that seemed familiar‏

From Futility Closet:

I was in the Outer Hebrides and I came across an abandoned derelict croft. It had no roof, but very substantial walls and in the gaps between the stonework was a starlings’ nest. I could hear the birds inside, and eventually one of the starlings came to defend its territory. I heard straight away that it wasn’t just the usual rambling song. It started to mimic a Corncrake, a species that is very rare in mainland Britain. It did this bird’s buzzing repetitive song, but then it immediately went into other sounds that seemed familiar and had a strong rhythm to them. As I was listening I was looking around and could see the remnants of farm machinery, including an ancient tractor that had not moved for 20-30 years. I realised this bird was singing the song of some of this machinery. It was singing the song of a mechanical pump that had obviously been active around this farm, and used by the people who had lived here.
I wasn’t listening to the same starling that heard these original sounds. These copied sounds are usually passed on from parents or neighbouring birds so that a young bird absorbs and then duplicates them. The strange thing was that I was recording the sounds in what had been somebody’s living room, a place that had obviously been full of the conversations of family life over generations and which had passed into history. Yet the birds had returned and taken it back — claimed this space and these rocks — and were singing their own song. And they were singing the songs that were around when the people were here.

– Chris Watson of Tyne and Wear, U.K., quoted in Mark Cocker’s Birds & People, 2013

On using religion for evil

Speaking to the protagonist Robert of the ideas of his Satanic companion, Mr. Blanchard, "who was reckoned a worthy, pious divine" says,

It is incalculable what evil such a person as he may do, if so disposed. There is a sublimity in his ideas, with which there is to me a mixture of terror; and, when he talks of religion, he does it as one that rather dreads its truths than reverences them. He, indeed, pretends great strictness of orthodoxy regarding some of the points of doctrine embraced by the reformed church; but you do not seem to perceive that both you and he are carrying these points to a dangerous extremity. Religion is a sublime and glorious thing, the bonds of society on earth, and the connector of humanity with the Divine nature; but there is nothing so dangerous to man as the wresting of any of its principles, or forcing them beyond their due bounds: this is of all others the readiest way to destruction. Neither is there anything so easily done. There is not an error into which a man can fall which he may not press Scripture into his service as proof of the probity of, and though your boasted theologian shunned the full discussion of the subject before me, while you pressed it, I can easily see that both you and he are carrying your ideas of absolute predestination, and its concomitant appendages, to an extent that overthrows all religion and revelation together; or, at least, jumbles them into a chaos, out of which human capacity can never select what is good. Believe me, Mr. Robert, the less you associate with that illustrious stranger the better, for it appears to me that your creed and his carries damnation on the very front of it.

James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824)

By the way, shortly after the above, Robert and his companion murder Mr. Blanchard.