What is this I don’t even

The wingnut deification of the couldn’t-have-happened-to-a-nicer-guy Blartblart has jumped the shark, a mere 90 days after the fucking disgraceful excuse for a human shuffled off his chubby, drunken, mortal coil.

Jesus H. Krispy Kreme. What is it with wingnuts and slobbering over their deceased leaders? And especially their leaders who were just worthless examples of their type during life – they did it with Reagan, who in life was a shitty President who got lucky, and now they’re doing it with Breitbart, who was a shitty journalist and shitflinger in life.

Is it some kind of daddy complex that drives them to fellate the corpses of their shittiest leaders?

(H/T LGM, Wonkette.)

A repurposed blog comment re cast iron cookware

From this thread. 

If you have a cast iron pan you need to get cleaned up and reseasoned, for my money, the best way to go is the oven cleaner in a plastic bag method, which involves covering the pan in lye-based oven cleaner and putting it in a plastic bag overnight.

It may take a few days, but that will get the nasty gunk off nice and easily. Just wash the cleaner off every night and apply a fresh coat before rebagging. I cleaned a nice skillet down to fresh metal that way. You may need to do a little scrubbing, but not much.

Then, you want to remove any rust, and the best way to do that is to soak it in a solution of water and vinegar for a few hours, and then rinse with just water. The pan should be thoroughly dried in a hot oven before applying your first coat of seasoning.

Your best bet for seasoning is a thin coat of a drying oil like fresh flaxseed oil or soybean oil. Canola also works, but sometimes creates a harder, more brittle coating. My preference is soybean oil; flaxseed oil is expensive, difficult to find, and goes rancid very quickly if not properly stored.

You’ll want to do several coats, ideally at least three, before you start cooking in it. The best way is to heat the oven to 500F and when heated place the pan in it, covered in a thin coating of oil. Leave it upside down so the oil doesn’t pool. You should leave it in there for an hour on full heat, and then turn the oven off and allow it to cool.

You should see an instant shiny coating – repeat as many times as appropriate, at least three. If the coating isn’t immediately black, don’t worry – it may turn a very dark brown, which is entirely normal, and this will become black with repeated applications and cooking.

Also, the things you cook in it will affect the seasoning – don’t do anything with a lot of sugar in it, or tomatoes, or anything which requires a lot of boiling. There is no surer way to f*ck up new seasoning than the above.

You should do lots of things involving frying at first; skillets are very good for this, obviously, and they are very good for making cornbread with a super crunchy crust, especially if you preheat oil in them and pour the batter into that before baking.

A new Mike’s Law

In the spirit of Poe’s Law, Mike’s Law of Internet Radfems:

Without an obvious smiley or graphic, it is impossible to determine whether an expressed opinion, article or comment by a radical feminist should be taken as a serious statement of her views.

Or to give you the shorter:

With radfems, never sure if trolling or just expression of views

Exhibit A, Julie Bindel:

If men like a particular brand of feminism, it means it is not working.

That’s right, Julie, because a) all men hate all women, and b) no men are feminists, and c) you decide what constitutes “real” feminism.

Cretin.

ETA: Shorter Cathy Brennan, proving the law to be true:

Look, ma! I’m funny because I’m a disgusting bigot!

But seriously, not only is she running a hate site, she is also proving the point that radfems of her stripe are indistinguishable from parody; I don’t think I could come up with a more unpleasant caricature of her political position than she already has. And the most ironic point is not that she thinks her leaden misunderstandings of memes are funny, but that she thinks she’s actually somehow defending and supporting her position.

An Open Letter to Glenn Reynolds

Dear Glenn,

Next time you go on a sex tour to Bangkok vacation and need some fill-in writers for your blog, please do us a favour and find someone from the ranks of the less stupid wingnuts — the current stand-in is a cretin and is accelerating the already speedy downward spiral of your blog into unconscious parody.

As easy as it is to make fun of your blog normally, this is like dynamiting fish in a very small barrel. Where the fish are already dead.

Love,
Mike

(via a guy called Andrew)

---

See also Scott Lemieux at LGM.

Gone to Where The Wild Things Are

Maurice Sendak, widely considered the most important children’s book artist of the 20th century, who wrenched the picture book out of the safe, sanitized world of the nursery and plunged it into the dark, terrifying and hauntingly beautiful recesses of the human psyche, died on Tuesday in Danbury, Conn. He was 83.

The cause was complications of a recent stroke, said Michael di Capua, his longtime editor. Mr. Sendak, who died at Danbury Hospital, lived nearby in Ridgefield, Conn.

Via.
A copy of Where The Wild Things Are was a prized childhood possession of mine, and now belongs to my son.

A brief thought

Celebrity couples who claim they won’t get married until there is marriage equality are the fashionably-lefty equivalent of Christians who claim to be praying about a problem – they get to have the feeling of doing something without having to actually do anything at all.

Go West. No, Really, West – Go Away!

Allen West doubles down in his campaign to win the award for most cretinous politician, having previously launched it with one of the stupidest things to come out of the mouth of a sitting Congressman.

The thing is, modern American politics has slanted so far towards the ridiculous that it’s now impossible to distinguish whether a politician actually means the idiotic things he says, or whether he’s just pandering to his constituents; with West, however, his actions seem to point to the former – even when not in the public eye, he seems ready, willing and able to be a massive idiot, and I don’t think anyone has the stamina to be engaging in trolling that far undercover for so long.

Via OTB, where the comments are just fucking priceless – Steven L. Taylor is one of the most readable, knowledgeable and sane members of Outside The Beltway and he gives far too much time and energy to a cretin called Joshua Sanders, whose blog seems to consist of steamboat pictures and uninformed political commentary, with the occasional American Idiot Idol post. You’re a better man than me for doing it, Professor Taylor.

By Republican standards, the program was a success!

John Cole blogs about the Florida drug test law which targets welfare recipients, and as usual, gets right to the heart of what really counts:

This was never about money. This was about shaming people, humiliating people, making being poor worse than it already was, and giving the soulless goons like the types I mentioned above an opportunity to feel smug and good about themselves at the expense of others.

And not to mention that the program was a resounding waste of money and arguably a massive failure; during the four months that the drug testing was in place, only

[…] 2.6 percent of the state’s cash assistance applicants failed the drug test, or 108 of 4,086, according to the figures from the state obtained by the group. The most common reason was marijuana use. An additional 40 people canceled the tests without taking them.

Even if we allow that the 40 who cancelled did so because they were using drugs, rather than for principle or cost reasons, that still only puts the figure up to 3.6%, and as John rightly points out, by the Federal govt’s estimate, only 8% and 10.2% of full- and part-time workers respectively test positive for illegal drug use; in short, welfare recipients are at least only half as likely to use illegal drugs.

To someone who actually thought about this reasonably and rationally, rather than through the filter of political ideology, this only makes sense: people applying for welfare don’t tend to have a bunch of extra cash lying around to blow on drugs; to the modern Republican Party, however, the only people who apply for welfare are lazy cheats who don’t want to work, because if they did want to work, they’d already have bootstrapped themselves into high paying jobs.

Let’s just not talk about how poverty tends to be intergenerational, or how these noble bootstrappers took advantage of the same government-provided privileges and opportunities that they’re trying to take away from the modern poor, or how these same self-made men and women just happened to have parents who gave them a leg up.

There will be some people who still insist this is about saving money; they can’t still very well insist that welfare recipients are all druggies now, or at least not with a straight face. This can be swiftly despatched with the following facts:

Because the Florida law requires that applicants who pass the test be reimbursed for the cost, an average of $30, the cost to the state was $118,140. This is more than would have been paid out in benefits to the people who failed the test

Let’s not kid ourselves here, folks. This whole thing was about class warfare and punishing the poor, because the Republican Party is now the official party of the 1%, because the poor vote for Democrats; it’s fruit from the same poisonous tree that leads to voter ID laws, and just another example of how Republicans are no longer interested in governing, only in being in power.

A brief thought

I’ve been rereading The Stand, and it really struck me this time how much the protagonists are whiny, judgemental arseholes. It’s not that I want Flagg to win, just that I really don’t like the “good” side.

About fucking time…

George Zimmerman has been charged with second-degree murder in the Trayvon Martin shooting, after weeks of stalling and white supremacist lobbying to have all young black men pre-emptively declared criminals.

Oh, and here’s one for the are-you-fucking-kidding-me file:

[Zimmerman’s] attorney, Mark O’Mara, said Zimmerman would plead not guilty, and hoped the judge would consider a bond.

“He is troubled by everything that has happened,” O’Mara said. “Truly, it must be frightening to not be able to go into a 7-Eleven or a store. It would trouble any of us.”

Do I have to point out the irony here?