I Got Me A New Cameraaa!

The Face of California's Budget Cuts

On June 23rd, activists blocked traffic in front of Schwarzennegger's office in San Francisco.





This is the cost of our choices. How much does it cost to book a man instead of caring for him?

How much to imprison him instead of aiding him?

How many other people are struggling, but too weak to make a stand?

What kind of nation would you stand for?

I do not know who these people are, or how to contact them. I don't know why our media covers the dead while we fail to care for the people who still live. But I thought everyone needed to see this.

Duck Redux

I know I must not be a proper hippie, because I get too excited about the new smokehouse addition to Whole Food's butcher shop. Yes. I know my friends who eschew even leather shoes would be horrified, but I can't help myself. They have a triangle to ring when they set out free samples, and I think is must be awakening some deep-seated, Pavlovian reflex we Southerners possess.

One day, the free samples were entire ribs. They're training me. And I like it.

Anyway, I did a double-take as I passed this display on Friday. Hanging in the case was an entire smoked duck. And I thought the tag said they were $9.99 each. What a deal!

I hassled the first man who came to help me about where the ducks were from, and as he went to check, another came to wrap up the duck for me. I'm not up on my duck's rights arguments, and this is how I tried to silence the little voice that jumped up to make me feel guilty. Thankfully, the young man came back at about this time to show me the packaged ducks so I could read the label: Pitman Farms.

It was also about this time that it dawned on me that the little sign really said the ducks were $9.99 per pound. So much for frugality!

But really, when you think about it, that's really not so much. The whole duck cost $28, and we ate it all weekend. Six meals so far have managed to squeeze inside that $28, and I know six meals based off duck would never be that cheap in a restaurant. I recently had Peking duck in a restaurant in Manhattan, and it was $50 or so for the three of us. And yes, I thought that was reasonable. I love duck.

But wait, there's more. We've only managed to scratch the surface of the duckly goodness. I carved a little bit into tacos. I rendered the skin in a frying pan for some fantastic duck fat infused Yukon Gold fries. And then I broke down the carcass and the rest of the meat for cassoulet. I'm guessing that total, we'll squeeze another four dinners out of the little guy.

So, if you too noticed the ducks hanging at Whole Foods, or if you're lucky enough to live in Chinatown... Here's what to do with duck.


Duck Tacos for Two
4 tortillas
2 tbs vegetable oil
1 sweet potato
2 apricots
1 cup cooked duck meat
1 cup mache
sriracha

Turn on your broiler and set up a tray about 3 inches from the heat source. Dice the potato and slice the apricot thinly. If your apricots are sour, sprinkle with a little sugar. Toss potato and apricots together with vegetable oil, and spread on your baking sheet. Broil for about 3 to 4 minutes, or until the diced sweet potato is cooked through. You might need to turn once, depending on your oven. Meanwhile, heat your duck meat up on a plate with the tortillas laying on top. This will also serve to warm and soften the tortillas. To assemble, layer mache leaves, duck meat and warm apricot/sweet potato relish in the tortilla, and serve with sriracha to taste.

More Duck Tacos for Two
4 tortillas
1 sweet potato
1 red onion
2 tbs vegetable oil
1 tbs butter
1/2 cup fresh salsa (by this I mean a salsa that isn't cooked before being packaged, like Pace... cooked salsas tend to have a vinegary flavor to me. The fresh salsas are generally found in the refrigerated part of the store...)
1/4 cup beer
duck meat
mache

Again, preheat broiler and set tray near heat source. This time, quarter your potato and thinly slice the quarters longways. Quarter and thinly slice your red onion. Toss red onion and potato slices with vegetable oil and broil for about 3 minutes, until the potatoes are done and the onion looks a bit charred. Meanwhile, take a small pan and melt the little pat of butter in it. When the foam subsides, add your salsa and cook for about five minutes. You will smell a difference as you cook your salsa down a little: it will lose a little bit of the tang from the fresh tomatoes. Add your beer and turn up the heat a little to reduce a bit. This is one of my favorite ways to use up old salsas, and the result is reminiscent of ranchero sauce.

Again, heat your duck meat in the microwave with the tortillas. To assemble, layer your mache and duck with the sliced potatos and onion, and then top with the sauce you made. Serve remaining potatoes and onion as a side dish with more sauce and cheese if you like.


Duck Hash

1 cup worth of fatty bits from your duck
6 yukon gold potatoes
1 red onion

Set your frying pan on the stove at medium, and allow it to preheat. Add duck bits and stir until the fat is rendered. Scoop out the bits with a spoon and reserve (you're basically making duck-pork rinds, which may sound either appealing or disgusting to you, but they are DELICIOUS). Slice your potatoes into a convenient shape for frying and let them get nice and crispy and brown in your rendered duck fat. Swoon. Remove potatoes and drain on paper towels, then add the red onion, which you will have sliced thinly. Once your onions get a touch caramelized, drain off the fat and toss the potatoes and crispy bits back in the pan to rewarm. This was fantastic with a fried egg on top. Do not tell your cardiologist.

Utterly Inauthentic Cassoulet
(But it could be quick, if you used a purchased and substituted chicken stock... that's the time consuming part)

for the stock:
1 meaty duck carcass, skin removed
1 onion
4 cloves garlic
1 tsp peppercorns
water to cover (about 10 cups I would say)

Place everything in a stockpot and add water to cover. Bring it to just about a boil, then crank the heat down to simmer, skimming the top from time to time. Allow this to cook for two or three hours, and I personally don't cover my stock and then reduce it... I let it simmer uncovered because I am lazy.

1 sweet potato, diced
2 sticks celery, diced
1 onion, diced
4 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
1/2 cup sopprasetta, diced
1 can cannellini beans, drained & rinsed
1 can kidney beans, drained & rinsed
3 pork sausages, casings removed and broken up
2 cups duck meat
1.5 cups duck stock
1 cup beer
1-2 cups coarse breadcrumbs
1 can diced tomatoes, drained

Saute the potato, celery, onion and garlic until translucent, then add sopprasetta. Cook until the vegetables and sausage are starting to brown. Remove from the pan and reserve. Add your beans to this mixture and stir to combine. Add your crumbled sausage to the pan and allow it to brown. Deglaze your pan with the beer, then add tomatoes.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease the bottom and sides of a deep casserole dish (I used two, a 9-inch square and a round 8 inches in diameter), and spread a layer of the bean mixture across the bottom. layer duck meat on top, and then use a spoon to remove the sausage and tomatoes from the pan, adding that on top. Repeat layers, then top with bread crumbs. Bake for 55 minutes to 1 hour. This is wonderful over rice, with crusty bread.

Smooth Criminal Mindreaders

Let me first state, I am not a huge Michael Jackson fan. I was a deprived child in the 80s, and my parents told us we couldn't afford cable. As evidence, for years, I thought Torture was a Michael Jackson video. I was watching it on a 13 inch screen, what the hell did I know?

But I'm not really here to write about how lame I was. No. I wanted to write about a peculiar article here that was posted on the occasion of Michael Jackson's death. JimGalt wrote a post titled, Death of a Child Molester. I'm not linking it here, so that link goes to a post where he ponders self-deletion.

If you choose to read his post, please enjoy this fine tune as an accompaniment:

But if you stay, let me just say, that the title really says it all. If you need more, I'm pretty sure this is him on Yahoo Answers. And I commented because I used to feel similarly, until I read this article from GQ. And he wrote back, and we had a very disturbing conversation with several other voices, all of whom had decided that Michael Jackson was a pedophile, based on the fact that a court had acquitted him of all the charges he'd faced. Now, I don't for one moment believe that our system is perfect. OJ Simpson even wrote an ill-advised book to rub our faces in how poorly it can work. But I was surprised by how bothered I was by the way they had decided that Michael Jackson had to be guilty, based on the words of children, and the fact that he was a goofy bastard.

Now, don't get me wrong. Child abuse and molestation really happens, and by no means am I encouraging parents to ignore their kids when they tell them that they've been touched inappropriately. That's not what this is about. I'm more concerned about the way we have accepted the notion that people who have been accused of something must be guilty of it, when there is no evidence. Perhaps I saw this relationship most clearly yesterday, because earlier I'd been at the march the San Jose Peace and Justice Center organized. We rallied in front of Jeppesen's headquarters to protest against their participation in the extraordinary rendition program, organized by the CIA. It astounds me that this country I love has become so fearful and paranoid that it will ignore the very reasons it was formed, Fedexing people to be tortured. When our founding fathers rebelled against England, it was in protest of the monolithic brutalizing force of that state. They rejected taxation without representation. They rejected the notion of presumed guilt. And they rejected the idea of law implemented capriciously, to punish the poor, the misunderstood or the powerless.

We inherited a country with those values, though we've often failed to uphold them. And now we are a country where the President can simply shove people in a hole, because of a case of mistaken identity. Now, we are a county where demagogues rouse us to violence because they grow impatient with the law and its workings. And finally, now we are a country where once a man has died, we remember what his accusers have said, instead of what was proven in a court of law.

I'm sure this always happened. Rumors proliferate because they are so much more colorful and satisfyingly spiced than truth. But we have means of finding what is true and what isn't these days, ways our ancestors lacked. Yet still, the messages that find their way into my inbox are unbelievably silly. I can disprove them in a heartbeat, the way I disproved the claim in the comments somewhere around here, that Timothy McVeigh only had one book, written by Al Gore.

And that's why I wanted to say something about JimGalt's post, even though it seems to have disappeared. It's a symptom of this paranoia we're infected with, that teaches us to fear each other and erodes our communities. His post is like a boil, erupting on the skin, where all the fear can bubble up. Where people slap each other on the back for indicting men who don't seem to have any genuine crimes to their name, besides maybe a freaky appearance and a penchant for dressing weirdly.

I was so fascinated trying to find out how he was so certain about this, when the police weren't, and then he closed the comments. And when I sent him that GQ article, he said I was stalking him. So that's why I posted this. If you can't even stand to read about what might exonerate this person you've decided is a monster, then I only feel it's right to demonstrate why that's so frightening to someone who values freedom and the rule of law. Yes, men can be monsters. And so can children. The Salem Witch Trials ran on the words of children. In LA in the 1980s, a DA went on a crusade against child molesters, getting statements from children who took the stand as witnesses.

And now, years later, we know those children were intimidated into lying. And that means that all those people went to jail, based on hysteria. That means the children who testified against them grew up with the horrible knowledge that you could be sent to jail on a lie. One man wouldn't even bathe his own baby girl because he was so fearful about what someone might say about it.

I can't imagine what it could be like for someone who has truly experienced the horror of being molested. I don't know what those memories would feel like, or what brings the bile up in the back of your throat. But I do know that innocent people are accused of crimes. Our system is slow and reliant on process because often, the truth is not obvious. But that slowness is a feature, not a bug. When it runs off those ponderous tracks, we get more horrible realities than those we thought we were correcting. And please, don't take my word for it:

"It screwed me up; the guilt of thinking I put my mom in prison for the worst offense possible," Donald Grafton says in an interview. He claims he was forced to falsely testify that his own mother had sex with him as a child. His mother, Margie, endured hellish treatment from other inmates. "Mom got black widow bites and they pushed her hands into machinery and busted them up because she was a child molester. It was directly on me because I lied and put her there."

When it runs off the tracks and we convict people based on patterns of behavior rather than evidence of a crime, we put innocent people in prison. That's what happened to the people in Kern County. That's what is happening to the people it Guantanamo Bay. And that's how JimGalt believes justice should work. For him, it's enough to just have the patterns of activity. Two people accused Jackson of molesting them, 10 years apart. Repetition equals guilt.

But he doesn't seem to consider it significant that the first molestation case was in all the papers, because of course Michael Jackson is a celebrity. That can't possibly have anything to do with people who came to accuse Jackson later.

And several times, he thought it was significant that La Toya had accused her brother of being a pedophile. And it doesn't matter that she recanted... that's when she's crazy apparently.

And what few in the comments seemed willing to acknowledge, was the pain of the children who are involved in this whole thing. What does it do to you, when one of your parents drugs you, and then puts you in a courtroom? What must it be like for Jackson's real children, who are getting to be old enough to google him, and who will inevitably find these things?

I can't know, and I won't guess. I only find it sad, that this is what followed Jackson to his grave, when the man left us with so much more.

Alien Ant Farm - Smooth Criminal
Uploaded by melkor75. - Music videos, artist interviews, concerts and more.

I've Been Cheating On You

Sorry. It was just a little bit! I worry occasionally that my gardenblog is infested with politics (like the post I just published)... and that's probably annoying for the people who just want to see the purty flowers. I can't really put up a wall of separation, but I decided I needed another outlet. So, if you enjoy stories about my activism, you are cordially invited to read my blog here on Open Salon. Many pieces will be cross-posted, but some are unique. Bill O'Reilly is probably happier there, where liberals can gnash their teeth at him. And some pieces belong in both blogs, like this haiku I'm sharing with you...

anonymous sex

a little pornography

for giant voyeurs

Open Source, Open Democracy

I've been following the news in Iran, as I'm sure all of you have. And this may surprise you, but I've been reticent to take a stand on whether or not their election was corrupt. How can you tell if an election is flawed from the outside? If their system is like ours, it relies on the secret ballot, which theoretically protects individual voters from being punished for exercising their right. If you vote for the loser, there is no list that publishes that data so you can be jailed by the dude that won. When you approach the ballot box there are no guards to "help" you fill in the forms correctly: it's just you and the ballot. And that's why I am so fascinated watching all the unrest and the conjecturing about whether or not Ahmadinejad or others altered the totals when the Iranian ballots were counted: there is really no way to know. Unless you have a system that checks the results and somehow verifies votes with the person who cast them, it would be impossible to know after the results are in.

Unfortunately, this is the same situation we're in in the United States. I'm not denigrating the secret ballot, but if you are going to have such a feature in a voting system, the chain of custody for the ballots becomes the most important check on malfeasance. And there are huge, documented problems with our chain of custody. I'm not talking about Acorn registering Superman and the Dallas Cowboys to vote... I'm talking about the 2000 and 2004 elections, which many people were very concerned about here. We just weren't concerned enough to riot, the way the Iranians are doing. If you google for stories about stolen elections though, there's a lot to be worried about.

That is why I wanted to pass on this note from my friend, Alan Dechert. If you cannot check the results with any certainty, then the system must be transparent enough for us to keep track of the ballots after they're cast. He's invented such a system and it was tested last year at LinuxWorld.


And it works. The difference between the Open Voting Consortium's system and the systems we usually use for electronic voting, is that we're all entitled to see how that system works. The typical electronic voting machine will let you cast your vote, and then it sends your choices off into the ether somewhere. Often you will get an opportunity to check the ballot on the screen and make changes, but how do you know that what you selected is what is getting sent?

The short answer is, you can't. That ballot only exists digitally. There isn't a record of it that you could ever expect to find. Like grains of sand, these things just accumulate somewhere to be counted, and who knows if any of them reflect your choices? You're not even entitled to see the code that runs on the machine to see if it adds or removes data.

The OVC's machine in contrast, isn't a machine at all. It's just code on a disk. You're free to look through it line by line, and if you pop it into a computer, your computer becomes a voting machine. All it can do is present you with a ballot for you to fill out. Once you've made your choices, it prints out a hard copy, so you can verify that your vote says exactly what you wanted. And then, you place it in the box. There is absolutely no trust required for using that machine. You can watch it in action here:



And did I mention its price tag is a fraction of the machines we use now? How many times have you waited to vote because there weren't enough ballots or machines for your precinct? How much easier would it be to print your ballots as you need them, instead of ordering expensive, preprinted ballots? Imagine how much more easily you could add new nominees and propositions.

This is why I'm passing along this note from my friend, Mr. Dechert. He's been working on this system for years. He can't do this alone. This is our country, and our responsibility. This morning, he asked me for help. So now, I'm asking you. The Iranian election should be a wake up call for all of us who wondered if Bush really won those elections in 2000 and 2004. We don't have to be trusting when we can be smart.

Dear Friends of Open Voting:

I need your help today. As you may recall, US Representative Rush Holt has introduced several badly flawed voting reform bills in the past few years. We have opposed them for a variety of reasons.

Last week, Holt introduced his new one: The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2009 (HR 2894)
http://holt.house.gov/voting.shtml

In general, the bill is not as bad as the previous. Some provisions are good. Ban DREs, ban wireless, provide some funding for voting software that would be publicly available. However, overall, the bill is still bad. The deep flaw with this bill, generally speaking, remains the same: it would put the federal government too much into running the voting system. Holt is trying to do too much and making a mess of it.

Parts of it are outrageously bad. The main offending part for me is where they say the machine for individuals with disabilities must allow the voter to "independently verify and cast the permanent paper ballot without requiring the voter to manually handle the paper ballot;" No machine has this capability currently, and such a machine would be many times more expensive than necessary. Potential solutions would solve one almost non-existent problem and create several others -- besides the expense.

It's the same mentality that led to adding the expensive printing mechanism to the DRE voting machines. Vendors didn't mind doing it as long as the government was paying for it. Guess what? Government paid for it. No wait, YOU paid for it. Now those machines are getting junked. So, tax-payers underwrote stupid voting architecture. Diebold et al got paid to develop it and sell it. Now the stupid machines go in the trash and Diebold keeps the money.

If we can't get this changed, the bill must be killed. Other parts of the bill should just be removed rather than fixed. We might support it if chunks of it were simply removed.

SEC. 102. ACCESSIBILITY AND BALLOT VERIFICATION FOR
INDIVIDUALS WITH DISABILITIES.
...

(II) allows the voter to privately and
independently verify and cast the permanent
paper ballot without requiring the
voter to manually handle the paper ballot;

I need your help contacting Congress in opposition to this bill.

I also need your financial support so OVC can continue to develop and demonstrate sensible open source voting technology, and defeat crappy legislation like this.

PLEASE DONATE NOW
----------------------------------
The PayPal button on our web site http://openvoting.org is probably the quickest and easiest. This is the address for PayPal: donation@openvotingconsortium.org

If by check, please send to:
Open Voting Consortium
4941 Forest Creek Way
Granite Bay, CA 95746

Thank you again for helping OVC to continue progressing toward the establishment of OPEN VOTING.

Alan Dechert
President, Open Voting Consortium
http://openvoting.org
alan@openvoting.org

What a Difference 6 Miles Makes

An Important Announcement From Your Friendly Neighborhood Blogger:

We moved. We were evicted... sort of. So if the garden looks a little different, there's a good reason for it. Some of the cast remains. Some were, by necessity, abandoned. But we're happy with the change. Sometimes you need to be pried out of your cave, just to see how dark it was in there. And in those cases, it's nice when someone provides a soft landing, in a sunny spot, where you can just be.

I'll be back with a more detailed post soon, but in the meantime, I am posting links for both of us, to remind me what I'm not missing:
my neighbor takes a page from monsanto
a garden plot
cold feet and warm hearts
absent
nerds
prayer for a potted tree in a storm
promoted
ouch
welcome, students
varmint update
i wish i had raccoons

And because I am a sucker for forcing meaning into my life, I feel it's only fitting, to end with this comment, from the wise Mr. Brown Thumb.

"Sorry you are having trouble with the neighbor but one day you may be able to look back on this and laugh."

That day is not today, but I can feel it coming soon. Absence might get all the credit, but distance also makes the heart grow fonder.