Rustic Tomato Soup

It’s been a banner year for tomatoes. I’ve been playing around with ways to use them before they end up in the compost bin. After some experimenting I came up with this tomato soup. It just feels like a classic bit of peasant cooking. It’s rich, cozy, filling and uses lots of tomatoes. Vegetarians can replace the chick stock with a veggie stock.

2-3 lbs tomatoes — halve, drizzle olive oil, dot with 6-8 garlic cloves (smashed, chopped) and salt.  

roast for 45 min at 425° and set aside

sauté in olive oil:

1/2 t red (or any hot) pepper

2 large onions - coarse chopped

1 T thyme

salt & pepper

add:

28 oz can of tomatoes (preference here for Muir Glen or Hunts)

4 c fresh basil leaves - rough chop

4 c chicken stock

the roasted tomatoes (and any liquid)

simmer for an hour or more

may need thickening — puree about 1/4 and return or do the “cornstarch and stock” thing

it goes so well with warm fresh bread and various cheeses

Why Crazy Republicans Get Elected

Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor had a fascinating column today. You can read it here on his Facebook page. In it he documents the bizarre and nearly clinical insanity that has gripped the Republican party. As I read it I kept wondering how, if the party has totally gone off the rails, do they maintain a significant presence in American politics? How do they keep winning elections, dominate so many state legislatures, control the Senate and have a stranglehold on the House?

It happens for the simplest of reasons: nearly half the electorate votes for candidates running as Republicans no matter how nutty they are, how bizarre their platforms are, how blisteringly ignorant they are or, as Reich put it, that they display a “level of ignorance and prejudice unprecedented in modern American politics.”

How? Why? Well, first there is the 27% “Crazification Factor.” This has been around for awhile and gets more empirical support in every election. It’s also called the “Keyes Constant” in honor of Alan Keyes who was totally, batshit crazy but still managed to pull in 27% of the vote against Barack Obama in his 2004 run for the Senate.

In short, about a quarter of voters are just nuts. They hold bizarre notions, are riven with fear of anything new or different, harbor racist attitudes, are homophobic, anti-science, anti-woman and have passionate religious beliefs that prop up these views. These are the folks who voted for Keyes and also for others like David Duke or Orly Taitz. If you don’t who Taitz is go here. But pour yourself a stiff one before you click.

Then there are those we can call “devoted Republicans.” They account for maybe another 15%. These are the folks who were raised Republicans, have always voted for the GOP and always will. They are typically more moderate and cleave to conservative positions because they honestly believe they are the right ones.These folks are upset with how things are going but loyalty keeps them in line.

This gets us to 42%. Then there’s a small group made up of wealthy, successful people who see that the deregulatory, low-tax positions of the GOP favor them. I’ll estimate another 5% of voters fall into this category. We’re almost there…

Now toss in people who just like something about some nominee, they think they have a cool haircut or remind them of a favorite, deceased uncle. It doesn’t matter what the reasons are but there will always be a couple of folks who cast their ballots on these vague, emotional reasons.

A boost, minor but real, comes from the voter-suppression campaigns that make it more difficult for minorities, the elderly, students and the poor to vote. These groups all tend to support Democrats so the GOP’s edge goes up if they can prevent these folks from registering or, failing that, from getting to the polls.

Finally, toss in a small error rate (people who pulled the wrong lever, checked the wrong box) and lo and behold, nearly half of the country is voting for crazy people and crazy positions.

The final nail in the country’s coffin? The effective gerrymandering after the 2010 census in states where the GOP took over after the midterm elections. This one operates independently of the others. Its impact becomes obvious when you realize that more people voted for Democratic candidates for the House in the last election but the GOP still ended up with a huge majority.

Can the country survive this? I think so but it’ll take some time. Most of the crazification gang are old, white and male. They are a necessarily diminishing cohort. Many of the more moderate “GOP-lifers” are beginning to see that their Grand Old Party is, in fact, not really their friend.

A quick look at the state of the economy under the past several administrations is rather startling and, if you’re an upper-middle class Republican, disturbing. Even Forbes, the bible of this group, says so. This article documents the long-term patterns showing that, despite the conventional wisdom, Democrats are far better at dealing with economic and financial issues than Republicans.

A moment of hope arrived from a good friend who was a life-long Republican. He told me recently that he’s switched to “Independent” because, as Reich described so well, his former party is out of its freaking mind. He’s probably going to need a year or two to adjust emotionally but I’m fairly certain he’ll soon be one of us.

What's Pejorative

A quickie comment: Jeb Bush was recently asked about the name of the NFL team that plays out of the nation’s capital. His response was a classic foot-in-mouther that we’ve all come to expect from members of the Bush family. He said that the pejorative word in the team’s name was “Washington” and not “Redskins.”

Now I’ll give Jeb! some credit. That was clever and he got to give DC a well-deserved dig but he violated a basic rule.

People who are not members of an identifiable group don’t get to have opinions on whether a label is offensive or not. White folks don’t get to say what Native Americans find insulting. Men don’t get to opine on whether a word or phrase is offensive to women. Christians don’t get to make claims about what words or slogans upset Jews.

Check with Native Americans, Jeb. Go here. You’ll find that nearly 70% of them find the term offensive.

First Road Trip in our Tesla

We’ve been tootling around in our Model S85D Tesla for about five months and 6,000 miles now but all of it within a hundred miles of home. Time for a longer trip — to the wineries of British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley.

Around 10 in the morn we left Point Roberts (an exclave in Washington State) for the Okanagan, a near-desert area of British Columbia that just happens to be one of the best wine regions in North America. Yeah, it really is. It shares features with the equally fine terroirs of the Washington-Oregon Columbia Valley and has many geological and ecological features in common with California’s Napa Valley.

We decided to take Route 20 through the Washington State Cascade mountains and then head north at Twisp to our hotel in Osoyoos. It’s much longer than the direct route through Canada but there are good reasons why it’s called the most beautiful highway in the state.

We crossed the border heading north, drove over the top of Boundary Bay, headed south and crossed it again at Blaine. When you live in Point Roberts it’s two border crossings to get to the rest of Washington State. We then drove south to the Tesla SuperCharger in Burlington. We had lunch and returned to the car, now topped off at 274 rated miles on the battery and headed east. We soon began having our first twinges of a new psychological disorder that comes with owning an EV (electric vehicle): “Range Anxiety.”

Since the climbing parts were draining the battery startlingly quickly (my tendency to push it didn’t help). The Plugshare app on my phone said there was a Level 2 charger at a camp site in Winthrop, WA. Winthrop turned out to be a delightful surprise, a most interesting museum and a town designed to emulate an 19th century village with classically quaint wooden storefronts and hand-painted signs.

We did the museum, walked around a bit, chatted with some locals and pulled out with an additional 70 miles on the battery and diminished anxieties.

After another series of long, battery-draining climbs (cause I couldn’t restrain myself, the car is just too much fun to drive on these kinds of roads) we hit the crest of the Cascades with the meter reading 134. No problem since we were only about 80 miles from the hotel — with its EV charger in the garage. We then experienced one of those cool Tesla moments. Gravity became our new best friend. Some 17 miles later we leveled out and now had 148 in the “tank.” Try doing that in an ICE (internal combustion engine) car.

We spent the next four days hitting up wineries along the Okanagan valley. We were delighted to discover that many of them had installed EV chargers, most of them Tesla-made 80 amp units. We had a real treat when, on our way back (for the trip home we took the Canadian route along Highway 3), we stopped at the Clos du Soleil winery in Keremos, BC.

We backed into the spot where the Tesla charger was and the owner and three employees came running out, hooting and whooping. We broke their cherry, so to speak. Ours was the first Tesla to use their charger and we became instant celebrities. The owner called their PR guy who arrived — with camera — and put together a piece for their website. It may be there by now. Take a look. We spent an hour there, bought a couple bottles of their surprisingly good whites and talked Tesla and grapes.

Next stop was Hope, BC where Tesla has a well-placed SC just off the TranCanada. We had a late lunch at a classic “yes, ma’am, we’ve been here fer some fiffy years now” diner, returned to a fully loaded battery and made it back to Point Roberts with lots of electrons left, some very good feelings about Teslas (damn, are they just freakin’ built for mountains!) and a frunck full of excellent wines.

If any EV drivers haven’t downloaded the Plugshare app, you need to. We were a bit worried about this trip since it was taking us out of “Tesla-land” but the number of independent businesses and organizations that have installed chargers is growing and all of them are listing themselves on Plugshare. Not all are Tesla-made but most are Level 2 that gives you close to 60 miles worth in an hour and every one we used was at a business that was just delighted to have us visit and use their facilities. The future is upon us and it is going to be wonderful fun. All chargers were free and we saved somewhere between $170 and $200 over what an ICE would have cost in gasoline.

BTW, for reasons that strain credulity, the right-wing crazies have got their knickers in a twist over Tesla. I’d touched on this in an earlier blog post. I’ll do so again because Tesla’s introduction of its new Model X has caused many a brain to explode.

How Smart Are Brain Surgeons?

That brain surgeons are very smart has found its way into a rarified spot in our culture: it’s become a cliché so obvious that no one doubts it. It’s right up there with rocket scientists.

Alas, what we cognitive psychologists know about both these professions, but especially brain surgeon, is that you don’t really have to be very smart to be successful.

Ben Carson is a classic example. Every issue that comes up on the campaign trail reveals his lack of serious intellectual chops. He’s not curious. He’s devoted little thought to complex issues and routinely accepts the most paltry evidence as somehow affirming some crackpot idea he got in his head — like his conclusion that prisons make people gay (yeah, he said this) or that Islamic principles are unconstitutional (said this too).

His cleaving to creationism demonstrates a serious lack of intellectual ability. To be a creationist and a doctor is professional oxymoronism. Medicine is founded on principles of evolutionary biology. Every element in it from the underlying neuro-physiological mechanisms that operate within the body to the models that provide insights into how to develop newer and more effective procedures is based on Darwinian mechanisms. To ignore these is, in a word, embarrassing.

Carson is a Seventh Day Adventist, an adherent of a fundamentalist, biblical literalist faith that butts its head against modern science and is utterly discoordinate with modern medicine and contemporary science.

And, it’s not just religion. He shows the same failure to test reality when it comes to climate change. Again, the data are overwhelming. Only the truly stupid or willfully ignorant can deny the reality of climate change or fail to grasp our role in it.

Similar analyses apply to his total lack of empathy for women and his failure to understand, even remotely, the rather simple notion that everyone gets to make the decisions about their own bodies.

Of course, no one doubts that he has remarkable surgical skills. He was one of the finest brain surgeons in the country, perhaps the world. He graduated from the best schools and his academic record was outstanding. He is also circumspect, careful in his manner of speaking and almost everyone who knows him likes him.

But … is he smart, “brain-surgeon” smart?

By now I hope you’re seeing the problem here. “Smart” isn’t just a simple thing. Intelligence isn’t a single entity. IQ tests, for example, hide a host of complications, buried under a single number. We’ve seen this before when we looked at Ted Cruz, another supposedly high-IQ guy who routinely makes statements that only a truly stupid person could make.

So, how could Carson, this not-very-smart guy, end up being one of the world’s top brain surgeons? The answer is that you don’t have to be all that smart to be a brain surgeon. In fact, you don’t have to be very smart to be a doctor. You do need scholastic skills, the ability to read a book, absorb its contents in a superficial way and be ready to answer questions about the material.

You need motivation and a certain stick-to-it quality because there’s a lot of information you need to commit to memory. But it’s not complicated stuff. It’s mainly material about anatomy, biochemistry, neurophysiology, structural features of bodies, basic biophysics. Anyone with a slightly above average academic intelligence, good social skills and high levels of motivation can pull it off.

To become a top surgeon you also need some other abilities, among them excellent sensory-motor skills, patience, a calm demeanor and, importantly, an ego and a deep belief in your own abilities. But you do not need to be very smart. You do not need to be creative or curious. You can pull it off without a probing intellect; have little interest in searching for new knowledge or new ways to understand issues. You don’t have to have a willingness to rethink issues when the evidence calls for it or an uncomfortablness with ambiguity and contradition and a desire to repair it.

Andy Borowitz, political town-crier had an excellent piece of political satire on Carson saying, in a much more amusing way, what I’m trying to get across here. Go read it.

Oh, in case you’re wondering, you don’t have to be all that smart to be a rocket scientist either.