Sometimes it's best to simply turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream. Here's a dinner that requires almost zero brain power, but is quite tasty. This recipe serves four normal humans, but you can adjust it to you own girth, of course.

INGREDIENTS:
• one three-quarter-pound salmon fillet - I prefer wild - if only for the more-natural color and the better karma - but farmed is okay, as well..
• three-quarters of a pound to a pound of pasta - Since this is a creamy sauce, a pasta with pockets - shells, for example - works well. As I've mentioned before, I'm a fan of Gragnano dried pasta, but even such standard brands as Barilla or De Cecco are fine. I've never seen fresh shells in the market, but dried pasta is usually better than supermarket "fresh" pasta, in any case.
• one half-cup of unsalted butter - The quality of the butter is important, so - if you can - go for the good, imported stuff, and not the cheap supermarket house brand. That said, you may not be as picky as I am...
• one cup of finely-grated Parmesan - What I said about the butter goes double for the cheese - and don't ever, ever, use that powdered crap in the metallic-green canisters.
• one cup of heavy cream or half-and-half - I like fat, so the heavy cream is my preference. You may disagree, and choose the half-and-half, instead.
• one teaspoon of capers - You may like more, you may like less. Whatever.
• one two-inch-by-one-inch piece of lemon zest - Just take your potato peeler and gently remove a thin layer of lemon zest from about a fifth of a normal-sized lemon. No white rind, just the oil-laden zest. And if you can't get it all in one piece, don't sweat it - you're going to chop it up in a few minutes anyway.
• salt and pepper to taste - Like most cream sauces, this one responds well to freshly cracked black pepper.

PREPARATION:
First, make sure that the salmon fillet is thoroughly deboned. (A side note: I didn't discover fish-bone tweezers until a couple of years ago, and I don't know how I lived without one. You can get a fine basic one from Messermeister or an insanely expensive one from Global, but whatever you get you'll be happy you got it.) Place the fillet in a pan big enough to allow it to lie flat, cover it by about an inch of cold water, then place it on the stove. Heat it on medium-high until the water begins to boil, then take it off the heat and cover the pan.

While the salmon is poaching in the hot water, cut the lemon zest into very, very thin two-inch slices - less than a millimeter, if you can - then cut those slices into one-inch slices. Cover them - a small upside-down bowl works fine - so that the oils don't evaporate.

After the salmon has sat in the hot water for 10 minutes, lift it out and place it on a plate to cool. Once it's cool, strip off the skin and break the salmon up into itty-bitty pieces by hand - "itty-bitty" in this case meaning peanut-sized or less (shelled peanuts, that is).

Now cook the pasta and set it aside - cover it to keep it warm, if you can. Alternatively, you can start the pasta cooking while you make the sauce so that the sauce and the pasta will be done at about the same time.

In a pot or pan big enough to hold all the ingredients and the pasta with enough room left over for tossing, melt the butter. At low-to-medium heat, add about a third of the cream and a third of the cheese. Mix them together until the cheese melts, then do the same with the next third of the cream and cheese, then the final third. If you want, you can toss in some freshly chopped parsley at this point for looks and a bit brighter flavor, but that's completely optional. You can also choose to add more cream, half-and-half, or even milk to get the sauce to the consistency you prefer.

Now toss in the salmon, capers, and pasta. Toss the whole concoction lightly together, ladle it into bowls or deep plates, grate a decent amount of pepper onto it and top with the shards of lemon zest. You can also add a bit of coarsely grated Parmesan, if you'd like. Serve.

See, I told you it was simple.

1/3/08: A note from blog reader Dale Hopkins: "I have to urge you to put in a stronger plug for "green" wild caught (or sometimes farmed) salmon -- some markets of course are doing the politically correct green/yellow/red labeling. Most farmed salmon is not sustainable, uses up too much other fish to feed the salmon, can pollute the nearshore waters, etc., etc." [back to top]

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Today's assassination of Benazir Bhutto proves many things: That Pakistan is a deeply unstable place. That the Bush administration's reliance upon one individual - Bhutto - has been a criminally incompetent policy, in that they again have no Plan B. That a personality-based political party such as Bhutto's PPP, which has essentially been a hereditary fiefdom of the Bhutto clan, can be rendered powerless by a single assassination.

But more than anything else, it proves that in today's world, a centrist position is at best powerless and at worst dangerous. In far too many places in the world, centrism is being increasingly marginalized as demagogues rally their forces of hate, greed, and religious fervor.

The average Joe, Maria, Ivan, Iman, or Muhammad is a natural centrist - that is, his or her goals are essentially communitarian. Most folks - you and I? - simply want to create a safe environment in which we can put dinner on the table and raise our kids. We don't want to acquire personal power or enforce ideological purity. Unfortunately, our lives are made miserable when, as for example in Pakistan, heavily armed dictatorships battle fundamentalist insurgencies. (And fundamentalism isn't limited to religious dogmatists; it can also be political, as Peru's Sendero Luminoso guerrillas so brutally proved.)

Living in the center of a struggle between a police state and an armed resistance is tough, but by keeping below each group's radar, survival is possible. Unfortunately, with increased visibility comes increased risk - as Bhutto showed today in the most dramatic way possible: death.

But even in less turbulent regions of the world, today's centrist finds him or herself marginalized - one only needs to watch the pandering of our Republicans to the religious right or the inability of our Democrats to build a broad-based coalition to realize that a step to the middle is a step into political oblivion.

In the middle, people share power and resources. They acknowledge that although others may believe differently than they, shared prosperity is to be preferred to ideological unity. They choose their leaders based upon the common good rather than sectarian advantage. They don't demonize infidels, rug-heads, fags, or graduates of Bob Jones University. They believe that fairness is a necessity. They also know that if you sit down with the aforementioned average Joe, Maria, Ivan, Iman, or Muhammad, you'll find more similarities than differences when it comes to work, family, a sunset, or a tall cold one on a hot day - whether that cold one is alcoholic or not.

But there's little personal profit to be made in ensuring the common good. And the exhilarating high of superiority isn't induced by tolerating others' beliefs. The former drives the overlords; the latter drives their malleable followers.

Right after the First World War, William Butler Yeats wrote The Second Coming. Although as with all great art it can support myriad interpretations, I've always thought of it as a warning against those times during which "the centre cannot hold" and "the worst are full of passionate intensity." Times such as today.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

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Now that my parents' 65th wedding anniversary has been celebrated, my dad's 90th birthday has been suitably commemorated by an iPhoto book and slide show, and a killer Christmas dinner for seven was produced and devoured (a recipe or two to come), there's time to return to finding the little nuggets in the news that lead to greater truths.

Such as, for example, this item from today's Top Tech News: "Intel, STMicro Flash Memory Deal Delayed."

A little background. STMicroelectronics is Europe's largest chip manufacturer; back in May they and Intel announced that the two companies would merge their money-losing flash-memory divisions by the end of 2007 to create the world's largest memory company and achieve profitability through efficiencies of scale and white-collar consolidation. How large? Really large - it's been estimated that the new company (euphoniously named Numonyx) will have annual sales in the $3.6 billion range.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the merger: the subprime mortgage meltdown. If you're unfamiliar with the underpinnings of this debacle, the following video includes the best (and by far the funniest) explanation of the reasons behind it that I've yet encountered:

But back to the Intel/STMicro merger... It seems that the merger won't be consummated on schedule after all. Today's announcement put it off until the end of March 2008 - at the earliest. Why? Well, it seems that those crappy subprime mortgages and the even crappier investment "products" that they were rolled into has put a definite damper on the institutions from which Intel and STMicro had planned to borrow the funds needed to accomplish the deed. As the article in Top Tech News notes, "In May, Intel and STMicro announced they had commitments for a $1.3 billion loan and $250 million in revolving credit, but [on December 26th] the companies said financing would be reduced to a $650 million loan and $100 million in revolving credit."

What's more, the subprime mess is far from over. Studies that I've read state that the peak of the uptick in adjustable mortgage rates - and, therefore, the peak in the uptick in home foreclosures and bad-debt write-offs - won't occur until late next summer and early next fall. With that in mind, realize that the credit crunch won't be lessening anytime soon. In my opinion, the most accurate description of the mess caused by what the video above describes as "greed and stupidity" was from an analyst who called the subprime meltdown and its concomitant credit crunch a "slow-motion train wreck." There's not a lot you can do to stop a train wreck once it starts - and this runaway freight will take a year or more to come fully off the rails.

What the Intel/STMicro paralysis shows is that the effects of "greed and stupidity" have reached beyond the poor shmoes who will lose their homes. Those effects are now seeping into the economy as a whole. Business investments are on hold, which means that job creation is on hold, which means that total national payroll will remain static, which means that consumer spending will choke, which means that jobs will be lost in the manufacturing and service industries, which means ... I won't go on. You get the idea.

So when you see some fat cat politician making noises about helping out the aforementioned poor shmoes whose interest rates are set to skyrocket in the months ahead, don't for a moment believe that said politician gives a rat's patootie about the fate of a beleaguered working-class family. He or she is, instead, responding to the orders being given to him or her by corporate donors/overlords/puppet-masters/whatever to try to stop the train wreck that I mentioned above.

It might still be possible for the economy to keep from sliding into recession or depression, but the measures needed to do so would cause some serious economic pain to the overlords. How much they're willing to bear will determine the depth and extent of the downturn. Personally, I'm not all that optimistic - but then, being Eastern European, I rarely am. [back to top]

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As holiday preparations mount (my dad's 90th birthday and my parents' 65th wedding anniversary are both on Christmas Eve, as well) and as my client count and concomitant workload increases, it's becoming increasingly difficult to post as often as I'd like. However, the recent crowing in the corporate media about the the "tough" new CAFE standards in the energy bill that just passed the Senate has forced me to postpone tonight's dinner, launch Dreamweaver, and warn my tiny-but-beloved readership, "Don't be fooled!"

This bill is a dog. How does it bark? Let me count the ways...

(But first, a disclaimer. I have not actually read the full bill (HR6) - it is, after all, 822 pages of government-speak, and plowing through all of it would be a daunting task even for a wonk such as myself. My reactions here are based upon various news reports and interviews that I've read and heard. The journalist in me wants to make that clear up-front - but somehow I doubt if Anderson Cooper has read it all, either.)

Let's start with the aforementioned Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards. Originally passed in 1975 (32 years ago!) in response to what was called the "Arab Oil Embargo," the CAFE standards were set to increase the overall fuel efficiency of an automaker's fleet by 1985. After a series of fits and starts, the CAFE standard was fixed at 27.5 MPG in 1990. (Although I have read 25 MPG in various news reports, my reading of NHTS documents seems to indicate that the overall average should be 27.5. Unclear...) Despite a number of abortive efforts, it has not been changed since.

The new energy bill will raise the CAFE passenger-car standard to 35 MPG by 2020 - a mere 7.5 MPG increase in the 45 years since the CAFE law was first introduced. That's an increase of 0.16 MPG per year.

That's a joke.

There have been innumerable improvements in fuel-efficient automotive technologies since 1975: electronic ignitions, variable valve timings, and computerized fuel injection controllers, to name just a few. There are plenty of ways for automobile manufacturers to meet a 2020 CAFE standard of, say 55 or 60 MPG - if Congress forced them to and if the average American wasn't jonesing for large, heavy vehicles.

So there's nothing to cheer about in a 35 MPG CAFE standard scheduled to go into effect 13 years from now. Instead, laugh or weep - your choice.

And then there's the biofuels boondoggle. While turning renewable vegetable matter into liquid fuel may sound like a lovely idea on the face of it, this bill requires that 36 billion gallons of such renewable fuels be blended into gasoline by 2022. Where will the bulk of those fuels come from? Yup - corn. Highly subsidized, mega-corporate, petroleum-fertilized, farmland-destroying corn. To be sure, there are specifications in the bill that renewable fuels should come from a variety of sources - many far more environmentally friendly than corn - but those provisions are sure to be challenged by such behemoths as the American Petroleum Institute, whose spokesmodel, James Ford, has already been quoted as saying, "With all these boutique biofuels, we need an ability to adjust the mandate if technological advances aren’t made." And - trust me - if the API doesn't want technological advances to be made, they won't be.

Additionally, there are three items which were in the original bill, but which the Democratic leadership (sic) dumped when they caved in to industry pressures. First, there was the requirement that utilities provide 15 percent of their electricity from renewable sources. Gone. Second, there was $22 billion for the extension of existing incentive packages for wind and solar power development. Kaput. And third, there was a tax on Big Oil buddies such as BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil, and Shell to offset the $22 billion for renewable energy development. Take a wild guess who won that argument.

Finally, there's more mischief in the making in a separate bit of legislation about which Congress has reached a "tentative agreement." It includes a $25 billion loan guarantee for developers and manufacturers of nuclear plants - with a li'l extra $2 billion tossed in for uranium enrichment plants. There's also $10 billion for an incredibly polluting, water-intensive scheme to turn coal into liquid fuels - with those highly polluting plants scheduled to be placed at the headwaters of both the Missouri and Colorado rivers. Yum.

There's nothing to be happy about in either the bill passed today or its follow-on sibling. But, sadly, there's nothing to be surprised about, either. [back to top]

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(First, a quick note: If you've wondered why I've been so long between postings, the answer is simple: Since a major drive meltdown last Saturday, I've completely rebuilt my system. With eleven volumes, 1.2TB of data, three different backup schemes, and some beta software that I'm testing for a li'l company up in Redmond, doing so has taken me a lot longer than I thought it would. But then again, doesn't everything..?)

Today Ward Cleaver's younger, handsomer, and far more ambitious little brother, Mitt Romney, gave his much anticipated speech explaining to fundamentalist Americans why it's okay for them to vote for a member of what many of their religious leaders have proclaimed to be a "cult."

It may work, and it may not. His 2,500-word paean to faith attempted to strike a workable balance between his beliefs and those of the men and women who demand that their leaders pray to exactly the same god as they do.

As usual on the campaign trail, he attempted to pitch a "big tent," even including fine words for "the ancient traditions of the Jews ... and the commitment to frequent prayer of the Muslims." But there wasn't a single word in his speech that honored - or even mentioned - the beliefs of what's estimated to be between 30 to 40 million Americans. Including me.

You see, I'm an atheist. In America today, those of us who believe - to paraphrase Richard Dawkins - that god is a delusion are second-class citizens, unfit to hold national office and shut out from moral discourse.

Let's take a few quotes from Mitt's speech as examples.

"Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone."

Well, I guess that means that a nation of atheists would be without freedom - which is, on its face, a ludicrous supposition.

"Religious tolerance would be a shallow principle indeed if it were reserved only for faiths with which we agree."

This might have been a good opportunity for Mitt to mention the millions of American atheists - you missed your cue, Mr. Romney.

"Whether it was the cause of abolition, or civil rights ... no movement of conscience can succeed in America that cannot speak to the convictions of religious people."

Mitt celebrates the need to appeal to people's religious convictions before they'll join in a social justice movement. I aver that the requirement to offer religious arguments in support of social justice is better identified as an unfortunate reality.

"We are a nation 'Under God' and in God, we do indeed trust."

Only if you exclude between 30 and 40 million of your fellow Americans, Mitt.

"Our greatness would not long endure without judges who respect the foundation of faith upon which our Constitution rests."

This sentence - unlike most of the others, which are standard political puffery - is a matter for real concern. Is Mitt suggesting that, as president, he'd require justices to pass a religious litmus test? It certainly appears so.

"Americans acknowledge that liberty is a gift of God, not an indulgence of government."

Uh, not we millions of atheists - are we not Americans, as well? Guess not...

I'll stop there. Although I'd love to also argue Mitt's contentions that "Radical violent Islam seeks to destroy us" and that "No people in the history of the world have sacrificed as much for liberty," those tired canards are beyond the scope of this post.

But with any luck at all, I won't have to rebut Mitt much more in the future, since his candidacy seems to be sinking like a stone.

Thank god. [back to top]