Chris P. Apple
I heard somewhere--I think--that we're supposed to have a very wet monsoon season this year. That inspired me to buy some New Mexican chili, petite tomato, basil, chocolate mint, and candy mint plants to transplant into my garden. (I didn't buy them all at once, but here and there over the last several weeks.) So far they're all doing well. I also had some old seeds that I decided to scatter around randomly to see if anything sprouts, some food, some non-food: red poppy, datura, scallion, cilantro, and Thai hot pepper.
Speaking of food, I stopped at Kimchi Time yesterday to get a take-out menu and see what vegetarian options they have, if any. They didn't label anything as vegetarian. It's unfortunate, because I would imagine they put at least a couple of vegetarian items on their menu whether they did it consciously or not. The two most likely vegetarian items, I think, would be the tofu salad and the doen jang chigae (soybean paste stew with tofu and vegetables). The vegetable fried rice, dduk bok ki (pan-fried rice cake and ramen noodles), and their token Japanese dish, yakisoba would probably also be vegetarian. The kimchi jeon (kimchi pancake) would probably be suitable for lacto-ovo-vegetarians, unless the kimchi is flavored with anchovies or some other meat ingredient.
I asked my mother about some of the menu items when I was on the phone with her this afternoon, and she told me I would have to ask the staff about each one. This seems to be common with Korean food. It's like Mexican food in that if you order something like a bean burrito, the beans may or may not have lard in them, and the tortilla may or may not have lard in it. There's not much consistency to the ingredients that go into it. I like a lot of Middle Eastern foods because they are much more consistent. Tabbouli and hummus (excluding gimmicky hummus like roasted red pepper hummus and so forth) are probably going to have almost identical ingredients no matter where you go.
A while back I posted a review of The Republican Brain on Amazon. It was essentially the same thing I wrote in here in response to the book. The review got one comment, and I think the person who wrote the comment was a conservative, or if not a conservative, at least someone who tries to understand the conservative perspective as well as possible. He agreed with me on at least one point; he, too, thought Mooney's understanding of history left a lot to be desired.
One part of his comment left me thinking for quite a while. I've probably waited too long to write out the thoughts he provoked, but maybe I can reconstruct some of them now. Here's an excerpt of what he wrote:His flaw, as you expose with Zinn, is that he considers all subjects to have the certainties of the physical sciences.
There is no "one" authoritative history or theory of economics just as there is no "one" school of philosophy. It is not a question of being "biased", its [sic] a question of what axioms and what point of view someone writes the history from. There is no difference between Zinn and those who write authoritatively that the Founding Fathers wanted church and state to be BFFs. They are both making valid historical arguments. The question isn't the argument they choose to make historically, but how they choose to go about making their argument and how they back it up.
And by that argument, he unintentionally points to one of the flaws of his own side in presenting "scientific" arguments.
I, of course, had written in defense of Howard Zinn's work but wrote dismissively about historians who claim that the Founding Fathers embraced church-state commingling. But this guy saw both the former and the latter as valid, and that made me wonder if I shouldn't see what the latter have to say.
Obviously the separation of church and state is spelled out clearly in the Constitution, but Zinn's scholarship calls into question the sincerity and depth of commitment behind the words in the Bill of Rights. He points out, inter alia, how the Bill of Rights was added not out of the Founding Fathers' own impetus but in response to criticism, and how the "First Amendment...shows th[e] quality of interest hiding behind innocence"; a mere "seven years after the First Amendment became part of the Constitution," Congress passed the Sedition Act of 1798, "a law very clearly abridging the freedom of speech." And I'll add that members of the Native American Church, Shakers, Sun Dancers, Sikhs, Mormons, Black Muslims, Rastafarians, Wiccans, Five Percenters, and many others know how well the government has left religion to its own devices.
The guy's comment left me wondering if liberal historians have tried too hard to make the history of church and state conform to the words in the First Amendment. Although most Americans don't like to think of the Founding Fathers as either dishonest, hypocritical, or shallowly committed to the ideals they expressed, I think history makes it clear that that was the case. With that in mind, I'm actually interested in seeing what the conservative revisionist historians have uncovered regarding church and state in the U.S. While I completely disagree with their principles, I imagine that I'd find their research informative and more honest about the inconvenient contradictions that liberal historians gloss over or ignore.
Speaking of food, I stopped at Kimchi Time yesterday to get a take-out menu and see what vegetarian options they have, if any. They didn't label anything as vegetarian. It's unfortunate, because I would imagine they put at least a couple of vegetarian items on their menu whether they did it consciously or not. The two most likely vegetarian items, I think, would be the tofu salad and the doen jang chigae (soybean paste stew with tofu and vegetables). The vegetable fried rice, dduk bok ki (pan-fried rice cake and ramen noodles), and their token Japanese dish, yakisoba would probably also be vegetarian. The kimchi jeon (kimchi pancake) would probably be suitable for lacto-ovo-vegetarians, unless the kimchi is flavored with anchovies or some other meat ingredient.
I asked my mother about some of the menu items when I was on the phone with her this afternoon, and she told me I would have to ask the staff about each one. This seems to be common with Korean food. It's like Mexican food in that if you order something like a bean burrito, the beans may or may not have lard in them, and the tortilla may or may not have lard in it. There's not much consistency to the ingredients that go into it. I like a lot of Middle Eastern foods because they are much more consistent. Tabbouli and hummus (excluding gimmicky hummus like roasted red pepper hummus and so forth) are probably going to have almost identical ingredients no matter where you go.
A while back I posted a review of The Republican Brain on Amazon. It was essentially the same thing I wrote in here in response to the book. The review got one comment, and I think the person who wrote the comment was a conservative, or if not a conservative, at least someone who tries to understand the conservative perspective as well as possible. He agreed with me on at least one point; he, too, thought Mooney's understanding of history left a lot to be desired.
One part of his comment left me thinking for quite a while. I've probably waited too long to write out the thoughts he provoked, but maybe I can reconstruct some of them now. Here's an excerpt of what he wrote:His flaw, as you expose with Zinn, is that he considers all subjects to have the certainties of the physical sciences.
There is no "one" authoritative history or theory of economics just as there is no "one" school of philosophy. It is not a question of being "biased", its [sic] a question of what axioms and what point of view someone writes the history from. There is no difference between Zinn and those who write authoritatively that the Founding Fathers wanted church and state to be BFFs. They are both making valid historical arguments. The question isn't the argument they choose to make historically, but how they choose to go about making their argument and how they back it up.
And by that argument, he unintentionally points to one of the flaws of his own side in presenting "scientific" arguments.
I, of course, had written in defense of Howard Zinn's work but wrote dismissively about historians who claim that the Founding Fathers embraced church-state commingling. But this guy saw both the former and the latter as valid, and that made me wonder if I shouldn't see what the latter have to say.
Obviously the separation of church and state is spelled out clearly in the Constitution, but Zinn's scholarship calls into question the sincerity and depth of commitment behind the words in the Bill of Rights. He points out, inter alia, how the Bill of Rights was added not out of the Founding Fathers' own impetus but in response to criticism, and how the "First Amendment...shows th[e] quality of interest hiding behind innocence"; a mere "seven years after the First Amendment became part of the Constitution," Congress passed the Sedition Act of 1798, "a law very clearly abridging the freedom of speech." And I'll add that members of the Native American Church, Shakers, Sun Dancers, Sikhs, Mormons, Black Muslims, Rastafarians, Wiccans, Five Percenters, and many others know how well the government has left religion to its own devices.
The guy's comment left me wondering if liberal historians have tried too hard to make the history of church and state conform to the words in the First Amendment. Although most Americans don't like to think of the Founding Fathers as either dishonest, hypocritical, or shallowly committed to the ideals they expressed, I think history makes it clear that that was the case. With that in mind, I'm actually interested in seeing what the conservative revisionist historians have uncovered regarding church and state in the U.S. While I completely disagree with their principles, I imagine that I'd find their research informative and more honest about the inconvenient contradictions that liberal historians gloss over or ignore.