Camping cuisine: personal pan pizza

As I'm not dying, I'm also not starving. I've decided to take more pictures of the fancier things I cook, in order to prove that point.

Today's entry is pic related: a deep-dish personal pan pizza, chicken and bacon with buffalo sauce. My extended family is based around the Chicago area, but the Noo Yawkeh gripes that "it's a fuggin' casserole, not a pizza" have somewhat landed. (IMHO the best pizza comes not from Chicago or New York, but from St. Louis. Imo's Pizza, or really any shop that'll make you a pie with Provel cheese, is the best pizza money can buy.)

That said, in the middle of the desert, this is a pretty tasty casserole. I've levelled up my dough-raising skills and I'm pretty proud of the results. There's a non-zero chance that I'll be making this in Omaha over the winter too. Also, on a more personal note, this is my birthday. I'll probably be celebrating out in the field when this is published, but if I'm in town I'll swing by and post something up.

This is your weekly notification that I am not in fact dead yet

I have never, ever been good at technological communication. I'm a firm believer in the notion of putting the phone away when people are talking to you, of prioritizing the folks in the here and now versus the folks across the wire. And then I moved to a place where I would never get an unwanted call again, where even making a phonecall required driving into town.

Maybe it's the spectrum folk's difficulty with multitasking that causes this in me. Here I am doing something, anything, and my flow is interrupted by a ringtone. I know this is part of it, because people that send five texts in a row irritate me by disrupting my concentration with every notification. (I've done it too and probably will again, but I'm trying to remember not to.)

George Galloway and the Great Experiment

Over across the pond, the left has enjoyed slightly more success since World War II, and therefore has a little bit more of an institutional structure. One of these institutional structures are the labor unions that still provide much of the funding to the Labour Party to this very day, and several of these unions are in the hands of literal comrades.

Over the years, one such comrade has been a fellow by the name of George Galloway. In 2005, George Galloway ran a campaign under the ephemeral Respect Party, appealing to the anti-imperialist left in the critical swing district of Bethnal Green and Bow who felt they had nowhere to go during a byelection. He won outright, destabilizing internal Labour politics in the process. This hastened the end of the Blair-Brown years and the beginning of the era of anti-imperialist Jeremy Corbyn.

Well, with Corbyn thrown under the bus by candidates for building roads in the Falklands Polly Toynbee, Nick Cohen, and their pals in the bourgeoisie's paper of record the Guardian, warmed-over Blairite Keir Starmer has taken over Labour. He's proceeded to stand for nothing, letting the Tory government of Boris Johnson get to his economic left several times without effective pushback. (That in itself is another tale I've waited a while to tell, but the story of our Tory quarries' poring over hoary theory isn't core to the moral of this story so I'm foregoing it; sorry but more later for sure.)

Anyhoo, the fall of Corbyn has left Galloway and his ilk on the Labour hard left with zero influence in the party now. On that basis, Galloway decided to resort to the tactic that had already successfully dickpunched the Blairites once before: running in a byelection as the candidate for a throwaway lefty party. The contours were going to be a little different this time though, and Galloway was going to go in a direction either pioneering or heretical for a leftist, possibly both.

On the end of Krystal and Saagar on "Rising"

I started watching Rising with Krystal Ball and some Republican in August 2019. I say it like that because initially, she was the draw for my commie ass. But I'm now watching my last bit of Rising with premier contemporary Republican theorist Saagar Enjeti and his Bernie-voting friend Krystal.

This show has fulfilled its deepest purpose, at least as far as I'm concerned. Seeing a Republican who wasn't a stereotype of heartless ignorance changed my thinking. It got me to connect the dots between our ideologies. The heartlessness in the Republican coalition is just caused by the propaganda fed to the workers; it's false consciousness and not their fault. The ignorance is deliberately kept and maintained by the rich through that same false consciousness, or as the GOP now calls it, "fake news."

Meanwhile, I came to see the Dems not as my halfhearted allies who just needed to be radicalized more, but as wealthy decadent bloats paying just enough guillotine insurance to forestall the loss of their enterprises. In the Democrat-Republican split in American politics, I came to realize it mirrored exactly the split in socialist politics between reformers (the Bernie camp) and revolutionaries (all hail the immortal science of Marxism-Leninism; also hello).

Notes from this wasteland

I am not actually dead, in fact.

I've been wrestling with inept financial institutions who can't figure out how to send me a replacement card. I have over $200 waiting for me from Patreon (thanks again, everyone, from the bottom of my heart), but I can't access it because whatever stupid financial organization doesn't feel like taking the five seconds to make sure they can get pennies every single time I buy something. And until they do, I have to ration the tiny amount of funds I have in cash, so I can afford the money to buy the increasingly-expensive gasoline that's critical to travelling to town.

Which means I don't travel to town. Which means I don't write updates to travelogues that I planned to write a month ago. I'm only here now to check my mail and, after failing to find a piece of financial-grade plastic inside it, castigating the company into resending one if they're interested at all in keeping my business. Having done that, it now costs nothing to hang out and post stuff.

And I've got stuff to post, boy howdy. I didn't finish the travelogue of the Denver trip, because I can't upload pics and format HTML for them offline. But I have content that will get gradually rolled out.