... you can talk about anything you want.

"... oil-free, refined sugar-free, flour-free, dressing/sauce-free, etc. and lived my life based off of when I could and could not eat and what I could and could not combine."

At some point, the interest in "healthy" eating becomes an unhealthy obsession, orthorexia nervosa.

This reminds me of the most interesting sin called scrupulosity — the sinful obsession with not sinning.

"We're less sexist. We're less homophobic than we used to be. We only have one remaining bigotry. We don't want to be around anybody who disagrees with us."

Said Bill Clinton, the former U.S. President, speaking at the 100th anniversary festivities for The New Republic.

"He didn't want any more rock star military generals, he didn't want, you know, this constant fighting with the Pentagon over troop numbers in Iraq and Afghanistan. And Chuck Hagel gave him everything that he wanted. I think at the end of the day though, Chuck Hagel was viewed by the White House as almost too passive. But I think the real reason why he was let go-- is because the White House, after the midterms, felt like they needed to show that they were doing something, they were shaking up their national security team. The reality is, he didn't want to shake up his national security team."

Said NYT reporter Helene Cooper on "Meet the Press" yesterday. Chuck Todd — the moderator, who'd asked her why Hagel was fired" — interjected after that first sentence: "He wanted a smaller personality." That is, Obama, when he picked Hagel, was looking for "a smaller personality." So... was Hagel too small or not small enough... or just the wrong kind of small... or the right kind of big enough to be worth making an example of? And by "right kind," I mean, he's a Republican. That's always been useful.

I don't know what you do for Cyber Monday, "the biggest online shopping day of the year," but if it includes some shopping at Amazon, please consider supporting this blog by entering Amazon through The Althouse Amazon Portal.

So the argument that businesses should go through all this expense and trouble is that it just might work.

The motivating idea is that consumers should be free to make their own choices -- but that those choices should be informed ones. Most restaurants have little incentive to disclose calorie information on their own. The new FDA rule is meant to force such disclosure, and then to rely on the operation of the free market.

The FDA hopes that once consumers see calorie counts, they will make healthier choices, and there is evidence to support the agency's optimism.... The evidence is far from unequivocal, however. Some studies find little or no effect....

But... [s]ometimes disclosure requirements affect providers more than consumers, prodding them to change their offerings. As a result of the FDA's rule, many restaurants, cafeterias, convenience stores, movie theaters, vending machines and so on will offer healthier foods -- at least as long as their customers want to buy them.

I'm amazed that this kind of guesswork and casual hopefulness is all that supports such an expensive and troublesome new requirement.

Here's a taste:



I'll keep my mouth shut about whether that's promising, since my initial take on "Breaking Bad" was — after a 22-minute taste — was that it fit the interests and emotional needs of people who are not me.

[Walter White is] an entirely listless, enervated man with nothing to live for, utterly empty and bland and beaten down with no love for anything (except maybe chemistry)... He's had it with his bland old life which wasn't worth living even before he was dying. He's energized to go bad. He's finally alive.

This is a classic melodrama plot point: man who is about to die finally learns how to live.

He's been emasculated and suddenly he embraces manhood, which is saying "no" to all the crap he's had to eat, like vegetarian fake-bacon strips that taste like Band-Aids.

"In fact, Cramer, the traveling professor, is writing a book whose working title is: 'Understanding the Politics of Resentment'... 'I finally sent the revised manuscript back to my editor the Friday after the election,' she says. 'I was kind of joking to myself that if Scott Walker loses, I'm a little bit in a bind because I think I've gotten this wrong. But I think his win is sort of a continuation of what I had been hearing.'"

From "No end in sight to Wisconsin's politics of resentment," by Paul Fanlund in The Capital Times. Cramer is Kathy Cramer,  "a youthful and charismatic political scientist from the University of Wisconsin," who "ventured from her Madison campus office to coffee shops and gas stations in small Wisconsin communities" and "struck up conversations uncovering a pattern of simmering resentment toward those of us in Madison and Milwaukee."

ADDED: The Cap Times doesn't seem to want us to get to that article. The proper link didn't work, and then a link going to a Google search didn't produce a workable link. And I'm down in the comments telling people to read the article and address the topic and don't just rehash Ferguson or whatever has rubbed you raw lately. All I can say is go to the home page of The Cap Times and see the article title there.

I'll think hard before linking to The Cap Times in the future. Do they see they are getting traffic from me and act to fend it off?

AND: Now, I think I've got a working link in the original post. Interestingly, the headline has changed! It's now "Ferguson makes us think about Madison's black-white divide." Wow! That didn't seem to be the subject of the article to me, and I was annoyed that my commenters were turning it into another Ferguson discussion. That is bizarre!

The teaser on the front page is now: "Paul Fanlund: Ferguson makes us think about Madison's black-white divide/Missouri firestorm elevates topic of relations between races here."

The article wasn't even mostly about race. It was about class politics.... at least the last time I read the text. Maybe the text is different too. I happened to blog this piece 12 minutes after it went up. Maybe they were still tweaking it, spiking it with click bait. What a sad place we're in with the media titillating us with Ferguson continually. What good do they hope to do! I'm sure there are at least a few lefties feeling bad that the effort to forefront class inequity is failing.

MORE: Now, I've figured out that the article with the Ferguson headline is a different article, also by Paul Fanlund, and it went up in the last hour. I'm thinking the original article I blogged has been pulled and that other article put in its place.

UPDATE: Commenter George Grady said "Google has a cached version of today's article, for now anyway," and I've now redone the first link with that, so it can be read. I can't believe I wasted so much time this morning on this article the Cap Times wafted momentarily. Talk about your "politics of resentment." I'm blogging pure resentment right here.

... you can talk about whatever you want.

Here comes Lesson 7 in the continuing series How to draw/paint like Paul Klee. Click the "Paul Klee" tag for more lessons and more of an explanation. Here's the transcription from the next page of that notebook I wrote at an exhibition in London in 2002:

• "Vegetable — Physiognomic" — Plants superimposed on a face.

• "Strange Plants"

• using a single line lazy eight movement, make a tree in the center w/ suitable background. Paint in yellow & green. Background is horizon line only & dark blue sky grading to light blue green at horizon. Dappled ground.

 It's frustrating that the most elaborate description is the one without a title, but I found what I'm sure is that tree:



"Fig Tree" is the title of that 1929 watercolor. As for "Vegetable-Physiognomic" (1921) and "Strange Plants" (1921), these were easy to find, and I've opted to brighten and sharpen these images a bit:
Click for more »