Peanut butter Chocolate Chess Pie

Start with a Basic Whole Wheat Crust and partially prebake, then look up the Deluxe Chocolate Chess Pie from Ken's excellent book. Use four whole eggs instead of separating one of them b/c little proto-pie makers make it tough to justify the mess and time to separate yolks.  To the melting chocolate, add 2tbsp unsalted peanut butter (the kind you have to stir).

Bake as instructed.  

Resistance on two fronts

Passivity is key to a "managed democracy" (credit to On The Media for introducing me to the term).  Protests and calls to legislators about moves to undermine good governance, legal protections and the United States' moral leadership are entirely appropriate forms of resistance to any move in that direction.

But there is another front where resistance will be key to the survival of the American experiment: polarization.  If we cannot agree on basic facts and assign deep moral opprobrium to others viewing their own interests differently than our own, then we may reach a point where we could not even sit down to eat pie together.

As satisfying as the language of combat and pugilism can be, they are ultimately counter productive.  To paraphrase David Brooks, the punchiest thing you can do to a Nazi may be to offer them pie.

Our political and entertainment professions are well aware of the progress made on these fronts and shamelessly exploit them to sell ads and ensure safe districts. The current administration's efforts to "flood the zone" with outrageous tweets, mendacious public statements, and a flurry of executive orders reflects a desire to completely own the cable news cycle, a commercial enterprise which depends on a passively watching audience that it must keep both affirmed and outraged.  Social media works along largely the same lines, but without the need to protect any reputation for objective credibility.

Long term, the greatest enemy of pie making is thus not any particular politician or party, but the increasingly thick bubbles in which they want us to live.  What follows are some thoughts about how to weaken our own bubbles and maintain or build the tools to pierce others'.

(1) PAY FOR YOUR NEWS.  If you're not the customer, you're the product.  Subscribe to a newspaper, join your local public radio station and donate to any current events or investigative organization/podcast that delivers relevant and verifiable information.  If their standards fall, angry emails from customers get attention.

(2) GET INVOLVED LOCALLY.  National elections and national offices get big audiences, but (a) they focus on somewhat abstract arguments about size/role of government and taxes or regulations that have at best an indirect impact on most people's lives, keeping discussions abstract and often emotional.  However, the operable levers of power are largely in the hands of state and local authorities.  Note that the big story of last week was about a state Attorney General's actions to derail the new administration's agenda.  Your state senator might not be as cool as mine, he has a blog named The Dixie Pig, but state houses are where most of the action happens that really affects your life.

(3) ASSUME GOOD FAITH: The most polarizing statements make the blanket assumption that voting for the other party renders that voter unfit for further conversation and possibly worthy of violence.  Lesser versions assume that the voter endorses, or even excuses, the worst qualities of their preference.  However, each voter's path to their decision is often interesting, and a considerable amount of nose-holding is likely to be involved.  Common ground, if it exists, will be found along that path if you can keep the conversation moving along it.

(4) THICKEN YOUR SKIN: Protective bubbles keep out ideas that challenge the beliefs that define our identities and leave us vulnerable to the idea that our bubbles themselves have merit.  This is not to say that there is no room for safe spaces in which to retreat, indeed the world's major religions explicitly require communal affirmations of belief at least weekly, but that's not a good place to live full time.  Most of us missed how bad things had become outside of metropolitan areas because we never went there, in no small part because it's much easier to just avoid people who will do and say things that are, to cosmopolitan city types, deplorable.  From the other side, who would speak to someone who's patriotically incorrect?

A good start would be to read and try to dissect the arguments in editorials on both the Huffington Post and Fox News.  If you can keep your heart rate under control and identify cases of valid inference, logical fallacies and base assumptions of each, that's a good start.  

It's not easy,  tho, and I don't recommend doing it alone or unfed.  Good thing you know someone who makes pies.

This week in pie making

Two weeks ago, it evoked a dark, ironic humor to see the Nobel laureate President make a case for war in Iraq while the governor of Texas appealed to our faith in public health authorities.  Now, not so much.

First, we learn that any underfunded health system is vulnerable to spread of Ebola, as the protocol for protection requires knowledge and diligence that are not hallmarks of the overworked.  The larger point, that a pluralistic society absolutely depends upon excellent sanitation and capacity for quarantine, shouldn't be missed.

BBC news on Tuesday carried several stories on the theme that states aren't able to solve problems that cross their borders.  The other problem, of course, is ISIS, which has made a name for itself by exploiting the weak governments and ethnic tensions in the middle east.  Now it's facing air strikes in both Iraq and Syria, but still manages to gain and hold territory and threatens to reignite sectarian violence for years to come.  parallels to the Spanish civil war seem apt.

A somewhat related development is that oil prices are falling fast, due to both a surge in fracking and falling demand as China cools and the US adopts a less energy intensive culture.  Your pie maker is writing this on bike-accessible public transit.

Speaking of, we're pleased to present two new features: this week's pie type and the status of your pie maker's bike chain.

Chain check: passed

Pie type: butternut squash

It's really hard to help people

The Washington Post has run a few stories recently about people receiving food assistance in the US.  The most recent is this Thanksgiving Day column.

Here at the Fuzzy Wups B^n, this is a topic of frequent and heartfelt discussion.  How can one claim to promote universal pie making without addressing the fact that the wealthiest country in the world has a sizable population of people who can't afford to buy their own food?  Like a good scientist, your pie maker would answer this with another question: What does it mean to address that fact?

Read the linked column.  Notice how many people on that list drove to pick up their donated food.  Notice the questions that implied some kind of right to expect a donated turkey for their own kitchens.  Notice the reference to "Condo Fees."  The people receiving this aid are most certainly not going to appear next to Sally Struthers, and are more likely to suffer from obesity than malnutrition in the classic sense. 

So how does one frame the policy question here?  What's the desired end state, what situations must be avoided, and how can we measure progress?  There are reams of papers on these questions and their implications for the design of everything from a community food drive to USAID's allocation of the surplus American wheat crop abroad.  This post, this blog and this pie maker's career could very well be spent diving in to this and deriving formulas to optimize the allocation of donated food, labor and money.  That, however, is a deeply impersonal approach and invites precisely the sort of callousness that lets us debate grandly while avoiding the fundamentally intractable problem at the heart of all of this: Why do the recipients need help, and why do we care?  Does the cause of the need impact our response to it?

Put aside any grand theory of social justice or personal responsibility for a moment.  Imagine that the aid recipient is not some faceless statistic or cameo in print.  That down-and-out was, is or someday will be a relative of yours. 

Odds are good that relative, we'll call him Uncle Bob, saw this situation coming.  Odds are even better that you, dear responsible reader, saw this situation coming, and probably even tried to warn Uncle Bob.  But Uncle Bob didn't change his ways, and now he's in pretty tough straights, and even though you're feeling pretty stretched by rising gas, food and rent prices Uncle Bob needs your help.  Denying Uncle Bob would, at the very least, hurt Aunt Bobbie and the Boblets physically and mean teaching any kids in the family that being good is not enough and family might not be there for you.  Heck, odds are good the "trouble" everyone saw coming was just Uncle Bob trying to do the right thing, at least from his perspective.  Most of us have an "Uncle Bob" somewhere in the family.

So you are stuck.  Do you cut off your uncle, let him suffer the fate he knowingly brought down on himself and his family?  Are you ready to explain to the kids who have to watch this fall that, as much as we all love Uncle Bob, he needs to learn his lesson like a grown up?  Even as we watch Uncle Bob and Aunt Bobbie begin to suffer stress and poor-nutrition related diseases?  No, blood is thicker than water, family comes first, and that boat/house/college fund/really nice oven purchase gets pushed back because letting Uncle Bob, Aunt Bobbie and the Boblets starve is just not an option. 

Now, how do we help Uncle Bob?  The "end state" is a self-funding, pie-making family, and the hard constraint is that Bob, Bobbie and the Boblets get 2000 Cal/day every day.  Everyone knows that Bob's not so good with money, so giving him cash is not going to solve this problem, and may be offensive besides.  Losing money is bad, losing dignity is much worse.

 First, Uncle Bob needs to accept the help.  The most dignity-preserving way to do this is to simply ring up the Bobses' groceries with your own, let them use an extra room in your house, and/or fill their cars with gasoline because (a) they are family and (b) they do stuff around the house and run the odd errand for you (not as much as you'd do with the kitchen you'd planned to extend into that bedroom . . . but who really needs to have a bigger Thanksgiving meal when family is so close!  All the time!  Because they can't keep their own house!  Yay family!).  What this approach says to Uncle Bob is that you're just helping him out through a rough spot, freeing up his time and money to put towards more pressing needs. 

Let's unpack that that last sentence.  If feeding and housing Bobbie and the Boblets is not Uncle Bob's highest priority, if "getting back on his feet" means returning to the situation two years ago when things weren't acutely bad but clearly getting worse, then the situation evokes a sense of moral outrage and hopeless frustration.  If the law, not family ties, compelled you to help Bob, you'd understand, and maybe join or even lead a local TEA Party group.  Your funds, your house and possibly your kid's education being sacrificed to pay for someone's very bad decisions, however well meaning, is galling.  Is Uncle Bob's dignity really worth so much? 

If plan A was to provide for physical needs directly via in-person support, what's Plan B if Uncle Bob moves away and still needs assistance?  This is much trickier.  We know Uncle Bob and the Bobses cannot to be trusted with cash, if they would accept it at all.  There really isn't any sort of fig leaf we can put over the provision of aid to make it seem transactional without dredging up things done decades ago (remember all those times Uncle Bob used to help out around . . . ).  This is where things start to get interesting, as the family drama now mirrors a national policy discussion. 

Here's what we want:
(1) No unfettered cash.  Not enough of it will turn into food or acceptable housing for this to be a good idea.
(2) Minimal cost.  The anger that this situation causes is directly proportional to the amount of time it delays your oven upgrade.
(3) Adequate nutrition.  No point if they starve anyway.
(4) Dignity preserving.  Breaking relationships to make a point violates both the requirement to keep the Boblets fed and keep the family whole.  This is the most galling, but also the most necessary.

So what we do?
Option (A): Ship them, or arrange for delivery of, weekly supplies of staple foods.  This is like going shopping with them, but instead of your silently suffering face they see an untipped delivery guy.
Let's evaluate:
(1) Yes. (2) No, emphatic No (3) Yes (4) Maybe . . . depends how much input they have.  It's really tempting to use a pipeline like this to exercise control ("show me three REAL job applications or it's rice, beans and greens again next week!")

Option (B): Grocery store gift cards.  It's saying "we want to make sure you're able to eat well."  Stores that allow them are generally more expensive than stores that don't, but you don't have to worry about the funds going to non-food things like gasoline.  Until the store starts selling gasoline.
Let's evaluate:
(1) Probably (store may redeem for cash or give it as change) (2) Maybe (3) Probably (4) Yes, if the Bobses like the store.

Option (C): Carefully monitored debit card.  It's saying, generally to Aunt Bobbie rather than the Bobses as a group, "We trust YOU to actually buy food, but if anyone tries to buy anything else, that's it!"  The behavioral economists reading this probably wonder why we hate Aunt Bobbie so much, tho, since this option means she has to deny Uncle Bob access to this line of cash herself, and probably quite frequently.  Uncle Bob's dignity comes at a steep price indeed.
Let's evaluate:
(1) Maybe, it's mighty temping to slide that card into a gas pump when other accounts are dry.  (2) Yes (3) Probably (4) Mostly

Option C, incidentally, is how our elected representatives have chosen to implement this type of assistance on a large scale.  They only allow purchase of select products from select retailers, rather than having to carefully monitor the cards directly, but the effect is the same.  These automatic controls make them more like gift cards to low-end stores, essentially combining the best of Options B and C. 

Here's the truly awful part.  We went through all of this and rather than making any progress towards our "end state", we're just barely avoiding the "no one starves" constraint while trying to minimize your costs and the offense to Uncle Bob's dignity.  So what of the questions "why does this situation exist?" and "why do we care?"  Uncle Bob is the reason the problem exists, and will continue to exist pending a significant (and unlikely) change in behavior.  We care because we want to be people who care, and don't want our children to see us be uncaring. 

The help is needed because people make really bad decisions sometimes.   Sometimes those seem like a good idea at the time, or would have been good ones a year, decade or generation ago.   But we who desire to help are powerless to change people's minds directly.  There is no escape from this fact.