From the blatantly obvious files Elisabeth Hassleback from The View is easily the stupidest woman in the country. And

In the deep black hole that is depression, I stop writing and listening to music. I also become more than a little agoraphobic. Simple things like doorbells and telephones send me into panic attacks. So I barricade myself into my house, turn off the ringer and I watch a shit load of tv. In my last major depression (about 7 years ago), I had cable because of a brief dalliance with a hot cable guy. We are way too poor to afford cable tv or even netflix now.

And as anyone without cable knows, network tv sucks. Network tv in the middle of summer is about as entertaining as sweaty boobs and an itchy bra. (Why yes, we are having a heat wave at the moment. That is where the analogy came from).

So I’ve been watching tv online. At first it was just Battlestar Gallactica episodes posted on Scifi’s website. Then Doctor Who and the Sarah Jane Adventures in 10 minute chunks on You tube.

Then I found the Holy Grail. Surf the channel. I’ve caught all of Mad Men, finally. And Weeds. It’s awesome, though sometimes they take a bit to load and suffer from buffer stutter. But it’s free (at least for the next 2 weeks, then I’m officially 2 months behind on my internet/phone bill and I’ll be cut off from civilization).

They also have movies, though I tried to watch Persepolis but it’s in French and there were no English subtitles. Ouyangdan might enjoy the large number of videos that have Chinese subtitles. It’s good for her to get some reading practice in.

And since I have been immersed in 1960’s nostalgia (or misogyny with a martini as I like to call it) here is a poverty dinner recipe straight out of poofy shirt dress and pearls ladies magazine.

Tuna Salad with Shells

1 large can of well drained tuna
1 box of medium sized shell pasta (cooked, drained and cooled)
a quarter of a red onion, diced
1 can of medium black onions (you can slice them but I just crush them with my hands)
lemon juice
salt (generously)
pepper
paprika
dill
mayo (enough to creamy up the tuna but not so much that it ends up macaroni salad like.)

Mix all together. You can also add tomatoes or anything else you like into the tuna. When we have it, I like to serve this over crunchy romaine lettuce with a lit more lemon juice to give it some cold crispy crunch. It’s a very Sunset magazine circa 1960 summertime luncheon meal, though being the modern American’s that we are we eat it for dinner. And then lunch, and then dinner again. It goes a long fucking way.

Claire at Feministe asks an interesting question- Is such a thing as a feminist population policy possible?

My short answer is yes, but only so far as educating and providing work opportunities as well as voluntary methods of birth control work together to make women choose to have fewer children. Notice the word choose.

I hear from a lot of well-meaning quasi-progressives who are worried about overpopulation. Almost exclusively they mean too many brown people in poor parts of the world. But a family of 8 in a third world country uses less resources than a family of 4 in this one. Hell, my poor family of 2 uses half what the average American family of the same size uses. Amazing what poverty does for your carbon footprint score.

But I don’t actually think we have an overpopulation problem. I think it’s a red herring of an argument. What we have is a resource distribution problem. Canada is not overpopulated. Europe is depopulating. The only reason America isn’t facing problems with a dropping replacement rate is because of immigration. And immigration, since the very earliest humans, has been our way of dealing with societies who have gone over their carrying capacity (along with war and new technologies, the first diminishes population and the second expands carrying capacity by increasing productivity). We have scientific proof the the first humans walked out of Africa in search of a better life and managed to spread themselves literally around the globe, not in one fell swoop but in groups over tens of thousands of years.

The crisis (or crises) we are facing right now won’t be solved by the immediate forcible sterilization of every woman of child bearing age ( or every brown person in India). We have a petroleum based society that is at carrying capacity coupled with the devastating weather patterns brought on by global warming (which happens to be caused by our petroleum economy). There is only one solution to both those problems, and fewer babies ain’t gonna change the weather anytime soon.

New technologies might though. The faster we can get ourselves off the gasoline standard, the better. And replacing it with some other non-renewable, global warming causing technology just shifts the problem slightly.