Hasta La Gadget!

Garlic is a decidedly delicious pain.

Yes, you can use a knife and smash your cloves into oblivion, scattering little peel pieces over the floor. You can put the cloves in hot water, but you have to wait half an hour for the skins to soften. If you have to peel a dozen heads, you can shake them into submission between two bowls, but that takes more coordination than many chefs have.

So what’s the home chef to do? A new video from Diply has a simple hack for the garlic-loving, but mess-averse, cook. All you have to do is put an entire head of garlic into a Mason jar, seal the lid and shake to your heart’s content. After 20 seconds, pour out the contents and your cloves should slip out skin-free.

Simple as that.

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Last week, Boston Globe columnist Shirley Leung proposed that yes, women can, in fact, have it all.

Just as soon as men get pregnant.

Leung argues that even though today, more women graduate from college than men (and charge headfirst into promising careers), “all the gains women achieve at the beginning of their careers evaporate as they get older.” And why? Because we bear the burden of carrying, delivering, and primarily caring for society’s next generation.

As Leung points out, in March, mobile-phone firm Vodafone announced that women working for the company are entitled to at least 16 weeks paid maternity leave, and upon returning to work can opt for a reduced work schedule at full pay for six months. A huge victory for women in the workforce, right? Leung is not so sure and neither am I. We’re still accepting that it’s the woman’s responsibility to break from her full-time career to care for her child.

“For sure, paid leave and flexible schedules are generous perks that not a lot of companies offer,” Leung writes. “But by focusing on mothers, Vodafone continued to put the burden of child care on women. Here’s what would have been better: Vodafone extending the same deal to new fathers and calling it parental leave.”

Interestingly enough, this essay came right on the heels of my fiancé, Alex, and I having the exact same conversation. The catalyst, however, wasn’t equality in the workplace (although we organically got to it as the discussion progressed) it was the terms of pregnancy itself, and birth control.

Faced with the realities of turning 30 and tying the knot, it seems I’ve been having an ongoing dialogue with myself regarding pregnancy and childbirth: I want kids, but I don’t want to be solely responsible for incubating them, and, well, forcing them out of my body — destroying my flesh, and, let’s be honest about something here: quite possibly leading my husband to eventually stray to some younger, tighter woman in the process — all the while putting not just my career but my self as a whole on hold until further notice. And so I fantasize. I fantasize about a futuristic society where babies gestate in see-through pods on the walls of our homes until a timer goes off and they’re done, like a pot roast, ready to come out of the oven.

I hypothesized to Alex that if men bore the burden of pregnancy and child birth, this would already be a reality, to which he, of course, disagreed. But think about it. Last month Kansas Governor Sam Brownback banned second-trimester abortions. (For the record, Brownback’s bodily contribution to the birth of his five children included only orgasming.) Conservatives everywhere are (still) bitching and moaning about health insurance covering birth control. Just look, for example, to Hobby Lobby, which, made headlines last year after dropping the morning after pill and IUDs from women’s health plans while retaining coverage for Viagra and vasectomies. If men could get pregnant there would be no public discussion about a fetus’s right to life. No one would argue that a tadpole has more rights than a fully-fledged breathing adult. You can guarantee that.

And so for the same reason that there is no male birth control pill, there will be no incubation system freeing women’s bodies from what I can only describe as a biological curse. (I mean, Christians even wrote it into the first book of the Bible the way Greek mythology explains rain.) And as long as we are slaves to our biological makeup, there will be no “having it all.” Unless, of course, there is a shift in the perceptions of men and women everywhere towards child-raising as a 100 percent joint responsibility. And as long as we’re still talking about maternity leave and mothers‘ rights, then we’re not even close.

This post originally appeared on anniegetyourguns.com.

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If this is Japanese TV’s answer to “The Hunger Games,” we’d prefer a fight to the death.

In America, pop stars humiliate themselves without being prompted, but in Japan, debasement is written into the script.

AKBingo is a television show starring members of an all-female pop group, AKB48. According to Asia One, the premise of the show is that the women play dodgeball, and whoever gets hit has to pay a penalty, usually in the form of a ridiculous game.

In this segment, which aired on the show last month, two women blow on opposite ends of a clear plastic tube in an effort to avoid eating a cicada.

Winning means fame and fortune, losing means a less-than-desirable lunch, and someone’s got to lose. Here’s the entire show, in which the loser bites down on the bug and “appears to swallow it,” according to the New York Daily News:

To be fair, eating cicadas isn’t that far fetched. They’re apparently a good source of protein. Although they’re generally eaten fried, the one on the show looks kind of… raw.

It should be noted that Japan’s entertainment game has always been a few years ahead of the curve. Therefore, the visceral disgust you may be feeling at this spectacle should be allayed by the outside chance that in three-to-five years, Carrot Top and Kathy Griffin will be vying for the title of “Didn’t Eat The Bug.” Won’t that just be peaches?!

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If you live in Baltimore, or anywhere in the United States, you shouldn’t be surprised by the anger, the poverty, the police violence and the hopelessness. All you have to do is sing the national anthem, written after witnessing the bombardment of Baltimore Harbor by the British during the War of 1812.

“O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave, O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!”

And skip down to the last lines of the third verse, which isn’t sung much:
“No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave,
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

And there you have it: embedded in the national anthem we so proudly sing is the core and composition of slavery, part of the organic foundation of the land of the free for white people.

This should be no surprise. We Americans from the founding fathers to the present, like to preserve the underclass of people of color, but not admit it. The founding fathers never directly mentioned slavery in the constitution, but assumed it. They established a national census “by adding to the whole Number of free Persons… three fifths of all other Persons.” They agreed that “the migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States… shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight…” That means that slaves could be imported into the United States until at least 1808. The founders made sure that, “(n)o Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.” So if a slave escaped to the North to be free, he was pursued and captured and returned to slavery.

It took a civil war to end slavery. But the leaders of the South, having lost the war, were raised up in popular culture as the heroes of the nation… and still are. It is odd how blind we are to our own history. We fought to defeat the Nazis and their genocide. We cringe at the rise of Neo-Nazis. And yet we honor Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and other leaders, who fought to preserve a system that enslaved 10 million people over two centuries.

While the Civil War ended slavery, new forms of servitude were put in place, such as convict labor, and share cropping. Segregation insured that blacks would have inferior education, inferior work, and inferior quality of life, and live in fear of stepping out of line in the eyes of whites. The civil rights movement demolished legal segregation, but the story did not end there. For a while we have witnessed the social devolution of segregation, the war on drugs could be characterized as the war on black people. Mass incarceration has created a new Gulag Archipelago to the United States. Since 1980, incarceration has quadrupled, with over 2 million people in prison. Of those, one million are black. African Americans are incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of whites.

On the job front, we have undermined the income, the work, the compensation and the jobs of African Americans. While wages of white workers have fallen, the wages of black workers have fallen by twice as much in the past five years. Two million more African Americans are living in poverty now than 10 years ago. Since 2009, middle class black families have seen a drop of 3 percent in their household income. Unions are denounced and the bargaining power of workers, black and white and Latino, is undermined. And on the other side of the ledger, the top one percent do better and better, while corporations reap record profits.

Meanwhile, with states facing continual fiscal crises, public higher education has been defunded and priced out of reach for aspiring students. Funding for early learning has been cut. Family leave insurance to enable working parents to care for newborns is a non-existent dream. The discussion about K-12 is focused on “reform,” not funding. Being poor is a crime and being wealthy is exalted.

We have created a pressure cooker of hopelessness and anger, built on racism, our history of slavery, our idolatry of the losing generals in defense of slavery and our economic institutions which enable, condone and applaud the private accumulation of riches to prevail over the needs and desires and hopes and dreams of a commonwealth of Americans.

Welcome to Baltimore. Welcome to America.

This blog enables the personal opinions of the author, not the organizational agreement of the Economic Opportunity Institute.

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