The title of this video is “Why not to barbecue a water balloon.” I’m not sure it’s the most compelling argument. I mean, that thing POPS!

Man, classic ’80s synth music is having a rough couple of days. First there was the desecration of New Order’s “True Faith” by George Michael and the Autotune machine that has apparently taken control of mind and relieved him of his faculties. Now Snoop Dogg and T-Pain do something not entirely unsimilar to Yaz’s “Situation.” (They used Alison Moyet’s wonderful bubbly laugh and everything!) “Boom” is also one of the most nonsensical videos I’ve ever seen. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. But, why did we go through a full minute-and-a-half of post-apocalyptic Tusken raider stuff just to get into the same club we spend most hip-hop videos in?

Here are the originals, to try to wash the taste out of your mouth.

by Abe Sauer

Two weeks ago, we reported on Danny Pye, a Christian aid worker who has been wrongly imprisoned in Jacmel, Haiti since October, 2010. Numerous Haitian officials, including at the Ministry of Justice, have acknowledged that Pye should be released. The U.S. Embassy, aware of Pye’s situation since the beginning, has done no more than write a strongly worded memo. Finally, last weekend, the Associated Press did a story on Pye.

The story (quite similar to our nearly 14-day old report) shed very little new light on the situation. The only new information shared was to note that the judge in the case “has been seriously ill and is unavailable.” As a matter of the fact, the judge, hardly “unavailable,” has perhaps gone mad, claiming to have been struck down “par une main invisible.”

It was already not surprising that article 44 of Haiti’s Constitution (“Persons detained temporarily awaiting trial must be held separately from those who are serving sentence”) is not observed in Jacmel. And now, with the embassy giving an all-we-can-do shrug, Pye reports that human rights abuses are occurring in the prison.

Last Thursday, two days before the AP story was filed, Pye said that rumors about some prisoners planning a break-out circulated in the prison. The guards caught wind of the plan and, to make an example, lined the entire prison up in the yard and forced them to watch as the conspirators were beaten viciously. Pye said that at least one died.

Subsequently, all prisoners, including Pye, were denied food or water for 24 hours to send a message. Pye has also been Tased.

Meanwhile, one lawyer having other business with the judge in the case, Maxon Samedi, said that Samedi has gone mad, become ill and has fled to be healed by a “hougan,” a priest.

An American aid worker in Jacmel said that she doesn’t buy that Samedi is sick. She said that she and Haitians in Jacmel believe “he is hiding from the accusations against his poor performance.”

Judge Samedi has been reportedly given a month to recover from his injures sustained from the “par une main invisible.” Currently, he is the only one who can sign the papers and, despite all the supposed great concern from ostensibly powerful authorities, including a U.S. government consul that practically runs the rest of the nation, Samedi will not be compelled to do so. Instead, he will be resting for a month.

This means the least — the least — of Danny Pye’s worries is that he will miss the birth of his son.

Senator Marco Rubio’s office acknowledged that it is aware of the situation. Several calls to the office of Vern Buchanan, Pye’s Representative in Florida, were not returned. Senator Bill Nelson responded to my press inquiry with a form letter that everyone else asking about Danny Pye received: “I have been informed that the U.S. government is committed to providing Danny with all the appropriate assistance and is engaged with the Haitian government at the highest level to ensure that his case is resolved in a responsible way. “

The U.S. Embassy has told Danny’s wife Leann that the ambassador wrote a letter. An American in Haiti who saw the ambassador’s letter to the minister of justice told us that, in essence, it said that the Embassy was aware of Pye’s case and that it requested it be expedited. “I felt the letter was strong, though I would like to have seen it be stronger yet,” he said.

The embassy told Leann that the letter is all it can do and from here on out it will monitor the situation to ensure Pye’s human rights aren’t violated.

But if having food and water withheld for days at a time and being Tased are not human rights violations, what are?

Above: Video of Pye last week in prison, shot by a visitor.Additional videos here.

The continued disinterest from America’s major media sources is amazing. A nine-month pregnant Christian woman with a wrongly accused pastor husband who will probably miss his son’s birth while enduring abuse in a Haitian prison offers no interest to Nancy Grace? After American college student Austin Bice went missing in Spain, his story littered the news. His parents were all over “Today” after he was missing for just a week. On Sunday, Pye will have been in prison for five months.

In a truly shocking turn, not even HuffPo has mentioned the case. Do you have any idea what an accomplishment it is that something like this has not found its way onto some page on HuffPo in two weeks? You couldn’t do that with a story if you wanted to.

It’s noteworthy that HuffPo has mentioned Pye, prior to his imprisonment. Back in February of 2010, a writer there mentioned how Pye sacrificed his own organization’s supplies to equip doctors helping with the post-earthquake aid effort.

Abe Sauer can be reached at abe sauer at gmail dot com.

“A few weeks after the issue was on the stands the phone woke me up at home on a Sunday morning with news that Biggie had been killed. I guess everyone remembers where they were when they found out. I turned on MTV, and watched the news coverage as his words — the ones about wanting to move past controversies, live a slower life, and show the world how he’d grown as a person — were repeatedly quoted from the story. It was all so surreal and senseless. I’ll never profess to have known Christopher Wallace, I just interviewed him for a magazine. But I think what I wrote captures things he felt at the time, that upon reflection I think were always a part of his music even at its Ready To Die-bleakest: a belief in the power of artistry to make life — despite its stress and adversity — something still worthy of celebration.”
 — Ego Trip’s Chairman Mao on the experience of writing a cover story, a great one, for The Source about Christopher “The Notorious B.I.G.” Wallace a couple weeks before the MC, the greatest one, died on today’s date, March 9, 1997. The original story’s up at Ego Trip site, if you’re in the mood to reminisce, or learn what the rap scene felt like 14 years ago.

For some, it is not just enough to use Twitter. Some must worry about how, when and why they use Twitter. It’s your life, you can be like that if you want! And most people can’t help but want to know who’s hanging on their every word, just desperately waiting for them to tweet again. Here’s tools to analyze Twitter use, audience, news research and ways to scratch the itch of your plain old vanity. [Read the rest here]

[Sponsored posts are editorial content that we are pleased to have presented by a participating sponsor, in this case Intel: My Life Scoop; advertisers do not produce the text.]

Eyes either narrow or widen, depending, and voices come up a tense octave. There’s a certain palpable raising of the drawbridge from the man responding: the question or statement is contemptible, and it is very clearly being held in contempt, and this discussion is going to end just as soon as it can be ended. The reason it doesn’t end right then, right after the word gets said, is that these are professionals, professional football players and smooth spokesmen both. And so the proper responses — “no, not at all”; “that’s most definitely not how we see ourselves” — make their way out and into the microphones and notebooks and early-week assessment pieces. But offense is taken all the same whenever a team or player is described as exemplifying or exhibiting finesse.

Even in the umbrage-powered world of the NFL, the response elicited by the word “finesse” is noteworthy for its intensity and weirdness. Offense is taken even though every NFL team is, in some sense and several facets, a “finesse team,” and even though the good ones are more so than others. “Finesse” means elegant and skillful and clever when used as a noun, and describes a swift use of subtlety as a verb. It is also both a noun and a verb in bridge, as it turns out, but in neither of the word’s common or (improbably complicated and weirdly player-on-your-left contingent) card-related definitions does “finesse” scan as faggoty or soft or un-tough. (Although the fact that there even is a bridge definition maybe does not help, there) The only place that finesse plays as an insult or gay-baity taunt is football, and the only reason for that is that, in the football lexicon, finesse is antonymic to power and therefore the opposite of praise. Describe a player or a team as a finesse team and they will correct you: they are a physical team, they are a tough team. They don’t know what you’re talking about, but they know in their hearts — they can look around this locker room and tell you, straight up and for sure — that there is no finesse in here.

Which is fine or fine-ish, since this particular usage issue is hardly the most offensive thing about football’s jingo-tarded lexicon and also because the league’s wounded linguists are honestly welcome to whatever gets them through the headache-y night of a brutally long season in a punishing sport. And anyway, it’s not unique to them; we get the same sort of thing from the secret sportswriters who cover politics. And in the same way that all that sneering at candidates inclined (so elitistly) towards “nuance” tends to look kind of nauseating once the blunt/direct/plainspoken Manicheans bring their straight-line idiocies to elective office, the NFL is suffering-unto-death from its aversion to the skillful or subtle or un-direct, and an unwillingness to acknowledge any way around a problem but over it. In this case, it’s about money, and labor, and how the NFL’s owners understand the coddled, sharecrop economy in which they participate.

After a year of relentless and relentlessly ridiculous war-talk, the NFL Players Association and the league’s owners are meeting — right now, and for the rest of this week — in a federal labor mediator’s office on the plains of Armageddon. On one side are football players trained to believe, think and speak in the language of power; opposite them are the puffy, tough-talking billionaires of the NFL’s ownership caste, who learned the same stupid language in boardrooms and boarding schools. It’s billionaires against millionaires — a point the president made in dismissing speculation that he’d involve himself in the dispute, right before he went back to determining what kind of cuts in the safety net were the most moderate. The NFL negotiations feature true believers and hard-liners everywhere you look, each rolling out the same smash-mouthy dullardry, calling plays from the same goofy playbook, and avoiding any appearance of finessing anything. Those stubborn things being, in no particular order, just how much money the owners are entitled to make off their teams, how little of that revenue they are entitled to pay to the athletes who create that value, and what broader responsibilities each might have to the other. This is complicated stuff, and neither side seems able, let alone willing, to talk about it. The resulting power-off has been not so much a negotiation as a helmet-to-helmet tackle, over and over, back and forth forever.

This is the kind of helmet-to-helmet hit of the kind that leaves both parties foggy and writhing on the turf, but the aggressor — the one who “launched,” to use the strangely technical language of the soggy and selective anti-concussion policy that the NFL belatedly put into place this year — would unquestionably be the owners. NFL players are bred as dominance machines, but in the hard-line owners — wild-eyed Galt-grade assholes like Panthers owner Jerry Richardson or doughy boardroom zealots like Patriots owner Robert Kraft — the players are facing a different and differently motivated opponent than they’ve faced before. Richardson is a former NFL player born again as a Hardee’s tycoon and Bush Ranger in the feudal and union-averse Carolinas, and he is prone to Tea Party-ish oratory about “taking his league back.” Kraft, a real-estate magnate and the NFL plutocracy’s most benign public face, bought the Patriots because he grew up as a fan and kept them in New England because he was from there. What the two have in common — besides great wealth, limited patience, personal friendship with NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and a vanishingly small risk of trauma-induced brain injury in their day-to-day lives — is a privileged place among the nation’s sports oligarchs.

Of all the reasons for rich people to buy a professional sports team, profit would ordinarily not rate terribly high. But Richardson and Kraft and every other NFL owner makes money off the teams they own. Just how much they make is a secret, because the privately held NFL teams have (as is their admittedly confusing right) refused to open their books to the union in negotiations; the open books of the Green Bay Packers, the NFL’s one publicly owned team, suggest that NFL teams generate profits in the tens of millions of dollars. They make this money through the league’s $4 billion television deal — split equally between the teams, as is the plutocratic style — and they make it through ticket and luxury box sales and the associated extortionate frippery related to those ticket sales and they make it through renting out the stadiums they (and local tax money and government-authored bond issues) bought. And they make it in part because their employees work on non-guaranteed contracts and also, in part, because they have not as yet had to contribute much to the very expensive post-retirement health care of those employees, who have recently evinced embarrassing-ish tendencies to lose their minds and harm/kill themselves post-retirement, among the other sad misbehaviors consistent with what one would expect from people who had suffered extreme and repeated work-related brain trauma.

Which would maybe make it more sensible if the players were the “launchers” here, driving themselves vengefully — in the self-destructive, head-first manner taught as a fundamental by your big-time football coaches — at the vulnerable heads of the employers who are kind of objectively getting over on them in a bunch of ways. But they’re not. The owners are proposing that the league expand to an 18-game season while simultaneously proposing to take another $1 billion (in addition to the billion they already get) off the top of the league’s $9 billion in revenue for overhead. The latter will shrink the players’ share of the league’s revenues from roughly 58% to a little under 48%, while tacking two weeks of effectively unpaid (and highly dangerous) overtime onto the season. Given how profitable NFL teams already are, given how small a share of those profits players actually see, and given that the players association is expected to concede on at least some of what’s in the last sentence — the 18-game season is seen as a virtual inevitability — it’s hard to see what the owners are so hacked-off about. Yes, costs have gone up and NFL revenues, despite breaking records year after year, have fallen short of the owners’ projections; but profits remain strong, and NFL teams continue to appreciate in value exponentially. Leaving aside the only-in-the-NFL idea that the owners of sports teams — teams that are generally regarded as vanity purchases, and perhaps most charitably seen as public civic goods with decent cash-flow — are somehow entitled to ever-increasing profits, this simply should not be a crisis.

There’s a reason why owners have proven seemingly unable to regard it as anything but that, though. It has to do with the same wrongheaded rich-guy righteousness that saw your more media-savvy plutocrats endeavor (and succeed!) in making public employees with five-figure salaries into the villains of an economic collapse created by financial industry speculators earning ten times that and more, and it also has to do with the permanent-midnight doomsaying that has become the only way the right talks about economics. And of course it has a lot to do with the by-any-means-necessary acrobatics of which even the softest-bodied capitalist is capable when his right to all-you-can-eat everything is challenged.

As with the dim, meatish governors of Wisconsin and Ohio, Karl Rove’s cynical rhetorical signature — accusing the opponent of your crime — has found a strange and sobering new life among NFL owners who are seemingly not in on the bleak joke, and who actually believe this shit. There’s a frank ridiculousness to Richardson and other NFL hard-line owners laying in a multi-billion dollar strike fund — comprised of TV revenues which the league demanded as an advance from the networks, without ever promising that there would be a season to televise next year — while heatedly filing a lawsuit accusing the players of not negotiating in good faith. (That ridiculousness probably has something to do with federal judge David Doty invalidating that agreement, a decision that deprived NFL owners of the wherewithal to weather a lockout and that gave the best hope yet for reconciliation.)

Likewise, there’s a breathtaking cynicism undergirding Jerry Richardson’s exhortation to “take back our league” from the players who do the dirty, concussive work in exchange for less than 60 percent of revenues, but it might absolve him somewhat that he honestly seems to believe that no struggle could be braver or more justified than that of NFL owners against their employees. Just as surely as Scott Walker believes his trollish politicking and crude bullying is brave and unblinking statesmanship, Richardson et al believe that they are making a twilight stand against… well, what?

This is the problem with making a casus belli out of something as simultaneously brutish and opaque as the divine right of the powerful. The broad-unto-blurry ideas at work here — keep what you earn, get what you can get, do as thou wilt, and so simply on — sell easily enough. Put it into practice, though, and the actual all-out pursuit of Every Single Thing looks a lot like madness. That is, it leads to behaviors and ways of understanding that are not just vain or self-interested but actually fucking nuts, which actually make the world warp and twist around its self-interested new axis until everything that is not the individual and that individual’s interest falls into formation with the army opposite, an army that’s just about the size of the rest of the world. It’s a worldview that doesn’t work. It widens every negotiation into an armageddon, brooks no result but the destruction of the opponent, and that’s what it’s doing here in the NFL and there in several states. The rhetoric of the NFL closes off compromise on its own, but this particular problem is deeper. It’s tough to imagine the NFL Players Association — or AFSCME, or anyone — successfully finessing this sort of apocalyptic narcissism.

David Roth co-writes the Wall Street Journal’s Daily Fix, contributes to the sports blog Can’t Stop the Bleeding and has his own little website. And he tweets!

Photo by BrokenSphere.

David Broder, known as “the dean of the Washington press corps” because he was really old, has died. The cause of death was the lack of bipartisanship that plagues our nation’s politics.

by Paul Schrodt

Suddenly pot edibles are everywhere these days. You can even take a class on how to make them! Yet the basic truth remains: Most pot brownies suck. No, you don’t really eat pot brownies for the chocolaty goodness — I get it. But if you’re going to spend that kind of cash on ingredients, shouldn’t the end result at least taste good? To fix this, I called up Jerome Chang, the former pastry sous-chef at Le Cirque and the mastermind behind DessertTruck Works, a New York City food truck that was so popular it became its own restaurant.

Chang was sympathetic to my concern: “I’m not a pothead, but I’ve had a couple, and I was disappointed. I guess… It takes some work. I think most of the people making them are male. They don’t have a lot of cooking skills. That’s my theory, anyway.” (Translation: The reason pot brownies suck is because they’re made by stoners.) So I asked Chang to make what he would consider the best batch of pot brownies ever, no-holds-barred.

He didn’t pull any punches. The recipe, below, is what you’d always wished pot brownies were even when you didn’t realize you were wishing it: decadent, overstuffed, rich, and kind of a mess. Chang says his mission was simple: to make brownies that are every bit as good as the high they give you. “It’s almost like a cross between high-quality fudge and a brownie — not too cakey, dense. And the saltiness of the pretzels and their crunch help. They elevate it without being pretentious.” Because the last thing you want to be when you’re making pot brownies is pretentious.

To achieve the desired result, Chang recommends using the highest-quality chocolate you can find in your mass-market grocery, such as Guittard or Scharffen Berger. “If I’m at home or away from my kitchen, those are the ones I’ll pick up.” The optional add-ons, butterscotch chips and mini-marshmallows, are good if you like things extra-sweet.

Other than that, making these isn’t so different from following any brownie recipe. Except, of course, for the pot butter. That’s the tricky part. There are a lot of different ways to infuse butter with marijuana, but Chang says that the best way is to use a double boiler with water in it, which doesn’t take too long and avoids burning. (For even cooking, it helps if the pot and the bowl are roughly the same diameter.)

As for dosage, Chang says his max is two brownies. “I’m a bit sensitive to all manner of drugs. Some guys felt a little something. But I was like, whatever, it’s enough for me.” If you’re at all like him, you might want to go light on the green stuff. Then you can enjoy them all over again when you’re stoned.

Jerome Chang’s Pot Brownies

Yield: 1/2 sheet pan, about 20 three-by-two-inch squares

Pot butter (recipe follows)
3 tbsp plus 1 tsp water (just shy of 1/4 cup)
1 lb 4 ounces bittersweet chocolate chips or baking chunks (Guittard, Scharffen Berger, or better)
6 large eggs
3/4 tsp vanilla extract
3 cups sugar
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 tbsp baking powder
3/4 tsp kosher salt
12 ounces bittersweet chocolate chips (1 package)
2 1/2 ounces pretzels
1 pre-made graham-cracker pie crust
1 cup butterscotch chips (optional)
4 cups mini-marshmallows (optional)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Line a half sheet pan with parchment
paper, set aside.

Melt the pot butter along with the 20 ounces bittersweet chocolate over a double boiler.
Whisk together until smooth and uniform.

Place the eggs, sugar, and vanilla extract into a large bowl. Beat together with an electric beater until thick.

Add the chocolate and butter mixture to the egg mix. Beat together until uniform.

Beat in the flour, baking powder, and salt.

With a rubber spatula, fold in the chocolate chips.

Pour the brownie batter onto the half sheet pan with parchment paper. Gently press the pretzels into the top of the batter. Then crumble up the graham-cracker pie crust and press the chunks into the brownie batter.

Place in the oven and bake for a total of 30 minutes, turning halfway through. If not using marshmallows or butterscotch chips, skip to the last step.

Remove the sheet pan from the oven and sprinkle the marshmallows and butterscotch chips onto the brownie. Put it back in the oven and bake for another 5 minutes.

Remove the brownies from the oven and let them cool to room temperature. Once cool, wrap with plastic wrap and store in the fridge overnight. Enjoy the next day!

Pot Butter

1/2 ounce marijuana
1 lb unsalted butter

Over a double boiler, melt the butter. Once melted, add the marijuana and let it infuse into the butter. Stir regularly, about every 5 minutes. After 30 minutes, take the butter off the heat, and strain through a fine-mesh sieve or cheesecloth. Use right away in the brownie recipe or store in the fridge.

Paul Schrodt works at Esquire.com and sometimes writes about drugs.

Libya: You know what’s an invitation to a (possibly short, possibly endless) war? The no-fly zone, which is not a thing that has been proposed to happen. And yet, you can understand why the rebels who are fighting on the ground, city-by-city, would want such assistance, as Gaddafi shells towns in his own country! This is madness. Fascinating to know: “Libyan envoys are meeting with European Union officials in Brussels.”

Yemen: “Government security forces beat demonstrators and then opened fire on them late Tuesday night, fatally wounding a 20-year-old protester and leaving nine others with bullet wounds…. Protests in Sana, the capital, have been relatively peaceful since President Ali Abdullah Saleh said that Yemeni security forces would protect the demonstrators. The episode was the first time that uniformed officers used live ammunition since the protests began here nearly a month ago.”

Oman: State workers are on strike! That is extremely impressive.

Egypt: Things in Egypt have been, to put it mildly, extremely messy the last few days, though they sound somewhat calmer today. By reputable accounts, supporters of the “security apparatus” have been attacking people in Cairo. Last night as well, there was strife between Copts and Muslims, an engagement that also involved “goons.” Throughout the week, there has been gunfire and shouting matches. A bone of contention is the dismantlement of the secret service; secret services don’t like to be dismantled and exposed!

Côte d’Ivoire: Okay, it’s not (at all) technically North Africa, but it would be remiss to not make note of this: “Marches by thousands of women in protest at Ivory Coast’s president Laurent Gbagbo have ended in bloodshed after his army killed four people…. The women made their stand on International Women’s Day, less than a week after Gbagbo’s soldiers killed seven women at a peaceful demonstration…. Thousands of women continued to gather in the besieged suburb of Abobo, where the seven women had been killed, some shouting ‘Gbagbo, assassin! Gbagbo, power thief! Leave!’”

Bahrain: “Bahrain’s Sunni and Shi’ite Muslim opposition groups have met to try to curb sectarian tensions that have escalated into street fights after weeks of protests aimed at bringing down the government.”

Life is a tedious dialog in which Death always has the final word, but much of the small talk in between concerns the weather. The next few days will be grey and dull, which is both seasonally and emotionally appropriate. Consider the age: certitudes dashed, confidence destroyed, ideals gladly forsaken for the cheap illusion of compromise in which the only winners are those who have already been rewarded with the greatest benefit. Consider the mood: mental and physical cruelties inflicted on the most vulnerable without remorse, anger and cynicism wrapped so tightly together that they become indistinguishable from each other, loneliness and despair so pervasive that they have supplanted even apathy and greed as our default internal settings. Consider the endless parade of degradation and infantilization produced to further pacify a glassy-eyed nation: televised obesity contests, Katy Perry, lollipops made out of birthday cake. Where you were once at least energized by your fear of failure, the best you can do now is reassure yourself that at least it can’t get worse, an empty promise even more damaging for its patent falsehood. Night, once filled with mystery and potential and the exotic hint of danger, now brings the only bit of joy you can muster up, allowing you to close your eyes and free yourself from the terrible burden of consciousness, however fitfully. Darkness is the sole comfort that remains. I’m sorry to heap more bad news on your already ample pile of pain, but soon there will be even more light in your life: Daylight Saving Time starts this weekend. Don’t forget to change your clocks.

Photo by James Cridland, from Flickr.