Normally, I’d start with a little snarky bit related to my title and theme. But I’m getting more and more pissed off at one of our local Team Blue candidates, who has deluged us with mailer after mailer about what an evil human his opponent is. Last weekend, I showed a couple examples where he implied that his opponent was a child molester (or at least a sympathizer). This week’s mailers were all subtly aimed at Brett Kavanaugh, despite an Illinois state representative having zero to do with that process. Yesterday’s arrival, though, completely took me over the edge, enough so that I’m now voting for a Team Red guy for perhaps the first time in my life. Fuck you, Sam Yingling, you managed to turn me from indifferent to actively hating you and your campaign. I have no idea if the Team Red guy has any merit, but at least he’s not spamming me every day with this shit. You are everything that is wrong with politics.
While I’m ranting, I note that it’s also a remarkably shitty day for notable birthdays. When Harry Brecheen (“The Armkiller”) and C. Everett Koop (“Look at my cool uniform, I’m an admiral!”) head the list of luminaries born on this day, one cannot help but think that October 14 is a day that could be removed from the calendar without anyone missing it much.
In the past 24 hours, reports have emerged that a government hit squad, said to have been dispatched directly by bin Salman, first in line to the Saudi throne, seized, interrogated, tortured, then killed and, using a bone saw, dismembered the body of a journalist. Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist, was one of the regime’s leading critics.
A central question now is just how far Trump may be prepared to go in defense of the kind of rabid values the Saudis now seem to have embraced. But even more important for American interests, at home and abroad, are the potential consequences.
Remember the press indignation when Trump’s predecessors cozied up to the Saudis? Yeah, me neither.
The Grand Forks Air Force Base recorded a whopping 17.4 inches overnight Wednesday into Thursday with snow drifts piling up to 33 inches high, according to the National Weather Service’s Grand Forks office.
“It’s kind of unbelievable that this happened in October,” Andrew Moore, an NWS-Grand Forks meteorologist, told the Grand Forks Herald.
Yeah, this is just weather and is entirely unrelated to AGW, but hey, if every hot day is blamed on it, every cold day ought to be as well.
The lawsuit, backed by the Trump administration, could eventually reach the Supreme Court, giving the newly cemented five-member conservative majority a chance to bar the use of affirmative action to help minority applicants get into college.
Of course, “minority” in this context doesn’t include yellow people or Jews. Yes, Harvard is a private institution and ought to be free to want to avoid looking too Chinese and to bake in the concept that blacks are inferior and should not be held to the same intellectual standards. My ideal outcome (which will never happen) is that Harvard would be free to continue to practice racial/gender/whatever discrimination, but would lose all public subsidies and tax breaks. But on the bright side, if this suit goes as expected, that sort of racism will be much harder for public institutions to practice.
The superintendent of Ridgewood public schools says local police are investigating “possible sexting incidents” involving school-age students within the district. According to a release sent to parents of children in grades 6-12, the explicit images were not shared on school property but school officials are working with Ridgewood police to find out who was involved.
“I want all parents to be advised that the possession and/or transmission of sexually revealing or explicit images, or any material of that nature, constitutes the very serious crime of possession and transmission of child pornography,” Superintendent Daniel Fishbein said in the letter.
The selfless public servants of the Ridgewood schools and police are, of course, examining the evidence very closely and at length.
“Who did this?! Someone placed googly eyes on our historic #NathanaelGreene statue in #JohnsonSquare,” the official City of Savannah Government account wrote on its Facebook page in a post Thursday.
“It may look funny but harming our historic monuments and public property is no laughing matter…”
Well, yeah, it is, actually.
Old Man Music is inevitable, so you may as well lay back and enjoy it. And all I can say is that this is a brilliant song, written and sung by a brilliant performer.
Apologies for my absence and things going to hell for a couple of days. SP was studying for her Iowa tests (they tell us that she is eligible for her school’s GATE program because she’s a bright child) and I’ve been occupied with a visitor from Europe, who has been alternately fascinated and appalled by our attitudes about government and politics. This isn’t an excuse, just an explanation. NO MORE THIRD RATE LINKS. Mine are second rate, thank you very much. SP set far too high of a standard for formatting, and I won’t pretend otherwise, but at least I’m not fobbing off links that are late or “hey, one link is enough for those people.”
Today is one of those days where there are too many amazing birthdays to list. But let me hit my favorites: the brilliant-but-personally-flawed libertarian philosopher Albert Jay Nock;Ray Brown, the greatest musician to ever play in the lower register; Margaret Thatcher, whose work in monolayer films lives on (I think she might have done one or two other things, but the Langmuir-Blodgett stuff was superb); Marie Osmond, whom my father directed me to teach oral sex; Jerry Rice, without question the greatest wide receiver in the history of football; and one more person to be discussed at the end.
“Governor Wolf, let me tell you what, between now and Nov. 6, you’d better put a catcher’s mask on your face because I’m going to stomp all over your face with golf spikes,” Wolf said in the video.
As American politics descends into complete chaos and has turned into professional wrestling, I am smiling and making the popcorn. Maybe one day, if we’re lucky, more people will get the attitude that these aren’t leaders, they’re the hired help.
“I repeatedly told the White House I wanted to reach an agreement on a package of 9th Circuit nominees, but last night the White House moved forward without consulting me, picking controversial candidates from its initial list and another individual with no judicial experience who had not previously been suggested,” [Dianne Feinstein, D-Leisure Village] said in a statement.
Similar outrage from California’s other senator:
“Instead of working with our office to identify consensus nominees for the 9th Circuit, the White House continues to try to pack the courts with partisan judges who will blindly support the president’s agenda, instead of acting as an independent check on this administration,” [Kamala Harris, D-Under Willie Brown] spokeswoman Lily Adams told The Sacramento Bee.
I like my popcorn with a spray of olive oil and some sea salt.
According to the letter released by [Chuck Grassley, R- Ethanol Pork], the State Department said that Clinton’s clearance was revoked on Aug. 30. Five of Clinton’s aides, who she had asked be designated as researchers, had their security clearances revoked on Sept. 20.
During Clinton’s run for president, lawmakers and investigators looked into her and her staff’s security clearance as part of the investigation into her use of a private email server.
I’m still astonished that she’s not in jail. I would have been if I did shit like that back in the days when I had a clearance. More astonishing, though, is that it took this long for such a de minimus action. It almost makes you think that government is really Team Red and Team Blue play-acting while they laugh their asses off at the dumb tax cattle citizens.
“Hey, guess what?” [Bill Cassidy, R-Corrupt Swampland] immediately replied after removing his earphones and turning to two young children sitting in a hallway inside the Hart Senate Office Building, near the Capitol. “I know your parents are using you as tools. In the future, if somebody makes an allegation against you, and there’s no proof for it, you’ll be OK.”
Delightful statement, but of course untrue as long as we have our current carceral state.
With under four weeks until Election Day, Hillary Clinton’s footprint on the 2018 scene has been remarkably light, with her involvement focused on fundraising behind closed doors rather than being seen by voters. She is slated to headline a pair of fundraisers in New York for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee on Monday, alongside House Minority Leader [Nancy Pelosi, D-Alcoholics Anonymous]. Additionally, Hillary Clinton is set to headline a fundraiser for [Bob Menendez, D-Dominican Fuck Farms], Monday evening.
Who has the over/under of February for the Death Pool?
Cops charge that Callijas-Gasperin battered his 41-year-old mother after asking her to make him some food around 8 PM Monday. The victim agreed to prepare a meal, but asked her son “to give her a few minutes due to being busy.”
“The defendant stated that he got mad, so he threw the remaining sausages at her.” Callijas-Gasperin contended that he had done nothing wrong, adding that he would not have tossed the sausages if his mother would have “said sorry.”
If you need an excuse for Florida Man AND Winston jokes, here it is.
And for the last birthday, it’s Old Guy Music Time, featuring the pianist who truly created modern jazz piano. Without Art Tatum, there would have been no Oscar Peterson or Horace Silver or McCoy Tyner or Chick Corea or… well, you get the idea.
After much drama, rending of clothes, high fiving, screaming, crying, cheering, and all around idiocy, we have a new Supreme Court justice, after successfully avoiding any actual rational discussion by our elected chimps of his statist jurisprudence and why he might not be a good choice on substantive grounds. Well done, Team Blue, you’ve managed once again to drown out useful debate with social signaling and culture wars. And while you’re at it, the two-three mailers a day like the above one that I’ve been getting from you for our local election have been effective in swaying me from, “Meh, don’t care, I’ll likely abstain,” to, “Fuck you guys, I’m voting for Idstein, whoever the hell he is, but he’s not filling my mailbox with mendacious garbage.”
Not that I’m annoyed. But I’m annoyed. The only thing that will make me feel slightly better will be watching Baker Mayfield being welcomed to the NFL today by that kind and gentle soul, Terrell Suggs. And a recitation of key birthdays: Niels Bohr, whose Copenhagen interpretation muddied the quantum waters for decades, Del Lord, who directed the greatest comic trio of all time (do not argue with me), slimeball Catharine MacKinnon, and scam artist and all-around Jew-hater Elijah Muhammed and his spirit animal Heinrich Himmler.
On to the actual news.
To demonstrate that there’s at least one agency in DC that has yet to be cleaned up, the FDA took action to ban seven food additives in response to money-grubbing litigation-focused “public interest” groups armed with the pernicious Delaney Amendment.
The decision comes in response to a petition brought by environmental and consumer groups, including the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Center for Food Safety, and the Center for Science in the Public Interest. “We think this is a win for consumers,” says Erik Olson of the Natural Resources Defense Council.
The FDA had concluded that these flavoring compounds do not pose a health risk to consumers. “The synthetic flavoring substances that are the subject of this petition are typically used in foods available in the U.S. marketplace in very small amounts and their use results in very low levels of exposures and low risk,” concludes an FDA statement on the petition. “While the FDA’s recent exposure assessment of these substances does not indicate that they pose a risk to public health under the conditions of their intended use, the petitioners provided evidence that these substances caused cancer in animals who were exposed to much higher doses,” the FDA statement says.
The three named groups are the food and environmental lawyer equivalent of the SPLC. After interacting with them professionally in the past, I came away with an even more cynical attitude, something I thought impossible. When “public interest” related to “science” is driven by lawyers, it’s safe to default to a Bullshit! mode.
Romania is one of several Eastern European nations that already ban both same-sex marriage and same-sex unions in civil law. Now it’s trying to ban it in the constitution. The government is spending millions holding a two-day referendum this weekend so voters can approve the change. “Do you know what a traditional family is? It’s a man and a woman who are able to bear children,” declared Liviu Dragnea, the leader of the ruling Social Democrats, after he cast his vote on Saturday. “I have voted for what millions of Romanians have been demanding, for what I think defines us as a society and as a nation.”
I love that it’s “social democrats” leading this charge. Sigh. Maybe one day, someone rational will successfully convince people that marriage should not be subject to the whims of the State. One day. Maybe.
Will Vinton died this week. As a fan of great animation, I am saddened by this; Vinton’s work was not only great in its own right, but it inspired the next generation of claymation art. For those of you who only know him through dancing raining commercials, here’s an example of the greatness of his serious work. And another. And another…
“This sham trial and shameful verdict is a message to every law enforcement officer in America that it’s not the perpetrator in front of you that you need to worry about, it’s the political operatives stabbing you in the back,” the FOP said. “What cop would still want to be proactive fighting crime after this disgusting charade, and are law abiding citizens ready to pay the price?”
If “the price” means “cops being accountable and going to jail when they commit crimes,” yep. And as several commenters have pointed out, the cop who murdered Tamir Rice is back at work, looking for the next kid to gun down. Police abuse is, of course, another issue that Team Blue has completely fucked up, making sure that we’re distracted by racial social signaling instead of the real issues of immunity, union protections, and far too many goddamn laws.
A Florida police officer was arrested late Friday after state officials say he used his patrol car to sell drugs near an assisted living facility. “At the time of purchase, White was selling the drugs out of his marked patrol vehicle, while in uniform and was using his personal cellphone to facilitate the drug deals,” FDLE said in a statement.
I’m trying to imagine the brass balls of someone who would buy dope from a uniformed cop.
In Old Guy Music, I was listening to Swiss talk sadly about the dwindling numbers in his local VFW post. On the other hand, maybe that’s a good sign that we’ve been going in the right direction- foreign wars haven’t gone away (thanks Bush and Obama!), but they’re a lot smaller now. We can only hope they converge on zero. And that reminded me strongly of this wonderful song from a wonderful songwriter.
Moving slowly this morning after breaking my hip last night, stumbling around in an alcoholic daze. This will clearly disqualify me from being on the Supreme Court. However, my fingertips still work, so here’s links and snark for breakfast. Since I’m using the hair of the dog recovery method (because we have prodigious amounts of hair from the Wonder Dog all over the house), this post may get progressively more incoherent.
The best birthdays today are Ernest Walton, the physicist who not only split the nucleus, but was the co-inventor of the Cockroft-Walton voltage multiplier (a circuit I have used in many of my electronics projects), and Bruno Sammartino, the greatest wrestler ever. Don’t argue with me, you’re wrong.
The transformation of Whole Foods from progressive touchstone to Evil Empire has been a continuous source of amusement. Jeff Bezos is apparently less amused.
“DxE members have repeatedly entered our stores and property to conduct demonstrations that disrupt customers and team members by blocking access to our aisles, departments and cash registers, interfering with our business and putting the safety of both customers and team members at risk,” a Whole Foods representative said in a statement.
“We have been kicked out, we have had the police called on us, we have been ignored, and now there is [the Whole Foods] lawsuit,” said King, who was among those arrested on Saturday. “But Whole Foods just continues to escalate this rather than give us the answers to really simple questions.”
I always wonder where people who spend their time with this shit in ultra-expensive elite areas (in this case, Berkeley, where $3000 a month will get you a studio apartment in a crumbling building) get the money to support themselves. And since this protest is all about chicken rights, I am obligated to link this.
“Don’t let anyone fool you: If he decides to run, you will see a national infrastructure come together,” said the hotel magnate George Tsunis, an Obama megadonor. “In the past when he’s run, there has been a formidable primary opponent … If he chooses to run in 2020, he would be the Obama-Clinton-like candidate. I think people would feel his time is now, and I think a lot of the country would feel that we need a Joe Biden as president.”
Hat and Hair would be replaced by Tooth Caps and Hair Plugs.
In Chicago, protesters were all set for a “Not Guilty” verdict in the Jason Van Dyke trial. Imagine their disappointment when the murdering cop was found guilty, guilty, guilty. Well, no use letting that spoil the party, eh?
Demonstrators began peacefully protesting in downtown Chicago’s Loop area shortly after the verdict, chanting “Justice for Laquan, justice for all” and “The whole damn system is guilty as hell.” The crowds marched in the streets holding signs in support of Black Lives Matter and Laquan McDonald.
Scroll down for the photo of the protesters shutting down the street. Notice something interesting? Yeah, I did too.
And the next story also tickled me. Much as I virulently hate this guy’s politics, there’s no denying that Banksy is the real thing, a truly great artist. And here’s another example of why.
The ‘Girl with Balloon’ painting slid out of its frame, simultaneously shredding the canvas just as the final hammer signaled an end to the evening, according to international auction house Sotheby’s. It had sold for $1.4 million, matching a record for the artist first set in 2008.
The artist posted an image of the scene from the auction house on his Instagram account with the caption “Going, going, gone…”
A campaign sign in Central Texas this week drew the scorn of an elected state official — and then it was confiscated by police. “I’m glad that I called out this offensive campaign sign and am pleased that hundreds of others did so as well,” [Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller] said. “It’s vulgar and just plain wrong and it had no place in someone’s yard visible from the street.”
A nice reminder that Team Red is just as happy to fuck with citizens’ rights as Team Blue.
The sign, posted overnight at the restaurant on Brooklyn Boulevard, featured the N-word and a derogatory term for a prostitute. Officers saw the sign at about 7 a.m. and took it down. The department says the sign is low enough to the ground that just about anyone can reach it.
Nazis preparing to storm the town, no doubt. It always starts with Arby’s.
Inevitably, Old Guy Music. And what better than having a Jew play Irish music? If you had been out with SP and me last night, you would have ended up at a cocktail emporium where this amazingly versatile (((guy))) held forth on pennywhistle, flute, guitar, mandolin, and violin, all with equal (and impressive) facility and skill. Irish music interspersed with Jethro Tull covers. I love America.
Brett is out getting some emergency dental work done, and his dentist has an accent and an odd attitude. I’ll be interested to hear how this turns out. And he’ll be interested to hear how the links turned out, since I’m doing them interstitially with my real work, so I might accidentally edit in something about Nyquist representations of electrochemical impedance.
The Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to a woman for the first time in 55 years. Donna Strickland, from Canada, is only the third woman winner of the award, along with Marie Curie, who won in 1903, and Maria Goeppert-Mayer, who was awarded the prize in 1963. Dr Strickland shares this year’s prize with Arthur Ashkin, from the US, and Gerard Mourou, from France.
Of course, there’s always sexism.
Reacting to her win, Dr Strickland, who is based at the University of Waterloo in Canada, said: “First of all you have to think it’s crazy, so that was my first thought. And you do always wonder if it’s real. “As far as sharing it with Gerard, of course he was my supervisor and mentor and he has taken CPA to great heights so he definitely deserves this award. And I’m so happy Art Ashkin also won.”
I hope you’re all asking why HE is HER mentor and not the other way around! And I thought it was important that females have female role models and that was why we had to do preferential hiring in academia?
“At the time, I was, like, innocent in it,” Irving said Monday. “But you realize the effect of the power of voice and even if you believe in that, it’s like, don’t come out and say that. That’s for intimate conversations because perception, how you’re received, it just changes. Like, no. I’m actually a smart-ass individual. So it’s not like I was just coming out and saying that. So at the time, I just didn’t realize the effect.”
“I’m sorry about all of that,” Irving said. “For all the science teachers, for everybody coming up to me like, ‘I have to re-teach my whole curriculum!’ I’m sorry. I apologize.”
I hope he really is sorry. After all, the foundations of science depend on the wisdom of basketball players.
The Version 6.0 global average lower tropospheric temperature (LT) anomaly for September, 2018 was +0.14 deg. C, down a little from +0.19 deg. C in August. The linear temperature trend of the global average lower tropospheric temperature anomalies from January 1979 through September 2018 remains at +0.13 C/decade.
“Maybe a black hole could form, and then suck in everything around it,” writes Rees. “The second scary possibility is that the quarks would reassemble themselves into compressed objects called strangelets. That in itself would be harmless. However under some hypotheses a strangelet could, by contagion, convert anything else it encounters into a new form of matter, transforming the entire earth in a hyperdense sphere about one hundred meters across.”
One hundred meters is roughly the size of an American football field. That’s the entire Earth, condensed into that tiny space. Obviously, it would mean the end of life on our planet.
So how would that affect the point spread? These scientists sure don’t know everything.
Website Space Weather states: “The sun is entering a deep Solar Minimum, and Earth’s upper atmosphere is responding. “Data from NASA’s TIMED satellite show that the thermosphere (the uppermost layer of air around our planet) is cooling and shrinking, literally decreasing the radius of the atmosphere.”
The sunspots was [sic] not expected to head into a solar minimum until around 2020, and if it is heading in early, it will mean a prolonged cold snap. The last time there was a prolonged solar minimum, it led to a ‘mini ice-age’, scientifically known as the Maunder minimum – which lasted for 70 years. The Maunder minimum, which saw seven decades of freezing weather, began in 1645 and lasted through to 1715, and happened when sunspots were exceedingly rare. During this period, temperatures dropped globally by 1.3 degrees Celsius leading to shorter seasons and ultimately food shortages.
At this point, I don’t know whether to shit or wind my wristwatch.
I have a better idea- some Old Guy Music. High on my list of “people who should have been more famous than they were” is Don Byas. I would argue that without Byas, there would have been no Trane. His choice to leave the US and spend his most productive years in Europe probably didn’t help. But still, he was a sax player’s sax player. Perfect tone, timing, and phrasing. Perfect. Here he is, wailing on that old Juan Tizol standard, “Perdido.” Because, after all, we’re all doomed.
I confess to Almighty Yahweh and to you, the Glibertariat, that I have sinned. My last confession was 50 years ago.
Since then, I have committed mortal sins. See, I am addicted to Food Wishes and Chef John’s videos. And this week, he did Detroit style pizza. Which is almost like deep dish but junkier. And… I gave in to temptation and made one. Oh, no, not with the canonical pepperoni, but still, with the thick crust, the heavily garlic-powdered sauce, the crusty cheese on the edges. And I added some thinly sliced heirloom tomatoes (last of the season) that had been salted, drained, and olive-oiled. I confess that SP and I ate it, and washed it down with some cheap New York wine. I further confess that we enjoyed it greatly. I further confess that we gave bits to the Wonder Dog, making that innocent creature an unwitting party to our grievous sin.
For this and all the sins that I have committed during my life, I am deeply sorry.
OK, with that out of the way, the usual birthdays and anniversaries. It is the birthday of Nevill Mott, whose work on amorphous semiconductors was key to my own past research, Hans Geiger (but he doesn’t really count), and the greatest Jewish drummer of all time, Buddy Rich. It is also the day when Alfred Bester took his last jaunt and Monty Hall chose Door Number 4.
We can’t just have the committee acting like this. The majority and minority parties and their staffs just don’t work well together. There’s no trust. In the investigation, they can’t issue subpoenas like they should. It’s just falling apart.
“Falling apart.” As a libertarian, I consider this a feature, not a bug. Where is Preston Brooks now that we need him?
“Guys, you’re going the wrong way, my car is here, come,” Lohan is heard yelling at the children who continued to follow their parents as she chases them down the street. “They’re trafficking children, I won’t leave until I take you, now I know who you are, don’t f— with me. You’re ruining Arabic culture by doing this. You’re taking these children they want to go,” she said before yelling at the boys, “I’m with you. Don’t worry, the whole world is seeing this right now, I will walk forever, I stay with you don’t worry.”
Then things got physical after Lohan tried to grab one of the kids and said “give me your hand,” but was then punched in the face by a woman who appears to be the child’s mother.
“And then this week, I watched 11 men who were too chicken to ask a woman a single question,” she added. “I watched as Brett Kavanaugh acted like he was entitled to that position and angry at anyone who would question him. I watched powerful men helping a powerful man make it to an even more powerful position.”
“I watched that and I thought time’s up. Time’s up,” she said. “It’s time for women to go to Washington and fix our broken government and that includes a woman at the top. So here’s what I promise, after November 6, I will take a hard look at running for president.”
I can’t even make a snarky comment here. This is… priceless.
Two groups of bettongs were placed in separate 26-square-kilometer fenced enclosures. Feral cats were then added to one enclosure but not the second. Cats killed two bettongs in the first enclosure—and the researchers found that their fellows’ behavior became generally warier over the course of a year. The control group’s did not. Subsequent generations of the test group are also avoiding cats, which indicates parents are passing the relevant behaviors along to their offspring.
Seven Palestinians were killed and hundreds more wounded during weekly “March of Return” protests along the Gaza border fence on Friday, which also saw more than 100 explosive devices hurled at IDF troops. The Palestinian news agency Wafa said another 508 were injured in the protests, including 90 from live bullets. Among the injured, 35 were children, four women, four paramedics and two journalists. According to the IDF, more than 20,000 protesters took part in the demonstrations, throwing explosive devices, grenades and stones at soldiers and burning tires. A number of attempts to cross the border also occurred.
Maybe we should get the Australian researchers involved here to teach these folks how to be a bit more concerned with their own survival?
Old Guy Music, though last night should have taught me to stay off YouTube. This is Chapter 7 in my upcoming book, What Dylan Would Have Been Like If He Were Much Better Than He Is. And very much reminiscent of what a folk song lyric would be if it had been written by SugarFree.
Poor SP. She comes back from her trip and finds that the furniture is broken, the dog has been shaved and painted with spots (“We thought she’d make a cute Dalmatian. OK, we were wrong, it happens.”), the 55 gallon drum of personal lubricant is empty, and the car has a shopping cart and a bum embedded in the front grille. Not that any of this was unexpected. After all, I hang out with Swiss and he’s a notoriously bad influence.
Almost the end of September. And what an auspicious date! It is the birthday of Suzzy Roche (who we met a few years ago after a great show and who patiently posed for selfies with me), Stephanie Miller (possibly the dumbest human being ever allowed to have a radio show), and Les Claypool (poster boy for major weed consumption, amazing bass playing, and all around fun).
Asked if Judge is also willing to cooperate with law enforcement officials to investigate Ford’s allegations, in addition to those made by Swetnick, [Judge’s lawyer] Van Gelder said he was. “Mr. Judge did not intend his comment to be limited in scope. If the FBI or any law enforcement agency requests Mr. Judge’s cooperation, he will answer any and all questions posed to him,” Van Gelder said in an email.
“Mr. Judge, are you familiar with the term ‘DP’? Which of you took the caboose?”
The House on Friday voted to permanently extend the individual rate cuts in the GOP’s $1.5 trillion tax-cut law as part of Republicans’ “Tax reform 2.0” effort, saying the cuts are needed to keep the economy humming in the future.
“By making the new code permanent for our families and small businesses, the [bill] will keep America’s economy booming and middle-class families growing again,” said Rep. Kevin Brady, the House’s top tax-writer.
The vote was 220-191, mostly along party lines, with only a few Democrats backing the bill and about 10 Republicans voting against it.
It’s just another giveaway to the millionaires and billionaires, amirite?
Police told St. Louis Post-Dispatch that 20-year-old Charles Wood Jr. pulled up to the drive thru at an angle around 10pm. They say he needed to open his car door and lean out to grab his order. That’s when the car accelerated backward and pinned him against a tree. Wood suffered severe injuries to his head, neck, torso and legs and was pronounced dead at the hospital.
I always said that fast food will kill you. This vindicates me.
Last month, deep in a 500-page environmental impact statement, the Trump administration made a startling assumption: On its current course, the planet will warm a disastrous seven degrees by the end of this century.
A rise of seven degrees Fahrenheit, or about four degrees Celsius, compared with preindustrial levels would be catastrophic, according to scientists. Many coral reefs would dissolve in increasingly acidic oceans. Parts of Manhattan and Miami would be underwater without costly coastal defenses. Extreme heat waves would routinely smother large parts of the globe.
But the administration did not offer this dire forecast, premised on the idea that the world will fail to cut its greenhouse gas emissions, as part of an argument to combat climate change. Just the opposite: The analysis assumes the planet’s fate is already sealed.
Wow! Unfortunately, the lede is, as usual, buried.
The draft statement, issued by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), was written to justify President Trump’s decision to freeze federal fuel-efficiency standards for cars and light trucks built after 2020. While the proposal would increase greenhouse gas emissions, the impact statement says, that policy would add just a very small drop to a very big, hot bucket.
OK, so: climate ‘experts’ at NHTSA. Draft statement. Career bureaucrats looking for more funding. But that’s the same thing as “The Trump administration.” I think some low level highway engineer is about to get reassigned to studying sled dog tracks in Nome, Alaska. And NYT, please, please, never change. (Note: satellite temp data still show consistently a 0.13 degree per decade rise- but what would actual climatologists know?)
Marty Balin – the co-founder and vocalist-guitarist of the psychedelic rock band Jefferson Airplane – has died aged 76, his family and publicist say. They did not specify the cause of death of the US musician.
Balin wrote some really memorable songs: Volunteers, Today, Plastic Fantastic Lover… One more bit of my youth disappears. Sigh.
Old Guy Music time. I was tempted to use some old Jefferson Airplane music, but instead got absorbed by birthday boy Les Claypool’s Pink Floyd covers. Especially this one.
It’s been an eventful past 12 hours. A server crash brought the site down and Sloopy managed to get himself into… let’s say “an adventure.” We’ll have the GoFundMe site for his bail up shortly, complete with sad-eyed pictures of his kids. And puppies. OK, he doesn’t own puppies, but it helps sell it. Anyway, I was called in at the last moment, so my snarky comments will be a bit truncated in the interests of getting this post up timely.
And a major THANK YOU to the Glibs’ all-female technology crew (SP and WebDom) who got us back up and running last night. At least one of you will be sexually harassed by me as a reward. Hint: WebDom is safe.
The big birthday today is the pride of Texas, candidate Beto O’Rourke. And an appropriate song for the occasion. Also, it’s the birthday of my third-favorite poet, T.S. Eliot, brilliant illustrator Winsor McCay, and OG George Raft.
I made a key mistake last night. I spent ten minutes watching CNN. Very key mistake. This story was all they wanted to talk about, but at least they featured guests on both sides of the issue: is Donald Trump literally Hitler? Or is Donald Trump just a laughingstock? I turned off the TV and found something more interesting to do: trim my toenails.
In sports, this season for the Vikings has been nuts. Literally.
I’m not quite sure what to make of this. I guess it’s just another consequence of our societal glee about putting as many people in cages as possible. But really, the policy is altruistic. Really.
“Offenders in Virginia have died of drug overdoses while inside our prisons. It’s our job to keep the offenders and staff as safe as we can,” Kinney said.
In comments to the Tribune, Araujo denied calling the prosecutor a “bitch” and said he “doubts” he’d ever made sexual advances toward her. “I just thought it was weird,” he told the paper. “I don’t know why she treats me like a stranger. I’ve been in this building five years and she always ignores me.”
On first read, I honestly thought this was an Onion story.
It’s not Christmas, but still. In one of the other cooking post comments, several of the Glibertariat complained that their stir-fries were just not… right. And most of the stir-fries I’ve gotten outside of heavily Chinese areas have been somewhere on the line segment between mediocre and really shitty. And that includes 95% of Chinese restaurants run and staffed by Chinese, but located in white, Hispanic, or black neighborhoods- they’re giving the people what they want (in the case of Jews, pork and shellfish- that was the code word for forbidden meats, “Chinese food”).
So sit back and I will attempt to make a Guide for the Perplexed. I clearly am not Chinese, or of Chinese origins, but I have decent cooking chops, traveled a lot over there, lived in Asian immigrant communities, and am not bashful about asking questions to chefs when I taste something really good, and that has reduced my level of ignorance. The word “Chinese” will be used a lot here, because that’s my personal epicenter for stir-fry cooking. But really, there’s a whole lot of other Asian cuisines that do these same sorts of things, so think Thai, Vietnamese, Laotian, or what-have-you, the principles are the same. Shit, you can even appropriate Chinese methods to prepare Italian-style food; that’s why America is great. Likewise, though I’m a vegetarian, what I’m talking about here is generic and applicable to the protein of your choice. If you prefer dead pig to seitan, you’re still making shitty stir-fries, and I’m still going to save your ass despite that offense to Yahweh.
We regularly fuck up stir-fries. Stir-frying is just a technique, widely applicable and flexible, and we still fuck them up. Here’s a partial list of the things that are most commonly wrong:
Too soggy. Everything in the dish is more like an Irish stew.
Singed ingredients that are raw in the middle.
Uneven cooking, so you get a combo of vegetables that are mushy and raw.
Gloppy. There’s a weird sauce-fetish that I think derives from old school American Chinese take-outs. The ingredients are drowned in a thick gooey brown or white sauce. And the sauces’ flavors tend to dominate the dish as well.
Sweet. And the worst offender is the sugar-fetish.
In order to help you avoid the common traps, I’ve got a couple of recipe-ish things here, but what I really want to harp on is some stupidly simple methods which come up again and again. While I’m at it, I’ll also beat you up about the shitty equipment you use. I hope that one or another of my random pieces of brain lint give you an easy fix so you’ll stop making shitty stir-fries.
Step One: Ingredients
The rule of thumb for good Chinese cooking is 60-30-10. 60% of your time should be seeking and obtaining good ingredients, 30% of your time doing preps, and 10% or less actually cooking.
By “good ingredients,” I don’t mean “exotic ingredients,” but rather quality stuff whose flavors and textures don’t need obscuring. The Chinese have been great about adapting their cuisine to local ingredients and freely appropriating. Yeah, it’s fun to use things like Szechuan pickled radish or fermented black beans, but that won’t make your shitty stir-fry less shitty. It will just be shitty but now exotically shitty. Here’s a crazy idea: buy great green beans or peppers or bean sprouts or mushrooms or chicken/beef/pork/seafood and don’t worry as much about the spices and condiments. Now you have a shot at a decent dish, even if you’re fresh out of huangdou jiang.
If you use canned bean sprouts or green beans or asparagus, I will personally come over and explain your porn history to your spouse and children.
The only real necessities peculiar to Chinese stir-fry cooking are soy sauce (have both dark and light on hand), toasted sesame oil, and Shaoxing cooking wine. Use a high smoke-point oil like peanut. All else is negotiable; I keep a variety of pastes, spices, and vinegars handy for specialty dishes, but my everyday stir fries do fine without ’em. Whatever you do, avoid the brand name generic “stir fry sauces.” Read the ingredients; most of them lead off with water and sugar. There will be other forms of sugar listed as well. And xantham gum for extra gloppiness. That stuff is a sure path to shittiness. Unless you like shitty, in which case, go get some deep dish with pineapple and spare the rest of us.
MSG frankly is rather common and not the devil that excess sugar is. Use it wisely and sparingly, but don’t reflexively avoid it.
Step Two: Tools
Since prep should be an outsize part of your time investment, it goes without saying that you need really good sharp knives to make the work go smoothly and quickly. I have a rather, um, eclectic collection. My default knife for stir-fry prep is a cheap Chinese cleaver. It says “stainless” on it and it isn’t. Which is OK, it takes a nice edge, but needs honing every ten minutes or so. Which is also OK because I bought it about 40 years ago for $8 at a Chinese grocery, given it a lot of hard use over the decades, and it’s still doin’ its thing. So while a $300 Shun is a delightful thing, it’s not really a necessity- I didn’t see many of them used in great kitchens in China.
My second-most used knife for stir-fry prep is also a cheapie, this one a 10″ Victorinox. It feels good in the hand, sharpens easily, and has held up well since we got it a few years back. Costs less than a couple of movie tickets and popcorn.
Victorinox Fibrox Pro Chef’s Knife, 8-Inch Chef’s FFP (I use a 10″ because of large hands)
Third most used knife is also a Victorinox, a 3.25″ paring knife, and cheaper than a slice of pizza and a Coke. Great for fine trimming (like the stems of tomatoes or the eyes of pineapple). I think these knives are Swiss, despite the lack of noticeable holes.
Victorinox 3.25 Inch Paring Knife with Straight Edge, Spear Point, Black
And obviously, you want your knives sharp. There’s folks among the Glibertariat who are masters of getting the finest possible edge. I am not one of them, so I cheat and use one of these, a Chef’s Choice Asian sharpener. It gives a good enough edge that I have no problem getting paper-thin slices of garlic or cutting through the skins of over-ripe tomatoes, and it’s so fast and easy, I can sharpen mid-prep without losing much time.
OK, next we bring the heat. Do you have a trendy wok, nicely ceramic non-stick coated and heavy stainless-aluminum clad construction? Toss the fucker, it’s a piece of shit. Ditto the abomination of cast iron woks. Donate them to a homeless turtle shelter or something, they’ll do more good there than on your stove. Know what you need? Something cheap, thin, and unlaminated steel. The kind of piece of shit you get for $20 at the Chinese grocery. Unlike nonstick, you can get these smokin’ hot. Unlike laminated or cast iron, you can get them smokin’ hot very rapidly. And when you turn down the heat, they cool very rapidly, so all in all, the shitty steel woks give you much better temperature control.
Shape is important. Round bottoms are the best BUT you have to have the right kind of cooking surface for that- I have a wok stand from Thailand which is superb, putting out approximately the same amount of heat as the engine from a Saturn V booster stage. I can get the wok to literally red heat in 20 seconds. It is absolutely the best stir-fry cooking I’ve ever done, with the food taking on a subtly smoky “wok hei” aroma and the food cooking in record time. THIS is the right way to do things. I shit you not, wok hei is the difference between indifference and real difference.
Unfortunately, there’s a catch- you either need a professional ventilator hood or you have to cook outside. And our outside cooking has been limited recently because of a heavy mosquito season. After our first frost, I’ll be able to do this again.
Lacking a wok stand like that, don’t even THINK about using a round-bottom pan on a flat cooktop, even with a wok ring, unless you have something like a 100,000 BTU burner. With normal stoves, you will have really shitty heat and that means really shitty, soggy, badly-cooked stir-fries without even a trace of wok hei. Find a thin steel shitty wok with a flat bottom. Not optimum, but you can at least turn out some half-decent product. Here’s mine:
Whichever you use, you want it well-seasoned and to maintain that seasoning. It’s the best non-stick surface you can get. I’ve got about 20 years of season on this wok, and as you’ll see below, I can fry difficult foods like eggs with no sticking.
You also need another utensil for the process- a steel spatula or wok turner. I don’t have one, so I get by with a big steel spoon (seen in the videos below). It works, but I’m a shitty person for not getting the right tool. Don’t be like me. Don’t be a shitty person. Get the right tool.
Techniques:
Did I mention heat? You want the ability to get that wok screaming hot, and the courage and attention to use it properly, which means not getting distracted and letting food burn, and most importantly… mis en place. You want EVERY ingredient to be prepped, chopped, measured, and handy. If you don’t make at least ten dirty little bowls and dishes for you ingredients, you’re doing it wrong and that’s why your stir fries suck. God invented dishwashers and orphans- make use of them.
Second, precooking. Most stir-fries use ingredients from their raw state, added sequentially. And that’s another reason most stir-fries are shitty. To get the best and most even degree of doneness with disparate ingredients, you need to precook (slightly undercooking) each of the major ingredients in advance, then bringing them together at the end. Typically, the protein will be cooked first, removed, then set aside. Various additives can be either parboiled and refreshed (i.e., dunked into an ice bath after boiling) or stir fried separately to get each one to the optimum cooking point. Then the actual building of the stir-fry commences by cooking aromatics (garlic, ginger, scallions, and the like), then adding the cooked ingredients and seasonings/sauces to reheat and finish.
I can’t overemphasize the latter point: stir-fry should be done in discrete stages which are brought together at the end. For years, my stir-fries were shitty because of misguided ideas about trying to time the sequence so that the ingredients were added on top of one another in the right order and would magically cook properly. This is an especially bad idea because not only does the timing become terribly critical and can’t be adjusted on the fly to accommodate variations in ingredients, but you also lose control of the cooking temperature- the first ingredients put in the wok will insure that later ingredients cook at a lower temp and with higher surrounding moisture. That is not generally a good thing.
The other advantage of the cook-shit-separately is that distinctive flavors and textures will remain distinct and not all blend together in a mish-mash. This is why German or British cooking is shitty and Chinese cooking is great. And why you need to spend time getting great ingredients.
Two Examples:
These are sort-of-recipes, but each illustrates points made before. Neither is “authentic,” but they each use mostly non-exotic ingredients and (when cooked right) show off the quality of the main ingredients. And each is linked to a video showing most of the process; the videos are pretty shitty because we didn’t have time to block out the shots or to do editing/voice-over, but future ones will be better.
Because of the aforementioned mosquitoes, I had to use my kitchen stove and the flat-bottom wok, so the heat was somewhat inadequate. But still, they turned out delicious.
Stir Fry Green Beans
This is loosely based on a classic Szechuan dish and is an example of a dry stir-fry. The Szechuan version uses pickled radish and Szechuan peppercorns, so feel free to exotify it if that’s your desire. Traditionally, the precooking is done by deep-frying in coolish (300 degree F) oil instead of the water-blanching that I do, and yard-long beans are used. Again, feel free- the important thing is to have the beans pre-cooked before the stir-frying commences.
1 lb fresh green beans, ends trimmed
1/4 cup raw peanuts
2-3 cloves garlic, sliced thin
5 or 6 dried red chiles
2-3 white parts of scallions, chopped
1 tsp Korean red pepper paste (gochujang); can substitute garlic-red-chile paste or chile-black-bean paste
1 tsp light (not lite!) soy sauce
oil to cook
Drop green beans into a pot of rapidly boiling salted water. Boil for 3-4 minutes or until the beans are about half-done. A few beans may need to be sacrificed to determine this; cook’s privilege. Drain and toss into an ice water bath, then after they cool completely, remove from the bath and drain. Set aside.
Mix the pepper paste and soy sauce together. Set aside.
Heat the wok until it’s smoking, then add in one or two tablespoons of oil. Toss in the sliced garlic and toss it around until it gets aromatic and starts coloring a little bit, 15 seconds or so. Remove the garlic from the wok. Add the dried chiles and stir around until they start to brown, then remove and set aside. Add the peanuts, and stir around until they start to color, 15 seconds or so. Remove the peanuts and set aside. Optionally, you can lightly crush or chop them after cooking for a finer texture.
Seeing a pattern?
Now it’s time to bring everything together. Add the chopped scallions, stir for a few seconds, then add the green beans. Stir-fry until the green beans are starting to show some black spots, a minute or two. Add the pepper paste/soy sauce mixture and a little extra soy sauce if you think it’s needed. Stir for a few seconds, then add the sliced garlic, the dried chiles, and the peanuts. Stir to combine, then remove to a serving bowl and eat up.
This is a standard Cantonese dish, seen in every university cafeteria in the province, and a home-cooking favorite. It’s stupid-simple and delicious. As with many standard dishes, every family makes it a little differently and will swear everyone else is doing it wrong. By contrast with the last dish, this one is very saucy, but the sauce comes mostly from the water in the tomatoes and is amazingly flavorful.
5 eggs, beaten
4 scallions, white and green parts separated and chopped
5 medium or 6 small tomatoes, cut into wedges
2 tbs ketchup
2 tbs soy sauce
1 tsp sugar (omit if your tomatoes are really good)
1 tbs shaoxing cooking wine
1/2 tsp toasted sesame oil
1/2 tsp white pepper (or more to taste)
1 tbs minced ginger
1 small onion or large shallot, slivered
1 tsp cornstarch dissolved in 2 tbs water
oil to cook
Mix together the ketchup, soy sauce, sugar, shaoxing, sesame oil, and white pepper, set aside. Heat the wok until it’s smoking, then add a couple tablespoons of oil and swirl around. Pour in the eggs. Let them fluff up a bit, then stir them around for a minute or so until done- they should be set but not browned. I like my eggs a bit loose, SP prefers them somewhere in the middle of the Mohs scale. Your choice. Scoop them out of the wok, chop them a bit with your spatula or spoon, and set aside. Wipe out any leftover egg.
Put a bit more oil in the wok. Add in the ginger and stir it for a few seconds. Lower the heat a bit, then add the whites of the scallion and the onion. Stir for a minute until they are fragrant and softened slightly, then bring the heat back up and toss in the tomatoes. Stir-fry for a minute or so until the tomatoes are heated through, then push them to the side of the wok. Add in the ketchup mixture and bring that up to a boil. Then stir everything together, stir in about half of the green parts of the scallions, and add the eggs. Stir, then add in about half of the cornstarch slurry (make sure the slurry is stirred before you pour it in) and cook until the sauce thickens. If you want it thicker, add more cornstarch.
Turn out into a serving bowl and sprinkle with the remaining chopped green parts of the scallions. Serve over rice.
Football Sunday is usually a boisterous day around these parts. SP is an animated and knowledgeable fan who won’t hesitate to scream at the announcers, the refs, and the fluffball sideline “reporters.” With her preferred hate-targets Jeff Triplett and Ed Hochuli gone, her ire now focuses more strongly on Joe Buck and Beth Mowins. “Please make her shut up. Oh my god, she’s awful. Why the fuck do they let this woman talk? Jesus christ, Joe, you’re a dummy! Who did you blackmail to get this job?” It livens up the games quite a bit. With her out of town, the only verbal excitement comes from the Wonder Dog, who barks constantly to protect us from anyone who might potentially urinate in our yard. And so far, it’s worked- none of the neighbors have dared burrow under the fence and let fly on one of our trees.
Today has two auspicious birthdays, one of them being the delightfully-named Hippolyte Fizeau, whose name has been tragically excised from the Doppler Effect. Maybe it’s because he was accused of groping a French teenager at a wine party? The other will be mentioned below.
And now the news, which unfortunately is totally dominated by the election Silly Season.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., said that “as soon as Democrats get gavels”, the party will investigate the Kavanaugh allegations even if he is confirmed and sitting on the Supreme Court.“This is such bad practice that even if they were to ram this guy through, as soon as Democrats get gavels we’re going to want to get to the bottom of this,” he said on CNN.
“If the Republicans rush through a nominee where you have unanswered sexual assault allegations, I can promise you that Democratic senators will be interested in going and looking at those allegations, and if Judge Kavanaugh lied under oath, you could see a judicial impeachment, and that’s not good for anybody, so we should try and avoid that,” Eric Swalwell, D-Calif, said on “America’s Newsroom.”
What the saddest part to me is that any real objections to Kavanaugh (like his apparent disdain for the fourth and fifth amendments) have been totally ignored in this shitshow. It’s the equivalent of the Black Lives Matter bullshit appropriating the real problem of police abuse.
But after high school, and after the alleged assault, Ford left the Washington area and never moved back. She took up surfing. She dressed in jeans when she wasn’t in a wet suit atop a surfboard. Colleagues mistook her for a native Californian. Quietly, she garnered a reputation for her research on depression, anxiety and resilience after trauma — telling almost no one what she herself had endured.
Years later, Ford would describe college as a time when she “derailed,” struggling with symptoms of trauma she did not yet understand.
It was during Ford’s junior year when Goldstein, who now works as an English teacher in Japan, gave her the advice that would change the course of her life. “He said, ‘You’re really smart, and you’re just like totally [messed] up,’ ” Ford recalled. She remembers him saying, “ ‘What are you doing? . . . Everybody’s getting it together but you’re like not.’ It was kind of a harsh talk.”
In other words, the PR machine says that she’s a mentally unbalanced snowflake. Therefore she must be unquestioningly believed.
Ellison, who serves as deputy chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), decried Monahan’s story as “not true” and assured that an “ongoing investigation” will conclude that Monahan’s claims are false. He dismissed the medical record, saying it was written a year after his relationship with Monahan ended.
When pressed whether the investigation will be done before the election, Ellison said it’s an independent investigation and he remains uncertain about the timetable.
So if a medical record is written a year after an alleged incident, it’s no good. But if it’s twenty years after, it’s utterly reliable. Got it.
Six siblings of U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar have urged voters to cast their ballots against the Arizona Republican in November in an unusual political ad sponsored by the rival candidate. The television ad from Democrat David Brill combines video interviews with Gosar-family siblings who ask voters to usher Paul Gosar out of office because he has broken with the family’s values. They do not elaborate.
“It’s intervention time,” Tim Gosar says in the ad, endorsing Brill. “And intervention time means that you go to vote, and you go to vote Paul out.”
“My siblings who chose to film ads against me are all liberal Democrats who hate President Trump,” [Paul] Gosar said. “Stalin would be proud.”
OK, I’ll admit that there are some entertaining aspects to this election.
OK, as you might have expected, today’s other birthday of note intersects with Old Guy Music. And even the title intersects this weekend. It’s intersections all the way down. Happy Birthday, Mr. C. Your art left this world a more beautiful place.
