I did not win anything, though Sharon won a category, but everything that I made came out well, though the dessert missed the time cutoff.
Recipes & documentation tomorrow.
I am exhausted.
Posted via mobile.
Category: History
Doing the Cranky Baker Bit Again
Doing pre-cook for the SCA cooking competition Trial By Fire, so once again, I am dealing with the vicissitudes of stiff and uncooperative dough.
This time, I am doing both white and wheat, and I’m cranky and tired.
The rules of the competition are that cooking must be done at the competition, but long prep, like a 12 hour proof, or 4 days of marinating gravlax, or of curdling and draining Neufchâtel/cream cheese can be done ahead of time.
That being said, my French pralines (c. 1636) will be done entirely at the event.
The pralines came from the fact that I had much liquid left over from the cheese making, or, as the saying goes, where there is a will, there is a whey.
The Very Modern Model Of a Modern Moron Pundit Class
Donna Brazile, last seen mismanaging Al Gore’s Presidential campaign in 2000, is now praising George W. Bush’s response to Hurricane Katrina.
Seriously?
Un-dirtyword-believable.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?
Once again, I find myself agreeing with Donald Trump:
Even as his campaign has shown remarkable staying power, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is dogged by the perception that there isn’t much to him beneath the bluster and the glitz. But he may have inadvertently steered the race into important territory, at least when it comes to Wall Street and taxes.
In interviews over the last several days, Trump made blistering comments about inhabitants of a corner of the financial industry who have grown accustomed to criticism. “I know a lot of bad people in this country that are making a hell of a lot of money and not paying taxes,” Trump said in an interview with Time, in apparent reference to hedge fund and private equity fund managers. “The tax law is totally screwed up.”
“They’re paying nothing and it’s ridiculous,” he added on CBS a few days later. “The hedge fund guys didn’t build this country. These are guys that shift paper around and they get lucky.” He went on: “They’re energetic, they’re very smart. But a lot of them, it’s like they’re paper pushers. They make a fortune, they pay no tax…The hedge funds guys are getting away with murder.”
“The hedge fund guys didn’t build this country. These are guys that shift paper around and they get lucky.”
Donald Trump is in agreement with me, and with Bernie Sanders, and Barack Obama that the carried interest loophole is bullsh%$, and it needs to be repealed immediately.
Let me be clear about this, Donald Trump is a bigoted nativist, or at least he does a remarkable job of playing on on TV, but a lot of Trumps positions, whether about welfare for hedge funds, social security, or healthcare (see my earlier previous post) he is literally the best Republican in the race right now.
As I’ve said before, Trump is not a political outlier. This is the Dixicrat politics of Strom Thurmond, George Wallace, and Theodore Bilbo.
An Interesting Point About Donald Trump………
Ian Welsh notes that “The Donald” has many policies that place him at the left of the Republican field:
Let’s state the obvious about Trump.
No, not that he’s a joke, or a sign of fascism, or any of that.
Rather that a lot of what he says makes sense. His policies aren’t as crazy as people make out, and people who support him aren’t as stupid as the media pretends.
- He doesn’t want to cut Social Security. Jeb Bush does. Obama has talked this up.
- He wants full universal healthcare. Yeah, he badmouths Obamacare, but he’s badmouthing it from a position of, “Give them the real thing.”
- His idea of returning manufacturing to the US and doing bilateral trade deals is not insane, or crazy, except to neo-liberal apologists and people too stupid to realize they’ve imbibed the economic philosophy of neo-liberalism, whose results have been the stagnation and then absolute decline of ordinary American wages. This is how capitalism worked for about half of capitalism’s history. Disagree if you like, but it’s not crazy.
- His idea of simplifying the tax code enough so that ordinary people don’t need professionals to fill out their tax forms is a good one. Jimmy Carter, by the way, wanted to do the same thing.
I’m not a fan of Trump, there are plenty of reasons why he’s problematic, but he’s actually an economic populist on many issues. People shouldn’t overlook that this comes married to some nasty nativism, but I’m tired of people who are lumping all parts of the Trump campaign together.
It’s an interesting point, and it actually places Trump in what has been a common meme in American politics, the racist populists, also known as the “Dixicrat.”
There has been a long tradition of politics who promise benefits for their communities while promising to keep them from perceived outsiders. (No Irish need apply is an example)
So, Donald Trump reduces to Strom Thurmund with a flamboyant hair.
Au Revoir, Mr. Stewart
I just saw his final show as host as The Daily Show.
I think that it did a decent job of balancing between acknowledging the history, and memories, and not being a downer.
Spoiler: Springsteen played at the end.
It is the end of an era.
I’m sure that I’ll get used to Trevor Noah in a few months.
Way Too Much Free Time………
On Google using the Lynx text mode browser
Some guy took his early 1980s vintage TRS-80 Model 100 and set it up to surf the net:
The true test of a man’s patience is crimping pins onto the end of a cable that leads to building a custom serial cable—especially if it’s the first time you’ve even handled a serial cable in a decade. So as I searched under my desk, using my phone for a flashlight, I wondered whether I had finally found the IT project that would send me over the edge. On a recent day, I set out to turn my recently acquired vintage Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100 computer into a working Internet terminal. And at this moment, I crawled on the floor looking for a DB-25 connector’s little gold pin that I had dropped for the sixth—or maybe sixteenth—time.
Thankfully, I underestimated my patience/techno-masochism/insanity. Only a week later, I successfully logged in to Ars’ editorial IRC channel from the Model 100. And seeing as this machine first saw the market in 1983, it took a substantial amount of help: a Raspberry Pi, a little bit of BASIC code, and a hidden file from the website of a certain Eric S. Raymond.
I respect how the author has gotten his geek on.
It means that he is doing his bit to prevent overpopulation, because with that under his arm, he is so never going to get his porcupine whacked.
Yes, Racism Is Rooted in Economic Inequality
This is the title of a a thought provoking article in Jacobin that needs to be read in its entirety.
A snippet to present their basic thesis:
Here’s my question to the angry commenters: if racial inequality isn’t merely a symptom of economic inequality, what is it a symptom of?
I already feel like I can hear the answer: it’s a symptom of hundreds of years of slavery, colonialism, Jim Crow, and urban apartheid.
Yes. But what were slavery, colonialism, Jim Crow, and urban apartheid if not extreme forms of economic inequality?
What was the point of England’s colonization of Ireland if not to impose a lucrative “economic inequality” on its victims? Was the urban apartheid of Haussmann’s Paris not the “symptom” of nineteenth-century economic inequality?
It provides a very good historical perspective (as one would expect with the author invoking Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s rebuilding of Paris under Napoleon III) on how bigotry is very much the product of exploitative economics.
It should be noted that Jacobin is an explicitly Socialist publication, and socialism has a long history of viewing pretty much everything in society through the prism of economics,* so this focus is unsurprising.
Still, it is a good read, and very thought provoking.
*In fact, I would argue that the lasting contribution of Marx to the study of society was his focus on the economic. Certainly, the degree to which all aspects of society, whether they be government, judicial, or social are viewed largely through the lens of economics has expanded enormously since Marx published Das Kapital almost 150 years ago.
This Is so F%$#Ing Cool………
For the past week or so, there have been rumors that divers in Sweden finding a sunken Russian sub, possibly related to the contretemps late last year when the Swedes were hunting what they thought was some sort of Russian submersible.
The story of the discovery is way cooler than that:
Sweden said on Tuesday the wreck of a submarine found off its coast appeared to be a Czarist-era Russian vessel that collided with a Swedish ship about a century ago.
“We are most likely talking about the Russian submarine the Som (Catfish) which sank after a collision with a Swedish vessel in 1916 during World War I and before the Russian revolution,” the Swedish Armed Forces said.
Speculation had been swirling about the origins of the vessel after Swedish divers announced Monday that a submarine had been found about 1.5 nautical miles off the coast of central Sweden.
The announcement came nine months after a high-profile hunt for a mystery submarine in Swedish waters, suspected to be Russian, and some speculated that the divers had chanced upon a modern Russian vessel.
The Swedish military however quashed rumors and said the vessel was old, referring to the design of the submarine and the lettering on the outer shell seen in the pictures of the wreck taken by the divers.
The military added it did not think a full technical analysis was necessary.
………
Stefan Hogeborn, a diver with the Ocean X Team that made the discovery, said the mini-sub was “completely intact” with “no visible damage to the hull” and the hatches were closed.
“It is unclear how old the submarine is and how long it has been laying at the sea floor, but the Cyrillic letters on the hull indicate that it is Russian,” he said in a statement on Monday.
Ocean X Team said the vessel was around 20 meters (66 feet) long and 3.5 meters wide (11.5 feet), adding it was planning a new expedition to study the wreck more closely.
Right now, I so want to fly to Sweden and go SCUBA diving in the Baltic.
You have a submarine, history, and the marvelous preservative properties of the Baltic.
This is like the biggest military history-gasm this decade.
I am seriously getting my geek on here.
Today’s Must Read
Joschka Fischer, the former Foreign Minister for Germany has an OP/ED titled, “The Return of the Ugly German,” and it has to be read.
I will give you 2 paragraphs, and tell you to go read:
Germany has been the big winner of European unification, both economically and politically. Just compare Germany’s history in the first and second halves of the twentieth century. Bismarck’s unification of Germany in the nineteenth century occurred at the high-water mark of European nationalism. Militarism became intimately associated with German power. Indeed, Germany’s public philosophy, unlike that of France, Great Britain, or the United States, never incorporated a civilizing ideal to justify the use of military power.
The foundation of the second, unified German nation-state in 1989 was based on Germany’s irrevocable Western orientation and Europeanization. And the Europeanization of Germany’s politics filled – and still fills – the civilization gap embodied in German statehood. To allow this pillar to erode – or, worse, to tear it down – is a folly of the highest order. That is why, in the EU that emerged on the morning of July 13, Germany and Europe both stand to lose.
H/t Naked Capitalism.
Not a Surprise, Given the History
In sdome rather unsurprising news, Crimean Jews are feeling safer now that the Russians are in charge.
Given the history of the Ukrainian antisemitism, and even by the standards of the worst times of the Czarist regime it was extreme, this should come as no surprise:
There were times when the Jewish population of the Crimean peninsula exceeded 65,000. Now it”s around 10,000 out of 2 million, but it suddenly looks like this number has a chance to increase dramatically.
The tumultuous events around Crimea slipping out of Ukraine’s control divided the Ukrainian Jewish community. From the very first days, Crimean Jews threw their lot with Russia. “In Crimea, some Jews feel safer after Russian intervention,” reported Jewish Telegraphic Agency on March 4, 2014, less then a week after Russian ‘little green men’ put Russian flag in Sevastopol. “While many Ukrainian Jews have strongly condemned the Russian military incursion into Crimea,” JTA continued, “others see the intervention as restoring order in the wake of violent revolution that overthrew the pro-Russian government of President Viktor Yanukovych.”
Since then, Crimean Jews en masse exchanged their Ukrainian passports for Russian ones, and to the chagrin of their co-religionists elsewhere in Ukraine, asked the West and to put an end to the ‘unjust’ sanctions imposed on Russia over Crimea.
International Business Times reported in the beginning of July that Russian president Vladimir Putin was urged to allow as many as 40,000 Jewish people who left Crimea during the reign of the Soviet Union to return to the now Russian-held peninsula and to ease the complex procedures that come with being repatriated to Russia in hopes of revitalizing Crimea. This initiative was led by Leonid Grach, the chairman of the regional public organization “Crimean Forum For the Defense of the Constitutional Rights of the Citizens.”
While there is clearly a propaganda aspect to all of this, it appears that Moscow is doing its best to shout this from the heavens, but the feelings here amongst the Crimean Jewish community are almost certainly genuine.
The history in the Ukraine is really that bad.
The Turks Insist That There Was No Armenian Genocide
I wonder how they explain a Turkish official taunting starving Armenian children with a piece of bread in 1915.
I do not understand why Turkey continues insist that there was no Armenian Genocide, or why some Turks maintain insist that there was a genocide of Turks by the Armenians, but the only thing that they get from this behavior is a loss of credibility.
It’s enough to make every decent human being quote Joseph Welch.*
*Joseph Welch is best known for an exchange with Senator Joseph McCarthy in which he said, “You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”
Good News Everyone!
Bloom County is returning to the funny papers, and I am stoked:
After 25 years, Berkeley Breathed is returning to his Pulitzer Prize-winning comic strip, “Bloom County.” Breathed announced the new incarnation of the politically-minded strip via a post on Facebook that featured him working on a new comic with the words “Bloom County 2015” at the top.
“Bloom County” originally ran from December 1980 until 1989, just two years after he won the Pulitzer. The characters, such as Bill the Cat, Opus the Penguin, Hodge-Podge the Rabbit, Milo Bloom, and Cutter John, lived on in the Sunday-only strip “Outland” from 1989 to 1995, as well as “Opus” from 2003 to 2008. When “Opus'” run ended, Breathed said he was stepping away from strips entirely and began focusing on writing children’s books. At the time, he said the political climate in the country had grown too bitter for him to continue taking a light tone on things, and he wanted to get out before things got too tough.
However, with the 2016 presidential campaign season heating up, it seems that Breathed has found something funny to talk about again:
I will miss Jon Stewart during the 2016 campaign, but Bloom County coming back takes the sting out, at least a bit.
What Wonkette Said
Let’s Dig Up The Rotting Bones Of Confederate Traitor (And KKK Founder) Nathan Bedford Forrest!
Confederate Major General Nathan Bedford Forrest, by most accounts except the white supremacist ones, was quite the murderous, racist shithead. He was a wealthy slave trader, and he presided over one of the bloodiest massacres of the Civil War at Fort Pillow, where hundreds of black and white Union soldiers, and also black civilians, were murdered in cold blood after they had surrendered. The historian Richard Fuchs wrote that “The affair at Fort Pillow was simply an orgy of death, a mass lynching to satisfy the basest of conduct — intentional murder — for the vilest of reasons — racism and personal enmity.” Oh, and he was also the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, so HE SEEMS NICE.
And in Memphis, the city which adopted Forrest so long ago as its own, there’s a big-ass statue of him in Health Sciences Park, in a racially diverse neighborhood that includes a world class medical center, dire poverty, gentrifying liberals, Victorian mansions, yummy restaurants, and the occasional murder problem. Buried underneath that statue are the rotting bigot bones of Forrest and his wife. And there’s a push to move the statue and dig up the bones, but, though that push is PART of the aftermath of the Charleston murders which left nine dead and millions of Confederate flags tossed aside in shame, this fight’s been going on a lot longer.
If there was a Confederate who deserved to end his days at the end of a rope with his remains fed to the dogs, it was Forrest.
Take down that f%$#ing statue, and put his remains in the town dump.
Finally!
Following a very long debate, and an empassioned argument in favor of removing the Confederate flag by (among others) a descendent of Jefferson Davis, the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia is leaving the statehouse grounds in South Carolina:
South Carolina’s governor signed a bill Thursday that will send the Confederate flag to the state’s “relic room.” The decision was made more than 50 years after the rebel banner began flying at the statehouse in Columbia to protest the civil rights movement.
Governor Nikki Haley praised lawmakers for realizing that the long-celebrated symbol is too painful to keep promoting.
“The Confederate flag is coming off the grounds of the South Carolina Statehouse,” Haley said. “We will bring it down with dignity, and we will make sure it is stored in its rightful place.”
State lawmakers were prompted to remove the flag by the recent killing of nine African Americans at a church Bible study in Charleston.
South Carolina’s leaders first flew the battle flag over the statehouse dome in 1961 to mark the 100th anniversary of the Civil War. It remained there to represent official opposition to the civil rights movement.
………
Rep. Jenny Horne, a white Republican who said she is a descendent of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, scolded her party members for stalling.
“I cannot believe that we do not have the heart in this body to do something meaningful such as take a symbol of hate off these grounds on Friday,” she shouted. “For the widow of Senator Pinckney and his two young daughters, that would be adding insult to injury and I will not be a part of it!”
The pity of all this is that it took a racist maniac to kill 9 people at a prayer meeting to make this happen.
Yes, It Is Hypocrisy on a Historical Scale
Thomas Piketty, economist and author of last year’s must read book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, a treatise on the economic forces leading to inequality gave an interview in the newsweekly Die Zeit, in which he (correctly) observes that Germany has a greater history of shirking on its debt than any other nation on the face of the earth:
DIE ZEIT: Should we Germans be happy that even the French government is aligned with the German dogma of austerity?
Thomas Piketty: Absolutely not. This is neither a reason for France, nor Germany, and especially not for Europe, to be happy. I am much more afraid that the conservatives, especially in Germany, are about to destroy Europe and the European idea, all because of their shocking ignorance of history.
ZEIT: But we Germans have already reckoned with our own history.
Piketty: But not when it comes to repaying debts! Germany’s past, in this respect, should be of great significance to today’s Germans. Look at the history of national debt: Great Britain, Germany, and France were all once in the situation of today’s Greece, and in fact had been far more indebted. The first lesson that we can take from the history of government debt is that we are not facing a brand new problem. There have been many ways to repay debts, and not just one, which is what Berlin and Paris would have the Greeks believe.
ZEIT: But shouldn’t they repay their debts?
Piketty: My book recounts the history of income and wealth, including that of nations. What struck me while I was writing is that Germany is really the single best example of a country that, throughout its history, has never repaid its external debt. Neither after the First nor the Second World War. However, it has frequently made other nations pay up, such as after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, when it demanded massive reparations from France and indeed received them. The French state suffered for decades under this debt. The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.
………
ZEIT: Are you trying to depict states that don’t pay back their debts as winners?
Piketty: Germany is just such a state. But wait: history shows us two ways for an indebted state to leave delinquency. One was demonstrated by the British Empire in the 19th century after its expensive wars with Napoleon. It is the slow method that is now being recommended to Greece. The Empire repaid its debts through strict budgetary discipline. This worked, but it took an extremely long time. For over 100 years, the British gave up two to three percent of their economy to repay its debts, which was more than they spent on schools and education. That didn’t have to happen, and it shouldn’t happen today. The second method is much faster. Germany proved it in the 20th century. Essentially, it consists of three components: inflation, a special tax on private wealth, and debt relief.
ZEIT: So you’re telling us that the German Wirtschaftswunder [“economic miracle”] was based on the same kind of debt relief that we deny Greece today?
Piketty: Exactly. After the war ended in 1945, Germany’s debt amounted to over 200% of its GDP. Ten years later, little of that remained: public debt was less than 20% of GDP. Around the same time, France managed a similarly artful turnaround. We never would have managed this unbelievably fast reduction in debt through the fiscal discipline that we today recommend to Greece. Instead, both of our states employed the second method with the three components that I mentioned, including debt relief. Think about the London Debt Agreement of 1953, where 60% of German foreign debt was cancelled and its internal debts were restructured.
As I’ve noted before, the Germans think themselves special, and as bad as American exceptionalism has been, the consequences of German chauvanism over the past 150 years has been uniquely horrific.
It does not help that pretty much everyone in German politics but the Die Linke (The Left) are n***er baiting the Greeks in a way that would impress Bull Connor.
I am inclined to believe that we are seeing the collapse of the Euro Zone, and possibly the EU.
H/t Gavin Schalliol, who did the original translation, and then was forced to pull it over IP concerns.
When the Eurocrats Ask,”How Do You Think the People of Manhattan Would Like Bailing out Texas?” Note That We Did 30 Years Ago
As Paul Krugman pithily observes that, “Bailing out Texas,” is a pretty good description of the Savings and Loan crisis of the 1980s:
Ahem. As it happens, the people of Manhattan did bail out Texas, big time. I wrote about it here. The savings and loan crisis, which was very costly to taxpayers, was mainly a Texas affair:
The cleanup from that crisis cost taxpayers about $125 billion (pdf), back when that was real money. As best I can tell, around 60 percent of the losses were in Texas (pdf). So that’s around $75 billion in aid — not loans, outright transfer.
So yeah, we did that.
The Tears of the Cuban Emigre Dead Enders Will Flavor My Cocktail
The US and Cuba are opening up embassies in their respective capitals:
President Barack Obama announced Wednesday that the U.S. and Cuba have struck a deal to open embassies in each other’s capitals and re-establish diplomatic relations for the first time in half a century.
“The progress we make today is another demonstration we don’t have to be imprisoned by the past,” Obama said.
Obama emphasized that the U.S. and Cuba have some shared interests, such as strong anti-terrorism policies and disaster response. But he acknowledged that the two nations still have “very serious differences” on issues like free speech.
“We won’t hesitate to speak out when we see contradiction to those values,” the president said.
According to a statement from the Cuban government, officials are aiming to reopen their embassy on or after July 20. White House deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes told MSNBC that the U.S. will open its embassy in Cuba “shortly after” July 20.
55 years of mean spirited and counter-productive (the Castros still run the place after 55 years of isolation) foreign policy has ended.
The real pity is that it took so long.
I’m looking forward the import of the revolutionary Cuban lung cancer vaccine into the United States.
Hero of the Day
And the accursed flag comes down
A woman scaled the flagpole in front of the South Carolina Statehouse Saturday morning and temporarily removed the Confederate flag that flew there. The woman was arrested by State Capitol police along with a man who had entered the grounds with her, the Associated Press reported. The flag was replaced and raised a short time later.
The woman, who was not identified by authorities, was named on social media as Brittany “Bree” Newsome, an activist from North Carolina. Her actions inspired the hashtag #KeepItDown, which was one of the top trending topics on Twitter in the U.S. Saturday. Later in the day, the hashtag #FreeBree was also trending in the U.S.
According to BreeNewsome.com, a site linked to a Twitter account belonging to a user with the name Bree Newsome and mentioned by numerous users in conjunction with the #KeepItDown hashtag, Newsome is an activist and graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
Here is hoping that this happens regularly until it comes down forever.
The Military Industrial Complex Is Spending Our Military into Oblivion
At the rate that this is going, we will be The Blaster: Flush With Cash, Running on Empty
One of the never ending claims made by proponents of the military technical revolution is that emerging complex weapons technologies create more combat power per unit of labor — that we are substituting capital for labor and technology-intensive capital goods are the key America’s competitive advantage, given America’s high cost labor. This claim is bullshit pumped out by a sound-byte addicted Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex.
For readers who think my rhetoric excessive, consider please the following series of graphics. That the revolution in military affairs (RMA) continues with increasing intensity despite such evidence to the contrary, and without substantive critical debate, says a lot about the dominant values in Versailles on the Potomac.
If the claim made by the RMA evangelicals were true, then a percentage reduction in the size of combat forces would be accompanied by a greater percentage savings in defense budgets. But as this table shows, huge reductions in force size (ranging from 56% to 69%) from the spending peak of the Vietnam War (1968) to the spending peak of the so-called Global War on Terror or GWOT (2010) have been accompanied by a 34% increase in the defense budget, after removing the effects of inflation (using DoD deflators which are biased to reduce the size of this disconnect).
Yet, as the next figure shows, compared to Vietnam, the GWOT is a tiny war, when compared in terms of troops deployed or operational tempos (e.g., total attack sorties).
………The bottom line should be clear to even the most casual observer: The claim that the ongoing military-technical revolution reduces costs by substituting capital for labor is fact-free claptrap. Moreover the hype about this military-technical revolution, which has became ever more hysterical since the mid-to-late 1980s, has been accompanied by a dramatic worsening of the mismatch been promises and reality.
Perhaps the apotheosis of the cost and labor saving dimensions of the military-technical revolution has been the evangelical rhetoric surrounding the use of “labour saving” unmanned airplanes — drones — in the GWOT. I urge readers in denial about my bottom line to carefully study How America Broke Its Drone Force by David Axe in the Daily Beast (attached below for your reading convenience). Axe describes how the high cost of labor-intensive drone operations has broken the back of the drone force to such a point that it had to cut back operating tempos in the face of the increasing intensity of the offensive campaign waged by ISIS.
Bear in mind, the pathetic misery in the drone force described by Axe coincides with Era IV of the boom bust cycle in the preceding chart of Defense Spending.
In 1985 or so, some wag noted that with current trends, that the entire budget of the US Air Force, including personnel, would cover the purchase of just one aircraft by 2050.
At the rate we are going, we won’t have a military, just shiny hardware with no one to operate it.