(Gig Harbor, WA)  OK, enough of the serious stuff.  We need a break…

When one of the biggest news stories of the week is that Apple has reinvented the watch so that it can put further in debt – and this is hailed as progress – it’s time we put our feet down and get back to food-binging because that’s one of the few pastimes that actually makes sense, anymore.

Our “binge” will happen Sunday morning.  And the weapon of choice will be French Toast.

In the rush to do this & that, I haven’t gotten around to describing chef-daughter Allison’s incredible French toast.  It’s French toast stuffed with a cream cheese/apple sauce filling – and it’s to die for.

The way it’s built seems simple enough:  You mix up the batter (heavy cream and a couple of eggs will do).  Then you gently cook one side of two pieces of bread.

As these come up to a light brown, you spread the “stuffing mix” on the cooked sides. Slap ‘em together and cook the soggy outsides.

The stuffing is whatever suits your taste portions of cream cheese (softened to room temp) mixed with applesauce and into this you put a dash of nutmeg – and maybe cinnamon.  By varying the spices, you can cover a good portion of the spectrum from dessert all the way over to near pastry.

Whew…toss in a few slices of ultra-trimmed bacon and some link sausage, some high octane coffee and OMG…what a fine combination of octane-rush and blood-sugar explosion with enough protein to moderate the crash later on.

If you have other fruits, I can see them working, too:  Peaches or cherries come to mind.  I’m not so sure about cantaloupe or watermelon…something with less moisture would be a better fruit choice, but I’m not the culinary school grad.

(I did mention that we’re foodies, right?  It’s just that Elaine doesn’t look the part so in an act of selfless chivalry,  I do my best to make up for both of us…)

I’ve made a note to ask Allison if she pre-spread the mix on dry bread and then dipped and cooked one side only…seems to me that would work, too…just depends how crispy you want the finished product. 

So that’s one “contestant” in my Battle of the French Toasts (BoFT) due Sunday morning.

The other is my old standby: Bailey’s French toast.

This is a single-layer French toast which is made (as always) with a base of heavy (whipping) cream and a couple of eggs and whatever you have in the way of bread.

What’s different is that you use a hair less heavy cream than usual and make up for the thicker dip by adding a shot or two of Baileys Irish cream to it.  Or, in my case, the cheaper imitation stuff; St. Brendan’s and Carolan’s work with minor taste differences. Cooked slowly, (and getting the middle above 170) may drive out the alcohol.

Next, as you dredge the bread in the batter, you dust the top side with some nutmeg and put this face-down in the frying pan.  Then a second dusting of nutmeg to the side that is face-up – and you then cook and gorge to your heart’s content.  It’s a binge-day and calories don’t matter.

One of these days, I’ve got a variant of this kind of French Toast:  In stead of making it with Baileys (a half shot of Frangelico is nice, too, just cook slowly and well so it tastes pastry and isn’t about the booze. 

Another one “on the drawing board” is to put in a shot or two of Hiram’s Chocolate Mint liquor instead of the Baileys (haven’t shopped for it for years).  This would be made possibly without the nutmeg, as an afer Thanksgiving of Christmas toast where instead of maple syrup, you’d use Hershey’s chocolate sauce and wash down with a hot buttered rum or high octane coffee and some chocolate-coated espresso beans…

Other liquors come to mind: A cherry cordial or (years ago, showing my age) San Martin used to make an apricot wine (Aprivette) that would interesting with either fresh apricot jam or perhaps a cherry jam on it…again cook slowly and well, it’s not about the booze.

The third French toast nominee is to get a big loaf of French bread the day ahead of time.  Since we’re going to be seeing friends up in Poulsbo Saturday, we will probably drop by Sluys Bakery where I’ve been fueling up the Scandinavian side of my DNA since I was 12 and just learning to row a boat around nearby Liberty Bay across the bay from downtown.  (That was more than 50-years ago…dammit.)  A picture snagged off this website will put you in the mood.

So in this third method, what you do is take 2-inch thick pieces of French bread, soaking them good the evening ahead of time and refrigerated overnight.

I’m not sure what this does, exactly, but the results  when baked the next morning in a 350 (or slightly quicker) oven, is something like a near bread pudding middle with a French toast exterior and OMG, the whole thing is good.  Nutmeg dust before cooking, or overnight, depending on your heritage, though I think chili peppers would ruin it. Dash of white pepper for zing? Hmmm…

Serving in all cases is with real butter and with real dark amber Canadian Maple syrup; Canada’s contribution to global obesity issues.  If you even think about putting that high fructose crap on this kind of art, I’ll be mighty disappointed in you.  Corn should be real, saved for breads, breading, and the last 90-days of cattle’s lives but certainly not for cooking, as I see it.

We don’t eat much sugar – and maybe that’s a reason why we’re in such good health and look 10-15 younger than our ages.  Vices like sugar, tobacco, and corn syrup can’t really be good for you.  No more than one tablespoon of syrup per piece of French toast.  The idea is to taste the mixed flavors, not mask the flavor in sugary sensations. OK, three tablesppons…

If you want to read an interesting take on healthy eating and how to stay young/fit, I can’t think of a better starting point than the article “The Oiling of America .”

In this view of things, the more artificial crap you put in your body, the more those fats tend to turn into plaque rather than being returned to use as useful energy – and the more chance you rack up to lose the stent lottery held by your cardiologist.

When I find my doctor is asking about ‘drilling rights” in my body, usually six-weeks of watching the fatty food intake, plugging in the treadmill for a half hour (or more) per day, drops things back to fit and healthy.  Sometimes I walk on the treadmill while it’s running.  But the meter doesn’t seem to care if I fudge, or not.

When I do this, the doc shrugs, pronounces me alive and skips the speech on how I might use a cholesterol drug.  To my thinking, they’re the hydrogenated fats of blood chemistry.

There’s a couple of things that come from reading Paleo Diet kinds of books; the main one is about eating the natural mix for where your genetics came from. 

For me?  Scotland means oatmeal. Denmark means cream and eggs…so oatmeal cookies must be health food!  Thank you, T-6 haplotype.

I could write about food and beverage endlessly.  The one Dark Side of cookery that I haven’t yet mastered is portion control.  I figure when I croak, it will be a self-solving problem.  I promise to drop my portions to zero calories immediately after dying.

In the meantime, the battle of French Toasts seems a fine way to spend a lazy Sunday morning – the winner will be the one that tastes most like a perfect pastry without so much sugary stuff on it. Judging could last an hour, or so.

Elaine (a long-time personal trainer who’d be a gym rat even now if we were staying put long enough) points out, one of my character flaws is that I live to eat instead of following her counsel which is eat to live.

Since she rarely reads this morning’s column, I’ll let you know how she does with that eat to live stuff when confronted with a properly plated trifecta of pastry-like winners.

Them Lying Mother-Frackers/ Review Processes

Thanks and a tip of the hat to my buddy Howard Hill who spotted this dandy report which you need to read if you live anywhere near oil or gas potential areas that the oil industry is licking its chops to frack open:

Proximity to Natural Gas Wells and Reported Health Status: Results of a Household Survey in Washington County, Pennsylvania

One thing I’d draw your attention to on the cover of this little 28-page report on the National Institutes of Health website:  Dates.

Received: 17 October 2013
Accepted: 20 August 2014
Advance Publication: 10 September 2014

Now here’s my pet theory:  When a report comes out with some highly damning information about how the runaway oil and gas biz is playing…

a small study (492 interviews) of self-reported health issues
significantly higher skin problems and lung problems for the group less than 1 KM from a fracked well and those >2 KM from same)

…it strikes me as highly suspect that it takes so long to get the word out..  We’re talking a 28-page summary, remember?  I’m probably too prolific (this would be a 2-3 day project max for a writer/writer).  Not the kind of thing that should take more than  a month to wend its way through the review process.

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(Gig Harbor, WA)  This morning we peel back the covers on one of our “secret missions” up here in the Northwest:  We’re trying to sort out whether to move back to this region to be closer to the kids, or just stay put in Texas and send the kids holiday airplane tickets. 

The Obama administration is driving some of this as they sit in waiting until after the elections with their potential November surprise on illegal immigration.  Transparent?  Forthright?  Yeah, right.  Just campaign BS sold to the sheep.  Save the heavy stuff till it’s too late to change your mind.  More practically? We eye the 357-mile distant border with Mexico with increasing suspicion because yes, we do Remember the Alamo and we do read terrorism alerts.

Given the complexity of modern life and the investment we have made in prepping it would be difficult if not impossible to duplicate what we have in the Texas Outback.  But now we’re putting numbers to it as we set about to size up terrorist rings, heart strings and purse strings in this morning’s discussion.  How to scale bug-in versus bug-out.

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This is the kind of thing that would normally show up in ours Peoplenomics subscriber reading, but it’s of broad enough interest, you might want to read it whole as time this weekend permits.

It’s from Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.  Yes, he’s a self-described socialist, but no, that doesn’t make him wrong – and here’s why:

As I’ve been writing about for more than a dozen years now, there’s a titanic battle going on between good and evil.  One aspect of that fight is the concentration of the world’s wealth into fewer and fewer hands while the ultra-rich have now got their hands on the neck of government so tightly that we might as well put government policies up for bid on eBay.

Between  the special interest groups of the One Percenters and the K Street Mafioso’s – the lobbying/influence buyers – socialist Sanders is one of the few talking common sense. 

From his website:

With the wealth gap in the United States growing and greater already than in any other major country, Sen. Bernie Sanders on Saturday called for a progressive estate tax on multi-millionaires and billionaires.   “A nation will not survive morally or economically when so few have so much while so many have so little. We need a tax system which asks the billionaire class to pay its fair share of taxes and which reduces the obscene degree of wealth inequality in America,” Sanders said in a speech to the Vermont AFL-CIO annual convention in South Burlington, Vermont.

The growing wealth gap in the U.S. is worse now than at any time since 1928, the year before the Great Depression began. The top 1 percent of Americans own more wealth than the bottom 90 percent. The richest 400 Americans have amassed more than $2 trillion in wealth, a sum greater than all of the assets of the bottom 150 million Americans combined.  One family, the Waltons of Wal-Mart fame, owns more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of Americans.

While the rich are becoming richer, more Americans live in poverty today than at any time in our nation’s history.  Half of all Americans have less than $10,000 in savings. We have the highest rate of childhood poverty – 22 percent – than any other major country.

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(Gig Harbor, WA) My note (Coping: Paint-balling the Internet) Friday reminded me that as smart as we like to think we are, when it comes to sizing up new technologies, we’re actually not that smart.  As evidence, I’d pointed to the numerous companies that various researchers have proposed will be the modern analogs to Radio Corporation of America during it’s 1919 inception through the end of World War II.

As discussed Friday, looking at the analogy between that new communications medium Radio in the 1920’s and our more recent familiarization with the full-spectrum of networked communications (e.g. text, hypertext, texting and Big Data) we don’t seem to really have a firm grip on how to best assess and invest in the emerging Big Data world.

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Hot off the pixels from the Labor Department:

Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 142,000 in August, and the unemployment rate was little changed at 6.1 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Job gains occurred in professional and business services and in health care. Household Survey Data In August, both the unemployment rate (6.1 percent) and the number of unemployed persons (9.6 million) changed little.

Over the year, the unemployment rate and the number of unemployed persons were down by 1.1 percentage points and 1.7 million, respectively.

Among the major worker groups, the unemployment rates in August showed little or no change for adult men (5.7 percent), adult women (5.7 percent), teenagers (19.6 percent), whites (5.3 percent), blacks (11.4 percent), and Hispanics (7.5 percent). The jobless rate for Asians was 4.5 percent (not seasonally adjusted), little changed from a year earlier

Sound good?  Well, hold on.  We need to drill down a bit.

First:  The labor participation rate actually dropped back to 62.8% from 62.9% last month.

What’s more, the labor force shrank by 64,000 people.  Was there a half-Rapture I missed?  (Not that I’d be surprised by that…)

Of these jobs, 142,000 new jobs fully  102,000 were “estimated into existence” by the CES/Birth-Death Model.

The number of people actually working was up a scant 16,000 and (is this fun, or what?) the U-6 long-term unemployment rate dropped from 12.2% last month to (just?) 12.0% this month.

Of course, what that means is that only the richest 10% of Americans have seen  their real incomes rise under the Changer’s regime.  The whole bloody-awful mess is over here, but check out this snip:

Real mean family wealth remained flat between 2010 and 2013. In 2013 mean wealth was $99,200 for the lowest income group, $380,600 for the middle income group and $3.3 million for the top income group. From 2007 to 2010 all groups experienced a decline in mean wealth. The lowest income group had the largest decline.

Sound like “The Rich get richer and the poor…well, that’s US…?”

Which means we’ve all been working our asses off to do what?  Maybe break even.  Average wages for the month were up 6-cents an hour.  Average work week is stuck at 34.5 hours, so the average increase in pay was  (you’ll love this) $2.07.  don’t spend it all in one place, sport.

Bet that makes you want to get up and go hump-it for 60-hours next week, on two or more jobs, doesn’t it?

Remember what researchers like Joseph Tainter have warned:  Complex civilizations (not sure we qualify, though) tend to disintegrate when the marginal rate of return on increased effort falls below zero.  now, go read that Fed report and tell me where you are…

Oh…don’t check your calendar:  The housing mess melted in 2008 and here are are (how many years later) and it’s still just talk about reforming LIBOR.

Can’t rush into change, now, can we?  Gotta keep them bankster fellows rich and rolling in it.

Quick – look surprised.

More after this…

              

Selling “Coalition”

The US has been the world’s “cop” for a long time – and it’s not an inexpensive project. 

By my back-of-the-envelope calculations, we could dramatically reduce the balance of trade problem by simply slapping a “US Defense Tariff” on all goods sold in the USA. 

Say you’re Europe, for example.

Most people don’t know that Germany didn’t pay off the last of its WW I debt until 2010.

Then there’s the matter of money due from Iraq following the Gulf War.  As Wikipedia reports:

After the Gulf War, Iraq accepted United Nations Security Council resolution 687, which declared Iraq’s financial liability for damage caused in its invasion of Kuwait. The United Nations Compensation Commission (“UNCC”) was established, and US$350 billion in claims were filed by governments, corporations, and individuals.

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The week’s last deep public ponder is not about economics, but about a phenomena that I think of as “paint-balling the news.”

Here’s the way it works:

A story breaks – something with huge emotional content like the tragic events in Ferguson, Missouri in the Michael Brown shooting case.

The events are slowly (and unevenly) reported in the mainstream media, but as is so often the case, there are seemingly deliberate spins and twists of events that appear almost immediately and continue on into the future for some period of weeks, or months.

This is what I think of as the “paint-balling” part:  A few facts are released (but not in depth and this leads to speculation).  And then people start to “pile on” (sort of like paintball) and suddenly the whole country seems to become partisans in a social reaction to a news story.

In columns here, I have referred to alleged injuries sustained by the Ferguson cop who was the apparent shooter in the case.  But that quickly brought out name-calling.  So let’s see what we can piece together about the alleged injury to the police officer involved.

First, we hear from the police chief in Ferguson that the officer received injuries.  Later reports from credible local media evolved to facial injuries.

But over the past week, or so, if you listen closely, you can hear the familiar Splat! of the trolls who “paint-ball the news” in an effort to press their own agenda.

It’s at this level that the alleged photos of the officer which turn out to be (again allegedly) of a Moto crosser begin to cross the net.

And next thing you know, the (alleged/concocted) photos are being denied at places like Snopes.com and the next thing you know, public opinion flips around so that anyone who mentions (alleged) injuries to the police officer is now a hopeless racial bigot.  The picture hoax blurs with the official reports.

The next thing you know, I’ve got an email inbox filling with hate mail for referring to the (alleged) injuries of the officer.

As you can see, the “paint-balling” of the news has really kicked in over the past  couple of weeks.  The police chief says the cop was injured, some local St. Louis area media report facial injuries that MAY involve bone damage, but no, that alleged photo was (reportedly) fake and that’s one reason I don’t try to get into details after the fact.  We’re in a kind of data gap.

I prefer to wait for as much data as possible.  But even here, we have a serious problem – one that makes paint-balling the news so easy:  Officialdom is often inexcusably slow  and not very forthcoming about pertinent details of the case.

While the police chief says there were injuries, the official extent hasn’t been made clear unless I’ve missed it.  Which is a possibility.

This opens the door to the paint ballers and trolls who have now smeared the story into a widening camp of partisans, rather than thoughtful citizens who are taking the “Show us the data” moderate approach.

To be sure, there is something wrong with the racial composition of the Ferguson police force and that’s fair game for Eric Holder and Justice to be looking into.  However, my point in an earlier column this week is that when surrounding jurisdictions get pulled into the mix, they shouldn’t be limited to St. Louis County, Missouri:  They should be applied uniformly coast-to-coast.

Otherwise, what wells up is the idea that if you want a police department to be reviewed as to whether it reflects the racial composition of the law enforcement area, all you need is a number of nights of rioting and here come the feds.

The problem becomes like pixilation in computers:  The picture may look OK when viewed from across the room, or at the State level, but if you zoom in enough, there will be increasing variances as you soon in (like Ferguson’s apparent force composition).

Question:  Does the racial composition of a police force come down to the state, county, city, or precinct/ward level?

Obviously, this is not something you can’t look up in the Constitution.  That was written back when only land-owners were considered worthy of voting – something that today would make banks the largest ultimate property owners, I suppose.

I’ll leave it to the legal scholar readers to comment on this one – it’s over my pay-grade.

# # #

Ferguson isn’t the only episode of “paint-balling” the news.

The MH-17 preliminary report is due out next Tuesday and the “paint-balling” blur of this one has mostly smeared any chance of hard analysis of what to expect.

The gov-trolls and many others go with the idea that Putin is all bad and that it must have been Russia that show down the jetliner and killed all those people.

But the Russia-friendly media maintains it was a stealth/off radar Ukrainian jet (though made in Russia) that shot down the plane.

Off on the sidelines are hopeless data junkies like me who ask other questions (What the hell was the plane flying over a war zone for?) and it’s here that derelict officialdom pops up again.

Unless that is addressed in the preliminary report, MH-17 will continue being paint-balled on the net.

When I last checked the news budget for Tuesday, no press conference was planned to accompany the initial findings on MH-17, so we’re braced for further “paint-balling” of the  story as early as mere minutes after the press release hits.

Absent actual facts, who need’s ‘em?  There’s really not much law (and even less responsibility) on the internet.

About the only useful purpose that such paint-balling to come will serve is to indicate who holds the upper hand in press manipulation:  NATO which is Kremliphobic, or Putin’s posse  is paranoid that anything coming east from the Danube is a Western attack.

That’s the makings of a Death Dance.

# # #

Take any conflict in the world today and singular events become paint-balling targets.  The Gaza-Israel mess is another fine example.

It leaves us with an  uncomfortable feeling that while the internet has done a tremendous amount of general good in terms of education and allowing people to go looking for facts on their own, there is a growing problem of paint-balling.

In many ways it is similar to the problems of radio in the 1930’s before the Communications Act of 1934.

Radio had its analog to the paint-ballers of the ‘net.  One might argue that the case of 1930’s Catholic radio activist Charles (father) Coughlin is something of a prototype for today’s paradigm:  (From Wikipedia)

Early in his radio career, Coughlin was a vocal supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal. By 1934 he became a harsh critic of Roosevelt as too friendly to bankers. In 1934 he announced a new political organization called the National Union for Social Justice. He wrote a platform calling for monetary reforms, the nationalization of major industries and railroads, and protection of the rights of labor. The membership ran into the millions, but it was not well-organized at the local level.^[1]

After hinting at attacks on Jewish bankers, Coughlin began to use his radio program to issue antisemitic commentary, and in the late 1930s to support some of the policies of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.

It was this kind of (then) “new media” uprising that may be expected any old time on the ‘net.  Which side, or which agenda is promoted, will likely matter less than the specifics of policy that are likely to follow.

While the US Army is worrying (at the doctrine level) how to worry about a mega-city uprising, sooner or later it will dawn on policymakers that just as slapping limits on media in the Great Depression made sense  in the lead-up to WW II, so too we might see similar logic applied today in a run-up to WW III.

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