kurtadb

The prescribed fires to restore overgrown forests and grasslands near homes in Colorado have hit a snag: plutonium and its perception at a former nuclear weapons site upwind of Denver.

Ron Fournier, "Is Obama More Interested in Progress or Politics?", National Journal, 1/20/2015:

Count how many times Obama uses the words "I," "me," and "my." Compare that number to how often he says, "You," "we," "our." If the first number is greater than the second, Obama has failed.

This leads naturally to a different question: "Is Ron Fournier More Interested in Analysis or in Bullshit?" (where I mean "bullshit" in the technical philosophical sense, of course).

If Ron Fournier had spent a minute or two looking into the facts of the matter, he would have discovered these plots, presented in "The evolution of SOTU pronouns", 1/28/2014:

They show that

• ALL presidents since WWII have used substantially more first-person-plural pronouns than first-person-singular pronouns in the SOTU messages;
• Adding second-person pronouns makes the disproportion even larger;
• Obama is pretty much in the middle of the pack on all the relevant measures.

He would also have found this table, in a blog post by Eric Ostermeier, "Obama's SOTU: Uniting the Country…through Pronouns?", 1/31/2011:

I'm therefore willing to place a substantial wager with Ron Fournier as to the outcome of his pronoun count. But I'm betting that he won't take the bet, because his column exemplifies Harry Frankfurt's analysis of "the bullshitter":

Both he and the liar represent themselves falsely as endeavoring to communicate the truth. The success of each depends upon deceiving us about that. But the fact about himself that the liar hides is that he is attempting to lead us away from a correct apprehension of reality; we are not to know that he wants us to believe something he supposes to be false. The fact about himself that the bullshitter hides, on the other hand, is that the truth-values of his statements are of no central interest to him; what we are not to understand is that his intention is neither to report the truth nor to conceal it. This does not mean that his speech is anarchically impulsive, but that the motive guiding and controlling it is unconcerned with how the things about which he speaks truly are.

By suggesting that tonight's SOTU address might conceivably fail that pronoun-ratio test (because Obama, as Everyone Knows, is the greatest narcissist blah blah), Mr. Fournier is reprising a sub-theme of the Great Obama Pronoun Fantasy, variants of which seem to draw pundits like flies to rotting meat. An earlier version of the we-me sub-meme was promoted a few years ago by Stanley Fish, discussed in "Inaugural pronouns", 6/8/2009, where I offered this table:

	1st singular	1st plural	1stPlural/1stSingular ratio
WJ Clinton 1 (1993)	0.93%	7.70%	6.1
WJ Clinton 2 (1997)	0.37%	6.10%	16.5
GW Bush 1 (2001)	0.94%	6.96%	7.4
GW Bush 2 (2005)	0.48%	4.41%	9.2
BH Obama 1 (2009)	0.21%	6.48%	31.2

For those with a perverse interest in our more distinguished purveyors of Bos taurus feces, here some other posts on similar topics:

"Fact-checking George F. Will", 6/7/2009
"Obama's Imperial 'I': Spreading the meme", 6/8/2009
"Inaugural pronouns", 6/8/2009
"Royal baloney", 6/9/2009
"Another pack member heard from", 6/9/2009
"I again", 7/13/2009
"'I' is a camera", 7/18/2009
"What is 'I' saying?", 8/9/2009
"Open fraud as Op-Ed discourse", 7/10/2010
""A sociopath and narcissist and manipulator"", 8/9/2010
"Fact-checking George F. Will, one more time", 10/6/2009
"Recommended reading", 5/3/2011
"Presidential pronouns, one more time", 5/22/2011
"Two more pundits who don't count", 6/21/2011
"Another pundit who can't (or won't) count", 6/23/2011
"Republican self-referentiality", 6/27/2011
"A meme in hibernation", 3/31/2012
"Another lie from George Will", 5/7/2012
"Obama pronouns again", 10/31/2012
"First Person Singular, Redemption Plea Edition", 1/11/2014
"Another casual lie from Charles Krauthammer", 9/16/2014
"Colbert on Krauthammer", 9/24/2014
"Buzzfeed linguistics, presidential pronouns, and narcissism revisited", 10/21/2014

---

Update — the "remarks as prepared for delivery" version of the speech pretty closely matches the pronoun rates of Obama's previous SOTUs: in 6567 words, there are

• 97 first-person singular pronouns, for a rate of 1.48%;
• 34 second-person pronouns, for a rate of 0.52%;
• 312 first-person plural pronouns, for a rate of 4.75%.

More specifically:

I	71
me	9
my	16
mine	1
we	175
us	28
our	108
ours	1
you	25
your	9

So Fournier's bizarrely careless enumeration (I, me, my vs. you, we, our) adds up as

71+9+16 = 96 = 1.46%
25+175+108 = 308 = 4.96%

…and so by Fournier's metric, Obama succeeds by a factor of 308/96 = 3.2 to 1.

---

Update #2 — Applying the same scripts to Senator Joni Ernst's SOTU rebuttal, we get 1245 words with 22 first-person singular pronouns (1.77%), 19 second-person pronouns (1.53%), and 55 first-person plural pronouns (4.42%). In terms of Fourier's careless enumeration, we have

I+me+my = 14+4+4 = 22 = 1.77%
you+we+our = 14+25+14 = 53 = 4.265

So Senator Ernst also "succeeds" by Fournier's (meaningless) metric, though not as strongly as President Obama did:

53/22 = 2.41
308/96 = 3.21

 

 

American Sniper is one of the best anti-war movies I have seen, ever.  But it shows the sniper-assassin, and his killing, to be sexy, and to be regarded as sexy by women, while the rest of war is dull and stupid.  (Even the two enemy snipers are quite attractive and fantastic figures, and there is a deliberate parallel between the family life of the Syrian sniper and the American protagonist.  The klutziness of the non-assassin soldiers limited how many African-Americans and Hispanics they were willing to cast in those roles, as it is easiest to make white guys look crass in this way without causing offense.)  By making the attractions of war palpable, this film disturbs and confuses people and also occasions some of the worst critical reviews I have read.  It also, by understanding and then dissecting the attractions of blood lust, becomes a quite convincing anti-war movie, if you doubt this spend a few months studying The Iliad.  (By the way, Clint Eastwood, the director and producer, describes the movie as anti-war.)  The murder scenes create an almost unbearable tension, the sandstorm is a metaphor for our collective fog, and they had the stones to opt for the emotional overkill of four rather than just three tours of duty.  Iraq is presented as a hopeless wasteland with nothing of value or relevance to the United States, and at the end of the story America proves its own worst enemy.  It is not clear who ever gets over having killed and fought in a war (can anything else be so gripping?…neither family life nor sex…), even when appearances suggest a kind of normality has returned.  The generational cycle is in any case replenished.  I say A or A+, both as a movie and as a Rorschach test.

Two Days, One Night has some of the worst economics I have seen in a movie, ever.  It would be brilliant as a kind of Randian (or for that matter Keynesian) meta-critique of the screwed up nature of Belgian labor markets and social norms, and most of all a critique of the inability of the Belgian intelligentsia to understand this, except it is not.  It is meant as a straight-up plea for sympathy for the victim and as such it fails miserably, even though as a movie it embodies reasonably good production values.  Everything in the workplace of this solar power company is zero-sum across the workers and we never see why.  The protagonist campaigns to get her job back, but never asks or even considers how she might improve her productivity or attitude, asking only on the basis of need.  (And she is turned down only on the basis of need.)  At one point her employer states the zero marginal product hypothesis quite precisely, something like “when you took time off, we saw that sixteen people could do the work of seventeen.”  She never asks if there might be some other way she could contribute — but she does need the money — nor does the notion of a better job match somewhere else rear its head.  The depictions of financial hardship confuse wealth and income, basic survival and discretionary spending.  The rave reviews this movie has received represent yet another Rorschach test and one which virtually every commentator seems to have failed.

Federal and local law enforcement officials recovered six child victims of domestic sex trafficking and arrested two alleged traffickers during the 2015 National Western Stock Show.

What if the Busy Busy Town Richard Scarry wrote about was Silicon Valley circa 2015? Meet the fine citizens of Business Town. Great stuff, but did someone forget to credit Ruben Bolling's comic strip Richard Scarry's 21st Century Busy Town Jobs for the inspiration?

Tags: books   remix   Richard Scarry

For the second time in a year, a Castle Rock man has been sent to jail for organizing bogus charity events and pocketing the donations.

David Ehrlich returns with a video montage of his 25 favorite movies of 2014. (Here's his 2013 video.)

His top 5:

5. Gone Girl
4. Nymphomaniac
3. Under The Skin
2. Inherent Vice
1. The Grand Budapest Hotel

These year-end videos by Ehrlich are incredibly effective trailers for movies. Not just the individual films, but the whole idea of cinema itself. Having just watched this, I want to leave my office, head to the nearest theater and just watch movies all day.

Tags: best of   best of 2014   David Ehrlich   lists   movies   video

The Golden Globes inched closer to legitimacy in its 72nd show, giving awards not just to A-List celebrities, but to the edgier productions that unequivocally deserved recognition, including "Boyhood," ''The Grand Budapest Hotel," and "Birdman.

1. The Strange Reason Murakami Fans Gather At A Hokkaido Sheep Farm Every Year.  And the campaign to create koala mittens.

2. North Korean defectors review The Interview.

3. Children and play in the Holocaust.

4. Japan’s birth rate problem is worse than thought.

5. Robin Hanson on vote trading and quadratic voting.

6. The best films of the decade so far?

7. A new breed of economist is helping firms crack markets.

8. More on Texas vs. California.

A barrage of shots rattled multiple inner-city Denver neighborhoods Wednesday night as the Denver Police Department tested a new system that detects gunfire.

Growing up in north Denver, Keith Villa would frequent Mexican restaurants with his family and enjoy a creamy, sweet, rice-based drink brought to the table in what looked like a metal cocktail shaker.

It's 2015. Stuff that happened in the 80s and 90s is getting to be positively ancient. Allow Tim Urban to make you feel old. I want to quote the whole thing, but I'll make do with just a few snippets:

These movies came out closer to World War II than to today: The Empire Strikes Back, The Shining, Airplane, Caddyshack.

There are millions of people alive today who will live well into the 22nd century.

How about 1980? It's closer to FDR, Churchill and Hitler fighting each other than it is to 2015.

As you know, I love this sort of thing. Part of it is nostalgia and the whole "fuck I'm old" lament. I like it for the shift in perspective; it's cheap time travel.

Update: And whoa, somehow I missed Urban's post on Putting Time in Perspective. Wow.

Tags: history   Tim Urban   time

From the last year's Foundational Questions Institute conference, a String Theory supporter (Raphael Bousso) is asked to argue against String Theory on behalf of Loop Quantum Gravity, while one of the founders of Loop Quantum Gravity theory (Carlo Rovelli) takes the String Theory side, in opposition to his own point of view:

This works out well, making me wonder about analogous opposite-day debates in linguistics and allied areas.

Maybe Jerry Fodor arguing for a Darwinian approach to language evolution, in opposition to Daniel Dennett explaining that tabula-rasa language learning is just as impossible for genes as it is for neurons?

Or Lera Boroditsky debunking the idea that language determines thought, while Lila Gleitman argues that Whorf was right all along?

Or Dan Everett and Dave Pesetsky taking each other's sides of the argument about recursive compositionality as the essence of language?

No doubt commenters can suggest pairings that are even more unlikely to happen…

Just a year and a half after opening near downtown Golden, Mountain Toad Brewing says it needs more space to keep up with demand. The brewery will rent 17,000 square feet of space in a planned 20,000-square-foot facility being proposed by Custom Control Sensors, a California-based aerospace sensory company that will use its 3,000 square feet [...]

Can this really be a thing?

It’s from a Regretsy tribute Tumblr.

I stayed up too late catching up on the final season of “Sons of Anarchy,” which is an awful, terrible show. I hate every single character — even the children. I’m about half way through it, but if I had any sense, I’d delete it from my library and find a YouTube of people knitting tortoise cozies to watch instead.

Speaking of ways to squander precious time, there are two NFL games on today: Bengals v Colts and Lions v Cowboys. I don’t give a shit about any of those four teams and only actively dislike one (the Cowboys) enough enjoy rooting for their defeat.

Maybe I’ll knit tortoise-shaped chicken cozies instead. Open thread.

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Oklahoma lawmakers are planning to introduce a bill this February that would make it illegal to wear hooded sweatshirts, or “hoodies,” in public, according to a report from Oklahoma’s Channel 6 News.

Republican Senator Don Barrington will introduce the bill, which would make it a misdemeanor to “wear a mask, hood, or covering” either while committing a crime or in order to intentionally conceal one’s identity. If the bill is passed, offenders would be subject to a fine of $50 to $500, and up to one year in jail. The ban would not affect mask-wearers on Halloween or at masquerade parties, nor would it apply to people who wear head coverings for religious purposes.

The bill’s purpose is seemingly to deter crime. As Channel 6’s report notes, robberies caught on surveillance camera often show the perpetrator wearing a mask or hoodie to cover his or her face. With the bill’s language only prohibiting wearing hoodies while committing a crime or to intentionally hide, supporters say the ban wouldn’t negatively affect people just trying to wear a sweatshirt in day-to-day life.

Others, however, have argued that bans on hoodies — no matter the intention — only serve to exacerbate problems with racial profiling. CNN legal analyst Sunny Hostin took on the issue when an Indiana mall banned the garment in March:

“This is about the pretext of being able to stop young African-American males,” she said. “Hoodie is code for ‘thug’ in many places and I think businesses shouldn’t be in the business of telling people what to wear. The Fourteenth Amendment protects us from this.”

Republicans are clearly for smaller, less intrusive government.  Unless it’s for black people, in which case criminalize every aspect of their lives.

Bonus points: under this legislation, who decides if a person is wearing a hoodie to “intentionally conceal” their identity?  Why, the cops, of course.

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Susan Schneider, professor of philosophy at UConn, is among those researchers and scientists who believe that the first alien beings we encounter will be "postbiological in nature"...aka robots.

"There's an important distinction here from just 'artificial intelligence'," Schneider told me. "I'm not saying that we're going to be running into IBM processors in outer space. In all likelihood, this intelligence will be way more sophisticated than anything humans can understand."

The reason for all this has to do, primarily, with timescales. For starters, when it comes to alien intelligence, there's what Schneider calls the "short window observation" -- the notion that, by the time any society learns to transmit radio signals, they're probably a hop-skip away from upgrading their own biology. It's a twist on the belief popularized by Ray Kurzweil that humanity's own post-biological future is near at hand.

"As soon as a civilization invents radio, they're within fifty years of computers, then, probably, only another fifty to a hundred years from inventing AI," Shostak said. "At that point, soft, squishy brains become an outdated model."

To use Elon Musk's language, biological beings would be a "biological boot loader for digital superintelligence". Schneider's full paper on the topic is here: Alien Minds.

Tags: robots   Susan Schneider

Gedion Zelalem is an American citizen and will play for the United States. The Washington Post first reported the news on Monday night and U.S. Soccer president Sunil Gulati confirmed it on Tuesday morning.

Gedion Zelalem is now a U.S. citizen. At his request we have started the FIFA process which would allow him to be eligible for the #USMNT.

— Sunil Gulati (@sunilgulati) December 30, 2014

Zelalem is one of Arsenal's top prospects and has been a target of Jurgen Klinsmann's for more than a year now. But as badly as the U.S. team wanted Zelalem, he wasn't an American citizen and, thus, couldn't play for the U.S

Zelalem was born in Germany, but moved to the U.S. when he was nine years old. He went to American schools until an Arsenal scout spotted him as a teenager and recommended the club sign him. They did and he quickly rose through their young ranks, making his senior team debut before his 17th birthday. He even played for Germany youth teams, but reportedly wanted to join the U.S. He just needed citizenship.

Now the 17-year-old is an American citizen and once FIFA processes his paperwork, will be eligible to play for the U.S. The Americans have one of Arsenal's best young talents and, if he pans out, the creative playmaker they have been craving. There are no more questions about citizenship or allegiance. He's a U.S. citizen, and he's all American.

A couple of news items that struck me recently

• Two years after the Sandy Hook massacre, a US Federal Appeals Court has ruled that people with a history of mental illness have a constitutional right to gun ownership.

• In the immediate aftermath of the Peshawar massacre, a Pakistani judge granted bail to the alleged planner of the Mumbai massacre, Zaki ur Rehman Lakhvi, a leading figure in the (military-backed) Lashkar e-Taibi terrorist group.

Obviously, these decisions were neither aberrational nor the product of a legal system divorced from any social context. Rather, they reflect deeply ingrained views in the societies from which they emerged. Beyond that point, I don’t have a lot to say, but I’ll be interested to read the views of others.

The hott podcast Serial concluded this week with its twelfth episode, an episode that crystallized for me why I like it. For all the complaints – that it is white privilege in distilled radio form; that it is really about its host, Sarah Koenig – it is a pretty good dramatization of the historical process.

And it’s not only because this week one of the intrepid reporter/producers descended into an actual archive to retrieve a critical document and, despite some gratuitous mockery of the archivists, gave a sense of what it’s actually like to do that and why you would want to.

It’s ultimately because Koenig held herself to a standard of argument that’s similar to what historians use. She repeatedly questioned herself as she pursued her research over the course of months; she tried to disprove her hunches even as she followed them, and ultimately concluded with “what we know” – which is distinct from “what really happened” (yes, she goes all Ranke on us).

Here’s how she ends (SPOILERS):

What do I think? If you ask me to swear that Adnan Syed is innocent, I couldn’t do it. I nurse doubt. I don’t like that I do, but I do. I mean, most of the time, I think he didn’t do it. For big reasons, like the utter lack of evidence, but also small reasons – things he’s said to me, just off the cuff, or moments when he’s cried on the phone and tried to stifle it so I wouldn’t hear, or just the bare fact of why on earth would a guilty man agree to let me do this story, unless he was cocky to the point of delusion.

I used to think that when Adnan’s friends told me, “I can’t say for sure he’s innocent, but the guy I knew? there’s no way he could have done this” – I used to think that was a cop-out, a way to avoid asking yourself uncomfortable, disloyal, disheartening questions.

But I think I’m there now too, and not for lack of asking myself those hard questions, but, because as much as I want to be sure, I’m not.

Like Linda Holmes, I was afraid Koenig was going to end up with “a contemplation on the nature of the truth.” But she didn’t. She came down on, I can’t say for sure, but the guy I know, there’s no way he could have done this.

Which is what historians generally end up with. We can’t know for sure, but neither should we let radical skepticism stop us from saying what we know. We state the truth as we know it, leaning on the probabilities – “this does not mean,” as Barzun and Graff remind us, “‘a doubtful kind of truth’ but a firm reliance on the likelihood that evidence which has been examined and found solid is veracious[.]”

Koenig has done what few historians have successfully achieved: she has made the process of research and analysis itself a compelling narrative. Mostly when historians go that route, it’s because they’re dealing with a murder or a like crime, in which case we can depend on readers wanting to follow the narrative of discovery the same as they might with a police procedural. (See e.g. the still-brilliant Return of Martin Guerre. Also, Ari Kelman manages it in his book on the Sand Creek massacre, because he’s dealing with competing narratives about violent deaths much as a detective would deal with competing alibis.)

But absent that kind of substance, it’s difficult to arrange a narrative in which the analysis is itself the story.

So how have things been going for our bored, exhausted, and disengaged president? He's been acting pretty enthusiastic, energized, and absorbed with his job, I'd say. Let us count the things he's done since the November 4th midterm elections:

• November 10: Surprised everyone by announcing his support for strong net neutrality.
• November 11: Concluded a climate deal with China that was not only important in its own right, but has since been widely credited with jumpstarting progress at the Lima talks last week.
• November 20: Issued an executive order protecting millions of undocumented workers from the threat of deportation.
• November 26: Signed off on an important new EPA rule significantly limiting ozone emissions.
• December 15: Took a quiet victory lap as Western financial sanctions considerably sharpened the pain of Vladimir Putin's imploding economy.
• December 16: Got nearly everything he wanted during the lame duck congressional session, and more. Democrats confirmed all important pending nominees, and then got Republican consent to several dozen lesser ones as well.
• December 17: Announced a historic renormalization of relations with Cuba.

I guess you can add to that a non-event: In its second year, Obamacare signups are going smoothly and ahead of target. Am I missing anything beyond that? Maybe. It's been quite the whirlwind month for our bored, exhausted, disengaged president, hasn't it?

All of these things are worthwhile in their own right, of course, but there's a political angle to all of them as well: they seriously mess with Republican heads. GOP leaders had plans for January, but now they may or may not be able to do much about them. Instead, they're going to have to deal with enraged tea partiers insisting that they spend time trying to repeal Obama's actions. They can't, of course, but they have to show that they're trying. So there's a good chance that they'll spend their first few months in semi-chaos, responding to Obama's provocations instead of working on their own agenda.

Was that part of the plan? Beats me. But it seems to be working pretty well so far.

An exhibition by Danny Lyon of color photos he took in the NYC subway is being staged by the MTA. The photos have never been publicly shown before.

The trains shown in these two photos still run occasionally: just catch the M between 2nd Ave and Queens Plaza between 10am and 5pm on the two remaining Sundays in Dec.

Tags: Danny Lyon   early color photography   NYC   photography   subway

Wait, how did I miss this...Hilary Mantel's excellent pair of novels about Thomas Cromwell & Henry VIII, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, are being turned into a six-part BBC miniseries. Outstanding! Noted Shakespearian actor Mark Rylance will play Cromwell with Homeland's Damian Lewis as Henry VIII.

BBC One will be airing the show in Britain in January while American audiences without access to BitTorrent will have to wait until PBS airs it in April.

Tags: books   Bring Up the Bodies   Damian Lewis   Hilary Mantel   Mark Rylance   TV   Wolf Hall

Woo! New Terrence Malick film! Knight of Cups stars Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, and Natalie Portman with cinematography by Emmanuel Lubezki, who also did Children of Men, Gravity, Birdman, and Malick's The Tree of Life. Here's the trailer:

The Tree of Life *wrecked* me.

Tags: Cate Blanchett   Christian Bale   Emmanuel Lubezki   Knight of Cups   movies   Natalie Portman   Terrence Malick   trailers

If you’re pulled over by a patrol car in Iowa, you might in future find the officer asking for your ‘iPhone and registration, please.’ The state is working on creating a smartphone app that can be shown in place of a physical license, reports the WSJ.

DOT spokeswoman Andrea Henry said that both security and privacy concerns need to be addressed before the project can proceed. Animation might be used to guard against someone showing a screengrab in place of the app, and privacy will be protected by ensuring that “the phone never leaves your hands.”

Users could hold up the phone so that police or Transportation Security Administration officers can scan the license electronically, rather than handling the phone.

The app will also need to hide notifications while it is in use, preventing a police officer having access to any other information on the phone, such as text message alerts.

MorphoTrust USA, the company working with the state to create the app, says that it is in discussion with more than 20 other states.

Filed under: Tech Industry Tagged: Apps, Drivers License, Government, iPhone, police

Visit 9to5Mac to find more special coverage of Tech Industry, iPhone, and Apps.

What do you think? Discuss "Iowa planning America’s first iPhone driver’s license, working on privacy concerns" with our community.

Like all of us, I've had to spend the past several days listening to a procession of stony-faced men—some of them defiant, others obviously nervous—grimly trying to defend the indefensible, and I'm not sure how much more I can take. How hard is this, after all? Following 9/11, we created an extensive and cold-blooded program designed to inflict severe pain on prisoners in order to break them and get them to talk. That's torture. It always has been, and even a ten-year-old recognizes that legalistic rationalizations about enemy combatants, "serious" physical injury, and organ failure are transparent sophistry. Of course we inflicted severe pain. Moderate pain would hardly induce anyone to talk, would it? And taking care not to leave permanent marks doesn't mean it's not torture, it just means you're trying to make sure you don't get caught.

Christ almighty. Either you think that state-sanctioned torture of prisoners is beyond the pale for a civilized country or you don't. No cavils. No resorts to textual parsing. And no exceptions for "we were scared." This isn't a gray area. You can choose to stand with history's torturers or you can choose to stand with human decency. Pick a side.

From our Food Goddess, TaMara:

I hope everyone had a good holiday. Now it’s time for the Christmas rush. But before I start with those recipes, I thought we’d revisit comfort foods. When things get crazy busy, I fall back on easy comfort foods: soups, mac-n’cheese, slow-cooker meals.

What sparked this idea was a recipe for Macaroni and Cheese Bacon Cups. No, seriously, someone thought of putting macaroni and cheese into cups made of bacon and baking it in the oven. If you’re daring and want to try your hand at it, JeffreyW has the recipe for Bacon Cups here and two Macaroni and Cheese recipes are here and here.

The photo above is easy to recreate (JeffreyW recommends frozen shoestring fries), but he has a recipe for even more elaborate Chile Cheese Fries, click here for recipe and mouth-watering photos.

When cold weather hits and my schedule is full, I want Spicy Potato Soup and Biscuits, recipes here.

Starting next week, I’ll move into holiday recipes, both for the meals and gift giving. For the animal lovers, there is a Bixby update here, but be forewarned when you click through, HE. HAS. GROWN. Although he doesn’t seem to realize it.

What’s on your menu for the weekend? How is the holiday shopping coming along?

Tonight’s feature recipe is very simple and quick to put together.

Slow-Cooker Tangy Roast Beef w/Potatoes & Carrots

2 to 3 lbs boneless chuck roast
½ cup red wine vinegar
¼ cup water
1 tsp salt
½ tsp pepper
1 bay leaf
1 onion, quartered
4 red potatoes, halved
4 carrots, peeled & quartered
Slow-Cooker

In order, place items in Slow-Cooker. Cook according to manufacturer’s directions (usually 8-10 hours on low). Couldn’t be simpler. But if you don’t want tangy, just substitute a good red wine for a richer flavor. If you have time, it’s worth it to brown your roast on all sides before tossing in the slow-cooker. Lightly flour all sides, heat oil in a skillet and brown quickly. I usually use tongs and brown the sides as well.

That’s it for this week. Next week we’ll tackle holiday treats for gift giving or to take to parties. – TaMara

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Via Tommy Christopher at the Daily Banter, my senator/human dumpster fire Rand Paul knows why Eric Garner died…

…cigarette taxes.

“I think it is hard not to watch that video of him saying I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, and not be horrified by it. But I think there’s something bigger than just the individual circumstances. Obviously the individual circumstances are important. I think it is important to know that some politician put a tax of $5.85 on a pack of cigarettes so they’ve driven cigarettes underground by making them so expensive. But then some politician had to say we want you arresting people for selling a loose cigarette. For someone to die over breaking that law, there is really no excuse for it. But I do blame the politician. We put our police in a difficult situation with bad laws.”

I do not have enough heavy objects to throw in complete sun-crushing rage right now.  Of all the possible and myriad plethora of reasons to object to the death of Eric Garner and the rampant injustice of the failure of the grand jury system here, the fact that cigarette taxes are high in NYC is such a peripheral piece of cowflop that even I, as much as I despise Rand Paul, am utterly shocked at his near cataclysmic lack of basic human decency.

Eric Garner was murdered on video for the world to see, and this asshole is worried about cig taxes.

And you know that’s the only reason these ghouls care about a dead black guy at all, because it gives them a reason to complain about government and taxes.  Because every black person killed by a cop suffered the ultimate sanction over fucking Austrian school macroeconomics.

Nope.  Rand Paul can go straight to hell while wearing thermite boxers with solar corona trim, along with all his glibertarian douchebag supporters.

 

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PINNER Throwback IPA will be released on draft and in 12-ounce cans in Oskar Blues’ home markets of Colorado and North Carolina in mid-December, with national distribution starting in February, First Drafts has confirmed.

One of the major points in Charles Mann's 1491 (great book, a fave) is that the indigenous peoples of the Americas did not live in pristine wilderness. Through techniques like cultivation and controlled burning, they profoundly shaped their environments, from the forests of New England to the Amazon.

In the 1850s, the indigenous inhabitants of Yosemite Valley, who used controlled burning to maintain the health of the forest, were driven out by a militia. As Eric Michael Johnson writes in Scientific American, the belief in the myth of pristine wilderness by naturalist John Muir has had a negative impact on the biodiversity and the ability to prevent catastrophic fire damage in Yosemite National Park.

The results of this analysis were statistically significant (p < 0.01) and revealed that shade-tolerant species such as White fir and incense cedar had increased to such an extent that Yosemite Valley was now two times more densely packed than it had been in the nineteenth century. These smaller and more flammable trees had pushed out the shade-intolerant species, such as oak or pine, and reduced their numbers by half. After a century of fire suppression in the Yosemite Valley biodiversity had actually declined, trees were now 20 percent smaller, and the forest was more vulnerable to catastrophic fires than it had been before the U.S. Army and armed vigilantes expelled the native population.

(via @charlescmann)

Tags: 1491   Charles Mann   Eric Michael Johnson   Yosemite National Park