James Joyner is a Professor of Security Studies. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.
It is a weird thing to come back after a holiday break where you basically unplugged yourself from the world and just spend time with family, friends, food, and drink. Everybody came home. The house crowded. Large quantities of food prepared. Adult children consumed large quantities of adult beverages. No family drama. All around goodness.
Here in Harris County, northwest of Houston, we under went two tornado warnings. During the first one, on Christmas Eve, the wall cloud passed overhead but no tornado formed. Just high winds, downpours, and about 1/2 inch of pea sized hail. We were all ready to drive to church but just stayed home. The second, a few days later, had touchdowns scattered around us but it was just lightning, wind and rain. No power loss, no damage. Gave thought for the first time about the best place to shelter in the house.
First major family get together in our downsized house. Just 2 bedrooms. Resulted in a little forced crowdedness, sleeping on the couch by the single adult children, etc. But cheer prevailed.
That being said, it is good to have peace and quiet again. And healthy food. This old 70 year old body doesn’t bounce back from carousing as easily as it did in its 20s.
I hope all went well with you all. I do miss this online community.
Actress Linda Lavin has passed away at age 87. She is best remembered for the sitcom Alice, but she was a one-time Tony winner. I sometimes watched Alice when the show was on the air. RIP.
I haven’t done anything new in the kitchen, mostly due to how busy we’ve been these past three weeks of Hell Week.
Yesterday I was about to make some instant coffee prior to cooking, when on a whim I decided to add powdered cocoa to it. the bag was there in the pantry right next to the bad coffee. It worked rather ok. 1 tsp coffee, 2 tsp. cocoa, 1/2 tsp vanilla, add about half a mug of very hot water, then fill the rest with milk. Sweeten to taste, place in the microwave for about 30 seconds (be careful heating drinks in it) as the milk was cold.
It’s not mocha, but it’s better than instant coffee.
@Kathy:
I have read, and practice now, that a little cold water (or just room temp) to the instant coffee to dissolve it first helps to temper the heat-shock of the boiling/hot water later. This immensely helps the taste!
I also have heard, and try to remember to do it, that adding a pinch of salt to coffee in the cup helps reduce any bitterness as well.
I only drink instant at home since it’s easier to make and strengthen to my preferred level! Try it out to see if it works for you as well.
Personally I think that dirt added to hot water is better than instant coffee.
While I generally agree with Mister Bluster‘s assessment, I am reminded of visiting a friend in Chile in the mid-’80s, assuming that good coffee would be abundant anywhere in South America. As it turned out, Pinochet’s government really didn’t trade that much with the coffee growing countries to the north and Nescafe ruled the market. In the Castellian accent that tends to drop post-vocalic s’s, “Dos Nescafes, por favor” becomes “Do- Ne-cafes, por favor.” It remains one of my signature memories from that trip. (That and cops with machine guns at every corner of Santiago.)
A few weeks ago I saw a video of a home freeze drier machine (spoiler: too expensive and difficult for routine home use). One thing the guy tried was freeze drying coffee. He made his usual quality brew, mixed in cream and sweetener, and ran it through the machine. He claimed it was almost as good as fresh brewed.
This proves the problem is not freeze drying the coffee, but the mix and method used in brewing it before freeze drying. I suppose they use the coffee equivalent of pink slime, and then percolate it with boiling water.
@Kathy: Years ago, a friend told me a story about going out with a coffee snob friend of his. The friend had a mocha latte and absolutely raved about it. Best mocha ever (and said friend had ones made from pulverized chocolate bars of some famous Swiss chocolatier)! On the way out, the friend complimented the barista and insisted on knowing “his secret” for such a great mocha.
The barista replied yes, Swiss Miss cocoa mix was hard to beat.
I drank something called klah as a teen, named for the coffee substitute in Anne McCaffrey’s Pern books. McCaffrey published a companion book that included a recipe to approximate klah using Earth ingredients, and it went as follows:
2 tablespoons sweet ground chocolate
1/2 cup dark cocoa
3/8 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon dark instant coffee crystals, ground to powder
small pinch of nutmeg
Use two to four teaspoons of the mixture per cup of boiling water. Stir well. The klah should be thick, much like hot cocoa.
I find a lot of commercial powdered chocolate mixes to be more powdered sugar with some cocoa.
What I want to try is Italian hot chocolate. The idea is to melt solid chocolate into a mix of milk and cocoa powder. Even using sugar free chocolate and splenda for sweetener, it packs a lot of calories from the cocoa butter in the chocolate.
The end result is a thick, rich drink. I’ve had it once at a restaurant long ago. It was too sweet (and had like a years’ worth of the FDA’s recommended daily allowance for sugar, I’m sure).
Mexican hot chocolate is nice, too, and can be made thick, but it’s even higher in sugar. It’s made from bars or thick round tablets fo a mix that’s largely sugar and cocoa with cinnamon. It doesn’t melt at all, but it does dissolve
BTW, the cacao fruit is one of the most disgusting things in the universe. The outside is just weird. Inside there is a bunch of BIG seeds nestled in slime. The seeds are sun dried, fermented, roasted, and thus turned to cocoa.
Years ago I read about a guy and his wife on a bike trip along a coastal route in the south of France. They stop at a little cafe to get a bite and are blown away by the meal. Nothing fancy, just simple food, but this guy had his socks knocked off and had to discover the local secret which turned out to be salt. Apparently there was some kind of salt mine nearby. I guess there was some local lore attached.
The guy ended up opening a specialty salt store in Manhattan or some big American city.
Personally, I think his great dining experience had more to do with being in the south of France in the spring time than magic salt, but I never bought into the pink Himalayan salt craze either.
Morning, OTB fam! Just came to say I’m enjoying this big bowl of buttered popcorn as I watch the latest shenanigans in MAGA world! Why? Because, even though I know we’ll never be off the hook due to the eternal smoke WS has for Black people, Indians are the new n*****s, now. And, while I’m here for ALL of it, noting how easily and swiftly immigrant groups jump on the anti-Black bandwagon in order to cozy up to whiteness, I just want to say, we told y’all this was coming. *Munch munch*
@Kathy:
Was that a Technologies Connections video by any chance? Great channel recommendation, if anyone hasn’t seen it! Especially the series on toasters. 🙂
@Kathy: Sugar is the principal ingredient in many prepared foods. A little surprising is that Swiss Miss has more sugar than milk powder. Not very though; fresh milk is probably mostly water.
A federal appeals court upheld a ruling against Donald Trump after he challenged a jury’s verdict that found him liable for sexually abusing and defaming a former magazine writer.
Monday’s decision from a three-judge panel with New York’s 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals follows a May 2023 verdict awarding E Jean Carroll $5m for the former president’s ongoing defamation by denying claims that he sexually assaulted her in a department store in 1996.
It’s getting to be the end of the year, so I’ll ask the same question I’ve been asking on and off since 2012 or so: Has there been any non-crypto based use for block chain technology that could be considered successful? I did a half assed search and the results were much the same this year, except for the fact that there sure were a lot of tech websites I never heard of delivering useless answers to this exact question (thank you, generative AI). One site did give actual examples, but they weren’t particularly convincing. Walmart has imposed a blockchain based solution on it’s suppliers but a) Walmart has a history of imposing the costs on their suppliers of every faddish supply chain concept they dream up, only to abandon it 5-10 years later, and b) the Forbes article seems to accept that a temperature check or fair labor practice entered into a block chain must reflect reality, while that same data entered into another system is suspect. As far as I know there is nothing magical about blockchain that can stop people from lying.
The second link in that article concerns healthcare, and what it actually describes isn’t anything unique about blockchain, but simply the benefits that would accrue to the medical system if we could force every provider to settle on a standard patient record format. A number of European countries have had such a thing decades before blockchain technology even existed. Everything described as a benefit of blockchain is actually a benefit of having a standard for recording patient records. Which, yes, is a great idea! And it doesn’t solve the problems that we have been slowly working through for the past twenty years that exist even within a common record keeping system, such as terminology (What is a “mild” temperature? What is a “significant lesion”?) and whether a record gets entered at all.
The next link, on insurance, actual takes you to an update of the article described – it turns out the customer has abandoned the system in question.
I gave up after the next link, concerning an application for recording artists, which turned out to be a concept by an artist rather than an actual system, and predicates the success of the system by assuming that every relevant transaction is entered, and everything entered is accurate.
The Walmart one is the only large scale (I assume) one described, and the only one worth keeping an eye on. Anyone have anything else?
Tito was mentioned in passing on the Jimmy Carter thread, and I think it’s worth noting that, given what happened in Yugoslavia in the years following Tito’s death, any assessment of Tito’s record should include that he held Yugoslavia together, more-or-less peacefully.
And not only was he less worse than what came after, but Tito was less worse than his contemporaries more firmly in the Soviet sphere of influence.
If one were to write a book about him, it might be entitled “Tito: Less Worse, More Of A Mixed Bag.” Or perhaps he would get a chapter in “Failures in Modern Nation-Building: From Yugoslavia to Afghanistan.”
Dearest MAGA,
If importing H1B’s is antithetical to your entire notion of “America”, what’s the plan to make Americans smart enough to not need to import people….. if you want to shut down the Department of Education?
And after all this time thinking being in the country illegally is a capital offense.. why, exactly, is being in the country illegally only a misdemeanor? It’s almost like they don’t want to fix the problem they’re intentionally creating!
@MarkedMan: I read part of the second article and thought that the travel insurance payout without the traveler filing a claim would be convenient. But I don’t travel enough, or use travel insurance often when I do. I’ve also never filed a claim*, so while it might be convenient, it might not have a significant effect.
*I buy all the waivers offered when I rent a car because I don’t own one, but I’ve never had to file the claim when the waivers were activated. I just turn in the keys and walk away.
the Forbes article seems to accept that a temperature check or fair labor practice entered into a block chain must reflect reality, while that same data entered into another system is suspect. As far as I know there is nothing magical about blockchain that can stop people from lying.
I think there should be a use in situations where people often want to change their story later. Is there a common problem of people backdating and fabricating records to show compliance? Blockchain has a value there. I don’t know how shady Walmart’s suppliers are, and this might be important.
Another case I’m thinking of is law enforcement.
Because cops regularly lie, change reports after the fact to reflect what becomes known, etc.
Storing digital signatures on dash cam footage and cop cam footage, so we know it hasn’t been selectively edited, or truncated.
If you just want to know your current inventory of self-sealing stem bolts, a plain database is fine. If version history is important, and you need to guard against bad actors trying to change history, block chain has a place.
I feel dirty having defended block chain even in theory.
What I don’t understand is how cryptocurrency provides anonymity. You should be able to track the history of every bitcoin from drug dealer’s wallet to child pornographer’s wallet to the moment someone is trying to get money. And then work backwards, identifying real people. Or nailing them really hard for a shitload of crimes once you can tie them to a wallet.
You always ask for the ransom in non-consecutive, unmarked $20s for a reason, and crypto seems to throw that out.
I’m hoping that I am not misunderstanding and that crypto turns out to be a huge sting operation, but I expect I am misunderstanding something,
The answer it always is for the poor and the under-educated: Bootstraps!!!! The free market!!! No handouts, and let the cream rise to the top! Battle Royale and let the winner take all! Hunger Games!
But big businesses and billionaires need tax breaks, incentives, and special allowances and variances to succeed so the money trickles down!
It is a weird thing to come back after a holiday break where you basically unplugged yourself from the world and just spend time with family, friends, food, and drink. Everybody came home. The house crowded. Large quantities of food prepared. Adult children consumed large quantities of adult beverages. No family drama. All around goodness.
Here in Harris County, northwest of Houston, we under went two tornado warnings. During the first one, on Christmas Eve, the wall cloud passed overhead but no tornado formed. Just high winds, downpours, and about 1/2 inch of pea sized hail. We were all ready to drive to church but just stayed home. The second, a few days later, had touchdowns scattered around us but it was just lightning, wind and rain. No power loss, no damage. Gave thought for the first time about the best place to shelter in the house.
First major family get together in our downsized house. Just 2 bedrooms. Resulted in a little forced crowdedness, sleeping on the couch by the single adult children, etc. But cheer prevailed.
That being said, it is good to have peace and quiet again. And healthy food. This old 70 year old body doesn’t bounce back from carousing as easily as it did in its 20s.
I hope all went well with you all. I do miss this online community.
Actress Linda Lavin has passed away at age 87. She is best remembered for the sitcom Alice, but she was a one-time Tony winner. I sometimes watched Alice when the show was on the air. RIP.
I haven’t done anything new in the kitchen, mostly due to how busy we’ve been these past three weeks of Hell Week.
Yesterday I was about to make some instant coffee prior to cooking, when on a whim I decided to add powdered cocoa to it. the bag was there in the pantry right next to the bad coffee. It worked rather ok. 1 tsp coffee, 2 tsp. cocoa, 1/2 tsp vanilla, add about half a mug of very hot water, then fill the rest with milk. Sweeten to taste, place in the microwave for about 30 seconds (be careful heating drinks in it) as the milk was cold.
It’s not mocha, but it’s better than instant coffee.
Personally I think that dirt added to hot water is better than instant coffee.
Could be why I often refer to some greasy spoon diner coffee as mud.
@Kathy:
I have read, and practice now, that a little cold water (or just room temp) to the instant coffee to dissolve it first helps to temper the heat-shock of the boiling/hot water later. This immensely helps the taste!
I also have heard, and try to remember to do it, that adding a pinch of salt to coffee in the cup helps reduce any bitterness as well.
I only drink instant at home since it’s easier to make and strengthen to my preferred level! Try it out to see if it works for you as well.
@Bill Jempty: She sang the hell out of the Show’s theme song. Once of my favorite 80’s TV Theme songs
@Mister Bluster:
Maybe, but the caffeine content of dirt is very low.
@Robert in SF:
I’ve tried the cold water. It helps. But instant is largely mediocre no matter what one does. In any case, I drink it solely for the caffeine.
@Kathy:
While I generally agree with Mister Bluster‘s assessment, I am reminded of visiting a friend in Chile in the mid-’80s, assuming that good coffee would be abundant anywhere in South America. As it turned out, Pinochet’s government really didn’t trade that much with the coffee growing countries to the north and Nescafe ruled the market. In the Castellian accent that tends to drop post-vocalic s’s, “Dos Nescafes, por favor” becomes “Do- Ne-cafes, por favor.” It remains one of my signature memories from that trip. (That and cops with machine guns at every corner of Santiago.)
@Robert in SF:
A few weeks ago I saw a video of a home freeze drier machine (spoiler: too expensive and difficult for routine home use). One thing the guy tried was freeze drying coffee. He made his usual quality brew, mixed in cream and sweetener, and ran it through the machine. He claimed it was almost as good as fresh brewed.
This proves the problem is not freeze drying the coffee, but the mix and method used in brewing it before freeze drying. I suppose they use the coffee equivalent of pink slime, and then percolate it with boiling water.
@Kathy: Years ago, a friend told me a story about going out with a coffee snob friend of his. The friend had a mocha latte and absolutely raved about it. Best mocha ever (and said friend had ones made from pulverized chocolate bars of some famous Swiss chocolatier)! On the way out, the friend complimented the barista and insisted on knowing “his secret” for such a great mocha.
The barista replied yes, Swiss Miss cocoa mix was hard to beat.
I drank something called klah as a teen, named for the coffee substitute in Anne McCaffrey’s Pern books. McCaffrey published a companion book that included a recipe to approximate klah using Earth ingredients, and it went as follows:
2 tablespoons sweet ground chocolate
1/2 cup dark cocoa
3/8 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon dark instant coffee crystals, ground to powder
small pinch of nutmeg
Use two to four teaspoons of the mixture per cup of boiling water. Stir well. The klah should be thick, much like hot cocoa.
@just nutha:
I find a lot of commercial powdered chocolate mixes to be more powdered sugar with some cocoa.
What I want to try is Italian hot chocolate. The idea is to melt solid chocolate into a mix of milk and cocoa powder. Even using sugar free chocolate and splenda for sweetener, it packs a lot of calories from the cocoa butter in the chocolate.
The end result is a thick, rich drink. I’ve had it once at a restaurant long ago. It was too sweet (and had like a years’ worth of the FDA’s recommended daily allowance for sugar, I’m sure).
Mexican hot chocolate is nice, too, and can be made thick, but it’s even higher in sugar. It’s made from bars or thick round tablets fo a mix that’s largely sugar and cocoa with cinnamon. It doesn’t melt at all, but it does dissolve
BTW, the cacao fruit is one of the most disgusting things in the universe. The outside is just weird. Inside there is a bunch of BIG seeds nestled in slime. The seeds are sun dried, fermented, roasted, and thus turned to cocoa.
Years ago I read about a guy and his wife on a bike trip along a coastal route in the south of France. They stop at a little cafe to get a bite and are blown away by the meal. Nothing fancy, just simple food, but this guy had his socks knocked off and had to discover the local secret which turned out to be salt. Apparently there was some kind of salt mine nearby. I guess there was some local lore attached.
The guy ended up opening a specialty salt store in Manhattan or some big American city.
Personally, I think his great dining experience had more to do with being in the south of France in the spring time than magic salt, but I never bought into the pink Himalayan salt craze either.
Morning, OTB fam! Just came to say I’m enjoying this big bowl of buttered popcorn as I watch the latest shenanigans in MAGA world! Why? Because, even though I know we’ll never be off the hook due to the eternal smoke WS has for Black people, Indians are the new n*****s, now. And, while I’m here for ALL of it, noting how easily and swiftly immigrant groups jump on the anti-Black bandwagon in order to cozy up to whiteness, I just want to say, we told y’all this was coming. *Munch munch*
@Kathy:
Was that a Technologies Connections video by any chance? Great channel recommendation, if anyone hasn’t seen it! Especially the series on toasters. 🙂
@Kathy: Sugar is the principal ingredient in many prepared foods. A little surprising is that Swiss Miss has more sugar than milk powder. Not very though; fresh milk is probably mostly water.
Trump loses appeal of E Jean Carroll verdict finding him liable for sexual abuse and defamation (The Independent)
Good.
@Bill Jempty: She was still working, at least very recently. She was in an episode of “Elsbeth” and was in “No Good Deed” on Netflix.
@Robert in SF:
Yes. I forgot the name when I posted. The videos on toasters are interesting. Purely mechanical automation doesn’t get enough recognition.
@DK:
I wonder whether the Leo & Crow Court will take the case. Uncle Thomas and Scalito will no doubt say defaming a private citizen is an official act.
@DK:
The MAGAs say Carroll fabricated the whole story.
It’s getting to be the end of the year, so I’ll ask the same question I’ve been asking on and off since 2012 or so: Has there been any non-crypto based use for block chain technology that could be considered successful? I did a half assed search and the results were much the same this year, except for the fact that there sure were a lot of tech websites I never heard of delivering useless answers to this exact question (thank you, generative AI). One site did give actual examples, but they weren’t particularly convincing. Walmart has imposed a blockchain based solution on it’s suppliers but a) Walmart has a history of imposing the costs on their suppliers of every faddish supply chain concept they dream up, only to abandon it 5-10 years later, and b) the Forbes article seems to accept that a temperature check or fair labor practice entered into a block chain must reflect reality, while that same data entered into another system is suspect. As far as I know there is nothing magical about blockchain that can stop people from lying.
The second link in that article concerns healthcare, and what it actually describes isn’t anything unique about blockchain, but simply the benefits that would accrue to the medical system if we could force every provider to settle on a standard patient record format. A number of European countries have had such a thing decades before blockchain technology even existed. Everything described as a benefit of blockchain is actually a benefit of having a standard for recording patient records. Which, yes, is a great idea! And it doesn’t solve the problems that we have been slowly working through for the past twenty years that exist even within a common record keeping system, such as terminology (What is a “mild” temperature? What is a “significant lesion”?) and whether a record gets entered at all.
The next link, on insurance, actual takes you to an update of the article described – it turns out the customer has abandoned the system in question.
I gave up after the next link, concerning an application for recording artists, which turned out to be a concept by an artist rather than an actual system, and predicates the success of the system by assuming that every relevant transaction is entered, and everything entered is accurate.
The Walmart one is the only large scale (I assume) one described, and the only one worth keeping an eye on. Anyone have anything else?
@CSK:
Of course they do, problem is that the jurors weren’t persuaded by that argument.
@Kylopod:
Steven Brust’s Dragaera books have an even more complicated not-coffee called klava. Making it involves filtering through eggshells, iirc.
Tito was mentioned in passing on the Jimmy Carter thread, and I think it’s worth noting that, given what happened in Yugoslavia in the years following Tito’s death, any assessment of Tito’s record should include that he held Yugoslavia together, more-or-less peacefully.
And not only was he less worse than what came after, but Tito was less worse than his contemporaries more firmly in the Soviet sphere of influence.
If one were to write a book about him, it might be entitled “Tito: Less Worse, More Of A Mixed Bag.” Or perhaps he would get a chapter in “Failures in Modern Nation-Building: From Yugoslavia to Afghanistan.”
Dearest MAGA,
If importing H1B’s is antithetical to your entire notion of “America”, what’s the plan to make Americans smart enough to not need to import people….. if you want to shut down the Department of Education?
And after all this time thinking being in the country illegally is a capital offense.. why, exactly, is being in the country illegally only a misdemeanor? It’s almost like they don’t want to fix the problem they’re intentionally creating!
@CSK: Apparently the court found they needed more evidence. Again. (This seems to be a theme for them.)
@MarkedMan: I read part of the second article and thought that the travel insurance payout without the traveler filing a claim would be convenient. But I don’t travel enough, or use travel insurance often when I do. I’ve also never filed a claim*, so while it might be convenient, it might not have a significant effect.
*I buy all the waivers offered when I rent a car because I don’t own one, but I’ve never had to file the claim when the waivers were activated. I just turn in the keys and walk away.
@Gustopher:
Solid points!
@Bobert: @just nutha:
Well, given that Trump himself has bragged about grabbing women by the pussy…
@just nutha: That’s the one that has already been abandoned.
@DrDaveT:
It sounds like he was ripping off McCaffrey (where the klah is made from tree bark native to Pern).
@MarkedMan:
I think there should be a use in situations where people often want to change their story later. Is there a common problem of people backdating and fabricating records to show compliance? Blockchain has a value there. I don’t know how shady Walmart’s suppliers are, and this might be important.
Another case I’m thinking of is law enforcement.
Because cops regularly lie, change reports after the fact to reflect what becomes known, etc.
Storing digital signatures on dash cam footage and cop cam footage, so we know it hasn’t been selectively edited, or truncated.
If you just want to know your current inventory of self-sealing stem bolts, a plain database is fine. If version history is important, and you need to guard against bad actors trying to change history, block chain has a place.
I feel dirty having defended block chain even in theory.
What I don’t understand is how cryptocurrency provides anonymity. You should be able to track the history of every bitcoin from drug dealer’s wallet to child pornographer’s wallet to the moment someone is trying to get money. And then work backwards, identifying real people. Or nailing them really hard for a shitload of crimes once you can tie them to a wallet.
You always ask for the ransom in non-consecutive, unmarked $20s for a reason, and crypto seems to throw that out.
I’m hoping that I am not misunderstanding and that crypto turns out to be a huge sting operation, but I expect I am misunderstanding something,
@MarkedMan: Thanks.
@Gavin:
The answer it always is for the poor and the under-educated: Bootstraps!!!! The free market!!! No handouts, and let the cream rise to the top! Battle Royale and let the winner take all! Hunger Games!
But big businesses and billionaires need tax breaks, incentives, and special allowances and variances to succeed so the money trickles down!
@Robert in SF: You still believe the money trickles down? How quaint. 😉