Why do we do this other stuff? Why not. If nothing else, football gives us a chance to relax from the deeper issues we post here at TAP. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to a third blog to post (one way or the other) about my opinions on the Internets outrage related to [insert anything here].
Either that, or jump over to our brother site. Bask in the high quality website design. Pay no attention whatsoever to the actual written content. Either way.
Unrelated photo of big huggable dummy bear.
Great news everybody, celebration is in order. For yesterday was the 200th birthday of one of history’s greatest thinkers. But did Marx understand what his ideas would bring about? That his philosophy would spawn history’s greatest monsters?
All throughout his writings Marx makes it pretty clear what he had in mind. He certainly got the bloodbath, it just didn’t come with his expected results. Because basically Marx (lauded as he is) didn’t understand the essentials of human nature. One of which is: When you give one man, any one man unlimited power, regardless of motivation, the end stage is evil.
For all the people who are ready to shout ‘Nazi’ at Trump, it’s always astounded me that the same argument isn’t made on the Communist side. As we’ve previously written, the death of Castro was a particular note.
I stand by every word of this:
Castro goes into my column as the consummate example of a guy who pours honey potion into your ear while he rams a stiletto dagger into your kidney. The dude’s appeal to the bulk of humanity was all talk. Castro talked a good game of social justice and equality. Then he turned around and enriched his own personal elite and destroyed his country. Depending on how you count, thousands or tens-of-thousands of Cubans were executed during his reign. Tens-of-thousands more died at sea fleeing his utopia. Also depending on how you count, perhaps 10-20% of Cubans left during the last five decades. The equivalent number is if around 30 million Americans felt the country was so bad they moved to Canada, with the understanding that say two million would die during the journey.
The end result of Marx to me is not the idea of social justice or class struggle. It’s the idea that humans can do just about anything to their fellow humans provided they use social justice as the justification of their cause. That’s the great evil of Marx. You can liquidate a few million fellow humans, but as long as your end goals were supposedly noble, folks will let you get away with it and apologize for your actions. That’s an interesting construct, unless you’re one of the broken eggs.
Marx was a pretty smart guy with a lot of interesting ideas. But, ultimately he didn’t understand the end game of his ideas. You can have whatever motivation you want, but when all you do is place all power into the hands of the few, and then provide them with the false moral cover of utopian progress, there is no limit on how cruel and ultimately evil a person can get. It’s why history’s two greatest serial killers are Stalin and Mao, and Hitler doesn’t even come close to their number of murders.
Marx wasn’t alive when all this happened. So you can possibly give him a pass for what subsequently occurred. He wasn’t around to potentially call bullshit to evil men who perverted his ideas and basically used them to do the same evil deeds as one would have seen from an 11th Century Khan. But still, ideas are ideas and they have power. Marx, and history, have to own up to what his ideas meant to the course of human history. Not to blindly celebrate them without deep thought as to the terror they wrought.
More and more I’m seeing this cultural appropriation term. The latest internet rage is apparently against a teenager (as in, not an adult) who wore a gown to the prom in a Chinese style. This is apparently a problem for some people (I guess) because she is not Chinese.
So for some people (I guess) the idea is that only Chinese people or people of Chinese background are allowed to wear gowns in the Chinese style. I think. Well, if that’s what cultural appropriation is? Then cultural appropriation is inhuman.
I thought the whole point of our human journey was to bring us all closer together? I thought that was the whole point of modern progressiveness? How do we do that by adding yet another redline that nobody can cross without offending somebody else?
I’ve seen this cultural appropriation nonsense in other ways too, like with food. So I guess I’m not allowed to write a recipe for a Thai curry or Indian rice because I’m not Indian or Thai? Too bad. I just did it last week. You’ll see them posted on this blog soon enough. If somebody finds it offensive, that’s of course their right, but I won’t give a shit.
I’ve worn a kimono before, and I’m not even Japanese. Oh my, what horror!
Any person, of any color or creed or religion or favorite football team should be able to wear whatever gown they want. I will write whatever recipe I want. I will not bin humanity into 735 boxes that are not allowed to touch each other.
One of the great gifts of life and our human race is to learn, experience, and grow from experiencing backgrounds that are not our own. It’s how we mature as humans and enrich our lives. It makes us better people.
Hey remember when everybody hated Facebook since it trashed their privacy? That was all of three weeks ago. Remember THAT? No? Apparently folks don’t. Nobody cares anymore. Facebook understands that the planet’s attention span (largely because of the internet) is about eight seconds. So Zucky had to keep his cool, talk like a robot, play it safe, and eventually it would all blow over.
It certainly helped that all the rich, self-inflated, but ultimately dumb people in Congress couldn’t tell the difference between a Facebook algorithm and a ham sandwich. These are the guys and gals with the power to regulate Facebook so it doesn’t sell your personal data to a KGB backed hedge fund or a bunch of alien overlords who will one day enslave you using Zucky as the turncoat Emperor of all Humanity.
But Zucky banked that Congress is so gridlocked, and so incompetent that he could ride it out. All he had to do in front of Congress was not stand up, give them all the finger, both barrels, and say, “Fuck you all. I might be the most powerful man on the planet. Do your worst. Foools.” But since he didn’t do that, Facebook continues to win.
After Congress let Zucky handle them like a seven figure donor, coincidentally Facebook’s stock went up north of 5%. That means Zucky’s performance over a two day span increased his personal net worth by over $3B. Never has one human in all of history made so much money so quickly by saying so little to people so incredibly dumb and ineffective at their jobs. It’s the perfect harbinger for where the planet is headed.
It gets better because of a number of tidbits that STILL inexplicably came out during Zucky’s testimony. It goes to show you how easy it would have been for competent questioners to hand Zucky his ass. The guy just doesn’t know how to deal with people getting in his face. It’s why he (I’m not kidding) walks around with a personal security detail close in number to that of the President.
First, whoever you are, Facebook has a profile on you. Whether you have a Facebook account or not, Facebook has a profile on you and is tracking you. They do this in case one day you create an account they already have a head start. But they really do this so they can connect you into the network of networks which involves your friends, family, coworkers, etc, most of whom have Facebook accounts.
The network of networks is what Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc will need to truly let the future AI algorithms do their magic. The idea is that the AI knows what you want for breakfast before you know what you want for breakfast. I’m not joking. It’ll be the digital voice assistant which is the ultimate end game to engage with you on this. Whoever can get to you first, gets your money and loyalty. That’s why the arms race of AI is so hotly contested. As is the race to get ever more amounts of your personal data into one bag.
Second, Zucky emphasized that he sees Facebook as an international company and not an American company. He essentially punted on the “only in America” idea when directly asked about it. As in, Zucky doesn’t believe in the idea that the freedom, entrepreneurial spirit, and rule of law that Facebook was afforded by America makes Facebook an American company. If he’d been born in China or Egypt or Poland he seems to think Facebook would still exist. This is kind of a shocking statement from a guy who runs a company that is (in theory) bound by American law. Especially for a guy who is said to harbor political ambitions.
Third, Zucky also refused to answer Congress on whether or not Facebook tracks its users when the user is not physically logged in. Zucky said he didn’t know. Which was of course a blatant, shameless lie. Facebook tracks its users when they’re not logged in. Similar to how Google tracks its users credit card purchases via a backdoor agreement with many national retailers.
Again, Facebook needs their user’s offline activity tracked because it further feeds the AI networks. But since Congress doesn’t understand any of this, and can’t do basic tasks like pass a budget on time, don’t expect things to change. Facebook will continue to win.
I think folks are waking up to this, that Facebook can’t be stopped. And in one of the first dominoes to fall is the resignation of Jan Koum, the founder of WhatsApp and for the last four years an employee of Facebook. Koum has battled with Facebook’s leadership for years over monetization, ads, WhatsApp’s privacy and encryption, you name it. He’s leaving now. And most of those who see things his way will undoubtedly follow. Then Facebook can finally have its way with WhatsApp.
So if you use WhatsApp (as I unfortunately have to do at the moment overseas; I’ll be deleting it one day after I get home) be prepared for some major changes as the program becomes more invasive, less secure, gets ads, and otherwise further links itself into the Facebook hive. But it’s okay, because in the end it isn’t about you, it’s about the people who will further own your life.
Take Koum for example, he might have lost the battle with Facebook, but in terms of winning the war of life? He has won. Quote:
“In his Facebook post, Koum said he would take some time off from technology to focus on other pursuits, “such as collecting rare air-cooled Porsches, working on my cars and playing ultimate frisbee.””
There are serious, long term concerns to the future of humanity with regards to what the internet is going to do to us all. But to Silicon Valley, in the end, it’s about success. As in, money. To Koum, he might genuinely share the same concerns I do about these matters. But in the end, to Koum, it’s all about those air-cooled Porsches baby!
You would think that living as a comical Bond villain who builds c-grade nuclear weapons and runs labor death camps would get one put into the bad guy column pretty easily. Then folks would treat that person like the living Hitler they were, and we’d respond accordingly.
You’d be wrong.
People are fascinated by Kim Jong-Un in a manner I just find weird. When his sister showed up at the Olympics the press covered her like she was some celebrity Kardashian. Never mind that all those expensive clothes she wore come at the expense of her starving people. Here was a royal figure the press could dig into with glee.
And take a gander at this Versailles picture from the BBC with this bizarre fawning line:
“North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un is to be served a Swiss potato dish at a summit dinner with the South, in an apparent attempt to remind him of school.”
Oh my, what an interesting line. It’s almost like it’s totally cool if you run an extermination camp, as long as you’re unique. Selective morality is awesome! Just ask most of today’s Western elite.
But really, I need Kim to sell my house too. Because the latest fiction is this guy is committed to giving up his nuclear weapons. Kim said so, so China says so, so does Trump, the media, whoever.
People just buy this shit like it’s true, because they really don’t seem to think things through. But, I guess, that’s to be expected when their whole lives are focused upon the most recent controversial Tweet, what Trump said to who, and who is outraged at who today.
But I’ll call this one right now, the celebrity cottage boy in Kim is not giving up his nukes. Daddy played the same game with the planet and got away with it. North Korea still has nukes. We’ve been down this road before.
If you still don’t believe me, or think just now there might be some hope of resolution, then please bask in this entirely unrelated photo of Gaddafi as he was beaten, sexually assaulted, and mutilated by a crowd before expiring. Note the guy nonchalantly smoking in the bottom right corner. In the end, tis nothing to kill a king.
Trust me, Kim’s not giving up his nukes. Kim is playing everybody for fools. Again. That anybody swallows this nonsense as reality tells me Kim’s the guy to sell my home. I could have a swarm of crocodiles living in the attic, Kim could make the sale happen.
Why do we do this other stuff? Why not. If nothing else, football gives us a chance to relax from the deeper issues we post here at TAP. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to a third blog to post (one way or the other) about my opinions on the latest Trump administration rumor.
Either that, or jump over to our sister site. Bask in the high quality website design. Pay no attention whatsoever to the actual written content. Either way.
Unrelated logo of organization with name worse than the Fourth Reich, run already, by idiots.
This one’s pretty straightforward. I made this for me Ma off the top of my head, but was not 100% pleased with it. So when she asked me for the recipe I had to play with it for a few months to get it where I wanted. Sometimes the simplest of recipes are the hardest to muck with.
The term ‘rocket’ is an inside joke known only to me, and seven other members of an obscure cult funded by a Yugoslavian oil baron who moonlights as a vampire slayer. But otherwise, it’s not meant to indicate this dressing is somehow special. It’s not, it’s just a simple salad dressing you can make in 43 seconds.
Enjoy the journey, bask in the exquisite plate presentation generated by a drunk-jaded-elf, observe only the finest and most complex ingredients, bask in the stupidity of food posts and garbage-level-food-photography provided by the most degenerate of blog authors. You’ll not regret it!
My last go I used this dressing over a salad with bacon, hard-boiled eggs, peaches, blue cheese, sliced apple, and tomatoes. I like this salad combo, credit where credit is due, it’s based off an old Emeril recipe that for some reason is now gone from the Food Network website, my printed copy says it’s called “mixed green salad with diced avocado, peaches, crispy bacon, feta cheese, and champagne vinaigrette”.
Let’s begin!
rocket vinaigrette
1/2 cup olive oil
1/4 cup balsamic vinaigrette
1 Tbsp honey
1 Tbsp mustard
salt & pepper
dash hot sauce
Pour all the ingredients into an airtight container, seal, and shake vigorously. Spoon over the tasty salad of your choice.
Store in the fridge for up to one week. Shake again prior to serving.
I enjoy how it all looks before shaking, it’s science, chemistry, and pretty colors all rolled into one.
Use whatever version of oil, balsamic, honey, mustard, and hot sauce you prefer. If you want a sharper taste, double the volume of balsamic, mustard, and hot sauce, though this might be too much for most folks.
I used standard Tabasco in this version, but in other more insane versions I’ve used hot sauces that melt metal and it adds a wonderful adventure to your salad journey. Salad is more exciting when the dressing tingles your lips with burning.
Enjoy life!
Why do we do this other stuff? Why not. If nothing else, football gives us a chance to relax from the deeper issues we post here at TAP. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to a third blog to post (one way or the other) about my opinions on the latest Israeli-Palestinian violence.
Either that, or jump over to our sister site. Bask in the high quality website design. Pay no attention whatsoever to the actual written content. Either way.
Unrelated photograph of insane man.
We had to pick a dish to bring for the work potluck. I chose potato salad, because it was easier than telling work I don’t like them and refusing to play. So we decided to spice things up and make a potato salad that nobody on the planet had ever had before.
stupid work potato salad
8 strips bacon, diced
1 yellow onion, diced
1 Tbsp brown sugar
2 lbs mixed potatoes, cubed
1/8 cup white wine vinegar
6 garlic cloves, mined
1 lemon, juiced
salt & pepper
1 Tbsp paprika
1 Tbsp olive oil
4 eggs
2 Tbsp mustard
1 cup mayo
2 Tbsp sriracha
1/4 cup capers
1/2 cup parmesan
cook the bacon over medium-high heat in a saute pan until it’s nicely done, remove bacon and set aside; discard all but about 1 Tbsp of the bacon fat from the pan; add the onion and cook until browned, add the brown sugar, lower the heat, and slowly caramelize the onions
preheat the oven to 375 degrees; wash the cubed potatoes in a colander, add them to a bowl and toss with the vinegar, garlic, 1/2 of the lemon juice, salt & pepper, paprika, and olive oil; dump the potato mixture on a baking sheet covered with aluminum foil and roast, stirring once, for about a half-hour until the potatoes are crispy but not overly brown
meanwhile, hard boil the eggs, cool them in the fridge, then peel and dice them
in a large bowl, add the potatoes, then add the mustard, mayo, sriracha, capers, remaining lemon juice, onion, bacon, eggs, and cheese, mix them all up until it’s a nice salad; serve immediately hot, or later on cold
Let’s begin!
Cube the potatoes to a size you like and then wash them in a colander to get the starch off. In a large mixing bowl douse the potatoes with the vinegar, garlic, juice of half the lemon, salt, pepper, paprika, and olive oil.
Cut the garlic to a size you like. I minced it because you never know how much folks do or do not like garlic. But, if I’d been cooking for myself I’d probably just leave the garlic cloves whole and roast them as is.
Make sure you mix up the bowl really well. You want the paprika, vinegar, and olive oil to really coat all the potatoes. After that, aluminum foil on a baking sheet and bake them.
Do not pre-grease the aluminum foil. As you stir them yes, they may tend to stick to the foil so don’t make the mistake of not stirring them at all during the roasting. You want the potatoes to be brown but not overly done, just slightly still firm. It’s potato salad and not true fully roasted browned potatoes.
You’ve got regular old bacon and hard boiled eggs which are staples of many potato salads. I add caramelized onions because I love them and want to share that love with all humanity.
When you’re done making the bacon, eggs, onions, and potatoes, it’s time to mix it all together with the remaining ingredients.
Use whatever mustard and mayo you prefer. The sriracha is flexible with another hot sauce if you want. Go with what you like. But please put some kind of sauce in there because it’s money and not boring.
The capers add a nice extra touch for my taste. If you don’t like capers, you can skip this part.
As with before, make sure you really get a good mix in the bowl so all the sauces coat the potatoes all over.
You can serve this immediately while it’s hot, or chill it and serve later cold.
Be advised, this will not really keep in the fridge for more than about two or three days. After that time, the moisture starts to separate from the potato mixture and the salad becomes dry and tough.
This is easily tackled by reheating the mixture in the microwave for about a minute to loosen it up again. But, generally speaking, I’d eat it all within two days for max tastiness.
Enjoy life!
Well, it’s been two months since my employer (dressed as an evil smiling clown) black bagged me in the middle of the night and sent me abroad. And my precious, precious doggies are doing well with my host family, but I miss them. I also miss my kitchen. A lot.
This has ended up being a far bigger issue than I would have expected. If you cook regularly, we all have our kitchens. We know them. It’s downright transparent. You might make an alteration here and there, but it’s essentially static. The dynamic factor is the food.
We also have what I guess you can call guest kitchens. For example I cook at my Ma’s for me Ma all the time. I know that kitchen like the back of my hand. It means nothing for me to cook over there as if it was my own.
So I guess I just kind of assumed since work wasn’t sending me to the middle of Vlad’s Siberia wonderland or a tiger filled jungle that I’d have a real kitchen, figure it out, and it would be fine. Right? Nope. But, why?
1) Bare Basics
Because I’m abroad for a limited time I didn’t get to bring my stuff. Work has a local contract (which wouldn’t pass most Western anti-corruption standards) to provide me the very bare bones basics at my apartment. This means I’ve got some plates, a few bowls, and six sad water glasses. I’ve also got some D grade pots and pans manufactured in Yugoslavia Circa 1989.
You can forget the most benign of kitchen items are important to you, until they don’t exist. Out here I have bowls, but they’re of a shallow nature, and hold only enough liquid for a six year old’s soup I made curry and the broth was a rather light consistency. Given the small bowl size I had hardly any food in there.
In frustration, I ended up using a pot as my eating bowl instead. I’m there eating straight out of the pot and I look over and there’s this Viking ghost sitting next to me doing the same. He hoists his drinking horn in a toast, I hoist my cheap ass local beer can made of cadmium. Cheers my Viking brother, I’ve gone back in time. It burns. The spicy curry, not the cadmium, not yet anyways.
How about spices? How about starting from zero, nothing. At home I might have 50 spices of a variety that would make a 16th Century Portuguese smuggler angry and pull his cutlass. Out here I had a bare cupboard. I’ve methodically replenished jar by jar for weeks.
At first I didn’t get new measuring cups because I didn’t want to buy new ones. I eyed everything. Then I realized you really can’t write proper recipes without them. So I had to go buy new measuring cups I didn’t want to purchase.
Remember grating cheese or vegetables? This is a pretty standard task, right? But what happens when you don’t have a grater? You have to make a tactical decision on whether it’s important enough to buy a new grater. Countless, countless decisions need to be made on how important things and tools are to you.
So you’re probably like, well, whatever man, just go buy all this stuff. It’ll be fun, right? But, …
2) Waste
I already have a grater, and spices, and bowls, and whatever back home. So I’m going to buy new items to satisfy my kitchen needs out here, for what, one year and some change? I had to buy a new colander because you essentially can’t cook without one.
But I’ve got like five or six different sized colander’s back home. So this was an unnecessary purchase. I felt really bad buying it even though I knew I absolutely needed it. So what do I do with it after I’m done here? Ship it home? I need a seventh colander less than a mercenary elf assassin.
So I guess I’ll ship the new one home, and donate one of my older colanders to charity? I guess?
It’s not that big a deal for these minor tools I suppose. A colander or a peeler or a wooden spoon are small, relatively cheap, and just not that big of an impact to anything. But, …
3) Gear
For the first few years of my cooking journey I didn’t really employ gear. You need good knives, good pans, a large steel mixing bowl, etc. For a long while I never used things like a food processor, blender, spice grinder, any of that. But once I did, and learned how to use them well. They became essential tools.
This is even truer for me because I like to cook and experiment with various cuisines from around the globe. Now without this gear I feel my powers are reduced. There’s less magic to be made. Buying a new colander I don’t need is minor waste. Buying a new food processor that costs north of three figures? I haven’t done that. I won’t do that.
And so in the meantime: I’m in a dark cave, behind me are a bunch of kidnapped urchin children I’m rescuing. The cursed bear is up on his hind legs, roaring, foaming with delight, urchins are screaming in terror. “I’ll deal with him,” I firmly state. I reach for my sorcerer wand, and nothing is there. Then the urchins are running and screaming as the bear rips me in half. But, …
4) The Past
I don’t know how my Grandparents did it. It’s weird to think about. The number one thing I typically wonder is how they cooked all that delicious food with so little counter space. The answer is I think they did a ton of prep actually at the kitchen table. In those days the table was actually right in the kitchen.
My Grandmother had a double stack oven, the kind where you have two whole elements you could set to different temperatures. So that capability was awesome, and actually in excess of what most kitchens have today. But they didn’t have fancy tools like food processors or spice grinders. They probably didn’t let a of lack spice jars bother them as much as it does me.
So it’s tough to know how much of my current kitchen is real legitimate frustration on my part, and how much of it is I’m an amateur cook who’s a spoiled brat. I’m still cooking and cooking well out here, it’s just a slog at times with these various limitations. It sucks when you plan a meal, you’re in the zone, and you reach for (x) and you’ve entirely forgotten you don’t have it.
So you flex, and get it done, and the food tastes great. But it was much harder to do, and so there’s a commensurate lapse in enjoyment.
Not sure how I feel about all this. But that’s about it. I miss my dogs. I really miss my family and friends. I’ll get the kitchen back too, and that’ll be nice.
In the meantime, it’s been a good long while since I put a recipe up here. More on that, and soon. After all, work made me.
The Arcturus Project 