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Quote of the Day

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Quote of the Day

All the same, that the dollar’s reign as the world’s dominant currency is drawing to a close is no longer in doubt.
– Jeremy Warner, The Telegraph, The dollar is dead, long live the renminbi

It’s not that bad.

Yet.

The Yuan is heavily tied to China’s ownership of America’s debt. If When the value of the dollar plummets, China will be hard hit, and they own so much of our debt that dumping it hurts them as much (or more) that it would hurt us.

Still, our doubling of the money supply will (must) eventually have an effect, and it won’t be good. And it makes me wonder how much longer oil will be valued in dollars versus another currency, such as the Euro.

Recipe Blogging

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Recipe Blogging

It seems to be all the rage among other gunbloggers. I’m actually a fairly enthusiastic cook, but I don’t do anything really fancy. For my initial foray into recipe blogging, I will give you the simplest bread recipe I know: Beer bread.

Now I don’t drink, but I will use alcoholic beverages in recipes (white wine in my chicken & wild rice; red in salisbury bourguignon; beer in both marinades and in this recipe).

Ingredients:

3C Self-rising flour (must use self-rising, not all-purpose)
3Tbs sugar
12 oz beer – use something you’d otherwise be willing to drink.

1 regular size bread pan is required.

Preheat the oven to 350ºF. Mix the flour and the sugar in the bread pan. Pour in the beer, and stir until all of the dry components are thorougly mixed. The result should be a thick batter. Scrape down the sides of the bread pan so the batter is uniform across the bottom of the pan. Bake at 350º for one hour.

No kneading, no rising, not much to clean up, just bread. It’s heavy, but damned tasty. Last night I picked up a 2lb package of self-rising and a 24 oz. Bud. I also got three of those little disposable bread pans you use for banana bread and the like. Two lbs. of flour is right at six cups. I doubled the batch and it made three perfect mini-loaves. One was dinner last night. This morning I toasted some under the broiler in the oven. Give it a try.

UPDATE: Thanks to commenter Hammerbach, you CAN use all-purpose flour, just add 1-½ tsp of baking powder (not baking soda) and ½ tsp of salt to each cup of all-purpose flour to make it self-rising. Mix thoroughly before adding wet ingredients.

Quote of the Day

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Quote of the Day

During the Bush years, we constantly heard the refrain, pushed especially by Paul Krugman, that the government was doing incompetent and corrupt things because conservative Republicans “don’t believe in” government. Put the government in the hands of true-believing liberal Democrats, and incompetence and corruption will virtually disappear.

This always struck me as foolish, in part because the problems with government competence and integrity are structural, not individual, and in part because it required one to believe Krugman’s fantasy that the Republican elite during the Bush years was dominated by wild-eyed libertarians intent on drowning the government in a bathtub, or something like that.

—

It’s amusing to get accused of anti-Democrat “partisanship” in the comments for a post whose theme is that when given power the Democrats are just as corrupt and incompetent as the Republicans.

– David Bernstein, The Volokh Conspiracy, Because the Democrats “Believe In” Government

Remind you of anyone?

Bueller?

As Promised

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As Promised

Here are some pictures of my new (20 year old) Pony. (Look! A pony! 😉


It’s originally an El Paso car, but it ended up in Surprise, AZ a few years ago, made a short trip to Missouri, and then came back to Arizona for me to buy. Like I said, not bad from twenty feet away, but it needs a lot of stuff both inside and out. Should be fun!

Tit-for-Tat

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For those unfamiliar, John C. Dvorak is a tech-head writer, a contributor to PC Magazine (which is where I first found him) and according to Wikipedia:

Dvorak has been a columnist for Boardwatch, Forbes, Forbes.com, MacUser, MicroTimes, PC/Computing, Barron’s Magazine, Smart Business, and Vancouver Sun. (The MicroTimes column ran under the banner Dvorak’s Last Column.) He has written for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, MacMania Networks, International Herald Tribune, San Francisco Examiner and The Philadelphia Inquirer among numerous other publications.

I occasionally check his blog, and I did today, finding two posts interestingly juxtaposed. The first one I came to was this one: School kids taught to praise Obama (Video). Apparently he found it a bit . . . disturbing, as he commented:

Expect this to show up on Beck, O’Reilly and the other right-wingers. Hmm… could this have been staged by them?

The next post in line was the story of the Census taker in Kentucky found hanging from a tree (I would say “hanged” but we don’t know yet if that was the cause of death, or just display). That piece he entitled Murdering federal workers still an acceptable all-American sport? and commented:

Census work wasn’t Sparkman’s full-time job. He also was a substitute teacher and an Eagle Scout who volunteered for the Boy Scouts.

Obviously part of the Socialist Conspiracy.

I have to ask, tit-for-tat, could this have been perpetrated by Leftist ACORN workers (but I repeat myself) to impugn the Right and draw off some of the attention they’ve been getting recently? After all, ACORN workers were going to be doing census work until the scandals broke.

I mean, it only seems logical to ask, given Dvorak’s first suggestion.

Oh, I forgot – only the RIGHT WING does character-assassination and real murder! Silly me!