Joan Didion dies at 87

The New Neo Posted on by

RIP.

Didion specialized in the non-fiction essay, one of my favorite genres. I read her 1968 work Slouching Towards Bethlehem (title taken from Yeats’ wonderful poem “The Second Coming”) a couple of years after it came out and admired it greatly, re-reading it several times. That was so long ago, though, that I no longer remember the details. What I do remember is how well-written it was, and what a sense of anxious foreboding it conveyed.

That was my own feeling about the 1960s, too.

I later read her very sad memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, about the sudden death of her husband John Gregory Dunne and the illness of her daughter (who also died not long after the book was written). That was over fifteen years ago. Her obituaries say that she died of “complications from “Parkinson’s disease,” so she also had that affliction. Difficult.

Lebkuchen time!

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: Regulars here may remember that most years I put up a family Christmas recipe. And here it is again.]

This recipe was brought over from Germany sometime in the mid-1800s, and was my favorite of all the wonderful treats cooked by my great-aunt, a baker of rare gifts. She and my great-uncle were not only exceptionally wonderful people, but to my childish and wondering eyes they looked very much like Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus.

The name of the treat is lebkuchen, but it’s quite a different one from the traditional recipe, which I don’t much care for. This is sweet and dense, can be made ahead, and keeps very well when stored in tins.

Flora’s Lebkuchen:

(preheat the oven to 375 degrees)

1 pound dark brown sugar
4 eggs
2 cups flour
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 cup chopped walnuts
4 oz. chopped dates
1 cup raisins
1 tsp. orange juice
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 tsp. almond extract
1 tsp. lemon juice

Sift the dry ingredients together (flour, baking soda, baking powder, cinnamon).

Beat the eggs and brown sugar together with a rotary beater till the mixture forms the ribbon. Add the orange juice, lemon juice, and extracts to it.

Add the dry mixture to it, a little at a time, stirring.

Add the raisins, dates, and walnuts.

Grease and flour two 8 X 8 cake pans [NOTE: In previous years I sometimes said 9 X 9, but 8 X 8 is actually much better and makes for a far moister product.] Put batter in pans and bake for about 25 minutes (or a little less; test the cake with a cake tester at 21 or 22 minutes to see if it’s done yet). You don’t want it to get too dark and dry on the edges, but the middle can’t still be wet when tested.

Meanwhile, make the frosting.

Melt about 6 Tbs. of unsalted butter and add 2 Tbs. hot milk, and 1 Tbs. almond extract. Add enough confectioner’s sugar to make a frosting of spreading consistency (the recipe says “2 cups,” but I’ve always noticed that’s not exactly correct). You can make even more frosting if you like a lot of frosting.

Let cake cool to at least lukewarm, and spread generously with the frosting. Then cut into small pieces and store (or eat!).

Enjoy!

Chile: As it will be in the future…

The New Neo Posted on by

…it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire.

Chile has had an election, and its new president will be 35-year-old leftist Gabriel Boric. There were originally seven candidates in the first round of the election, and the frontrunner was the more conservative Jose Antonio Kast. But in the second round, the original number-two finisher, Boric, won by a large margin. The legislature, however, seems more evenly split.

[Boric] is set to become the youngest president in Chile’s history and second youngest state leader in the world, as well as the president elected with the largest number of votes in the country’s history.

What are Boric’s stated plans?:

Once the most stable economy in Latin America, Chile has one of the world’s largest income gaps, with 1% of the population owning 25% of the country’s wealth, according to the United Nations.

Mr Boric has promised to address this inequality by expanding social rights and reforming Chile’s pension and healthcare systems, as well as reducing the work week from 45 to 40 hours, and boosting green investment.

The president-elect also promised to block a controversial proposed mining project which he said would destroy communities and the national environment.

Chile’s currency, the peso, plunged to a record low against the US dollar after Mr Boric’s victory. Stock markets fell by 10%, with mining stocks performing particularly badly.

Investors are worried stability and profits will suffer as a result of higher taxes and tighter government regulation of business.

I would be worried too, with a 35-year-old leftist activist in charge.

ADDENDUM: Boric isn’t an Israel fan, to say the least:

Boric’s criticism of Israel is longstanding. As a lawmaker, he supported a bill proposing to boycott Israeli goods from the Golan, West Bank settlements, and areas of Jerusalem that came under in Israeli control in 1967.

And during the campaign, many members of the community expressed concern over that, along with what they said was a pattern of demanding that local Jews condemn Israeli policy.

“We are of course willing to accept reasonable criticism about Israel, but what we hear from Boric is that Israel is a ‘genocidal’ and ‘murderous’ state,” Gabriel Zaliasnik, a prominent member of Chile’s Jewish community, told Israel’s Haaretz daily last week. “To make matters worse, he blames our Jewish community for Israel’s actions.”…

Some Chilean Jews fear Boric intends to promote his supporter, Daniel Jadue, a member of Chile’s Communist Party of Palestinian descent, who has declined to explain why his high school yearbook lists him as “an antisemite” who will “clean the city of Jews.” He has called the Jewish Community of Chile the “Zionist Community of Chile,” and Chilean Jews have called him an antisemite. Jadue has denied the charge, arguing that he himself is a Semite, as he is Arab.

There aren’t many Jews in Chile. Estimates are about 18,000 or a little bit more, which is a tiny fraction of Chile’s 19 million people. On the other hand, you may be surprised to learn – as I was – that there are considerably more Palestinians there, and that they tend to be highly successful and influential. Most of them are not recent arrivals, either, and for the most part they are Christian rather than Muslim:

The Palestinian community in Chile is believed to be the largest Palestinian community outside of the Arab world. Estimates of the number of Palestinian descendants in Chile range from 450,000 to 500,000. The effects of their migration are widely visible…

Many of the immigrants were very poor and illiterate and had to take loans to pay their travel costs. Once in Chile, Palestinians settled largely in the marginal areas of cities and worked as small merchants. In the 1950s by the time of the second government of Carlos Ibáñez del Campo many Palestinian-Chileans had acquired substantial economic as well as political power in Chile, some working as deputies, ministers or ambassadors…

The vast majority of the Palestinian community in Chile follow Christianity. The largest denomination is Orthodox Christian followed by Roman Catholic, and in fact, the number of Palestinian Christians in the diaspora in Chile alone exceeds the number of those who have remained in their homeland.

Interesting.

More on the January 6th mystery men

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve written quite a few previous posts on the idea that government-agent-generated entrapment may have been a big part of the January 6th proceedings. Much of the evidence for this theory is that there are quite a few men who have not been charged with anything and are identifiable (their faces were uncovered) and who seem to have had starring roles in egging the crowd on that day. Several of them even obliterated the barriers so that most people didn’t know that they were trespassing when they entered the Capitol grounds and then the building.

One would think these men in leadership roles would be among the people most pursued by the FBI and the DOJ, and slapped with serious charges. And yet – crickets.

Revolver has been doing good work on this right along, and now they’e published a lengthy in-depth article complete with videos. It’s very intriguing and very troubling. If there’s an innocent explanation, it certainly would be good to hear it.

Viva Frei discusses the Revolver piece here:

Unsurprisingly, Merrick Garland has declined to address the issue:

This makes me a bit uneasy, I must say

The New Neo Posted on by

Science marches on:

A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in Australia and the U.K. has taught a small mass of human brain cells to play the video game Pong…

The mass, which the researchers call a cyborg, was created by placing human stem cells on top of a micro-electric array, where they grew into brain cells. In their configuration, the cells can both stimulate other cells and read the activity of others around them. Electrical signals are sent to the array to tell them where the ball is located. If electrodes to the right of a cluster fire, for example, the brain cells know that the ball is to their left. The distance of the signal gives the cells information regarding frequency. As with real Pong, the paddle can only move left and right. And also like the real game, the goal is to move the paddle into the path of the ball.

The cyborg was taught to play the game in the same way as are humans—by playing the game repeatedly to learn how to move the paddle in ways that result in success. In this case, it was feedback in the form of electrical signals in the electrodes.

The researchers found that the system was able to learn how to play the game in about five minutes—significantly faster than artificial intelligence machines. They note that the skill level of the system was far lower than for humans or AI systems, however.

I’ll be even more impressed when it graduates to Mario Brothers.

California taxation is killing the legal pot industry

The New Neo Posted on by

Not really a surprise, is it?:

Leading California cannabis companies warned Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday that the state’s legal industry was on the verge of collapse and needed immediate tax cuts and a rapid expansion of retail outlets to steady the shaky marketplace.

The letter signed by more than two dozen executives, industry officials and legalization advocates followed years of complaints that the heavily taxed and regulated industry was unable to compete with the widespread illegal economy, where consumer prices are far lower and sales are double or triple the legal business.

It’s partly the taxes, of course. California is well known for that sort of thing. But the reason there aren’t more dispensaries is that localities often vote against them. Are the letter-writers proposing the government force towns and cities to allow dispensaries that they don’t want? I don’t see how else it could happen.

Biden and COVID

The New Neo Posted on by

A lot of things puzzle me, and one of the big ones – although I should know better than to be surprised by it – is why anyone would have believed candidate Joe Biden when he said, in October of 2020:

It was an obvious absurdity, a rhetorical boast that not only was untrue, but had to be untrue. He didn’t offer anything much that he would do to accomplish this magical feat other than things Trump had already done – except for maybe a mask mandate (I seem to recall him shifting back and forth on that), which was never going to “shut down the virus” and everyone knew it.

And yet, people believed. They believed because they wanted to, but mostly because they had bought the “It’s all Trump’s fault!!” garbage. I have long been stunned by the susceptibility of even intelligent people to propaganda, but it cannot be denied.

By the way, whether more Americans have died of COVID (or “with” COVID) under Biden depends on when you start counting. But at any rate, the numbers are close and the gap will almost certainly be closed if such a gap exists, and of course under Biden we’ve had vaccination whereas under Trump there was no vaccination.

Now we have the Omicron variant, which is starting to become common and now accounts for most of the newly-diagnosed cases in the US, especially in certain regions. That could be a really good thing, if Omicron is as mild as some reports indicate. But we simply don’t know yet – although I think we should know, since Omicron has been around in some countries for over a month. I keep reading articles that say we don’t have enough data, and then go on to scaremonger. So I’ll just say the jury is out on it, but indications are somewhat encouraging so far.

Today Biden gave a COVID speech. I don’t watch his speeches, but here’s a report:

Most notably, the government plans to buy a half-billion at-home COVID test kits and mail them to people who want them, with deliveries beginning in January…

In January, the government will also start a website where people can order at-home tests to be delivered for free.

That makes a certain amount of sense. Why wait with other possibly-infected people in order to be tested?

I spent several hours last night trying to get some objective facts about Omicron. Other than the fact that it was becoming much more common in the US, there was really very little. It’s clear that it doesn’t spare the vaccinated. There also seems to be a trend towards milder cases. But are they milder in the vaccinated than in the unvaccinated? That was true for Delta, but I can’t find any indication of whether it’s true for Omicron.

Biden urged people to get vaccinated, of course. I have no problem with urging people to do that; it does seem to mitigate severity for previous variants, on average. As I’ve stated many times before, I’m against vaccine mandates.

Interestingly, Trump announced the other day that he’s had a booster. I assume he’s also had two previous vaccines, despite also having had COVID. Apparently, indications are that having had COVID plus vaccination yields even more protection.

An aside: I personally know four unvaccinated people fairly well. One would like to be vaccinated but has a serious medical condition which means she cannot be. The other three are all on the left politically, and are rather extreme health nuts of the sort who won’t eat genetically altered food and who won’t drink tap water. Make of that what you will.

[NOTE: By the way, I don’t give much credit to results from the UK on Omicron or other variants, because a significant number of people there had the rather ineffective AstraZeneca vaccine, which wasn’t ever given in the US.]

Milan Kundera on the left’s dream

The New Neo Posted on by

From The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera:

Totalitarianism is not only hell, but all the dream of paradise– the age-old dream of a world where everybody would live in harmony, united by a single common will and faith, without secrets from one another. Andre Breton, too, dreamed of this paradise when he talked about the glass house in which he longed to live. If totalitarianism did not exploit these archetypes, which are deep inside us all and rooted deep in all religions, it could never attract so many people, especially during the early phases of its existence. Once the dream of paradise starts to turn into reality, however, here and there people begin to crop up who stand in its way. and so the rulers of paradise must build a little gulag on the side of Eden. In the course of time this gulag grows ever bigger and more perfect, while the adjoining paradise gets even smaller and poorer.

3rd grade students in DC school psychologically abused by librarian

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a sickening story:

A staff member at a Washington DC school has been suspended after making third-grade children reenact scenes from the Holocaust, including getting them to pretend to dig mass graves and shoot victims, and telling them the Germans were angry “because the Jews ruined Christmas,” parents and officials said Sunday…

“There was a lot of sobbing and crying and distress and then momentarily we got an email to say that the children had reenacted the Holocaust,” one parent told the Fox5DC TV station. “This included the trains, dying in gas chambers, playing Hitler and mass graves.”

Some children were given specific roles, including one Jewish child who was told to portray Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and then to pretend to commit suicide at the end of the exercise, as Hitler did, the parent of the child told the Post.

The instructor told the children not to tell anyone, but they did. She has been suspended, pending an investigation.

This does seem to have been the idiosyncratic decision of one person rather than any approved official pedagogical device. The sad thing, though is that some of the actual programs one hears about these days are not far behind in terms of damage done to children.

It turns out this woman had quite a history. You might say she never should have been hired in the first place. For example:

The librarian — identified as Kimberlynn Jurkowski — was accused in a tutoring scam in New Jersey that defrauded the Atlantic City school district of thousands of dollars and had her teaching licenses suspended for three years by the state Department of Education in 2017…

A former Hamilton, Atlantic County resident, Jurkowski faced charges of theft by deception and fraud for allegedly billing the Hamilton school district for tutoring services for her two children that was never performed, according to the state’s order of suspension…

In December 2013, Jurkowski and Spencer were accepted into a pretrial intervention program for first-time offenders for six months, and Jurkowski was forced to forfeit her employment in the school district, according to the Department of Education ruling.

Does the DC school system check on these things before hiring someone? Or are they that desperate?

[ADDENDUM: More information and a photo of Jurkowski can be found here.]