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  1. Peaches and Cream Cobbler

    One of my favorite co-workers - Peggy - brought this in one day and was so nice to share the recipe with me.

    Ingredients for the cobbler:

    1 cup plus 1 tablespoon sugar
    3 tablespoons cornstarch
    1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
    1/2 teaspoon grated lemon peel
    6 cups sliced fresh peaches or nectarines

    Ingredients for the crust:

    1 cup all-purpose flour
    1/4 cup sugar
    2 teaspoon baking powder
    1/4 cup (1/2 stick) unsalted butter
    1/4 cup butter-flavored shortening
    1/3 cup milk

    Ingredients for the cream topping:

    8-ounce package cream cheese, softened
    1/4 cup superfine sugar
    1 teaspoon vanilla
    1/2 cup milk


    Directions:

    Preheat oven to 375 F (190 C).

    Prepare cobbler crust: combine flour, sugar and baking powder in mixing bowl. Cut in butter and shortening until mixture resembles fine crumbs. Stir in milk with fork, just until dough hold together. Set aside.

    Combine 1 cup sugar, cornstarch, nutmeg, lemon peel and peaches in large saucepan and cook, stirring with wooden spoon, until mixture thickens and boils.

    Pour into ungreased 8-inch square baking dish.

    Drop equal sized spoonfuls of cobbler crust over peach mixture. Sprinkle remaining tablespoon sugar over dough.

    Bake until golden brown, 35 to 40 minutes.

    While the cobbler bakes, prepare cream topping.

    Beat cream cheese, sugar, and vanilla together until smooth. Slowly blend in milk.

    Serve cobbler warm with cream topping.

    Enjoy!!



    Tips: I use cinnamon instead of nutmeg for the cobbler mixture and added a bit of vanilla to the crust.

    The cobbler has the tendency to boil over a bit. Always use a cookie sheet under the baking dish.
  2. The News Has Been Cancelled

    What have you been seeing on your favorite "news" outlets lately? The budget fight? A dead blond girl in a ravine? The 2012 GOP campaign shoutfest?

    Have you seen this:

    http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540...79119#44679119

    It's mildly surprising that MSNBC finally caught up with a story that's been raging -- and ignored by the mainstream media -- for weeks now. I have a theory on it and I'll get to that in a minute.

    But first, to address the actions of the "white shirts" in the NYPD.

    There's an ancient rule in propaganda that when you begin to lose control of the story, you change the conversation. To my eye, that's what's being attempted here. The unprovoked actions of the police department clearly aren't random or even those of rogue actors. Here's why: watch closely and you'll see they're being done in a calculated fashion by the commanders -- not the rank and file. This is important, so please stick with me here. In military organizations, there's something known as the "need to know" (the NYPD has been fully militarized since 9-11). If you're low on the totem pole, you don't get anywhere NEAR the same access to the type of information your superiors (who hold the SAME clearance) do. There are very good operational security reasons for this. Secrets never remain secrets for long, but the half-life of a secret depends on how many people are in on it initially. If 10 people know a secret, then its half life (the probability of it being a widely disseminated or "open secret") is the square root of the same info that 5 people initially knew.

    So, it stands to reason that the blue-collar police knew nothing of the plans of a select group of white shirts to incite violence.

    Why would Police incite violence? Wouldn't they want law & order? Yes. Most of them -- because they're concerned with their own physical safety. But for those high ...
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  3. Click Your Heels and Say It Three Times: "There Will Always Be Oil"

    Have you been wondering where the next big bubble is going to pop up?

    Well, The Wall Street Journal has just trotted out an old energy industry whore to let us in on the secret: domestic "liquids" production. Sounds like we need to be convinced to dump all those dollars sitting on the sidelines (small investors are fleeing the stock market in droves, at the moment) into -- you guessed it: energy stocks.

    You see, every time the economy takes a dump, like oh, right now -- energy companies take a disproportionately large hit for what I hope are obvious reasons. But there's a problem: all those domestic liquid "plays" in North Dakota, Oklahoma, and Texas are exceedingly expensive to develop. So, they need more capital than ever in the face of plummeting market capitalizations.

    Hmmm. Gee, you don't suppose they'd roll out an old whore to tell us how wonderful life is going to be if we just give them all our money to go get the oil those nasty environmentalists have been selfishly keeping locked up all these years. Would they?

    You don't suppose a geophysicist with years of experience in the oil industry including the Gulf of Mexico, the North Sea and China would have something to say about all this? As it turns out, he does.

    Read it and weep. This makes me very suspicious of everything related to energy at the moment. Oh, I'm sure we'll see "investments" touted as a "sure thing" all over the air waves in the near future. Color me skeptical.
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  4. The Myth of The Free Market

    The reason we have the term "Market Makers" is because, well, there are people who drive (make) the markets. The existence of the term disproves the notion that markets can ever be truly free.

    Markets will always exist in human affairs. The Soviet Union's mass experiment/failure with grand mal collectivization pretty much proved (ironically) that Marx was, in fact, correct about the human propensity concentrate wealth in the hands of a few, until you reach a Minsky Moment and everything collapses. In short, they practiced Marxism, just not in the way the revolutionary peons may have intended.

    So who controls our markets, you may ask?

    Here's your answer. What's chilling about this video, is that the interviewee comes right out and admits it.

    Welcome, my friends, to the official notification that all pretense of local (nation-state) governance has been dropped. As if the GOP debates as of late haven't proved it beyond a shadow of a doubt, but I digress.

    Earlier this week, I posted in the forums an exhaustive study showing that all of the world's wealth, power and resources are concentrated into a small global Keiretsu.

    These are the market makers, and whether you believe the EMU crisis was "accidental" or not, it is clear that it's untenable and unfixable.

    In my opinion, the insiders' arrogance puts all of us at extreme risk of events cascading out of anyone's control. To my (admittedly jaundiced) eye, it looks as though greed combined with hubris and a false sense of omnipotence at the top will cause individual actors to unthinkingly and unblinkingly act in profoundly irresponsible ways. I believe they've learned nothing from 2008. Rather, they're busy polishing their fingernails on their lapels and congratulating themselves on their "smartest guy in the room" status.

    I bothered to write the blog post in hopes that its readers will remember ...
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  5. The Monday Blues.

    So, my work laptop crashed, it's dead, it's an over sized paper weight now. Which meant I had to be at work super early to do my releases and reports. OH but wait, that sounds too easy right?

    So, the alarm goes off and I snooze until 7:30. I jump up and I am out the door in 8 minutes. Fucking record. No coffee, no lunch, no breakfast and no mother fucking pain pills.

    I get in traffic, finally get to work at 8:10. Fifty minutes before we start business, this will give me time to get my releases done. I get here and my badge will not work. Security lets me in and lectures me because my badge is bent and that is why it will not work. He tells me to come back in 30 minutes to get a new one, that someone will have to let me in the office, he cant.

    I come upstairs and no one is here to let me in, so I go back down to the security desk and he says, your badge isn't broke, your company has it set where no one can come in until 8:30.

    Do you know how fucking pissed I would have been had I gotten here at 7 like I was trying to?

    So, IT isn't here yet, my boss isn't here yet, I have had nothing to eat, no coffee and I am fucking hurting. OH and I cannot do my reports because the templates are on my fucking laptop... you know the OVER SIZED FUCKING PAPER WEIGHT!!!!!!
    Tags: blues, monday, work
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