Heating Lard Vs. Heating Water

I was making roux last night from lard and flour and as I stood there stirring, listening to God Music and drinking a Harp, I wondered what was going on in the pot in terms of heat transfer.

First, there would have been almost no temperature variations within the roux. My stirring made sure of that. So the roux was of even temperature with two boundaries - one of the pot and the other of the air. The pot, being cast iron, wasn't quite even in temperature, but probably close enough where it contacted the roux. Same with the air.

Consulting an engineering table, I discovered that lard is almost twice as easy to heat up as water. It takes 1 calorie per gram of water to raise it 1 degree C. It takes 0.54 calories per gram of lard. I'm way rusty on my heat transfer calculations, but to me that says the lard would have been closer to the temperature of the pot than the temperature of the air as compared to what a pot of water would have been.

I'm discounting the effects of the flour suspended in the lard, which is probably a tragic mistake. Flour needs only 0.38 calories per gram to go up one degree Celsius. That suggests roux - an even mix of flour and lard - would be closer still to the temperature of the pot.

Maybe Ohioan at Heart or Mut could lend a hand here. They're a lot closer to the worlds of science and engineering than I am right now.

Preventing The Unicorn Invasion

President Obama put his name to a column recently wherein he details his plans to keep us safe from unicorns.

On Tuesday, I unveiled a new national plan to confront unicorns. It's a plan that will reduce carbon pollution to prevent the worst effects of unicorns, prepare our country for the effects we can't stop, and lead the world in combating the growing threat of a unicorn attack.

The science is settled. Unicorns are out there, massing for an assault on our country and our way of life. Thank Gaia we've got a president who recognizes the threat.

The sparkly rainbow ones are the most dangerous.

Ecuador Better Not Mess With Us

... because if they do, we'll send the US Navy down there to teach them a lesson.

Ecuador has been acting up. They're thumbing their noses at President Obama and telling him to get lost when it comes to Eric Snowden and some other stuff, too. Well, we're not going to take that kind of guff from a bunch of Latin American pipsqueaks, no sir. Dig what we're going to send them*.

Pretty frightening, no?

* - We'll send them the video, not the fleet. Due to military budget cuts to pay for green energy subsidies, free contraceptives for 30-year-old coeds and IRS employee conferences where they pour over tax returns from Dawn Wildman and Mut, we can't afford to send any real, you know, ships. Instead, we'll just email them a link to that video. Tough times demand tough action.

Gay Marriage: The Biggest Domestic Issue Of Our Time

It's high time we got rid of the hate and stood strong with couples of grown men or grown women who have no dependents and love each other.

I can't sleep at night because of the injustices they face.

Pope Francis In The Hood

Chart of the Week

... comes from Zerohedge.

Bernanke: We might begin to consider the chance of discussing talks to look into the possibility of contemplating a slowdown in our insane money printing.

Markets: AAAIIIEEEEEE!!! RUN AWAY!

Everyone else on the FED: Wait! We were just kidding! We'll keep printing forever and ever!

Markets: Really? Are you sure?

Stock prices as the members of the Fed spaz out.

One More Thing On Highland Park And Gay Marriage

Thanks to the DOMA ruling yesterday, the DoD now recognizes gay marriage. Yay! The greatest civil rights issue of our time is being won!

What's the plan for places like Highland Park, MI when the debt bomb goes off? We owe more than $16T. At some point, monetizing the debt will no longer work and there's going to be a fiscal day of reckoning like no other for the US. Cataclysmic budget cuts will happen, either through actual cutting or inflation. The residents of Highland Park get a large percentage of their income from the government and they currently live in crime, poverty and social decay.

What are you going to do when their benefits are slashed? More to the point, what are they going to do?

Enjoy the parades while you can.

A Little Bit On The Gay Marriage Rulings

I think they're a distraction. I'm growing to think the whole gay issue is a giant distraction. It's like Global Warming Climate Change. It's a manufactured issue that's being exploited to the benefit of some.

Some of my progressive friends think gay marriage is the civil rights issue of our time. Two adults without children, living together must be recognized as "married" for some reason. Whatever the horrible injustices they face with only two incomes, no kids and no responsibilities outside of managing to keep themselves off the police blotters while they find new ways to inseminate feces or chafe faces, I just can't believe it rises to the level of "the civil rights issue of our time."

Instead, I'd argue that Highland Park, MI* and its peers are the civil rights issue of our time. Cities where civilization has regressed, leaving a shattered population living in squalor and ruin.

Gay marriage? Marching and chanting and singing. Highland Park? Crickets.

* - I've been doing research into Highland Park. I've got a bunch of links stored up and that one is the best summary, sans commentary and analysis. The problems in Highland Park are not centered around their schools, but this representative of the overall collapse of society in places like that.

A Dave Ramsey Defense Of Wealthy Nations

I'm a big Dave Ramsey fan. He's against debt, in favor of saving and offers a great plan for getting rich. Getting rich is great, but that wealth has a purpose - helping others. My wife and I are working hard to pay off our last debt, our mortgage, so we can do just that. Being wealthy is a prerequisite for significant financially charity. As Dave says, poor people can't help others.

The same is true for nations. Zambia didn't develop the AIDS drug cocktails which changed that disease from a death sentence to a handicap. Ecuador didn't then distribute the drugs throughout Africa to try to bring an end to the AIDS-related misery and devastation. Dittos for all manner of other technological advancements which have improved and extended human life.

A common criticism hurled against America is that we consume a vastly disproportionate amount of the world's resources. Thank God we do or the rest of the world would be utterly screwed.

The Fundamental Problem With Meghan Laslocky's Morality

... is that she assumes everyone else will apply it where she does. To her groin.

Meghan Laslocky is one of many let the mask slip on the whole single sex marriage thing. It's not about fairness or civil rights, it's the obliteration of a restraining social norm in pursuit of entropic, destructive hedonism.  She's got an article out on CNN attacking the whole idea of monogamy. Because, you know, we're animals and animals aren't monogamous.

It's time for our culture to wake up and smell the sex pheromones: monogamy is not natural for many, or probably even most, humans...The evidence shows that monogamy is a rarity among mammals. Only 3% to 5% of all the mammal species on Earth "practice any form of monogamy." In fact, no mammal species has been proven to be truly monogamous.

CNN ran the piece with a charming photo of penguins, though why they chose penguins is beyond me. I would have chosen 1940 Rotterdam in flames or something similar.

Yes, animals like to have lots of sex. That's fun for people like Meghan! Animals also go in for cannibalism, pointless slaughter, vivisection, and lots of other things that aren't fun for people like Meghan, but are fun for others. See, Meghan likes her groin. A whole lot. Not everyone thinks of their groin first, though. Some think of lebensraum or, at a more basic level, simple violence.

Meghan thinks that if we put an end to that icky, repressive monogamy stuff, she can wander back to her hut and get it on with a banker, a gardener, a part time Wal-Mart greeter or her Aunt Sally and no one will say, "Boo!" Well, she can until the people that like harsher things use her own logic to tumble to similar conclusions and decide to act on their now-freed fantasies.

Two good reasons to bomb Rotterdam: 1. Animals kill each other without mercy to gain territory*. 2. You can do it to some really cool music.

* - Animals do it to obtain mates, too! There's your groinal tie-in right there, Meghan! It's the Daily Double - He-111s bombing the tar out of the Low Countries and Nazi soldiers raping people. How can we go wrong?

Government Response To The Bond Market Bubble Popping

So now that Bernanke has driven the markets into a total tailspin by suggesting that he might not go on printing unbacked trillions of dollars forever, you can bet that the DC political consultants brilliant people in the Senate are planing a rescue of something or other. After all, these guys and their staffs are all members of David Brooks' meritocracy. They got the test scores and grades and we didn't.

Having fixed health care, won the war on poverty, saved the American farmer, liberated undocumented workers and firmly disciplined Wall Street and the banks, it's a sure thing that the likes of John McCain, Lindsay Graham, Chuck Shumer and Harry Reid will rally their squads platoons brigades of Ivy League meritocrats and rescue us all with another bill.

This time there will be no half-measures. Expect a 24,000 page bill, at least.

I Want My Bathroom Mirror To Do This!

I'm Not So Sure This Is An Error

... seen on another website:

Hooray For The Meritocracy!

Right now, I'm listening to David Brooks' Bobos in Paradise. Well, off and on. Mostly off. Brooks' chief claim at the beginning of the book is that during the 1960s and 70s America went from a hereditary ruling class to a meritocracy by changing the entrance requirements of our best colleges, and then, most of the rest.

Harvard and Yale, you see, used to give preference to the children of it's alumni. So that means we have the SAT test to blame for things like this.

Senator Bob Corker issued a statement on Sunday to clarify that 1,100 pages of the immigration bill have been public since May.

Corker added another 117 pages to it recently, bringing the total to 1,200 pages.

Back in the days of the American aristocracy, when legislators wore powdered wigs and all sounded like Thurston Howell III as they spoke to each other, President Eisenhower signed the Interstate Highway Act  into law to build our freeways.

It's 3 pages long.

Thank God for our meritocracy. Just think what might be happening now if we lived in those bad old days.

Thank goodness we don't live under these people any more and instead, live under the brilliant rule of a genuine meritocracy.

We Are Detroit

Michael Barone has a short review of Charlie LeDuff's new book, Detroit: An American Autopsy. If you hadn't seen it elsewhere, the book is particularly timely as Detroit has defaulted on some loans, stiffing creditors, retirees and, perhaps, diversity consultants in the city's gay and lesbian outreach office. It's widely agreed that the place is a wreck. That means that all manner of shortcuts can be taken and we can get straight to the blame. Here's Mike's take.

Who is responsible for all this? LeDuff sometimes seems ready to blame just about everybody in authority-crooked politicians, political fixers, lazy judges, General Motors executives, union leaders, Wall Street. Looming over his narrative is the giant—literally giant; he is hugely tall and fat—figure of Kwame Kilpatrick, son of a (now former) congresswoman. He was elected mayor of Detroit in 2001 and 2005, and convicted of bribery in a trial replete with evidence of phone-sex texting with one of his top staffers. And there's no doubt Kilpatrick fostered a political culture that was rotten to the core. 

But Kilpatrick didn't start it. I blame the ambitious liberalism of the Cavanagh years, which I believed in at the time, and the 20-year rule of Coleman Young, mayor from 1973 to 1993. Young was smart, funny, and politically ruthless, with a background in left-wing unionism.

Why is it always people in authority that get the blame? Did they come from a different set of humans, a different species, perhaps? Do people in authority come out of a different box than we do? Are they marked at birth?

My good friends and mentors in the SLOBs might tell me that the problem was incipient socialism, but I'd suggest that it was an inseparable combination of socialism and cultural decay. Defaulting on loans, particularly in the case of a place like Detroit, is an indication that the people of the Detroit divorced having from earning and that's why they elected Peronist demagogues and socialist morons. It was as much moral relativism as it was childish, progressive economics that killed the city.

In a group email a while back, one of the SLOBs pointed to an address by Pope Frances that smacked of socialism. Here's part of what the Pontiff had to say.

"Francis of Assisi tells us we should work to build peace," Pope Francis said. "But there is no peace without truth! There cannot be true peace if everyone is his own criterion, if everyone can always claim exclusively his own rights, without at the same time caring for the good of others, of everyone, on the basis of the nature that unites every human being on this earth."

When everyone claims his own rights, there's a natural tendency to vote for the guy who promises to take things away from people who have earned them and hand them to you.

And then there's my favorite hobby horse.

While clicking around the Interweb Tubes, I came across Data Driven Detroit, a site loaded with facts, figures and presentations. Here's a presentation on the state of children in Detroit. Things are pretty bad, but there's apparently no need to discuss behavior. The concept of illegitimacy isn't raised once. Moral relativism at work, perhaps?

A mind-blowing stat from the presentation: 80.6% of all children 6 years old and younger living in Highland Park live in poverty. Not surprisingly, 87.6% of all births in Highland Park are to single women.

Coleman Young, Kwame Kilpatrick and all the rest are undoubtedly swine, but they didn't drive around Highland Park wrecking the place themselves.

Seeing Leprechauns

No, really! He was there just a minute ago!

So our daughter is playing club soccer again this year. It's an expensive proposition and we're a bit tight with the cash right now. Our budding Jonas Gutierrez talks to me all the time about how much she loves the game, but she never says that to my wife. Consequently, it seems like the soccer thing is all my idea and I'm hallucinating her desire for the sport while we pay out for her to be on the team.

I feel like I'm telling her over and over again that I've seen leprechauns in our back yard.

:-)

Went To A Wedding Last Night

... and the men were in suits and the women in dresses. Everyone was doing their best to look their best. The  women were smaller than the men and clearly weaker. The groom was a big, strapping fellow and the bride was a lovely, petite woman.

My wife and I taught a remarriage class for the Diocese recently. At the beginning, the couples spent about 5 minutes each telling their love story. The stories were different, but had some basic similarities. The men were caught by the woman's beauty and the women fell in love with their man's kindness, thoughtfulness and skills.

Our obsession with "everyone is equal" is madness. Whether it's women in the infantry or gay marriage, the underlying concept that we're all the same flies in the face of observable reality.

Is it so very hard to be happy with who you are?

Laguna Meadow Panorama

One of our boys figured out how to do the panorama thing with our Galaxy 3's while we were camping on this week. After he taught me how to do it, I took several. Here was one of my favorites - Laguna Meadow. I left it really big, so it's probably worth a click.

The Immigration Bill In A Nutshell

Here's my understanding of the bill*.

The people in favor of the bill are the big government types. The government is responsible for education, health care and is the dominant feature in the lives of most people making less than the median income. In short, the government is responsible for the state of our human capital.

The people who have created the situation are telling us that our human capital is screwed up. We don't create enough businesses, have enough babies or work hard enough so we need to import uneducated, unskilled people who don't speak English from a failed narco-state.

Well, that's good enough for me. If Harry Reid and John McCain like it, I guess I ought to support it, too.

* - I don't understand the bill at all. It's about twenty three thousand pages long. No one understand the bill.

Americans Are Such Losers

No, this is not a repeat. I'm just stealing from myself.

Jeb Bush in support of the immigration bill:

"Immigrants create far more businesses than native-born Americans over the last 20 years. Immigrants are more fertile, and they love families, and they have more intact families, and they bring a younger population. Immigrants create an engine of economic prosperity," Bush said at the annual Faith and Freedom conference in the nation's capital.

And now, the logical inverse of his statement.

"Americans don't create enough businesses to maintain our standard of living. Americans have wrecked their families and are slaughtering their babies to the point where we can't maintain our population. Americans are slothful." Bush said at the annual Faith and Freedom conference in the nation's capital.

We suck.