Monday, July 8, 2013

Gluttony: Glorious Glorious Gluttony




Definition: Gluttony is the willful and insatiable desire to over consume, excessively elevate, and be preoccupied with that which Belly God created for good. It is more interested in consuming than in what is being consumed.

The New Hostess Twinkie Scandal

Hostess To Start Freezing Some Twinkies Before Shipping Them 

Hostess will begin freezing some of its Twinkies before shipping them when it re-releases the highly-anticipated pastries this month, the company confirmed to The Huffington Post on Friday.

In an emailed statement, Hostess spokeswoman Hannah Arnold said that the decision was made after a small percentage of the company’s retail customers explicitly requested frozen versions of the treat, which will allow companies to “date the product for freshness,” while providing “flexibility in filling their shelves.”

Any retail customer will still be able to request non-frozen Twinkies, and the company maintains freezing Twinkies will have “no impact on the quality or taste” of the product.

“Any suggestion that Hostess is changing the integrity of the iconic snack cakes consumers have loved is completely untrue,” Arnold wrote. “The new ownership is absolutely committed to baking top quality snack cakes and, in fact, is making major investments to ensure that Hostess products are as good, if not even better, than before.” BULLSHIT!

Sources told the New York Post, which first reported the news, that they feared the new freezing process could threaten the product’s integrity and future popularity. IT DOES!

Hostess filed for bankruptcy in early 2012, after which investment firm Metropoulos & Co. swooped in to buy Twinkies and other Hostess snacks in 2013.

Last month it was announced that Twinkies would be back on shelves by July 15.

I Fat Bastard am PISSED! I need Belly Boy to talk me down!

 

 

 

Sunday, July 7, 2013

Cronuts or Dossaints Could A Pastry By Any Other Name Taste So Fucking Good?

TRIGGER WARNING!

The following news story could cause gluttons to have intense and uncontrolled foodgasms and excessive drooling.


It's always more fun to DIY. Today, Julie Van Rosendaal from Dinner with Julie shows us how to make cronuts.




Yes, I made cronuts. I jumped on the bandwagon. Turns out, everyone's right. I might pay $40 for one of these on the black market.

 Not since Krispy Kreme have I seen this level of fried dough fanaticism. In the month since their inception tons of copycats have popped up -- since the name is copyrighted, others are calling theirs 

"Dossaints" or "CroNots" -- and in New York, lineups are going around the block for the things, which are also being sold on the black market. It's full-on cronut mania.
 
>>RELATED: Crazy good Croissant French Toast
Madness, I tell you. But I'm always up for a challenge, and we really need to start warming up for Stampede. So I took out the deep fryer. (Note: you don't need one. A pot works just as well.)


Puff pastry sounds daunting to make from scratch, but it's really a matter of mixing together a basic yeasted dough, slathering it with butter, and then folding it up like a letter a bunch of times, rolling and chilling between each fold. It isn't as finnicky as you might think, particularly when the end result is a batch of buttery, golden croissoughnuts.

Homemade Cronuts (a.k.a. Croissoughnuts)
Inspired by Dominique Ansel Bakery
Makes 1 dozen
Dough
3/4 cups milk, warmed
1 tablespoon active dry yeast
1/3 cup sugar
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
3 1/2 cups all-purpose flour (divided)
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup butter, at room temperature

Maple Glaze
1/2 cup powdered sugar
3 tablespoons pure maple syrup
1 to 2 tablespoons milk, cream or water


In a large bowl, stir together the milk and yeast. Stir in the sugar, eggs, and vanilla and mix well. Add a cup of the flour and the salt, then gradually add another 2 1/4 cups of the flour, stirring and then kneading for a few (or several) minutes, until it's smooth and elastic, and still a little tacky.


Transfer your dough to a baking sheet and cover with plastic wrap; chill in the refrigerator for 30 minutes.


Meanwhile, beat the butter and remaining 1/4 cup flour with an electric mixer for a couple minutes, scraping down the sides of the bowl, until smooth.


When the dough has chilled, turn it out onto a lightly floured surface and roll into a rectangle that is about 13 by 18 inches and 1/4-inch thick. Spread the butter evenly over the dough.


Fold it as you would fold a letter, in thirds. (Unlike a letter, the dough ends should line up, so that it's folded exactly in thirds.) Cover the dough in plastic wrap and put it back into the fridge for 30 minutes.


Pull the dough out and put it back on the countertop, with the open sides to the left and right. Roll it out into another rectangle.


Fold the left third over the middle, then the right third over the middle. (This is referred to as a "turn". To keep track of each fold -- or turn -- press your finger into the dough at the edge to make two marks -- you can do this each time you roll and fold so that you know how many times you've done it.) Chill the dough for another 30 minutes.


Roll, fold, and refrigerate the dough two more times, so that you've done it four times total. Cover and refrigerate for at an hour, or overnight.


Then, roll your dough out to 1- to 2-inch thickness, then cut it into rounds, or rings, or scraps.


In a heavy pot (or deep fryer), heat a couple inches of oil to about 350° F, or until it's hot but not smoking, and a scrap of bread sizzles when you dip it in. Cook the doughnuts in batches, without crowding the pot (this can cool down the oil), flipping as necessary until deep golden. Transfer to a baking sheet lined with a paper towel.


Meanwhile, whisk together the icing sugar, maple syrup, and enough milk, water, or cream to make a drizzling consistency. Drizzle over the croissoughnuts while they're still warm. Then try not to eat the whole batch.

 
Photos by Julie Van Rosendaal

Thursday, July 4, 2013

NSA Spying Hurting the US Economically and National Security

US NSA Criminal Spying Angers Both Friend and Foe

Our enemies now have more reason to be our enemies and our friends now have more reasons not to be our freinds. Hopefully the Europe and Asia will develop search engines as operating systems that are impervious to the criminal spying of the NSA. I'll feel bad for the Americas who will lose their jobs to foreign competition but hopefully they will find employmet working for law abiding companies outside the US.

Below are links to news articles that explain in greater detail how the criminal spying by the NSA will hurt Americans economically and weaken our national security.

German minister: Stop using U.S. Web services to avoid NSA spying

Germany is one of the most privacy conscious nations in the world, with data and privacy laws stronger than any other in the EU. And amid the NSA spying scandal, the country's top security chief has warned users to simply avoid U.S. companies. Will that work?

Amid NSA spying scandal, the gloves are off for EU's justice chief

No longer is the EU standing for U.S. lobbying and policy pushing. The EU's Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding is back in the trenches. The gloves are off, and she's fighting back.

EU to vote to suspend U.S. data sharing agreements, passenger records amid NSA spying scandal

The European Parliament will vote — ironically of all days, on U.S. Independence Day on July 4 — whether existing data sharing agreements between the two continents should be suspended, following allegations that U.S. intelligence spied on EU citizens.


Latest NSA leak details PRISM's bigger picture

Another leaked batch of top secret slides relating to the U.S. National Security Agency's PRISM data collection program sheds further light on how non-U.S. data is collected from various tech firms, and how under law, U.S. data is filtered out — albeit not always.
June 29, 2013 by Zack Whittaker

ZDNetGovWeek: NSA chaos continues, big tech fights back

The ongoing chaos that is the NSA story continues. Google, Microsoft, and Facebook try to get permission to tell the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. That doesn't work out so well, and all we get are aggregated numbers and more aggravation.
June 17, 2013 by David Gewirtz

The real story in the NSA scandal is the collapse of journalism

A bombshell story published in the Washington Post this week alleged that the NSA had enlisted nine tech giants, including Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Apple, in a massive program of online spying. Now the story is unraveling, and the Post has quietly changed key details. What went wrong?
June 8, 2013 by Ed Bott

ZDNetGovWeek: More NSA fun, tin foil hats, Google slapped in UK, and more

There's nothing more fun than government news, and nothing that puts humanity's foibles in clearer light. This week, the NSA story continues, we gently mock those wearing tin foil hats, Google's Street View is once again in view, and all around the world, governments are keeping us entertained (and worried).
June 23, 2013 by David Gewirtz

Privacy is dead: So what if you friended the NSA?

The National Security Agency is better than Santa Claus. It knows when you're sleeping. It knows when you're awake. It knows when you've been bad or good. Not that most Internet users will care.
June 6, 2013 by Larry Dignan

How did mainstream media get the NSA PRISM story so hopelessly wrong?

Last week's bombshell stories by The Guardian and The Washington Post accused some of the biggest names in tech of willingly working with the NSA to give up your data. It now appears that those stories misread the technical details and got the story wrong.
June 14, 2013 by Ed Bott




Tuesday, July 2, 2013

America's Newest Secret Weapon: Pizza for Peace

Pizza is a great food and when people are eating it they are always happy. Happy people don't want to fight. The US military knows this and are now having their soldiers trained by Little Ceasars Pizza delivery boys. Instead of soldiers delivering a burst of .223 rounds from their M-16s to their enemies they are now delivering hot and tasty pizza and wings to the enemy in hope that they will sit down with them for a Coke and a slice.

The next time a cruise missile or a drone flies over the Middle East instead of dropping  bomblets or firing deadly missiles it will be dropping stuffed crust pizza, 2 liter Pepsi, and Buffalo wings. Think of it as pizza pie parabellum.




Saturday, June 29, 2013

How Corporate Slime Is Fucking You Is Mind Blowing

Image result for corporate gangster


A judicious writer avoids adjectives like "mindblowing," especially when covering political or economic issues. But no other word seems to describe the stunning reality of corporate taxation in modern America, which cries out for the italics-heavy, exclamation-point-driven format made famous by Ripley's Believe It or Not.

Stylistic overkill? Read these thirteen facts and you may change your mind.

1. We're told we can't "afford" full Social Security benefits, even though closing corporate tax-haven loopholes would pay for Obama's "chained CPI" benefit cut more than 10 times over!

Abusive offshore tax havens cost the US $150 billion in lost tax revenue every year (via FACT Coalition). That's $1.5 trillion over the next 10 years.

The "chained CPI" cut, proposed by President Obama and supported by Republicans, is projected to "save" a total of $122 billion to $130 billion over the same time period by denying benefits to seniors and disabled people.

It's true. "Serious" politicians and pundits are demanding that ordinary people sacrifice earned benefits, while at the same time allowing corporations to avoid more than ten times as much in taxes.

2. Corporate tax rates are near their 60-year low, even though profits are at a 60-year high!

Need we say more?

(Source: Americans for Tax Fairness.)

3. Wells Fargo got $8 billion in tax breaks, even as executives at its subsidiary Wachovia avoided indictment for laundering money for the Mexican drug cartels!

That's right. Wells Fargo paid a negative tax rate of -1.4 percent between 2008 and 2010 while Wachovia, a Wells Fargo subsidiary, admitted to laundering more than $378 billion for Mexican drug gangs.

We're talking about crazed killers like "El Loco" and gangs like "Los Zetas" -- gangs who cut people's heads off and toss them out onto disco dance floors or display them in the town square.

Wachovia bankers ignored repeated warnings from law enforcement officials, and continued to launder money for cartels that have murdered tens of thousands.

And yet no criminal indictments were handed down because, as a Senate investigator told Bloomberg News, "There's no capacity to regulate or punish them because they're too big to be threatened with failure."

4. Some other huge corporations paid less than nothing, too.

Pepco Holdings (-57.6 percent tax rate)
General Electric (-45.3 percent)
DuPont (-3.4 percent)
Verizon (-2.9 percent)
Boeing (-1.8 percent)
Honeywell (-0.7 percent)

(Source: Citizens for Tax Justice)

5. The amount of money http://ctj.org/ctjreports/2012/12/fortune_500_corporations_holding_16_trillion_in_profits_offshore.php#.Uc-VlD7h6lLUS corporations are holding offshore is an estimated 1.6 trillion dollars!

Rather than tax these profits the way other countries do, corporate politicians are promoting a tax "repatriation" break that would let corporations "bring this money home" while paying even less than their currently low rates.

They tried that in 2004 and it didn't create any jobs. In fact, corporations took the tax break and then fired thousands of people. What "repatriation" did do is line a lot of wealthy investors' pockets.

So, naturally, they want to do it again.

6. One building in the Cayman Islands is the official location of 18,857 corporations!

According to the Government Accountability Office, a five-story building called "Ugland House" is home to nearly 20,000 corporations. That's impressive, especially for such a small edifice. (Perhaps it has supernatural half-floors and space-time defying "mind tunnels" like the office in Being John Malkovich.)

While impressive, Ugland House's distinction pales next to that of 1209 North Orange Street in Wilmington, Delaware. According to one investigation, that address is home to 217,000 corporations.

http://tjn-usa.org/storage/documents/FACT_Sheet_By_the_Numbers_Final1112nt.pdfhttp://tjn-usa.org/storage/documents/FACT_Sheet_By_the_Numbers_Final1112nt.pdf

That's because Delaware has very generous tax rules -- and, as a result, is home to more than half of all the corporate subsidiaries in the United States. That's startling, since only 1/342th of the nation's population lives in that state (917,092 residents, out of a national total of 313,914,040, according to the latest census results).

7. Conservatives complain about the "official" corporate tax rate in this country, but corporations actually pay roughly one-third of the official rate in actual taxes.

The official, or "statutory," corporate tax rate is 35 percent. But the actual rate paid by American corporations is only 12 percent, less than that paid by many middle-class Americans.

(Source: The FACT Coalition.)

In fact, US Corporations pay less tax as a percentage of the GDP than corporations in Canada. Or Japan ...

... or South Korea. Or Norway. Or Luxembourg, New Zealand, Israel, the Czech Republic, Sweden, Belgium, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Finland, and Italy.

(Source: OECD StatsExtract interactive database.)

8. Corporations used to pay 30 percent of Federal taxes, and now they pay less than 7 percent!

That's because the corporate tax rate has plunged since Dwight D. Eisenhower was President and is now the lowest it's been in modern history.


(Source: FACT Coalition.)

9. Big corporations paid $216 million to Congress and got $223 billion in tax breaks!

As Citizens for Tax Justice and USPIRG reported, 280 large and profitable corporations contributed $216 million to Congressional campaigns over four election cycles and got nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars in tax breaks.

That's a terrific investment for them -- a return of more than a thousand to one -- but it's a bad deal for the American people.

10. We don't even know who owns some corporations, even though that makes it easier to evade taxes, dodge creditors, avoid paying alimony or child support, and even fund terrorism!

Here are some examples of investments that might represent a terror threat. Corporate interests are blocking disclosure rules that would help protect our national security.

11. Bank of America committed foreclosure fraud, was bailed out by the government, and then paid no taxes on $4.4 billion in profit!

That's right. In 2010, while BofA was negotiating a sweet settlement deal for its foreclosure fraud, it paid nothing in taxes. (Source: FACT Coalition.) Zero, on $17.2 billion in offshore earnings. (Source: Americans for Tax Fairness Corporate Tax Dodgers.)

Its $4.1 billion tax break came on the heels of the bank's taxpayer-funded bailout, immunity from prosecution for its criminal employees, and a cushy government settlement for its foreclosure fraud.

Now David Dayen reports that the bank has apparently continued to defraud customers in violation of its government settlement. Whistleblowers have stated in affidavits that they were "told to lie" to customers, continued to deceive homeowners before foreclosing on them, and flipped customers to new servicing companies to invalidate previous homeowner agreements.http://www.salon.com/2013/06/28/new_bank_of_america_whistle_blower_emerges_more_customer_abuse/


12. What they call "tax reform" would actually prevent our elected representatives from giving businesses financial incentives to improve our lives!

The word "reform" is an honorable one that's been put to some dishonorable uses lately. "Entitlement reform," for example, is merely a euphemism for gutting Social Security and Medicare.

Similarly, corporate-backed politicians are pushing a formula for permanent corporate tax breaks and calling it "tax reform." They insist their "reform" be "revenue neutral" and say it will "broaden the base while lowering the rate."

Here's an English translation: The current, unsustainably low rates for corporations would be made permanent, while eliminating many tax deductions in the name of "simplification."

Here's what that really means: The domestic tax credit for creating jobs? Gone. Tax breaks for protecting the environment with clean energy, rather than harming other people's health and leaving a mess for the rest of us to clean up? Gone.

All in all we'd lose dozens of important policies that make our lives better, while permanently fixing corporate taxes at today's cushy giveaway rates.

"Reform"? Ripoff is more like it.

13. Despite their greed, mismanagement, and freeloading, tax-dodging corporations are using shell organizations like "Fix the Debt" and "the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget" to tell ordinary Americans they have to sacrifice even more to preserve corporate wealth!

These organizations are using the heads of failed banks -- people like Chase's Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs -- to dispense "advice on the economy." That's like getting navigation tips from the captain of the Exxon Valdez.

(Tax breaks for Exxon Mobil: $4.1 billion between 2008 and 2010. The company paid no taxes at all in 2009.)

These executives and their paid spokespeople tell the rest of us we need to "sacrifice" and "tighten our belts" so that their party can go on forever. And too often they're treated as credible sources, rather than as corrupting influences on our public life.

It's all true -- and there are many more astonishing facts to be found in the world of corporate taxation. To fix the economy more people will need to learn about them - and demand that they be changed.

Thursday, June 27, 2013

How Google Is Aiding Terrorism

 

 

It's a fact 99.999999999999999% of terrorist acts worldwide are carried out by Muslims in the name of Allah or the pedophile Prophet Mohammad. 

The so called Religion of Peace is anything but a religion of peace and anyone with a brain knows it and anyone with a shred of honesty will admit it. The censors at Google same as the Nazi censors are censoring anything critical of Islam. Why aren't these cyber thugs censoring anything critical of Christianity when Christians complain? Could it be that Christians like the idea of free speech?

For further statistics of a similar nature, see Persecution and Homosexuals. For statistics covering prejudice against Jews and Muslims, see Antisemitism and Crime & Prejudice

If the latest FBI hate-crime statistics are any indication, of the 1,314 verified offenses motivated by religious bias, 68.5 percent were anti-Jewish.

Only 11.1 percent were anti-Islamic, despite claims of rampant anti-Muslim bigotry in the U.S. by groups like the Council on American Islamic Relations.

Raped and beheaded by Muslims for being a Christian.

Google Takes Down Sites critical of Islam

In early 2006, Google removed several news sites from its news search engine because complaints were received about various articles that were critical of Islam.[5][6] These included the The New Media Journal, which contained phrasing such as, "[in the] world of Islam ... it is common for the men to have multiple wives, and harvest many children with each of his wives to train for martyrdom." MichNews and The Jawa Report were among the other sites removed from Google News. These sites do remain accessible from Google's main search page as normal. Google responded to the change by stating, "We do not allow articles and sources expressly promoting hate speech viewpoints in Google News, although referencing hate speech for commentary and analysis is acceptable"

Calling something hate speech is one of the most insidious forms of censorship. If Google want to ban hate speech they should ban the Koran because the Koran is a very hateful book.  Google sees telling the truth as hate speech as it aids the NSA in spying on millions of innocent Americans and while Muslims terrorize the civilized world.