We’ll have a recipe this time, for live fermented kimchi. It’s non-technical and it doesn’t involve heat. With a bit of labor, you can make enough to last for months. Live kimchi doesn’t provide much in the way of calories, but it’s chock-full of fiber and healthy gut bacteria. It’s also a way for you to manufacture your own Vitamin C in the kitchen. Kimchi is high in both survival value and flavor. You can skip straight to the recipe here.

When we think of cooking, we mostly think of heat. You take a raw ingredient and apply heat; the heat causes chemical changes; at some point the ingredient is cooked and you call it food.

Fermentation is cooking without heat. You take a raw ingredient and let yeast and/or bacteria colonize it. Their metabolic activity causes chemical changes. At some point you call it cooked and start eating it.

Fermentation not only cooks, it preserves. Raw ingredients that would spoil in hours or days can be preserved for months.

There are endless variations on exactly what organisms are doing the cooking and what the chemical effects are. There are two main general modes of fermentation used around the globe: alcohol and acid.

In alcohol fermentation, yeast converts sugar into alcohol. (The Greeks figured out that if they stomped barefoot on sweet grapes, the resulting juice would turn into wine over time. They didn’t know they were inoculating the brew with wild yeasts, resident on their feet.) Starchy foods like grains and potatoes can be malted to produce fermentable sugar. Sugar cane, cactus leaves, berries…sugar from every possible source has been at least tried. The food preservation value of alcohol is straightforward.

Acid fermentation uses many different species of bacteria in a bewildering array of processes. The product is usually lactic or acetic acid. Using one technique or another, acid fermentation will cook just about any ingredient in the human repertoire. (Here’s an article on the microbiology of cheesemaking. It gets far into the technical weeds, but it’s worth at least skimming to get a notion of just how complex – and how controlled – these live-chemical processes can be.)

Sometimes yeast and bacteria team up on a fermentation project. For this to work, the yeast has to be one of the rare kinds who will tolerate a sour environment. In the case of kombucha, the yeast and bacteria cuddle up in a gelatinous blob. The yeast makes ethanol; the bacteria consume the ethanol to make acid and fizz. In the case of sourdough bread, the bacteria make it sour, and the yeast makes the bread rise and provides a host of twisty flavors.

Brewing alcohol and rising sourdough bread are ancient, borderline pre-civilization technologies. In these troubled times, we may be thankful that Divine Providence ordered things in such a way that trillions of invisible workmates would infest us every moment, ready to help feed and entertain us.

Perhaps the most famous of the acid-producting bacteria is lactobacillus acidophilus, which translates to “sour-loving milk-bug”, a lactic-acid producer. This little guy is all over the place; just make a home for him and he moves right in. Once he’s all moved in, he keeps the place tidy and spends all day cooking.

Lb. acidophilus is superbly adapted to certain extreme environments. You already know he’s an acid-lover. He also tolerates lots and lots of salt. For many undesirable microorganisms, sour and/or salty is a deal-breaker; they just die out, leaving Lb. acidophilus and a few close friends.

To achieve this condition, it is generally desirable to get water out of the food, and get salt in. Salting or brining the food heavily accomplishes both at once. Mechanical pressure is another way to remove liquids from the food.

The famous 18th-century British explorer James Cook sailed ’round the world at a time when scurvy was the terror of the oceans. He experimented with various preventatives and cures. Any foods or medicines brought for the purpose would have to go three years in the unrefrigerated hold of the ship, without spoiling. Somehow, Cook got the idea to pack barrels, alternating a layer of cabbage leaves with a sprinkling of salt; then screw-pack the contents to half their original volume, drain the excess water; then repack the top half of the barrel and hammer in the lid. Cook called it “sour kroutt” and he brought 8,000 pounds of the stuff on the first circumnavigation.

Captain Cook didn’t know how acid fermentation works or what Vitamin C is. He had several rations, thought to be preventive, which he doled out on a rigorous, sometimes non-voluntary basis. He didn’t know whether the sour kroutt was effective. But he knew something was working:

The Ship’s company had in general been very healthy, owing in a great measure to the Sour kroutt, Portable Soup [bouillon] and Malt; the two first were served to the People, the one on Beef Days and the other on Banyan Days. [fermented] Wort was made of the Malt, and at the discretion of the Surgeon given to every man that had the least simptoms of Scurvy upon him. By this means, and the Care and Vigilance of Mr. Monkhouse, the Surgeon, this disease was prevented from getting a footing in the Ship. The Sour Kroutt, the Men at first would not eat it, until I put it in practice–a method I never once Knew to fail with seamen–and this was to have some of it dressed every day for the Cabin Table, and permitted all the Officers, without exception, to make use of it, and left it to the Option of the men either to take as much as they pleased or none at all; but this practice was not continued above a Week before I found it necessary to put every one on board to an allowance; for such are the Tempers and disposition of Seamen in general that whatever you give them out of the common way–altho’ it be ever so much for their good–it will not go down, and you will hear nothing but murmurings against the Man that first invented it; but the moment they see their superiors set a value upon it, it becomes the finest stuff in the world and the inventor an honest fellow. Wind easterly.

How to ferment your own live kimchi at home. (Sauerkraut is the exact same process, just without all the flavor ingredients.)

Feel free to skip ahead to the recipe, there’s a link back here so you can check the Recipe Notes.

Recipe Notes: Equipment and Techniques

A big head of cabbage makes almost a gallon of kimchi, which means you need some large vessels for mixing and brining and fermentation. For the salt/brine part of the recipe, an extra large, wide vessel is best; about one gallon more capacity than the amount of kimchi you’ll make. A plastic dish tub will suffice for this part. I use a big deep enamelware baking pan, which is nice because it has a lid.

Nitrile gloves are recommended for the part where you mix in the spice paste.

For the fermentation part, you need a glass or ceramic vessel. A gallon mason jar will suffice, though the narrow opening makes it inconvenient to get at the brew. There are fermenting crocks made for the purpose, they are handsome and have large capacities: as much as three gallons. I like to look at my kimchi from the side, so I keep it in a 2.5-gallon glass crock I picked up cheap at Wal-Mart.

The lid on the crock does not form an airtight seal; it’s just there to keep dust out. If you use a mason jar, leave the lid loose.

The salting process produces a quantity of brine. There are two main schools of thought: ferment the final product in this brine, or discard the brine and ferment in fresh water. Some advocates of brine-packing have exact recommendations, by weight, of how to get the salinity right; as though everyone has a kitchen scale that can measure fractions of grams.

It’s way easier to just discard the brine. You can confidently oversalt that brine, knowing you won’t have to eat it later. Yes, the kimchi will take on a little water after brining.

If you’re a novice with a knife, beware the cabbage. When you try to shove a knife through a cabbage, it has a way of rolling over on your left hand. Use a gentle slicing motion to get the knife well in the groove, before applying force. If you’re unsure how to cut the other vegetables, I’ve cued up this video to the part where Billy Parisi demonstrates basic slicing and dicing (about two minutes). For mincing garlic and ginger, refer to Spain on a Fork, where he demonstrates the rocking technique with the left-hand fingertips on top of the blade.

Once you’ve got all your vegetables cut up, you put them in the tub with lots of salt. Then you “massage” the salt into the vegetables with your hands. This could be a science fair demonstration, because after a little bit of mashing and heaping and tossing, the salt dissolves and the vegetables start to get wet. That’s the beginning of osmosis: water is coming out of the plant tissues, and salt is going in.

Once you get the osmosis under way, you cover the veg with water and let it soak in the resulting brine. Soaking in that salty brine will dry the vegetables out and make them crisp, counterintuitive as that may seem. Up to a point, more salt means a crisper end product.

Sliced cabbage is a bouyant, lively fellow who always wants to stick his head out of the water and have a look around. It’s important to weight the soaking cabbage with a plate or similar, to keep the cabbage submerged. Any cabbage exposed to the air will rust, and rusted cabbage is not only ugly, it gives a foothold to spores and slimes that can spoil your brew. The same goes in the early stages of fermentation; you want to check in periodically and stir the stuff under. As fermentation proceeds, cabbage becomes more sensible and sedate, residing mellowly below the surface.

When packing kimchi for fermentation, it’s important to leave headspace, especially in a tall narrow vessel such as a jar. When cabbage that has been dried in brine finds himself in less salty water, he swells up a bit while retaining his bouyant personality. This swelling can cause the vessel to overflow in the early stages of fermentation, so it’s a good idea to keep the vessel on a sheet pan or similar to catch any drips. Adequate headspace in a gallon jar is about two inches of clearance for the kimchi itself, and one inch of clearance for the liquid. If the cabbage swells so much you can’t stir it under, take some out and eat or discard it. Keep your kimchi submerged.

Recipe Notes: Ingredients

• Cabbage: the standard cabbage for kimchi is the Napa cabbage. Its leaf structure is gossamer compared to the bony leaf structure of standard green cabbage. I prefer the latter as having more crunch and squeak.
• Salt: do not use table salt. Table salt has iodide and other additives that don’t do well in fermentation. Pickling salt is pure sodium chloride. Kosher salt is the exact same pure chemical, just not as fine a grind. I like the kosher salt because it “feels” better, but it makes no difference once the salt dissolves.
• Water: tap water is okay for the salting-brining part. Use filtered or better water for the fermentation part.
• Garlic: Optional / do not overdo. Garlic retains his sharp, sulfurous character despite fermentation. It might be worth experimenting with roasted garlic.
• Ginger: Optional / do not overdo. Like garlic, ginger also remains pretty raw in the brew. It might be worth experimenting with pickled ginger.
• Sugar: I like a raw sugar, which includes Turbinado, Palm Sugar, and Indian Jaggeree.
• Fish Sauce: Optional. If you don’t like fishy umami flavor, retain a little brine as a substitute. You can also substitute just about any salty umami ingredient, such as salted shrimp paste or anchovy paste. Some people add minced raw oysters.
• Korean Red Pepper Flakes: Koreans are the world leaders in fermenting everything they eat. They, and they alone, have a spice evolved for fermentation; any substitution is likely to be regretted. American chiles are delicious, but they are evolved for heat cooking; in fermentation they might turn out oily, bitter and raw. Cayenne might ferment well, but it’s too pungent and lacks the characteristic flavor. The Korean flakes feature moderate heat, they seem strangely “dry”, and they really do resemble tiny flakes of shiny red glitter which adds a handsome color component to the dish.

Home-Made Live Kimchi

(Recipe techniqes detailed here, details about ingredients here.)

Ingredients:

• One medium-large head of Napa or green cabbage
• 1/4 cup Kosher or pickling salt
• Filtered or distilled water
• Spice Paste:
  • 1 tablespoon minced garlic (optional)
  • 1 teaspoon peeled minced ginger (optional)
  • 1 teaspoon raw sugar
  • 2 tablespoons fish sauce, salted shrimp paste, anchovy paste, or brine
  • 1 to 5 tablespoons Korean Red Pepper Flakes aka gochugaru
• 1 cup Korean radish, daikon radish and/or carrot, peeled and cut into matchsticks
• 4 medium scallions, sliced thin

Quarter the cabbage and remove the stem from each quarter with a diagonal slice. Remove any outer leaves you don’t care to eat, and slice the cabbage (say, 1/4″ slices or so), starting from the leaf end and working towards the stem end.

Put the cabbage in a dish tub, full pan or similar. Add the salt. Mix thoroughly, rubbing the salt into the cabbage with your hands, until the cabbage gets wet and the salt dissolves.

Cover the cabbage with water (tap water okay). Weight the cabbage with a plate or similar to keep it submerged. Soak for two hours. Cut up the root vegetables and the scallions.

Drain the cabbage and rinse three times (retain a little brine if you don’t want to use the fishy ingredients). Set it to drain thoroughly.

In a bowl, mix garlic, ginger, sugar, fish sauce, and pepper flakes.

Put cabbage and other vegetables in the mixing tub. Add the spice paste, and again using your hands thoroughly rub the paste into all the vegetables. Nitrile gloves will protect your hands from getting stinky or spiced.

Transfer all ingredients to your fermentation vessel(s), leaving one or two inches of headroom. Cover with purified water, place the vessel on a pan to catch drips, and allow to ferment. If your vessel has a screw-type lid, leave it loose; fermentation produces gases. Check several times daily, especially at first, to stir the cabbage back under when it wants to float out. If the cabbage won’t fit under the water, take some out.

In Korea, they do most fermentation at 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Kimchi will ferment just as well, and considerably faster, in the 50-60 degree range. At 70 degrees, fermentation is rapid and results in a soggier product with different flavor. Once fermentation is complete, the batch must be moved into refrigeration. Ambient slimes and spores can take root in warm kimchi when the bacterial competition is played out.

Estimates of how long to ferment kimchi are all over the map. At moderate temperatures, you’ll be able to detect the sourness in a couple of days. I like the sourest possible kimchi myself. Once it’s in the fridge, it will continue to ferment indefinitely but any change will be slow and small.

The odor of kimchi is funky, but it’s not foul. If slimes and molds get into your kimchi, you’ll be able to tell. Most common is a white or pink slime on the surface, with a rank odor. If you have any doubt, it’s probably fine.

With such a funky, spicy concoction, you’d think it would tend to heartburn and indigestion. But it actually soothes the digestive tract. Between the fiber and the pro-biotics, it feels good to eat the stuff.

Enjoy!

There are no good guys in the George Floyd matter. Not Floyd, not Chauvin, not the rioters, not the prosecutor, and not the judge.

Commentators and opinionators have not been covering themselves with glory either. We expect big lies and argument by assertion from the left. That stuff drives people on the right kind of batty, and justifiably so. But in countering these falsehoods, voices from the right have fallen into error. Here’s the left narrative:

George Floyd’s death was a state-sanctioned race-motivated murder of an innocent man, and it proves all white people are evil and justifies rioting and looting.

It is fair to say about any of the parts in bold, that’s dishonest garbage. But take a look at “proves all white people are evil”; that’s an example of conflation. Once you notice how conflation works, you can see it in every Big Lie. All white people didn’t step on George Floyd’s neck; only Derek Chauvin did that. Conflating whiteness with Chauvin is an error, a falsehood. The correct response is to say, white people don’t own that guy, he’s on his own.

Instead, many fell for the conflation and developed an unhealthy bias towards narratives of Chauvin’s innocence. These are smart, good people, driven by politics into the trap of motivated reasoning. They were forgiveably, perhaps happily naive enough to fall for smoke screens like “no evidence of strangulation” and “fatal level of Fentanyl”.

And they do have a point when they say George Floyd brought this on himself. At least, he mostly brought it on himself.

This TMZ article features the bodycam footage. Here’s how they describe the opening encounter:

George Floyd was terrified and afraid [and also probably scared –ed.] when cops first approached him in his car … pleading for his life with a gun trained on his head.

Here’s the sequence of events from 00:03 to 00:18:

• Officer Thomas Lane raps Floyd’s car window with his flashlight.
• George Floyd looks around and jumps like a jackrabbit when he sees the badge. Cops call it “the look”. If you look at a cop and your eyes go wide or you startle, that’s a red flag.
• “Lemme see your hands.” Floyd ignores this command, slumping over the steering wheel. Then he opens the car door. Cops hate that. An open car door is an open door to assault or ambush. Red flag.
• “Stay in the car, lemme see your other hand.” Officer Lane tries to push the door shut, Floyd pushes it back open, saying “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry”. There are more red flags in this moment than at a Tiananmen Square Patriotic March. Floyd is now offering physical resistance to this officer, to keep the car door open; he’s obviously feeling guilty and desperate; he’s physically huge; he has disregarded every command from this officer, and we still haven’t seen that right hand.
• “Let me see your other hand. Both hands!” “I didn’t do nothin!”
• Officer Lane draws his sidearm and covers Floyd. We still haven’t seen Floyd’s right hand.

That’s in just fifteen seconds. Officer Lane shows considerable restraint up to this point and beyond. At any moment he could find himself fighting for his life at a disadvantage. With nothing but his service pistol, he’s sadly undergunned for George Floyd. In an eyeblink, Floyd could boil out of that car with a knife.

In movies, handguns are usually portrayed as instant fight-enders; someone gets shot and falls over dead right there. In real life, if George Floyd turns out to be a knife attacker, there’s no timely, reliable way to stop him with a service sidearm chambered in not more than .40 S&W. Floyd could take a dozen hits and fight on for minutes. If that fight starts at this range, officer Lane will almost certainly lose. That’s why he’s covering Floyd’s head; a head shot would be his one and only chance.

And Floyd just keeps screwing around: he reaches with the right hand where Officer Lane can’t see, puts his foot out of the vehicle, blabbers hysterically and ignores everything Lane says. He wrestles mightily with the cops when they go to cuff him, and on and on.

To their credit, the officers managed to load Floyd into the back of the cop car without hurting him, but then he got out again and Derek Chauvin took over the scene.

In Part One, based on my interpretation of public information, I gave my opinion that Derek Chauvin is guilty of murder in the second degree under Minnesota law. A conviction would be a just outcome. But at sentencing, George Floyd’s conduct should be taken into account as a mitigating factor. True, Floyd never did get actively, aggressively violent. But with his hulking frame, his seemingly limitless capacity for physical resistance, his hysteria and his refusal to cooperate in his own interests, Floyd deserves much of the blame. Had he cooperated, he would never have been hurt, much less killed.

Had George Floyd lived, he probably would have done time for drug possession, DUI, and resisting arrest. As a repeat offender, he might have gone away for a while. They ought to work out what his sentence would have been and reduce Derek Chauvin’s by at least that. Instead, they’ll increase his penalty because…you know.

In the Foreword, I talked about my background in Emergency Medicine and working with Police. That background informs my opinions today.

After watching both the bodycam and cellphone videos (which you can’t find anywhere anymore except in a misleading “news” context), everyone has an opinion on George Floyd, and so do I. Executive Summary: You’re All Wrong.

Precis:

• George Floyd was a criminal scumbag, of little or no use to society.
• George Floyd was killed by Derek Chauvin.
• The killing was legally wrongful.
• Minnesota law is kind of weird to call this Murder in the Second Degree, but that’s Minnesota law.
• The conviction itself will be just.
• The sentence will not be just; it will be barbaric.
  • Mitigating factors, of which there are many, will not be taken into account.
  • Unproven allegations that the murder was racially motivated will be taken into account.
• Chauvin will die in jail.
• None of this is Justice.

I’m pretty sure everybody can disagree with that, because I’ve seen all manner of commentary to oppose my view. So let’s just take this item by item. (I won’t always provide a cite, you know you read this stuff somewhere, go look it up.)

Assertions in bold are false, and they come from all points of the spectrum.

George Floyd was innocent.

George Floyd was apprehended for passing a counterfeit bill. He was operating a motor vehicle while in a high state of intoxication. Floyd himself massively escalated the situation. Nothing the officers did should have caused Floyd’s extreme reaction or made it impossible for Floyd to comply with simple commands and stop physically resisting. Had he simply calmed down and complied, he would have been fine.

At the beginning of the call, Floyd’s demeanor and conduct expressed mostly fear, but he was clearly a physical threat. The officer who can be seen exercises admirable restraint throughout this stage of the video.

George Floyd violently resisted arrest.

Floyd was six-foot-eight, rangy, and out of his wits. He repeatedly disobeyed commands and wouldn’t keep his hands in sight. The officer who made first contact was taking no chances, covering Floyd’s head with his pistol. I don’t think the officer wanted Floyd to see the gun as a threat, he was trying to keep it out of sight and keep Floyd covered at the same time. But Floyd did see it.

They managed to get Floyd out of the vehicle and cuffed. Floyd was burly and squirrely and it took two officers working in tandem and kind of bending him up to get the cuffs on. At any time, Floyd’s best hold would be to stop resisting, just as the officers repeatedly instructed him to do.

At no point did Floyd produce a weapon, throw a kick or a punch or head-butt. He passed up several chances to bite an officer’s ear. But any of those things might have happened any time. To say he was unarmed is a misnomer; anyone of George Floyd’s build is armed by definition.

Even cuffed, Floyd gave effective passive resistance. They couldn’t get him in the car. As long as he stayed stiffened up like a plank, they couldn’t fit him in the back seat. When they finally got his head under the doorsill, he squirmed away, handcuffs or no, and got out on the other side. He must have bruised himself quite a bit; apparently he didn’t care.

That’s notable resistance, but it is not violent resistance. Thing is, cops have no way of knowing if or when passive resistance will turn violent, so their escalation was also justified, up to a point.

The Coroner’s report showed no evidence of strangulation.

Red Herring. Nobody ever said anything about strangulation.

George Floyd diead of asphyxiation, which can happen many ways other than strangulation. His death was predictable and preventable. Derek Chauvin had been trained to prevent exactly this manner of death.

It’s called “positional asphyxia”. Both police and ambulance personnel are trained to avoid positional asphyxia with handcuffed subjects. Positional asphyxia can happen when a handcuffed subject is positioned face-down. It’s worse for fat people and people with heart or lung issues. Unintentional fatalities have resulted in the past, from simply handcuffing a subject and putting him face down in the back of the car. All cops know this. Derek Chauvin knew it (or should have known it) when he put his knee on George Floyd’s neck.

They were holding George Floyd in a “recovery position”

Recovery Position is one of the first things they teach you. It’s not prone; it’s always on the side with the knees tucked up a little and a couple other things. That position drains the airway, allows easy breathing, and lets the body rest naturally.

George Floyd died in the positional asphyxia position, not the recovery position.

They were restraining Floyd so he wouldn’t injure himself.

It’s true, Floyd was flopping around pretty hard and he could have banged his head on the pavement or something.

You know who else does that? Seizure patients. They thrash around and they can bang their heads on the walls or floor. There are a couple of things you can do to protect the head of a patient in convulsive siezures. Kneeling on the neck is not one of them.

It’s a legitimate restraint technique which police are trained to use!

True, but irrelevant.

I’m not exactly a bleeding-heart when it comes to police use of force. If it was up to me, those rioters in Portland would have been gassed and batoned into early retirrement on the third night at latest. I have no problem with officers applying chokes, busting heads, or kneeling on necks.

But there’s a time and a place for everything, and this wasn’t the time and place. Police are trained to use deadly force. That doesn’t mean they get to blow your brains out for jaywalking.

Derek Chauvin, in placing his knee atop George Floyd’s neck when Floyd was handcuffed and prone, was applying deadly force. It’s not as immediate as a bullet, but it kills you just as dead. Believe me, if I tied your hands behind you and set you down prone, and had three other people hold you, and put my weight on your neck, you would die. That goes double (as in double-quick) if you have heart issues, which George Floyd did.

Knee-on-neck makes a lot of sense when you have a subject on bath salts or ketamine or similar, a person who can’t be reasoned with, who displays superior physical strength and knows neither pain nor fear. A person who will set himself on fire with gasoline just so you can’t touch him. Most importantly, a person you haven’t got the cuffs on yet.

George Floyd in handcuffs isn’t the same thing. Chauvin continued the deadly force even after Floyd became unresponsive. Deadly force against an unresponsive, handcuffed subject, a person who poses no threat to anyone at that point, is a crime no badge will cover.

George Floyd died of a Fentanyl overdose.

In news about George Floyd’s post-mortem toxicology report, Floyd had about 11 ng/mL fentanyl in his blood. Fatalities have been reported as low as 3 ng/mL. So some have claimed that Floyd died of a fentanyl overdose.

People have indeed died at 3 ng/mL. But then, alcohol synergizes with opiates, and an inexperienced user who had a drink or two and tried Fentanyl would be at risk, sometimes with tragic consequences. There’s no public evidence George Floyd had been drinking. Based on his history, his opiate tolerance would have been high, and his experience lengthy. 11 ng/mL would hardly be out of line for a guy like him.

Leave out the numbers and look at the video. Say what you will about George Floyd’s state of physical and mental health, it is obvious he didn’t die of a opiate overdose. There’s no torpor, no loss of muscle tone, no unresponsiveness. To look at this sequence of events and say George Floyd died of an overdose is as ridiculous as watching the Hindenburg go up in flames and saying Hmmm…Fentanyl.

At least one guy with major medical training agrees with me. The headline is “George Floyd had fatal levels of Fentanyl in his system”, but the Doctor says:

The new documents say Floyd had a “heavy heart” and “at least one artery was approximately 75% blocked.”

Dr. Stephen Nelson, chairman of Florida’s medical examiners commission, who is not affiliated with the case, reviewed the new files and says that doesn’t mean the drugs or health condition is what caused Floyd’s death.

“We’ve all had cases where those kinds of of levels come into play. You’ve got to look at the whole picture,” Nelson said. “It’s one thing to die *with* something. It’s another thing to die *from* something.”

The documents say Baker performed the autopsy before watching the videos of police restraining Floyd, with Officer Derek Chauvin’s knee on Floyd’s neck, because Baker wanted to avoid bias in his autopsy.

In Baker’s final report after watching the videos, he ruled Floyd’s death a homicide caused by “law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression.”

The FBI asked the Armed Forces Medical Examiner to review Baker’s autopsy and they agreed with his findings, writing “his death was caused by the police subdual and restraint” with cardiovascular disease and drug intoxication contributing.”

George Floyd died of homicide, not a drug overdose. That’s what a lay person intuits from the imagery; that person is correct.

You can’t call it murder!

This is a reasonable point of view. “Murder” is a very strong word and Americans mostly reserve that word for crimes of obvious intent.

Minnesota law, however, defines the offense of murder in such a way that Derek Chauvin can be guilty. There are two subdivisions under the 2nd-Degree Murder statute in Minnesota. The second subdivision covers “unintentional murders”:

Whoever does either of the following is guilty of unintentional murder in the second degree and may be sentenced to imprisonment for not more than 40 years:

1) causes the death of a human being, without intent to effect the death of any person, while committing or attempting to commit a felony offense other than criminal sexual conduct in the first or second degree with force or violence or a drive-by shooting.

2) [causes the death of a human being, without intent to effect the death of any person, while in violation of a domestic court order, i.e. violent stalker or abuser.]

Chauvin will be charged under provision 1 of this subdivision. It’s a concept known as “felony murder”, and not all jurisdictions agree on how to define it. Suppose you rob a bank, and you run down a bicyclist in the getaway vehicle (stop smirking). You may not have intended to kill the guy, but you took deadly risks in the commission of a felony, which shows a callousness paramount to a lesser form of murder. Many if not most states have a statute like this.

But what if you got mad at someone and hit him with a baseball bat, and he ended up dying of a spleen fracture? Maybe you didn’t intend to kill him, but you did commit a felony and he died as a result, so that looks like felony murder. But in some states, it is specifically forbidden to upgrade a felony assault to a felony murder; the intended crime has to be something else: robbery, arson, etc. In those states, assault is only murder if you can prove intent, and then it’s not mere assault anymore.

Minnesota is different. In Minnesota, an assault which results in an unintended death can be prosecuted as felony murder. (Note that you can’t get busted for felony murder in Minnesota if you merely assault and rape someone or participate in a drive-by shooting. This raises the argument that Chauvin could be exempted under this provision if he had only forcibly penetrated George Floyd or let off some random fire in his direction.)

So that’s the legal line against Chauvin. They have to prove he feloniously assaulted George Floyd, and they have to prove that was the cause of death.

It won’t be hard to prove. Chauvin himself seems to know this. He tried to plead guilty to Murder in the Third Degree, last year. Attorney General Barr personally scuppered the deal. That’s a tell.

It was state-sanctioned murder!

People actually said this.

Chauvin, a policeman, did five months in maximum security waiting to bail out. He faces charges that could send him away for the rest of his life. If that’s your idea of state sanction, I wonder what your idea of state persecution is.

It was a racist murder!

This is an inflammatory, unprovable, and irresponsible thing to say. Nobody knows for sure what Derek Chauvin was thinking.

There are some lines of inquiry that might shed some light. Did Chauvin have a history of complaints from black subjects? During Chauvin’s 18-year career, did any other blacks get injured or killed in Chauvin’s custody?

Did Derek Chauvin have previous run-ins or associations with George Floyd? Was Floyd a “frequent flyer”, a known troublemaker?

Did Chauvin have general reasons to be stressed? Wife having an affair, gambling debts, anything like that?

He certainly had specific reasons to be stressed. George Floyd turned what should have been a routine stop into a deadly encounter.

The Foreword isn’t about George Floyd. The Foreword is about me.

I was a working medical professional for about a decade. Not to glorify myself with my actual job title, I was what you could call an ambulance driver.

Among medical professionals, ambulance drivers receive about the least formal training. To have less medical training than an ambulance driver and still be called a professional, you also have to be a certified Wildland Firefighter or something.

The training to be an ambulance driver is intensive, but it only lasts about half a year. Obviously you can’t make a physician or a surgeon in just six months. The part they can teach you in that limited time is the best part: Assessment.

For filling out certain medical paperwork, there’s a formula called SOAP. It means: Subjective, Objective, Assessment, and Plan.

Subjective is whatever the patient is complaining about, that you can’t see. “My stomach hurts.” “I feel dizzy.” These things are referred to as symptoms.

Objective is things you can see in one way or another. There’s a rash on the scalp. The breathing is noisy. Blood sugar is down to 35 mg/dL. These things are called signs.

Assessment is what you think is going on. Diabetic ketoacidosis. Siezure. Generalized anxiety.

Plan is what you did about it, or what you intend to do. Administer aspirin. Administer electric shock. Splint a fracture. Transport to ER.

A physician working in a full-service hospital has all the tools for assessment, including things like blood work and CAT scans. Obviously you can’t take those tools out in the field. But you have your physical senses, and a few tools: heart monitor, pulse oximeter, blood glucometer, stethoscope, blood pressure cuff, penlight. With that limited kit an ambulance driver can rapidly and accurately assess dozens of common medical conditions and internal injuries.

Ambulances typically roll with a crew of two: the driver and the Paramedic. Paramedics have about two years’ minimum of intensive training. In terms of assessment, it’s not much of an advantage. Paramedics have exactly one assessment skill that drivers don’t: they are licensed to assess a heart monitor readout. Which is a very nifty skill, but rarely applied.

Thus, paramedics are only marginally ahead of drivers when it comes to Assessment. But when it comes to the Plan, the paramedic is God. A driver has a license to splint and bandage trauma patients, do basic life support and defibrillation with a couple of crude tools to help manage the airway, and administer a handful of the most innocuous drugs. Paramedics can bring the dead to life. If there’s air in the chest, a paramedic can poke a hole and let it out. They can poke a hole in the neck to let air in. They can poke a hole in the circulatory system, add fluids to a bleeding patient, add sugar to a diabetic emergency. They can chemically paralyze and intubate, administer opiates and sedatives, insert a urinary catheter, etc.

An ambulance driver isn’t licensed to do those things, but he knows how they’re done and he’s generally the one carrying the gear. On scene, the driver acts as a physician’s assistant or surgery nurse, anticipating the next step and having tools ready when they’re wanted. The driver has another traditional role: when the paramedic has his head down working on the patient, the driver keeps his own head up.

It’s called the Prehospital Setting, and nobody knows where it’s going to be. It might be in the works of some industrial machine, it might be at someone’s elegant wedding feast, it might be in the bottom of a muddy ditch trying to smash the window of an overturned pickup truck that was on fire when you got here. Scene safety is paramount. Is this machine locked out/tagged out? Is the attacker still here at the feast? Is this truck going to roll over on me? And you have to keep an ongoing eye on all these things. That cross-eyed bridesmaid with the serving fork could pop out of the shrubbery anytime. The ditch bank could start to erode.

It’s common to have sketchy people or weapons on scene. In the semi-rural service area where I worked, there was a lot of what you might call downscale living, and people who live like that rely on emergency services for their health care. Many live in squalor; some are drunks and/or meth-heads; a few are flat-out criminals. When sketchy people are around, you have to try to be tactical to keep everybody in view and maintain a line of retreat. You don’t just assess the patient. In a low-key, circumspect way, you continuously assess everybody.

Imagine you’re at a party with some friends, some friends-of-friends, and some other acquaintances. As you move around and interact with people, you use your social skills to assess people and decide how to treat them. This one seems manipulative, this one is friendly but annoying, her laugh is atrocious, that one’s attractive, he seems grumpy, etc. Now imagine everyone at the party is a sketchy stranger. This one’s huddled in the corner mumbling, this one seems to be spoiling for a fight, this one has sallow skin and twitching hands, this one is wearing sunglasses and trying to look intimidating. You’d pick up on the dangerous vibe and amp up your awareness. You’d notice more details about everything and everybody. People who live in neighborhoods with detectable levels of street crime develop the habit of heightened awareness when out-of-doors.

Ambulance personnel do the same thing, not so much as a matter of instinct or habit, but as of training and experience. Heightened awareness coupled with medical training means you can assess a lot at a glance. You see the skin, the posture, the eyes, hear the voice or the breathing…you can often make an accurate assessment before you even have time to introduce yourself and set down your bags. If the patient has heart failure, you can see his swollen feet and confirm it by listening to him breathe. There are quite a few specific conditions you can spot from across the room.

In my capacity as an ambulance driver, I have worked with the police. I have treated people who were in custody at the time. Not all cops are good, but the cops I worked with were good, and I never knew them to mistreat anyone. Police have medical training too, some of which I know about. I also know a thing or two about fighting and the legalities of deadly force.

***********

I assessed the video of George Floyd’s death. I saw the cellphone video of him actually dying, and I also saw the bodycam video of the initial stop and confrontation.

In a nutshell: George Floyd’s death was wrongful. I predict Derek Chauvin will be justly convicted of murder in the second degree. I also predict Chauvin will be unjustly sentenced; a light sentence or early commutation would be just. They’ll give him life. There is no justice in any of this.

There’s a lot of commentary to the contrary, from both right and left, so I’ll take that line by line in Part One.

They’re paying him money. I’m desperately jealous, and annoyed because I’ll have to update my blogroll.

Mr. DeBoer wrote a very personal article about his medical struggles with mental illness. He’s diagnosed with bipolar disorder and has struggled with mania and depression throughout his adult life. A few years back he had a manic episode that blew up into paranoid delusions, and it ripped his life apart.

Since then, he’s been on a horrific cocktail of drugs just to keep him on the rails. Lithium, benzos, antidepressants, amphetamines, and more. To me the most frightening of side effects (one Freddie doesn’t confess to experiencing) is tardive dyskinesia, which happens mostly with the old-school anti-psychotics. (In this video, they’ve positioned the camera so the speaker’s mouth is hidden by a little rail. It doesn’t work to disguise the dyskinesia. It may not cause any real harm, but it must be horrible to live with, and Freddie’s at risk.)

In the face of all this, in the face of his own shame over his past antics and the grim day-to-day reality of drug cocktails and a long-term prognosis which offers only the most distant and difficult hope, Fredrik DeBoer endures with heroic stoicism.

And he has a fine mind! From his professional writing you would never suspect the guy is a bug-eye. He’s smart, open-minded, pro-social and forthright. He argues in favor of competing points of view. He questions the weak characters, the antisocial tendencies of the left, and they hate him for it. Freddie really has copped an ungodly amount of online abuse from the left, and he takes that stoically as well.

Fredrik DeBoer does not align with me on some of the moral fundamentals. But if he’s in the opposition, he’s the kind of opposition I want. He’s in good faith, he’s honest, you get the feeling you could persuade him of things.

Definitely worth a read.

Fans of Theodore “Dr. Suess” Geisel are aware that Dr. Suess Enterprises, the publishing company will cancel printings of six books:

“These books portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong,” Dr. Seuss Enterprises told The Associated Press in a statement that coincided with the late author and illustrator’s birthday.

“Ceasing sales of these books is only part of our commitment and our broader plan to ensure Dr. Seuss Enterprises’ catalog represents and supports all communities and families,” it said.

The other books affected are “McElligot’s Pool,” “On Beyond Zebra!,” “Scrambled Eggs Super!,” and “The Cat’s Quizzer.”

My personal favorite Dr. Seuss book is Green Eggs and Ham. Second place is pretty much a three-way tie between The Lorax, Happy Birthday to You!, and McElligot’s Pool. I was very fond of On Beyond Zebra when I was little, but I don’t remember the book all that well.

When I was about six, I would read McElligot’s Pool to my four-year-old cousin. When I had little kids of my own, I read them that book again and again. It’s a wonderful globe-spanning flight of fancy, with some of Suess’s most entertaining illustrations. I don’t have a copy handy, but I can remember most of the verses. I racked my brain: what part of McElligot’s Pool could anybody find offensive or harmful? Then it struck me:

Some Eskimo fish
From beyond Hudson Bay
Might decide to swim down
Might be headed this way!

It’s a pretty long trip
But they might and they may.

Here’s the illustration (partial, I found a copy of the whole two-page illustration earlier today, but Twitter censored it before I thought to download.)

Oh the humanity! I asked an Eskimo how he felt about it:

Oh wait, that’s not an Eskimo, that’s a fucking wop. Real Eskimos don’t have time to be offended by this kind of thing. The Eskimo fish are portrayed as sympathetic and happy.

As soon as word broke that these titles would now be out of print, the books trended strongly on eBay, bringing in three-digit bids. Ebay reacted by scraping the books from its market, based on an offensive materials policy:

Listings that promote or glorify hatred, violence, or discrimination are not allowed.

I don’t promote hatred, violence, or discrimination and neither does anyone buying or selling these books. Nobody, absolutely nobody, is harmed by McElligot’s Pool.

This decision by Dr. Seuss Enterprises was driven largely by a scholarly analysis of Dr. Seuss’s early work, some of which was heavily satirical and used negative racial stereotypes freely. It’s probably reasonable to get offended at some of this stuff. The study would be more convincing if it showed the cartoons it spends so much verbiage merely to describe. Dr. Seuss called black people “niggers” and portrayed them as monkeys and savages. That’s unkind and it does somewhat tarnish the image of the kindly, benevolent Dr. Seuss.

Historians generally agree that the “nadir” of American race relations was in the 1920’s. That’s when you saw the highest rates of race-based alienation, division and violence. Dr. Seuss’s bigotry in the 1930’s was mild stuff compared to some of his contemporaries.

Then, there’s the war propaganda. Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in a treacherous sneak attack; American Sailors and Marines perished by drowning in flaming diesel oil and salt water; others suffocated in the dark, trapped in the armored hulls of their sunken ships. The Japanese routinely tortured and murdered prisoners of war, sometimes on a mass scale as at Bataan. In Nanking, they queued up live civilians and used them for bayonet practice. Attractive females who fell into the Japanese’s clutches were raped many times a day for months or even years. In Manchuria, Japan’s Unit 731 performed vivisections and other experiments on live prisoners, every bit as sickening as anything Mengele did at Auschwitz, and on a much larger scale.

And then Dr. Seuss portrayed them with buck teeth and slanty eyes. The horror!

His stepdaughter, who seems like a nice lady, defended Dr. Suess against charges of racism, but she nevertheless agreed with the publisher’s decision to terminate the six titles. She thinks the world is hurting with racism or something and it’s time to be extra-extra nice. That would make sense if anyone, anywhere, could feel good about this. To a first approximation, nobody can. On the contrary, millions of people are dismayed if not outright pissed.

The decision to cease publication and sales of the books was made last year after months of discussion, the company said.

‘Dr. Seuss Enterprises listened and took feedback from our audiences including teachers, academics and specialists in the field as part of our review process. We then worked with a panel of experts, including educators, to review our catalog of titles.’

Random House Children Books, Dr. Seuss’ publisher, issued a brief statement on Tuesday: ‘We respect the decision of Dr. Seuss Enterprises and the work of the panel that reviewed this content last year, and their recommendation.’

Why? How can you respect that decision? Literally one-hundred percent of the market disagrees; millions of readers. And this honking prune-faced gaggle of constipated geese scowls and burns their books.

Dr. Seuss is one of the greatest Americans of the twentieth century. Millions of kids learned to read, drawn in by Dr. Seuss’s loopy illustrations. He preached open-mindedness, creativity, adventure, kindness, and cleaning up messes. The legacy of Dr. Seuss ought to be defended and preserved in its entirety, even if that legacy is partly unsavory. Dropping these six titles on such specious grounds is something like treason. Dr. Seuss is important, and we can’t have valid opinions about him if we’re not allowed to know the man on his own terms.

This isn’t “censorship” or “cancel culture”. The correct word for this is genocide. If they can cancel McElligot’s Pool, they can and will cancel everything. Dr. Seuss has millions of fans, and they couldn’t defend him against a handful of lemon-sucking eggheads. Who will step up to defend Milton or Melville, Kipling or Poe? We have Professor Padilla at Princeton, a “leading scholar of Rome”; this resting-bitch-faced little scold is calling for classical studies to be abolished and the Western canon consigned to the dustbin, and the NY Times cheers him on because one time stormfront.org featured an image of the Parthenon, so that naturally proves that everything from ancient Greece on down is white supremacist. In this reasoning, everything is instantly contaminated and must be thrown away.

All we treasure, all we share, to be thrown away. Genocide.

(Part 1 here.)

Suppose you have a barrel of water, with a dead fish in the water and a bullet hole in the fish. You don’t have the smoking gun, but you know somebody shot that fish. That’s all you need to declare an election illegitimate. You don’t need proof, all you need is doubt. If they didn’t want us to doubt the election, they shouldn’t have conducted it so dubiously, and they should be willing to talk it over now and prove their side of the case. They’re not; they can’t. As the victors, they bear the burden of proof. They have no proof.

That’s all you need, but some people on our side wanted more.

There’s a great book by Stanislaw Lem, called Memoirs Found in a Bathtub. It’s about a guy on a secret mission in The Building, a gigantic underground hive of offices, bureacrats, military men and spies. It starts out kind of light-hearted and satirical; the guy encounters comical bureaucratic resistance, his mission turns out to be so secret that nobody is authorized to brief him on it, so he’ll just have to proceed without orders, etc. But gradually it descends into the profoundest depths of paranoia. Everybody in The Building is an enemy agent, except for the ones who have turned against the enemy, except for the ones who have turned back, etc. Every perception, every thought, is a coded message or a tactic of deception. If you so much as clean your fingernails in The Building, someone is watching you, someone perceives the hidden meaning of it. If the brakes squeal, or the toilet gurgles, it’s trying to tell you something.

And finally the guy realizes his mind has been on rails the whole time. The Building controls everything he sees and feels and thinks, from the robotic fly that lands in his coffee to his attempts to understand the meaning of life. Even knowing that, he can’t get his mind off the rails. He can say, I am a man, but that’s just what The Building wants him to say, expects him to say. Even in asserting his individuality, even in violent resistance, he does the will of The Building. In the end there’s no mission at all, just The Building, consuming agent after agent in exactly the same way.

With that as a preamble, let’s take a little dip in the murky waters of paranoia around the 2020 election.

Lin Wood, who kept a very high media profile and vaunted himself a defender of the right in Georgia, flamed out QAnon style somewhere along the line. Just keep that in mind; we’ll get back to it.

Sidney Powell never disgraced herself the way Wood did, but she made major public claims against Dominion Voting Systems. From memory:

• Dominion voting systems featured a graphical UI that could be used to reassign votes.
• Votes were programmatically flipped from Trump to Biden without need for human action.
• Vote tallies included “fractions” of votes, indicating a vote-weighting algorithm.
• American votes were tallied overseas in Germany or Spain.

Which brings me to Patrick Byrne. At his Deep Capture blog, he wrote a six-part series on how Donald Trump lost the White House. Perhaps the most exciting installation is Part 3.

Byrne is a smart guy, a successful tech entrepreneur, survived three bouts of cancer, rode a bicycle across the continental US more than once. He’s not a trivial fellow and he has no discernible motive to grift. He worked closely with Sidney Powell and Mike Flynn, and he was first-hand witness to some events in the White House. He didn’t prefer Trump as a candidate, but he preferred electoral integrity over beating Trump, which is wise and principled of him. I do recommend the whole series.

Byrne doubled down on every claim Sidney Powell made, and added a couple of his own:

• There was a lot of suspicious internet traffic originating in China, targeting Dominion machines.
• Someone installed a spy transmitter in an internet-controlled thermostat, to remotely control Dominion systems in the room.
• …

Byrne then goes on to speculate that COVID, the Summer of Riots, and the election were all one big psyop, run according to some master plan. Then he presents a stronger form of the same concept, where the psyop was run out of China, and we can look forward to a future where American political and economic life are pretty much under direct Chinese control.

Now, there are some current conspiracies that are trivially easy to debunk. There aren’t any microchips in the vaccine, and 5G radiation won’t make you sick unless you stream a sickening movie or something.

You can’t disprove Patrick Byrne’s wilder assertions and speculations. It really is possible that 2020 was a coordinated psyop; it’s possible China was behind it; it’s possible that China has clandestine control, or at least undue influence, in the US government and on Wall Street.

It doesn’t matter, because you can’t prove these things. The basic arguments to challenge the 2020 election process and result are simple arguments based on facts nobody can deny. Throwing in all these wild allegations, abstruse technical details, and shadowy conspiracy theories dilutes the argument, makes it incoherent, unconvincing, even boring.

When Lin Wood embraced QAnon, it was a huge embarrassment. This guy was leading the charge in Georgia, and suddenly he was revealed as a frothing bug-eyed maniac.

Sidney Powell promised us a Kraken, and failed to deliver so much as a cuttlefish. She is now being sued by Dominion for 1.3 BILLION dollars, and it doesn’t appear her defense is going well. She’ll be represented by…Lin Wood, I guess because Michael Avenatti is under house arrest awaiting sentencing. It all just seems sleazy.

When Sidney Powell first publicly aired the Kraken allegations, several commentators on the right were dismayed that the effort was distracting from more provable lines of inquiry and more applicable principles of law. Angelo Codevilla made the argument forcefully back in November. You don’t need proof of specific crimes, you need probable cause to investigate. Taping up windows at the polling station is probable cause. You don’t need to prove there’s a spy device in the thermostat, and if you can’t prove it, you shouldn’t say it.

Lin Wood and Sidney Powell did tremendous harm to the cause. They helped the opposition conflate legitimate concerns with crackpot gibberish and easily-denied allegations. It doesn’t matter whether that stuff is true; it’s a liability in legal and rhetorical terms and it may have been decisive in losing the election. Wood and Powell massively impaired the credibility of anyone questioning the election result.

Maybe we should pay them back by believing they were working for the other side the whole time.

Which brings us back to Patrick Byrne. It’s not really believable that Byrne is a member of some sinister cabal. His series is definitely worth reading. But Byrne is a bit of a brainiac, a rambling, consilient thinker, and not everyone will have the time to understand him fully. More importantly, I think Byrne led himself astray. He got so hooked on the details and deep patterns that he forgot the fundamentals.

The six-part series is long, and Patrick Byrne has edited it into a single volume you can buy. He touts it as the thing to send to anyone who doubts the election was rigged.

Thumbs down. That book will not convince anyone who is not convinced in advance. I’ve put Patrick Byrne in my blogroll under Cult Leaders and Conspiracy Theories, not because I think he’s a liar or a grifter, but because too many in his audience are likely to take up his more fanciful ideas and run with them. That can only further discredit, by association and conflation, the simple points that need to be made:

FINAL WORD!

It is astonishing how effective the narrative of “no proof of voter fraud” has proven. Stalwarts of the Right, people who should know better, capitulated almost instantly. They eagerly joined the Left to delegitimize, dehumanize and even criminalize any voice dissenting from that narrative.

The best dissent I’ve seen so far comes from Michael Anton, author of the famous Flight 93 Election essay. Anton chronicles a meeting of minds between himself and our old friend and ally Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan really is an endearing character of whom I’ve always been strangely fond, but of course he’s also a glassy-eyed lunatic who needs cult followers to fund his HIV treatment. Anyway, Anton tried to talk Sullivan off the ledge, and in the process he hit the rhetorical mark with precision.

I will now echo, amplify, and expand on Michael Anton’s thesis, but do take the time to read Anton as well.

Gentle Reader, you may someday come under pressure to confess the 2020 Presidential election as legitimate. Perhaps an associate or family member, or worse yet an official, will demand this acquiescence. The way to win is to keep your arguments in the realm of the provable, the indisputable, the things that people can’t unsee.

Item 1: Non-Transparency

The 2020 election hinged on five key swing states: Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Nevada. At midnight on election day, President Trump had comfortable leads in all those states. Then Democrat election officials halted the counting in Atlanta, Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukie, and Las Vegas. They ejected Republican poll watchers, in some cases by physical force, and then for the next three hours they did…something, in secret, and Biden mysteriously pulled ahead in each statewide race. Biden’s total margin of victory in all five states combined was only about 70,000 votes.

Look at this picture:

Those are poll workers in Michigan, blocking the windows to prevent the public from observing their activities. At best, that’s highly suspicious. But notice what they’re blocking the windows with. It’s 8-foot sheets of what looks like posterboard. They didn’t just nip out to the art supply store at midnight and buy that stuff. That’s a specialty item; they probably had to order from a regional supplier and wait six weeks for delivery. They had a plan, in advance of the election, to render the process non-transparent by literally making the windows opaque. There is no innocent explanation for this.

Just to rub salt in the wound, the NY Times pretended there was an innocent explanation for this:

By around 3 p.m., there were dozens of calls posted on Facebook, and people responded by showing up; over 100 people were at the vote-counting site by then.

NBC News earlier reported on a private Facebook group, Stand Up Michigan to Unlock Michigan, that was part of the calls; Facebook removed the group shortly after.

Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

After the protesters arrived, workers began to cover the site’s windows, leading to unfounded rumors about their motivations. Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, shared one such video, and captioned her post, “SHADY …” It collected 62,000 likes and shares on Twitter, and 7.3 million video views. On Wednesday evening, President Trump tweeted about the falsehood, generating more than 350,000 likes and shares.

The people who came to observe the polls wouldn’t have called themselves protesters. The rumors were well-founded, and even if they weren’t that’s not the same thing as a lie. The NYT makes no effort to reason out the argument or persuade anyone. It merely asserts, you will believe us when we say this is a lie. Such assertions betray a psychopathic level of contempt for the reader. It gets worse:

Lawrence Garcia, the city of Detroit’s corporation counsel, said the windows had been covered because poll workers inside had expressed concerns about people taking unauthorized photographs and videos of their work.

“Only the media is allowed to take pictures inside the counting place,” he said, “and people outside the center were not listening to requests to stop filming poll workers and their paperwork.”

Only the media is allowed to take evidence of election integrity? Well, having such power and privilege, surely the media dutifully observed and recorded the proceedings. Oh wait, they didn’t? Nobody checked the poll-workers’ work?

Voting is the most public of insitutions, and an institution in which the public has total interest. To impose any limitation on the public’s right to understand and observe their own elections, can only mean you want to cheat. There is no innocent explanation for the opaque windows. Garcia goes on to blandly assert that the process was transparent, free and fair.

That’s how they did it in all five states. Then they just handwaved away legitimate concerns. Nothing to see here.

Proprietary code

There have been various claims made about Dominion voting systems, claims for which the public has no proof. We’ll talk about these claims later, there is one claim that can’t be denied: Dominion systems use proprietary code.

That should absolutely be illegal. Any source code for voting equipment should be open-source, available for public review. Tallying votes is not rocket science; there’s no need for a patented algorithm.

Dominion can program their equipment to do literally anything to vote tallies. Because their code is proprietary, nobody outside of Dominion can ever know what Dominion programs its machines to do. With trivial ease, Dominion can decide the outcome of any election where their machines are used.

Even if Dominion is on the up-and-up, they are still subject to fiendish temptations to abuse their power. Those temptations should not legally exist.

That’s all that needs to be said about Dominion. Any election result that comes from proprietary software is a result that can’t be proven, can’t be verified beyond a reasonable doubt. That’s unacceptable in a nominal Republic.

Shut Up Shut Up Shut Up

There are reams of circumstantial evidence that are damning to the supposed integrity of the 2020 election. Rather than cite all that eye-glazing information, just note how desperate Democrats are to close the book on all this. They make no effort to persuade; they just assert and assert that the election was legitimate. And now they’re moving to criminalize as terrorist incitement any public pushback against that assertion.

By taking this line they tacitly admit they would have lost a fair, transparent election. Or at least, they admit they can’t win the argument. We can’t prove they cheated, but they can’t prove they won. That’s all on them, it’s all their fault, they brought this on themselves.

Michael Anton cautions against “believing” the election was stolen. For rhetorical purposes he is correct. To be persuasive, you mustn’t believe things you can’t prove. A stolen election is by far the most likely explanation for everything we know, but it’s not proven and it won’t be proven. The trail is cold, the evidence despoliated.

A prosecutor making a criminal case tries to develop evidence of method, motive and opportunity. There can be no doubt as to the Democrats’ motive: they intended to win. There was also ample opportunity, and Democrats clearly went out of their way to create opportunities for fraud, with unsolicited mail-in voting and secret shenanigans with the ballots. But we can only guess as to the exact method. It seems to have been pretty crude, blatant stuff; the resulting anomalies are obvious.

That’s all you can say for sure. It’s enough.

FINAL WORD!

Last week, in Slice and Simmer, we talked about how to prepare food on a cutting board and put it in a crock pot (or maybe one of these new-fangled Instant Pots). We were tired with all that learning, and we didn’t want to work over a hot stove just then. This week, let’s brace up and get into the hot stove stuff.

Here’s a rudimentary list of home-cooking techniques ranked by temperature in Fahrenheit:

• Fermentation: “cellar temperature”, about 60
• Drying/Salting: room temperature or maybe a little warmer
• Smoking: about 170 to 200
• Boiling Water: 212 at sea level, too many techniques to list
• Pressure Cooker: around 240
• Oil Cooking (Stovetop Pan or Deep Fry): 350-450
• Roasting: 350-450
• Searing/Browning Meat: 400-800 (This includes pan-frying, grilling, and blackening)
• Baking: 350-500
• Candymaking: somewhere in the high 400s

This series is focused on good people who happen to know nothing about cooking, to show the way to maximum food and survival value with minimum investment and risk. This next bit of advice takes some investment: learn to cook in a pan on your stovetop. Learn to cook in oil and sear meat on the stovetop.

Last week we talked about Student Stew. We suggested that stewing things like onions and meat would produce edible food. That’s true; it will. But processing at higher temperature produces a whole new level of food value that is worth it.

Suppose you stew an onion. The cell walls will soften and the onion will release its characteristic sulfury flavor. Nothing wrong with that.

But if you sizzle sliced onion in oil, you get this other thing called Caramelization. The starches in the onion convert into sugars, and the sugars start to melt down into caramel. Short-order professional cooks sizzle raw onions long enough to convert the starches to sugar, and maybe enough to see a little browning. That’s enough cooking to see a total transformation in food value.

Likewise with meat. Stewing will cook meat more or less okay, but at higher heat you get Maillard reactions, named for the chemist-chef who figured out what the protein and sugar were doing. Normally it’s called browning or searing meat. It smells wonderful, and it gives a better mouth feel than meat which is merely stewed.

Oil-cooking temperatures are also excellent for developing flavors from fresh herbs and spices. Garlic in particular doesn’t cook and is even kind of offensive if stewed or eaten raw. Roasting or stove-top temperatures make garlic sweet and digestible.

Oil-temperature cooking on the stovetop is done in what is called a pan. It may seem condescending to place so much emphasis on such a common word, but the meaning of the word pan is vast; it contains multitudes. Men have died over differences of opinion with regard to the pan, and in seeking a pan of your own you will find your options to be panoptional, with the occasional flame war breaking out.

So let’s break it down to the basics. The most stylish pans are called saute pans, and they look more or less like this:

“Saute” is the French word for “jump”, which refers to the practice of tossing and flipping ingredients one-handed. Saute pans come in a variety of shapes and sizes, with a shallowish nine-inch pan being common. The handle is a separate piece of metal riveted onto the cooking vessel; the handle may be slender or hollow, either way it won’t get hot. Restaurants commonly use inexpensive aluminum pans; discerning chefs use stainless-steel pans with copper inlays in the base to distribute heat more evenly. You can spend anything from six to six-hundred dollars on a saute pan; it doesn’t make a lot of difference.

Saute pans are great in a restaurant, because you can run as many as six burners at once. The cool, ergonomic handles of the pans let you keep the food moving without needing a hot pad or a spatula. And the flipping action is stylish and fun, though you will drop a few shrimp on the floor in the learning process.

Despite all these fashionable advantages, I prefer a cast-iron skillet for home cooking:

It’s possible to flip and toss in a skillet, but the ergonomics aren’t great and the skillet is much heavier than a saute pan. The short handle is the same piece of metal as the vessel, so the grip gets scorching hot. You need a hot pad or dry dish towel just to shake the pan around.

But for home cooking the skillet has advantages:

• Easier temperature control (The skillet is massive and iron conducts heat slowly, something like ten times slower than copper.)
• Forgiving cooking surface (Iron doesn’t like to stick, and with a little care it can be made slick.)
• Larger capacity (A ten-inch skillet will hold about twice as much food as a 9-inch saute pan.)
• Versatile (Try making bacon, burgers or pancakes in a saute pan!)

The cooking surface of cast iron requires its own kind of maintenance. The key word with cast iron is seasoning. Here, I’ll just let Lodge explain it:

When oils or fats are heated in cast iron at a high enough temperature, they change from a wet liquid into a slick, hardened surface through a process called polymerization. This reaction creates a layer of seasoning that is molecularly bonded to the iron. Without this layer of carbonized oil, iron cookware would corrode and rust due to the oxygen and moisture in the air.

The seasoning protects against rust and also forms a slick, glossy-black cooking surface which resists stickage. The seasoning in your skillet improves with use as more oil is polymerized into the seasoning.

Some people get really invested in their skillets’ seasoning, and at least one marriage was called off because some poor sap used soap to wash out great-granny’s heirloom skillet. Don’t wash cast iron with soap.

If someone does wash your skillet with soap, or you burn the seasoning off your skillet, or you have a brand-new or bare-metal skillet you got somewhere, you’ll want to do a “preseasoning” procedure. If that’s your predicament, you can get no better advice than from Cowboy Kent Rollins:

• How to Use Cast Iron: Cooking, Cleaning and Seasoning
• The Best Cast Iron Skillet? – Review of Lodge, Field Co, Stargazer, Butter Pat
• How to Smooth Rough Cast Iron (pertains mainly to new Lodge skillets with their weird factory coating)
• The Tricks to Crispy Hash Browns

Just had to put that last one in there! Cowboy Kent Rollins’s hash browns are heaven, I can tell you. There’s something about Rollins himself, too, the guy is a wellspring almost of spiritual comfort. If you’re in the market for recipes and techniques, Cowboy Kent can demonstrate.

Okay, so you’ve got yourself a skillet. Now what?

The basic concept is, you get the pan hot, you add oil and get the oil hot, and then you add ingredients. The ingredients will sizzle and it’s important to keep them moving so they won’t overcook on one side. Shake the skillet and stir with a fork or spatula to keep things moving. This technique will caramelize onions, cook garlic, or sear meat that has been cut up or ground. It’s simple enough and it adds a lot of flavor.

Beyond that, there’s a template for saute cooking (yeah, I’m just going to call it sauteeing from now on, even though it’s in cast iron)

• Preheat pan / heat oil
• Add onions and start caramelization
• Add meat and sear (Meat can be anything from cubed lamb to mushrooms.)
• Keep everything moving and add oil as necessary to continue caramelization and searing
• Add minced garlic and herbs (in hot oil, these ingredients will cook in seconds)
• Cook down until the food almost starts to stick
• Deglaze with alcohol
• Add liquid
• Reduce liquid
• Finish

There are thousands of recipes that follow this template; limitless possibilities arising from a simple set of techniques. Whatever ingredients you have on hand, whatever flavor you have a wild hair for, you can plug it into this formula and it will make food. Selecting some ingredients at random, let’s make

Shrimp in Creamy Garlic Sauce

Pre-heat the pan until it is hot. Add oil. When oil is shimmering hot, add julienned onions.

Once the onions are sizzling and starting to look clear, add peeled, deveined shrimp. Toss and cook until the shrimp are seared and beginning to cook through.

Add minced garlic, basil and chives. Toss and cook until the garlic appears snow-white, about 15 seconds.

Deglaze with white wine. (What’s deglaze? In the high-heat part of the process, a lot of sugars and aromatics and Maillard reaction products are released or produced. At the same time, the food is cooked to the point where it starts to stick. Much concentrated flavor ends up glued to the pan. Alcohol is a solvent. It dissolves this glue, returns all that flavor to the mix, and gets everything unstuck. The alcohol itself rapidly boils off.)

Add fish stock and heavy cream. Return to a boil and reduce. (Reduce just means you boil or simmer a liquid to remove water and thicken it.)

Once the bubbles in the cream sauce are large, finish with Romano cheese. (A cream sauce like this is an emulsion of creamy fat and water. One way to stiffen or thicken this emulsion is to boil away water. Another way is to add fat. A little cheese, stirred in, will thicken this sauce right up.)

Remove from heat and serve. (When you reduce and finish an emulsion, the sauce gets very “tight”. Continued heating at this point can cause the emulsion to break, leaving an oily, watery mess.)

Pro Tip: Have everything handy when you start. Working in a pan at sautee temperatures, events unfold rapidly and need constant attention. When you have a pan sizzling on the stove is not an opportune time to mince garlic or run to the pantry. Have that wine bottle within reach.

That’s all for now, see you next week!

(UPDATED section here)

I shouldn’t have to rehearse all the ways the Chinese Communist Party is the deadliest global fascist menace to humanity. But some people don’t know, so I guess I have to.

(The ancient and honorable People of China, their Nation, their Country and their Culture, are not to be disparaged. “China”, when used here in a negative context, means specifically the Chinese Communist Party, the most disgraceful bunch of thugs ever hatched by human mothers. The point is not that the Chinese are bad people, the point is that China as currently governed is a global threat. It may already be too late for anyone to oppose them.)

People talk about fascism in America. By that, they mean Orwell’s definition, “something I disagree with”, not my definition based on the Roman fasces, “all institutions bound to the central power”. In America, Fascism isn’t formalized, but the alignment of major non-government institutions with a political party could reasonably be called Fascism Lite. In China, Fascism is formal and explicit. Every major institution in China, be it a corporation, a university, the military, etc. has CCP members on its board, in its executive staff and senior management. To call the arrangement Communist is a misnomer. The Party doesn’t own the means of production, but it controls the people who do.

Fascism also comes with a strong national identity and boatloads of propaganda to control public opinion. The Han Chinese are proud racist bigots; other races they disdain at best and despise at worst. They sneer at Westerners’ ideas of diversity and inclusion. They are currently carrying out a genocide of the Muslim Uighur minority in Xinjiang. In a review of the policy of repression, murder, torture, forced sterilizations, forced abortions, and even forced impregnation, the CCP determined that the policy was “totally correct”.

The Chinese are brutal with political dissidents. They continue the ancient practice of guilt by association, imprisoning and torturing relatives of those who speak out against the CCP. Even beyond that, the personal risk to dissidents is inescapable, even for those who successfully defect to a friendly foreign country. China pursues personal revenge with globe-spanning determination, hunting down and physically abducting dissidents and criminals on foreign soil, maybe even in the US. Sometimes the abducted return to life, sometimes they don’t.

China has a huge military with advanced weapons, some of them featuring technology that was stolen from the US. Their military posture is aggressive on multiple fronts. Recently they took over Hong Kong. Soon they will move against Taiwan. China’s neighbor to the Southwest is Myanmar, formerly known as Burma. Just this month Myanmar’s military (which has a human-rights record comparable to China’s) overthrew its government in a hard coup. These are people the Chinese can work with, and for China’s purposes Myanmar is a royal prize: a land corridor to the Indian ocean, with 1400 miles of coastline facing India.

China pursues such strategic gains all over the world. They have massive investments in Africa, and if cashing in means slaughtering all the Africans, that’s what they’ll do. Such investments are part of China’s “Belt and Road” project, a long-term plan to build a global trading network through which China can control the world economy.

In China, ethics isn’t really a thing. The Chinese are not amoral, but they have little sense of ethics as understood in the West. In business, it’s pretty much taken for granted that anyone will cheat who can. In America it’s Trust, in China it’s Verify. One who fails to Verify gets what he deserves; a successful cheat is good business.

The population of China is roughly four times the US population. Average Chinese IQ is higher than the US average. As we do away with standardized testing and grades while grabbing our ankles for Critical Race Theory and Transgender Rights, the Chinese are trying to develop genetically-modified super soldiers and geniuses. They call it Biological Dominance and they have zero qualms about it.

China has some of the world’s best hackers and spymasters. There are small countries like Israel and, strangely, Cuba, that punch far above their weight in spycraft. But China has that advantage of numbers and it figures in everything. China practices international spycraft and covert influence on a scale nobody else can match.

From November of 2013 to April of 2015, The Chinese hacked the United States Office of Personnel Management. The OPM hack compromised millions of federal personnel records including SF-86 forms, the highly-sensitive, detailed and personal background checks for high-security clearances. Generals, Navy SEALs, FBI agents, senior diplomats, Justice officials or anyone else in the Federal Government may have been outed in this way, to the most indefatigable and ruthless spy network on Earth. The OPM hack is a catastrophe unlike any other in history.

China’s numbers, ruthlessness and reach make it a fearsome global adversary.

What’s more disconcerting is China’s relentlessness, its tirelessness, the insouciant way China pushes forward on every front and attacks everything simultaneously.

Any normal American who knows this stuff will feel some anxiety about it. But normal Americans aren’t in charge of America any more. So what do the people in charge of America think of China with its genocidal totalitarian fascist master race global empire ideas of fun?

They think it’s just dandy.

Google and Amazon and Facebook and Apple are companies founded in America. They wield immense power here. If they wanted, they could draw a line against China. But they don’t see China as a threat to the civilization that made their great companies possible. They see markets. Labor can be bought in China very cheaply, because workers have no protections and no options. The labor force is more than twice the size of America’s total population. Common working conditions are terrible; hours are inflexible and gruelling; compensation is barely above slavery. In one factory where they made Apple products, there was a rash of suicides as workers jumped off the roof. Some of the workers may have been poisoned by n-hexane, which causes permanent nerve damage. Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, went to investigate and recommended the factory install nets to catch anyone jumping from the roof. The same people who freak out about fascism and slavery in America flaunt Nikes and iPhones.

American industry relies on rare-earth metals. China has cornered the global market in this precious resource by the simple expedient of having no environmental regulations. Same with solar panels: they can never be made in America because Americans don’t know how to dispose of all the toxic waste. In China they just dump it in the lake.

Google and Facebook are partners with China not just in advertising and streaming etc., but also in domestic surveillance, social credit, and censorship. They won’t be giving up that market; they’ll be implementing those concepts in America.

When entertainment media look at China, they don’t see a foreign rival to propagandize against. They see 1.4 billion souls to consume American entertainment. Thus China captured Hollywood and Major League Sports. As a condition of access to that market, the CCP has required American entertainment media to effectively propagandize on China’s behalf. If you wonder why Colin Kaepernick trash-talks America so much, it’s because he works for Nike and Nike works in China. NBA also works in China. When some NBA bigwig tweeted support for the Hong Kong protesters’ right of free speech, LeBron James set him straight. Mr. James knows all about the perils of free speech; he has immensely lucrative business in China with NBA and Nike.

So much for professional sports. Hollywood is equally supine, equally complicit. One notorious story has it that the 2019 trailer for a Tom Cruise Top Gun movie showed the flags of Taiwan and Japan as patches on Cruise’s flight jacket. The film was produced in part by a Chinese conglomerate. The studio offered to blur or CGI those patches when the trailer hit the Chinese market. Not good enough, their Chinese partners declared. The patches must be obscured in all public releases in all countries. Our Hollywood Heroes complied.

What about the news media? Here’s a clue: the Washington Post, probably the most-influential national newspaper in terms of straight-up politics, is owned by Jeff Bezos. For Bezos, China is a consumer market whose potential dwarfs that of the America which made him the richest man. The Washington Post will never do or say anything to antagonize China. Other major outlets are similarly incurious. China is making the stories of the century, and our media can’t be bothered with factual or investigative reporting.

The US Military is gearing up to fight Climate Change and Misogyny, or something. That’s not going to help much in a naval battle over Taiwan. When our green-haired intersectional lesbian giraffe dyslexics go up against the stern discipline and rigorous training of the Chinese, we’ll lose a carrier or two. The American Military-Industrial Complex will chortle and rub their hands with glee; it means they get to replace a carrier or two.

And that brings us to the Biden Administration.

Some people will say that Hunter Biden’s laptop story was a Russian disinformation campaign. Maybe they’re right. But even without the laptop, there’s plenty to suggest that Hunter Biden is a scumbag and crook. This was a guy who would impregnate a stripper, deny paternity and publicly defame the mother, and finally have to settle once the paternity results were in. He was married at the time. He also is a known cokehead, even if you don’t believe in the photos from the laptop. Finally, this total wastrel with no particular qualifications received millions from government-controlled corporations in Ukraine and China. Hunter had nothing to sell; no skills, no expertise, nothing other than his father’s position as Vice President. Joe used his son as a bag-man for large-scale bribery and paid him a share. The circumstantial evidence is overwhelming; there is no innocent explanation for the things we know, even if you leave the laptop out.

Now that Joe Biden’s in office, how have his executive decisions aligned with China’s interests?

Pretty well, unfortunately. When Donald Trump was President, he harbored a delusion that Chinese companies might not be trustworthy in building out the sensitive parts of our critical energy infrastructure, so he forbid it. That ban has now been lifted. Likewise there is noise about lifting Trump’s ban on Chinese Huawei 5G technology development in the US.

And then Joe Beijing said this:

“If you know anything about Chinese history, it has always been, the time when China has been victimized by the outer world is when they haven’t been unified at home,” Biden began. “So the central — well, vastly overstated — the central principle of Xi Jinping is that there must be a united, tightly controlled China. And he uses his rationale for the things he does based on that.”

This is straight-up CCP propaganda coming from the mouth of the President of the United States. Opposing the Party’s ideas of fun is counterproductive. Live in Peace, but know we will Take what we Want.

Buy charcoal.