This became known as the “Miracle Rescue” but many Danish historians now believe it was less miraculous than it seems. And my grandparents’ experience provides evidence for this theory.
My grandfather – usually known by his nickname, Folle – always claimed that the reason they managed to escape early in that month of miracles was because of a high-ranking German officer who came to his brother-in-law’s tailor shop, N Golmanns, on Istedgade in the seedy red light district of Copenhagen.
……………………………….
I suspect my grandfather’s hands shook as he took the measurements and fitted the suit of this particular German officer, who must have been pleased with the finished article as he then offered my grandfather and brother-in-law a warning: “Get out, while you still can. There’s a round-up coming.”
My grandfather never named the high-ranking German officer, but years later Nathan made a startling declaration to my cousin, Margit. The source of the leak that saved my Danish family was none other than Dr Karl Rudolph Werner Best – the very man who, as Germany’s plenipotentiary in Denmark (and, moreover, deputy head of the SS) was in charge of ensuring that Denmark’s Jews were sent to their death.
So why would such a man – a member of Hitler’s inner circle, known as the Butcher of Paris for his relentless pursuit of France’s Jews a year before – be fraternising with Jewish tailors in the red light district of Copenhagen, much less warning them to escape? It’s hard to believe.
When Margit heard the story, she immediately went to the bureau which still then held pride of place in the family tailor shop. She searched for the measurement cards from 1940-1943 and rifled through to the letter B. Her heart stopped as she pulled out the card of Dr Karl Rudolph Werner Best.
Quote Tweet
David Burbach
@dburbach
· 9h
Oregon Public Broadcasting confirms tweets today that federal officers in camouflage but no agency identification or badges, driving unmarked non-government rental cars, are grabbing protestors off streets in Portland and not talking w local authorities
Lots going on in this story, but let me point out just one: If agents are seizing people, throwing them in vans, driving them around, bringing them to the courthouse, putting them in cells, & trying to interrogate them, over hours, that’s an arrest that requires probable cause.
Orin Kerr
And at least based on the story, they don’t seem to have probable cause. The story makes this sound like the kind of “round up the usual suspects” they used to do in the bad old days. In other words, that’s bad.
Orin Kerr
Maybe there’s more going on that explains this. But it should be a priority of some good reporters to take a very close look at this and find out what the heck is going on. /end
ETA: WaPo has a story up on it. I can not link because I am a non subscriber.
Don Rockwell
@DCDining
This is quite a list of topics in @PressSec
Kayleigh McEnany’s binder: Obama, Hate, China, Absurd, Hogan (!), CDC, Golf (!), Mueller, Flynn, Lies (!!), Wins (??), COVID, DACA, LGBT (?!), Masks, Karl (@jonkarl
), etc.
Click on the picture to get the full trumpian flavor.
@OzarkHillbilly: The OPB.org link embedded in the tweet doesn’t work for me. If it doesn’t work for you either, try this one.
ETA: from the story:
Blinded by his hat, in an unmarked minivan full of armed people dressed in camouflage and body armor who hadn’t identified themselves, Pettibone said he was driven around downtown before being unloaded inside a building. He wouldn’t learn until after his release that he had been inside the federal courthouse.
“It was basically a process of facing many walls and corners as they patted me down and took my picture and rummaged through my belongings,” Pettibone said. “One of them said, ‘This is a whole lot of nothing.’”
Pettibone said he was put into a cell. Soon after, two officers came in to read him his Miranda rights. They didn’t tell him why he was being arrested. He said they asked him if he wanted to waive his rights and answer some questions, but Pettibone declined and said he wanted a lawyer. The interview was terminated, and about 90 minutes later he was released. He said he did not receive any paperwork, citation or record of his arrest.
“I just happened to be wearing black on a sidewalk in downtown Portland at the time,” Pettibone said. “And that apparently is grounds for detaining me.”
In a statement, the U.S. Marshals Service declined to comment on the practice of using unmarked vehicles, but said their officers had not arrested Pettibone.
“All United States Marshals Service arrestees have public records of arrest documenting their charges. Our agency did not arrest or detain Mark James Pettibone.”
When several men in green military fatigues and generic “police” patches sprang out of an unmarked gray minivan in front of Mark Pettibone in the early hours of Wednesday morning, his first instinct was to run.
He did not know whether the men were police or far-right extremists, who frequently don militarylike outfits and harass left-leaning protesters in Portland, Ore. The 29-year-old resident said he made it about a half-block before he realized there would be no escape.
Then, he sank to his knees, hands in the air.
He was detained and searched. One man asked him if he had any weapons; he did not. They drove him to the federal courthouse and placed him in a holding cell. Two officers eventually returned to read his Miranda rights and ask if he would waive those rights to answer a few questions; he did not.
And almost as suddenly as they had grabbed him off the street, the men let him go.
Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie on Thursday told a conservative media outlet that President Donald Trump is the first president in more than 100 years to take veteran suicide seriously.
Paul Rieckhoff, who founded Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, a nonprofit veterans advocacy group, challenged Wilkie’s comment on Trump’s efforts with veterans suicide.
“Nobody has done enough, but it’s a lie to say nobody has done anything but Trump,” Rieckhoff said. “Anyone who’s spiking the ball on suicide is way out of touch.”
Previous administrations have also taken action to address the veterans suicide crisis.
In 2015, Obama also signed a measure into law to combat the veteran suicides after increased attention since the peak of the post-9/11 wars. The bill was named after Clay Hunt, a Marine from Texas. He killed himself when he was 28.
In 2007, former President George W. Bush signed a suicide prevention bill into law, which required mental health training for VA staff and a suicide prevention counselor to be set at each health facility. The law was named after Joshua Omvig, a 22-year-old Iraq War veteran who killed himself in 2005.
@Kylopod: I think Amy. Tommy Tuber is not a confirmed stalker and pedophile, and Mitch is, well Mitch. Tho from what I’ve seen, McGrath’s political skills aren’t anything to write home about. I’m hoping she gets better now that it is her and the turtle.
Because the final solution was to rid the “Germanic” lands of non-Aryans. After all, the intent was to make Germany great again following their crushing defeat in WWI
Look at it from a strictly numbers perspective: The tailor is being told to abandon all and flee. That means one less non-Aryan, and one less that the Nazis would have to deal with later. Remaining property would be easily confiscated.
If you can get people to abandon everything and leave it’s more efficient than having to round them up and kill them. Less troops, less transport, less gas, less bodies. The Nazis were efficient accountants.
If you can completely vilify an enemy and rally the population around that, then all manner of horrors can be accomplished. Nationalism does that.
@Liberal Capitalist: If you can get people to abandon everything and leave it’s more efficient than having to round them up and kill them. Less troops, less transport, less gas, less bodies. The Nazis were efficient accountants.
If you read the story that’s pretty much what Best said when Hitler complained that they weren’t killing enough Jews. Quite the change for the Butcher of Paris.
The polling is a mess, but McConnell appears to be leading. Barron is drawing more support than he was earlier in the year, but difficult to say which of them he’s parasitizing more.
People are weird, people who chose to be Nazis even more so. It could have been as simple as “wow you did an excellent job, your payment is you get to try to flee for your life”. Serial killers and mass murderers have been known to tip off people they liked or who just happened to be kind to them /did something acceptable beforehand. It’s actually a frightening behavior because they are so sure nothing is going to stop their carnage they don’t care that this particular person escapes or might sound the alarm. After all, does it matter if you spare a single ant on your way to destroy the colony? They do it because they can and because it really doesn’t matter if the person survives or not. Token kindness in the face of monstrous cruelty, doled out at whim for lives they think have no meaning.
Indeed, except I’d argue that there was no intent to induce the Danish people to vilify us. Popular wisdom has it that we were more integrated into Danish society, which was also comparatively much less anti-Semitic than other regions conquered by Germany. Because of this, it was easier and more productive in the bigger picture to allow us to escape from Denmark and in doing so avoid causing an upheaval of resistance from the Danish population. Indeed, there is historical evidence that all of the German patrol boats operating in Øresund were called in to be repainted shortly before the escape occurred. The evidence as a whole suggests that Best et al made a calculated decision to permit the exodus, not out of any sudden sense of compassion, but to mollify / avoid antagonizing the Danish population and make them easier to govern, thereby avoiding the scorched earth policy which was being advocated and which Werner Best opposed. No kindness involved, just cold hard analytics.
It may be an instance of highly bigoted moral licensing: the monster spares a few victims, so he’s virtuous now and can kill all the others with a clear conscience.
Is there any actual proof, I mean at all, that any of this ever occurred besides the assertions being made by this one person?
I’m skeptical by nature under the best of circumstances, but decidedly more so when I’m viewing sole source allegations being levied by someone with a vested ideological interest in making them.
On the much lighter side of things, I hit upon a good balance of foamed milk and espresso at the office.
And let me tell you, the Veracruz dark roast coffee we have is far better than the uncertain origin burnt roast Starbucks peddles.
Also, last Saturday I bought a bunch of bananas, as I do every week. as I also do every week, I picked the greenest bunch I could find, as I begin consuming them on Monday and they have to last until Friday.
Well, this bunch was really too green. it’s Friday now, and exactly one banana has ripened enough to be nicely edible. On the upside, I’ve three left that can use another couple of days, and the latest wasted effort project at work left behind some samples, one of which was pancake mix. So Sunday I’m making banana coffee pancakes.
Meanwhile, in Portland, Oregon, federal agents without visible badges and in unmarked cars are sweeping up protestors.
“Federal law enforcement officers have been using unmarked vehicles to drive around downtown Portland and detain protesters since at least July 14. Personal accounts and multiple videos posted online show the officers driving up to people, detaining individuals with no explanation of why they are being arrested, and driving off.”
Pettibone said he was put into a cell. Soon after, two officers came in to read him his Miranda rights.
Surely that’s waaaay too late, right? You have to read people their Miranda rights before you kidnap them. Er, detain them.
In a statement, the U.S. Marshals Service declined to comment on the practice of using unmarked vehicles, but said their officers had not arrested Pettibone.
Um, they read him his Miranda rights. That’s a ritual that only goes with being arrested.
Unless, of course, the spokesman meant “We didn’t arrest him; we kidnapped him.” Which I think legally is what happened, especially if they never identified themselves as law enforcement or showed badges before dragging him off.
IANAL, but this seems like a pretty slam dunk lawsuit.
@HarvardLaw92: I think the historical consensus up to now has been that it was Best’s second-in-command who let the cat out of the bag (“we’re going to round you up”) and encouraged flight. This is just moving one more link up the chain (looks like his boss was also in on the same policy.)
Best was supposedly most interested in keeping Denmark stable as a provider-of-food-to-Germany because that’s what he had been plonked into position for. I suspect he took a look at the situation and calculated that yeah, they could attempt to round up the Jews but at the risk of the population going into total revolt, with commensurate effects on the food supply chain to Germany. He might make all the “exterminate the Jews” people happy, but he’d still find his own neck on the line because of interruptions to the German food supply, and there were probably a bunch of fellow Nazis who were just waiting to be able to accuse him of incompetence and sabotage and get him overthrown. So by encouraging the Jews to escape, he would immediately be able to confiscate everything they had, avoided a show-down with the rest of the population, and could keep the food supply chain humming.
I don’t think it was out of mercy for the Jewish population or anything like that. It was Best’s own neck that he was saving.
It’s clear that I have no idea how the real estate market works. Why haven’t home prices dropped, at a time when 1/3 of homeowners have missed their last payments, evictions are soon to skyrocket (meaning there are fewer people who can pay rent), and nothing about the economy looks to get better any time soon? I’m very glad that people aren’t losing the equity in their homes. It just doesn’t make sense, from this admittedly ignorant observer’s vantage point.
@HarvardLaw92:
I completely agree that actual proof is needed before buying into these two people’s account. And the dark video provided to OPB by one of them isn’t good enough evidence. The Washington Post should be sending reporters and just not taking the OPB story and running with it.
But, considering the documented incident where Federal law enforcement shot and severely injured a protester last Saturday night by shooting him in the head with an impact munition, I would suggest skepticism be applied for all sides. The Feds haven’t earned any benefit of doubt.
Indeed. I think we’re making the same point – Werner Best operated entirely out of pragmatic self-interest, not out of any latent sense of compassion for my people. He alleged at his trial that Duckwitz was able to provide that information (dates, etc.) only because Werner Best provided it to him for exactly that purpose. I’m inclined to believe, all things being considered, that he was probably being truthful in that statement.
@HarvardLaw92: Popular wisdom has it that we were more integrated into Danish society, which was also comparatively much less anti-Semitic than other regions conquered by Germany.
The article’s ending:
My grandparents and aunt spent the rest of the war in Sweden, only returning home after it was over, in June 1945. Like many others, they were welcomed home with freshly cut flowers on their tables, placed there by their Danish neighbours.
The article also cites what you said about the entire German patrol fleet being in harbor for painting for the 3 weeks the exodus to Sweden was going on..
Federal officers have charged at least 13 people with crimes related to the protests so far, while others have been arrested and released, including Pettibone. They also left one demonstrator hospitalized with skull fractures after shooting him in the face with so-called “less lethal” munitions July 11.
Officers from the U.S. Marshals Special Operations Group and Customs and Border Protection’s BORTAC, have been sent to Portland to protect federal property during the recent protests against racism and police brutality.
But interviews conducted by OPB show officers are also detaining people on Portland streets who aren’t near federal property, nor is it clear that all of the people being arrested have engaged in criminal activity. Demonstrators like O’Shea and Pettibone said they think they were targeted by federal officers for simply wearing black clothing in the area of the demonstration.
Agreed. I’m not saying it did or didn’t happen, or that the federal government would be above such tactics. I’ve just looked everywhere that I can find and all I come up with is one unavoidably biased alleged victim and one inconclusive (at best) video. You’d think if this sort of thing was as widespread as they’re alleging it to be, substantiation would be pouring out of the internet, but it isn’t.
Hopefully this won’t turn out to be another of those type of own-goal incidents where the guy alleging racism turns out to have spray painted his own house. We should get to the bottom of it, either way, but the Post dropped the ball here. They have the resources to do so, but seem to have just punted and ran with the OPB story.
@Kingdaddy: My neighbors husband died 3 years ago. She finally got to the point where taking care of her place was just too much and put it up for better than double what they paid for it in 2011. Signed a contract for the full amount with the first person to look at it.
@DrDaveT:
Taking Pettibone at his word (which as HarvardLaw92 notes should be done skeptically), the abductors were in camo and unidentified. The guy says he wasn’t processed. That makes it pretty easy for the U.S. Marshals Service to “honestly” state he wasn’t arrested by them, even if everything Pettibone experienced was real.
None of this smells right across all parties. Too much we don’t know.
I’m sure that some may have been properly arrested, but where is there any proof that this Pettibone person was? Indeed, where is there any proof that anything he’s alleging happened to him actually occurred? There is no record of his arrest.
I read the story, and all I see are a lot of unsubstantiated allegations being dutifully reported as gospel. That isn’t journalism. It’s stenographers taking dictation to push an agenda. OPB should be above that, I’d think, but the Port definitely should
Why haven’t home prices dropped, at a time when 1/3 of homeowners have missed their last payments
Because too many people are unable to pay mortgages.
Mortgage companies are going to work with home-owners rather than deal with foreclosures (and, I believe most states require at least 3 missed payments before foreclosure can start–and then it takes several more months to complete). They don’t want all that capital sitting there with no one able to buy it.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Here’s my reason for doubt about the Portland story. Oregon has a Democratic governor, and Portland has a Democratic mayor. Why are they not screaming to the heavens?
I’ll go with Amy as well. Mitch isn’t a cuddly well loved Senator in KY. He has high negatives and low approval. In prior races his vote totals have lagged the R gubernatorial or presidential candidate also on the ballot. While the former reality TV host will win KY’s EV votes, that race will be closer than 2016. A large Dem turnout coupled w/a discouraged R base could put that seat in play.
The reality though is that Amy will need to thread a very small needle and her primary campaign showed she is a pretty unsteady candidate.
@HarvardLaw92: but where is there any proof that this Pettibone person was?
Well, the Marshals are saying they didn’t arrest him and they have no record of him being detained. Which is not exactly exculpatory in this time and place (at this point I have no faith whatsoever in any law enforcement statements without corroborating evidence) which is not to say Pettibones statement should be taken at face value.
The video here is very clear. Probably a different incident but it is very similar to what Pettibone says happened to him:
@RonWyden
and
@ARetVet
Militarized Federal Agents from a patchwork of outside agencies have begun policing Portland (in rented minivans vans) without the explicit approval of the mayor, the state, or local municipalities. This is what that looks like in practice:
It sure doesn’t look right to me and somebody needs to do some serious digging to find out what is really going on.
ETA: Something I just realized. They didn’t even bother searching him for weapons. Just grabbed him and threw him in the van. They knew he wasn’t a threat.
Hopefully this won’t turn out to be another of those type of own-goal incidents where the guy alleging racism turns out to have spray painted his own house.
I hope this as well, but fabrication seems no more likely than realistic to my mind at this point. The incident fits too neatly into Trump’s recent rhetoric placing himself as the savior of cities lost to derelict Democratic mayors to dismiss out of hand. Trump desperately needs some kind of law & order win to bolster his narcissism.
This all allegedly happened last night. No need to rush to conclusion. The story is too sensational to not get a lot of scrutiny and the truth will out.
Mayor Ted Wheeler’s office declined to offer comment on the latest events involving federal officers, but reiterated a statement from earlier in the week, saying federal officers should be restricted to guarding federal property.
“We do not need or want their help,” Wheeler said. “The best thing they can do is stay inside their building, or leave Portland altogether.”
Oregon Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkely said if Wolf is coming to inflame the situation in Portland so the President can “look tough,” the acting DHS leader should leave.
“Federal forces shot an unarmed protester in the face,” Merkely said in a tweet. “These shadowy forces have been escalating, not preventing, violence.”
Oregon Gov. Kate Brown similarly called for federal law enforcement officers to leave Portland. She added, Wolf is on a “mission to provoke confrontation for political purposes.”
“This political theater from President Trump has nothing to do with public safety,” Brown said in a statement. “The President is failing to lead this nation. Now he is deploying federal officers to patrol the streets of Portland in a blatant abuse of power by the federal government.”
They are being measured with their words, trying not to inflame things.
We’ve been mulling downsizing, so a couple of years ago my wife signed up for one of those property for sale alert emails. She still gets them and forwards them to me, but they show far fewer properties being listed. In March the alerts will rife with price reductions but then the listings dried up. So it’s supply and demand, the supply has shrunk as has demand, therefore prices have remained steady.
@Michael Reynolds: “Oregon has a Democratic governor, and Portland has a Democratic mayor. Why are they not screaming to the heavens?”
Don’t know if this will reach the heavens:
“Mayor Ted Wheeler and other local officials have said they didn’t ask for help from federal law enforcement and have asked them to leave. “A number of people have asked if I know DHS leadership is in town, and if I’m going to meet with them. We’re aware that they’re here. We wish they weren’t. We haven’t been invited to meet with them, and if we were, we would decline,” Wheeler tweeted Thursday. Democratic Gov. Kate Brown called Wolf’s visit “political theater from President Trump” and said he “is looking for a confrontation in Oregon in the hopes of winning political points in Ohio or Iowa.”
On aviation news, currently just 30 passenger 747s are operating. This is more than I thought there would be, as who the hell needs much capacity right now? But on the other hand, it’s a low number compared to just a decade ago. The Queen is definitely on the way out, destined for a second act as cargo planes for decades to come.
Boom will unveil its XB-1 demonstrator (a two seat scale prototype of their proposed airliner) later this month, with test flights expected in 2021.
The finished product, now named Overture, is supposed to carry 55 passengers ar Mach 2.2, which is about half the capacity of the Concorde, and about 8% faster.
There is interest, and money, from Virgin Atlantic and Japan Air Lines involved, so the plane stands a chance. Whether it will succeed if it goes into production is a different matter.
I agree. I’m not inclined to summarily exonerate the Feds here / say it didn’t happen at all. I’m just troubled by this rush to report what amounts to gossip at this point as actual news. Certainly troubled that the Post just ran with it without seemingly lifting a finger to even dial a phone.
Here’s a report from a local television station (Wikipedia says it’s the local ABC affiliate) with far more comments from the public officials. From Senator Merkley:
“The senator says he talked to the deputy director of the U.S. Marshals Service on Thursday.
He said he refused to answer basic questions about the role of federal officers in Portland.
“What the rules of engagement are, what roles they’ve been playing on the streets of Portland, who decided what equipment they have or when to use it, they will not answer questions about the level of coordination they’ve had with Portland Police,” Merkley tells KATU News.”
Governor Brown is quoted saying:
“I told Acting Secretary Wolf that the federal government should remove all federal officers from our streets. His response showed me he is on a mission to provoke confrontation for political purposes. He is putting both Oregonians and local law enforcement officers in harm’s way. This, coming from the same President who used tear gas to clear out peaceful protesters in Washington, DC to engineer a photo opportunity.”
This political theater from President Trump has nothing to do with public safety. The President is failing to lead this nation. Now he is deploying federal officers to patrol the streets of Portland in a blatant abuse of power by the federal government.
A peaceful protester in Portland was shot in the head by one of Donald Trump’s secret police. Now Trump and Chad Wolf are weaponizing the DHS as their own occupying army to provoke violence on the streets of my hometown because they think it plays well with right-wing media.
Homeland Security acting Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli said Friday morning on “Fox & Friends” that the federal government has a responsibility to protect buildings such as the courthouse.
“What we’ve seen around the country is where responsible policing is advanced, violence recedes,” Cuccinelli said. “And Portland hasn’t gotten that memo. Nor have a lot of other cities. And the president is determined to do what we can, within our jurisdiction, to help restore peace to these beleaguered cities.”
President Donald Trump recently sent the federal officers to the city. Tensions have escalated in the past two weeks, particularly after an officer with the U.S. Marshals Service fired a less-lethal round at a protester’s head on July 11, critically injuring him.
Looks like the Trump administration is willing to claim a legitimate role in the Portland situation. This would appear to bolster the OPB story.
Few days ago, the Supreme Court refusal to grant AL voters ‘absentee ballots’ of the basis of the pandemic was given some time here. Thought I’d toss out that there also has been a refusal to grant the franchise to FL felons who are not rich enough to pay all fines and penalties related to their sentences.
Gosh, seems like a trend. Like ‘values’ or something.
Regarding Dept. of Homeland Security Sec. Chad Wolf’s visit: As part of a statewide law enforcement delegation to discuss recent responses to demonstrations in Portland, I was invited to meet with Department of Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf. I was under the impression this was going to be a thoughtful, honest and open discussion, but following statements made by Sec. Wolf, it became clear law enforcement in the City of Portland was becoming highly politicized, and for that reason, I declined to meet.
Protests are among the most difficult events to manage in policing today. We have a responsibility to safeguard the right of people to assemble and engage in free speech, while balancing other rights guaranteed in our Constitution, including maintaining public order by preventing rioting, arson and other illegal activity. As public safety professionals, we have to be measured and proportional in our response. We have to communicate our intentions and be fair and consistent, regardless of an event’s message or people’s actions.
As Sheriff, I value the positive the relationship we have with our local law enforcement partners, to include Federal Protective Services, U.S. Marshals Office and the FBI.
However, the actions by out-of-state federal agents last weekend failed to display good decision-making and sound tactical judgment. The use of force did not appear proportional to the actions of the demonstrators.
I look forward to a thorough investigation into the matter by the U.S. D.O.J. Inspector General. These actions caused a significant setback in our local efforts to end the nightly violence around the Justice Center and in Portland.
@JohnMcC: That’s a good segue into another topic. Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland is now refusing to have ballots sent out to every voter, instead having absentee ballot applications sent out–which often leads there to be voters who don’t get forms even after requesting them. Furthermore, he’s ordering in-person polling stations to be opened.
Just like with Mitt Romney, it seems a lot of liberals and centrists have this naive desire to pick out “good Republicans” they can praise. You don’t know how many comments I’ve heard from Dems calling Hogan decent and principled, the kind of Republican they could vote for. I think this is a misunderstanding. As a Republican in the state of Maryland, Hogan doesn’t have the same incentives as one from Florida or Texas. It wouldn’t be in his interests to appear to be overtly pro-Trump. But at the end of the day, he’s still a Republican, and therefore slime.
@charon: We are in the middle of the Authorization and Appropriations season for FY21 which starts 1 Oct. The bills funding DHS has passed committee but not the House. House should threaten to zero out their budgets until they come to heel.
@OzarkHillbilly: I’ma go the other direction on this one and note that they can’t even Gestapo correctly.
He didn’t have anything on him–no weapons, papers, incriminating whatever
The guy conducting the search admitted he was a nothingburger
They couldn’t come up with any plans to persuade him to talk to them
They released him and then couldn’t even make a convincing denial of having taken him–how many people do YOU not arrest and detain where you identify them by their full names?
You call this a Gestapo? More like a clown show. They need to up their game. Step one–stop pulling random people of the street.
@CSK:
I misspelled “Ginsburg.” Apologies. The justice said in a statement that the lesions on her liver have shrunk and that she is tolerating the biweekly chemotherapy well. I send my best to her, as I’m sure many million others do as well.
the uncertain origin burnt roast Starbucks peddles.
People forget–or never realized in the first place–that Starbucks got their start in the coffee business as a jobber/purchaser of last resort. The fact that they figured out how to turn it into a business is remarkable, though. Most jobbers end up having to sell their wares steeply discounted in “the poorer quarters where the ragged people go” rather than upscale-ier supermarkets and designer coffee bistros.
ETA: And “me, too” on the banana coffee pancakes. 🙂
Will Joe Biden do more to protect religious liberty than Donald Trump? Not a prayer. “City of Toronto Bans Catholic Churches From Administering Holy Communion”
She really tweeted that.
Best response:
Frank116@Frank11612
·
3h
Biden has done nothing about the crime in Montreal and don’t get me started on Quebec. His infrastructure bill for Brussels is quite good however.
Why haven’t home prices dropped, at a time when 1/3 of homeowners have missed their last payments, evictions are soon to skyrocket (meaning there are fewer people who can pay rent), and nothing about the economy looks to get better any time soon?
Because the banks know that the market is a house of cards and that another set of foreclosures/defaults will set up another “too big to fail” scenario but this time with a Federal Government hard pressed to come up with the X-trillion dollars necessary for the bailout?
@OzarkHillbilly: Frankly, I’ve always been impressed at the way my generation and our children speculated the fwk out of real estate to the point that working class people can no longer to afford to live where work is. That was quite an accomplishment. 🙁
@Kathy:
You don’t go to Starbucks for coffee but rather for sugar shocks and weird flavor combos. Most people put so many adulterants in the coffee there that the quality of it really doesn’t matter; if you’re drinking a Venti Skinny Caramel Macchiato Extra Shot, Extra-Hot, Extra-Whip, Sugar-Free you aren’t tasting coffee you’re being super picky about your not-sugar’s flavoring. Frapps are essentially vaguely coffee-flavored slushies with whipped cream piles. Tasty calorie-ladden gut busters but you could care less what you’re drinking is terrible quality.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: Driving 1-2 hrs each way to job sites was just part of the job for most everyone in construction. I did manage to work one big job for 9 months that was only a half hour away. I also had one that was less than 10 mins away but I’m not sure it even counts as it only lasted 6 days.
@Mu Yixiao:
That’s a great play on words, but I don’t think Trump is familiar with any food that isn’t Diet Coke, incinerated steak with ketchup, Filet-o-Fish sandwiches, fries, and two scoops of ice cream
I must be a terrible Starbucks customer, then 🙂 All I order* are lattes, cappuccinos, or flat whites, and don’t add more than half a packet of Splenda and some cinnamon. Ok. One time I ordered a croissant, because I had an offer for a free one in the app.
It’s a wonder they let me in at all.
*While the flavored sugar drinks have no appeal to me, once or twice a year I order a hot mocha cappuccino without whipped cream.
Recently, multiple EV battery makers have announced the imminent arrival of “million-mile” batteries, power packs that supposedly have enough juice to be driven to the moon and back twice. In May, a top executive at General Motors said the company was “almost there” on development of a million-mile battery; in June, Chinese battery maker Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd. (CATL) told Bloomberg it was ready to produce batteries that last 1.24 million miles. For months, rumors have swirled that Tesla will soon roll out a million-mile battery on its own. Its 2019 Impact Report, released in early June, certainly reinforced that impression when it emphasized the environmental advantages of a “future Tesla vehicle with a million mile battery.”
But what does the million-mile battery revolution actually mean? According to experts in battery storage technology and the EV market, claims of new batteries that will last a million miles don’t tell us much on their own. How these batteries can be used is going to depend, first and foremost, on how they perform and degrade over their so-called “million-mile” lifespan. Several experts pointed out that true million-mile batteries are likely to outlast whatever cars they’re built for, meaning their arrival could dramatically impact both second-use markets and battery recycling.
“What they’re talking about with million-mile batteries is not so much that an average consumer would put a million miles on the clock,” said Simon Lambert, a co-lead investigator at the Recycling of Lithium-Ion Batteries project (ReLiB) at the UK’s Faraday Institution, “but that you’d potentially be able to use the battery multiple times, either in vehicular energy storage or grid-connected stuff.”
What’s not entirely clear is, are they claiming the battery has sufficient charge to power the vehicle for a million miles, which I’m skeptical about, or that the battery can be recharged enough times for the vehicle to travel a million miles. Currently the batteries in GM EV’s have a warranty of 8 years which likely means the expected usable life span is 10-14 years.
A critical mass of the staff and management at New York Magazine and Vox Media no longer want to associate with me, and, in a time of ever tightening budgets, I’m a luxury item they don’t want to afford. And that’s entirely their prerogative. They seem to believe, and this is increasingly the orthodoxy in mainstream media, that any writer not actively committed to critical theory in questions of race, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity is actively, physically harming co-workers merely by existing in the same virtual space. Actually attacking, and even mocking, critical theory’s ideas and methods, as I have done continually in this space, is therefore out of sync with the values of Vox Media. That, to the best of my understanding, is why I’m out of here.
Thought I’d toss out that there also has been a refusal to grant the franchise to FL felons who are not rich enough to pay all fines and penalties related to their sentences.
It is actually far, far worse. Even if they have the money, the state isn’t telling anyone how much they owe.
They seem to believe, and this is increasingly the orthodoxy in mainstream media, that any writer not actively committed to critical theory in questions of race, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity is actively, physically harming co-workers merely by existing in the same virtual space.
Perhaps, but it bothers me that a significant number of media types feel sufficiently threatened by someone’s written words that they would campaign against them and the gatekeepers would surrender. Fortunately, as Sully points out, the internet provides (for now) a forum for iconoclasts.
@OzarkHillbilly: It’s not even a wild breakthrough. Here’s an article from a couple years back about a Tesla taxi driver with 93% capacity left in the battery after a quarter if a million miles. And last year there was a breakdown from some guy that ran a small fleet of Tesla’s as a taxi service in CA. If I remember correctly he replaced his first battery pack at somewhere north of 300k, maybe closer to 400k.
Most jobbers end up having to sell their wares steeply discounted in “the poorer quarters where the ragged people go” rather than upscale-ier supermarkets and designer coffee bistros.
Extra kudos for the Simon and Garfunkel reference.
@Scott: Was in a Starbucks once. Asked for a cup of black coffee. There was some consternation but the … is he called a ‘barista’ — how strange! … got that figured out. Then he says ‘what size’. I told him “twelve ounces.” That took a while.
Recharged enough times to last for a million miles.
the energy needed to move the mass of a car even at low speeds, say 20 kph, for 1.6 million kilometers, must be HUGE.
say a gas tank is good for 700 kilometers (I once traveled that long on a full tank, mostly on highways, before the warning light came on). You’d need 2,285.7 tanks of gas to drive 1.6 million kilometers. That won’t fit in your car, nor any reasonable equivalent energy source.
@Sleeping Dog: If the reason he was sacked is as he states, then that’s an unprogressive move by NYMag. That said, I have been reading him less and less. I realized that what I really liked about him was the give and take he engaged with people who disagreed with him. But in his column he gradually became more and more of a voice shouting down from the mountaintop. I hope the dish regains it’s old flavor, although without staff that might not work.
Will Joe Biden do more to protect religious liberty than Donald Trump? Not a prayer. “City of Toronto Bans Catholic Churches From Administering Holy Communion”
If the communion wafer is transmuted into the literal body of Christ, and you get covid, does that mean Christ had covid? Is Christ being exposed to covid?
Seriously, though, I don’t see why the communion would be treated any differently than any other shared eating experience — different waiter, different food, but still, if you must do it, do it outside, with appropriate precautions and social distancing.
He implied there would be other writers, specifying that he hoped to give voice to younger writers who aren’t getting an opportunity at larger outlets.
I’ve read him less, but in part it has been because he’s writing only once a week and I need to make a special effort to go to the Intelligencer, as it is not part of my usual rotation. I’d agree that he hasn’t been as good in this space as he was at the Dish, but I wondering how much of that is a result of not writing daily. In the Dish days, he would often write shorter informative posts about an issue that was coming forth and follow that by a more, dare I say, philosophical piece where he ties his thoughts together.
@Gustopher: I miss my homeland. The one I was born in. Where coffee was called coffee and did not resemble custard and waitress/waiter were perfectly good words.
Look out Gus, the speech patrol is going to get you. baristas/baristadors, that’s sexist or will offend someone somewhere and the required term will be baristx.
@Sleeping Dog: They are saying the batteries could go a million miles with some degrading of performance but not significant. Basically, the gbatteries will far outlast the car and most likely be repurposed for other uses.
My parents, grandparents, and one of my uncles, really liked an Italian restaurant called Rafaello’s, and we ate there several times a year. So I knew lattes and cappuccinos from a young age.
Hopefully this won’t turn out to be another of those type of own-goal incidents where the guy alleging racism turns out to have spray painted his own house.
I think I would have rather had a well-planted false story than unidentified federal agents abducting people on the streets in combat gear and unmarked vans.
We should get to the bottom of it, either way, but the Post dropped the ball here. They have the resources to do so, but seem to have just punted and ran with the OPB story.
My impression of the Washington Post is that they are unlikely to run a story like this if they don’t have their own confirmation of the basic outline. They may not be showing all their work, and they may be publishing a bit ahead of confirmation of some of the details, but I expect that they have the basic outline right.
Is there some reason I shouldn’t have that impression? Past reporting that turned out to be completely false in cases like this?
Genuine question as to whether I should be raising my suspicion level with WaPo.
NYTimes lost a lot of credibility when they allowed themselves to be used as a mouthpiece for the Bush administration’s lies leading up to Iraq War II, and then again in the run up to the 2016 election when they were bothsidesing the many Trump scandals with “some people (Republicans) say the Clinton Foundation is corrupt… but 18 paragraphs later we have no evidence”
@Sleeping Dog: It’s just the spanish, I’m sorry, it’s a gendered language. I am willing to accept that female bean wranglers also should be called baristadors.
We call female actors “actors” these days, rather than “actresses”, and I think we can do the same with “baristas”
@OzarkHillbilly: I was thinking more about how I make more in retirement than many of the people who do the jobs I worked make and how I pay more for rent (on a ~4oo sq. ft. studio) currently than the mortgage on my ~1500 sq. ft. condominium that would currently go on the market for roughly 6 times what I paid for it when I was working the blue collar job that was paying the mortgage on it.
But yeah, as construction moved out into places where people weren’t living yet, what you are describing happened, too.
@CSK: Well, he HAS to know “taco salad” because he was eating one at one of the Trump hotel coffee shops while he ran for office. Even identified it correctly, IIRC.
Now it didn’t look like a taco salad to me, but I’ll take the word of the people who said it was. From what I could see, it was only a bowl of chopped up stuff, but he was holding up his fork and had his “I eat kittens for breakfast” smile on (sort of like the one in the Goya beans pitch), so I assume the product was what he expected it to be.
@Kathy: Ma’am, I have to confess that ‘eating out’ was amazingly rare in my birth family and usually involved Howard Johnson’s.
It wasn’t a very nice world if you weren’t white and reasonably fortunate in your choice of parents. I understand. But I grew up there and understood it.
And I gather from your posts that Starbucks does not come up to the standards that Rafaels’ set. So we can perk a pot of coffee someday and share stories of how the modern world fails to measure up, eh?
@Sleeping Dog: “it bothers me that a significant number of media types feel sufficiently threatened by someone’s written words that they would campaign against them and the gatekeepers would surrender. ”
If I were Sullivan, I’m sure I’d be saying that I was fired because my truth was just too truthful for the other hacks at the magazine, too.
But I think the real reason is pretty obvious. I’m sure they were paying him a lot of money, and when they made the hire they made it a big, big deal. Clearly this wasn’t simply because they felt it would be good for the cause of belle lettres — they were expecting publicity, they were expecting quotes, they were expecting links.
And then… when was the last time before this whiny self-justification that you saw Sullivan quoted about anything? When did you see a link to anything he wrote in New York? Everything Chait writes get written about and linked to. Rebecca Traister, same. Olivia Nuzzi used to be on TV all the time (although I don’t think I’ve seen her lately). Sully? Crickets.
Sully has nothing left to say and no interesting way left to say it. He was as useful to NY Magazine as Michael Ovitz was to Disney, and he’s suffering the same fate. But he’s going to be dining out on the victimization on Bill Maher’s show for the rest of his life.
@JohnMcC: “I miss my homeland. The one I was born in. Where coffee was called coffee and did not resemble custard and waitress/waiter were perfectly good words.”
I, too, miss my homeland. Where you could go outside without a mask and without fear of contracting a fatal virus because the government refuses to do anything. Where my US passport would allow me access to foreign countries. Where we didn’t have anonymous federal agents seizing innocent people off the streets with no charges. Where we had a department of justice that wasn’t dedicated to eradicating the president’s personal enemies. Where we would have been annoyed to learn that Russia was paying to have our soldiers killed.
@KM: @Kathy: @Joe: You guys can get all uppity if you want to, but I still like a good mocha (although that probably means that I’m not going to Starbucks). 😉
@OzarkHillbilly: Certainly true. And I used to have a 45 minute commute that would have extended to 90 minutes if I hadn’t worked nights for most of my blue collar life.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: On one job I worked with carpenter from Illinois. He said he had a brother on the MO side of the river. He swore that no matter how he pleaded he was always getting sent to jobs on the MO side of the river and his brother was always getting sent to jobs on the IL side.
He was certain they were just doing it to fck with him and his brother. (tongue in cheek)
Yes, that is what I believe they mean by a million mile battery. As @Kathy pointed out a battery large enough to hold a charge that could carry a vehicle a million miles would need to be huge or we would need an upgrade in storage density that is thousands if not millions of times thicker than currently. But a battery that can function for a million miles is realistic. As it has been noted, today’s EV batteries are capable of 200,000-300,000 mile duty lives.
Since few cars are on the road after 300,000 mile the opportunity to re-purpose the battery is significant, think energy storage for household/small commercial solar. Reuse will also help alleviate the future problem of how will we recycle all these batteries.
IIRC the range on most of the EV’s is now 250-350 miles per charge. An ICE gets 350-450 per tank. Range anxiety should no longer be an issue for general use, a cross country trip, yes.
The three problems that EV manufacturers need to address are; increasing the number of public charging stations, recharge time and range degradation in cold weather. Note how often all the charging stations are in use at a highway rest area. Not only are you waiting for your car to charge you’re waiting for someone else to finish. It is one thing to need 3+hours for a 100% charge at home but not on the road. The industry claims that cold weather degradation is ~20% and that is probably accurate for a fleet average, but in places like Minnesota on a January day reliable reports claim 40-50% with anecdotal reports of up to 60%.
It’s technology, so we’ll eventually get there, though probably not while I’m still driving.
@wr: But it would still be nice to get a cup of coffee. You would think that if we have to live in a proto-fascist hellscape that’s denying the existence of a virus while demonizing latte-sipping-liberals, we would at least be able to get a simple cup of coffee.
If we latte-sipping-liberals were going to win on just one thing, I wouldn’t have picked the lattes.
You know, ti’s been decades since I last visited Rafaello’s. I don’t recall whether their coffee was good or not. Back then, at age 12, the treat was having foamed milk and cinnamon.
The thing is, Mexico is a coffee exporter. We don’t have the cachet that Colombia or Jamaica or Hawaii have, but we have some dammed good coffee. Why, then, is it so hard to get good coffee commercially? The local brands in stores are average. You need to find the old fashioned coffee mills here and there, where they roast and grind coffee; and they’re better in their states of origin, like Veracruz or Chiapas.
The coffee at Starbucks ins’t bad, just average and roasted to a crisp.
I like mocha. Coffee and chocolate, who doesn’t love that combination?
The problem is the sugar. Most places add either sweetened chocolate powder, or chocolate-flavored sugar syrup.
I’ve made a decent mocha by taking baker’s cocoa powder (Hershey’s is rather easy to find), and dissolving it in like 1/8th cup of boiling water, then adding that to a regular latte or cappuccino. But it’s a major PITA, so I don’t do it often.
I’ve been thinking of making a torta caprese without sugar, using baking Splenda instead, and adding instant coffee to the mix, sort of mocha torta caprese.
What I’ve lacked is the time and patience to blanch some almonds I’ve sitting on the freezer. Then they have to be, peeled, chopped and powdered in a food processor.
@Kathy: I’m inclined to think that the reason it’s so hard to get good coffee commercially is exactly because of the *commercially* factor. Commerce usually dictates that success is most represented by market share. The route to market share is, unfortunately, creating the most average (as in appealing to everyone) product.
Denny’s Restaurants deliberately chose to make less creative, more ordinary products for the purpose of being able to duplicate the experience of eating there wherever “there” is. When I’m on the road traveling, I stop at Denny’s (provided that there’s not a preferable choice of which I’m aware) specifically because I know exactly what I will get.
I just wish they’d move away from individual carafes of coffee with rubber stoppers. The coffee always tastes like it’s from the garden hose. 🙁
ETA: You clearly have much better culinary skills than I have. The only way I’d ever be able to have torta caprese would be to order it at a Neapolitan coffee bar.
@Kathy: The thing is, Mexico is a coffee exporter. We don’t have the cachet that Colombia or Jamaica or Hawaii have, but we have some dammed good coffee.
You ain’t just a woofin’. I never took a Mexico trip that I didn’t bring back some coffee. Way under rated.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: When I’m on the road traveling, I stop at Denny’s (provided that there’s not a preferable choice of which I’m aware) specifically because I know exactly what I will get.
Heh, that’s funny, I will stop at some local dive specifically because I don’t know what I will get.
I wonder if range per charge has gotten significantly better.
My battery-savvy colleagues tell me that it’s a multi-way trade space. It’s possible to get really great power densities, but only by trading away how many times you can recharge the battery before it won’t hold a decent charge any more. There are certain sweet spots in the trade space that have natural applications, and other spots where that combination of power/duration/rechargeability doesn’t really work for anything useful
The thing is, Mexico is a coffee exporter. We don’t have the cachet that Colombia or Jamaica or Hawaii have, but we have some dammed good coffee. Why, then, is it so hard to get good coffee commercially?
Because all of the good stuff either stays very local or gets exported to a place with higher prices?
I remember traveling to Scotland in the 1990s. I was excited that I would finally get to taste some of my favorite beers on tap, instead of from bottles. Yeah, right. When I got there, I discovered that all of the pubs were owned by one of 3 national chains (Samuel Smith, John Courage, don’t recall the other) and served only those (English) beers. No draft Fraoch or Skullsplitter or Traquair House or wee heavy… And bottles of those cost more in Edinburgh than they did in Pittsburgh.
@DrDaveT: “CAN YOU UNDERSTAND THE WORDS THAT ARE COMING OUT OF MY MOUTH???”
Thanx, I’m pretty sure I get the gist of what you are saying, but “power densities” and “trade space”, have no real meaning for this dumbass carpenter. 😉
I get the gist of what you are saying, but “power densities” and “trade space”, have no real meaning for this dumbass carpenter.
I did mention that I’m not the one of my colleagues who really knows this stuff, right? 🙂
Attempting to explain to my nephew would be good practice. Let’s see:
1. You want the flashlight to be really bright
2. You want it to stay bright as long as possible on one charge
3. You want to be able to recharge it over and over, just as bright
4. Pick which two of those you want most, because the other one will suck.
A very interesting story: The Tip-Off From a Nazi That Saved My Grandparents
Why indeed.
ETA: WaPo has a story up on it. I can not link because I am a non subscriber.
Click on the picture to get the full trumpian flavor.
@OzarkHillbilly: The OPB.org link embedded in the tweet doesn’t work for me. If it doesn’t work for you either, try this one.
ETA: from the story:
Blinded by his hat, in an unmarked minivan full of armed people dressed in camouflage and body armor who hadn’t identified themselves, Pettibone said he was driven around downtown before being unloaded inside a building. He wouldn’t learn until after his release that he had been inside the federal courthouse.
“It was basically a process of facing many walls and corners as they patted me down and took my picture and rummaged through my belongings,” Pettibone said. “One of them said, ‘This is a whole lot of nothing.’”
Pettibone said he was put into a cell. Soon after, two officers came in to read him his Miranda rights. They didn’t tell him why he was being arrested. He said they asked him if he wanted to waive his rights and answer some questions, but Pettibone declined and said he wanted a lawyer. The interview was terminated, and about 90 minutes later he was released. He said he did not receive any paperwork, citation or record of his arrest.
“I just happened to be wearing black on a sidewalk in downtown Portland at the time,” Pettibone said. “And that apparently is grounds for detaining me.”
In a statement, the U.S. Marshals Service declined to comment on the practice of using unmarked vehicles, but said their officers had not arrested Pettibone.
“All United States Marshals Service arrestees have public records of arrest documenting their charges. Our agency did not arrest or detain Mark James Pettibone.”
@OzarkHillbilly:
Here you go:
‘It was like being preyed upon’: Federal officers in unmarked vans detain Portland protesters
@Scott: Thanx, just finished reading the OPB piece. trump now has the Gestapo he’s always wanted.
There is nothing these people won’t lie about.
Wilkie: ‘Trump is the first president since 1890s’ to recognize veteran suicide crisis
Angels-on-head-of-pin question of the day: Who has a better shot at winning their race? Amy McGrath or Doug Jones?
@Kylopod: I think Amy. Tommy Tuber is not a confirmed stalker and pedophile, and Mitch is, well Mitch. Tho from what I’ve seen, McGrath’s political skills aren’t anything to write home about. I’m hoping she gets better now that it is her and the turtle.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Because the final solution was to rid the “Germanic” lands of non-Aryans. After all, the intent was to make Germany great again following their crushing defeat in WWI
Look at it from a strictly numbers perspective: The tailor is being told to abandon all and flee. That means one less non-Aryan, and one less that the Nazis would have to deal with later. Remaining property would be easily confiscated.
If you can get people to abandon everything and leave it’s more efficient than having to round them up and kill them. Less troops, less transport, less gas, less bodies. The Nazis were efficient accountants.
If you can completely vilify an enemy and rally the population around that, then all manner of horrors can be accomplished. Nationalism does that.
If you read the story that’s pretty much what Best said when Hitler complained that they weren’t killing enough Jews. Quite the change for the Butcher of Paris.
@Kylopod:
The polling is a mess, but McConnell appears to be leading. Barron is drawing more support than he was earlier in the year, but difficult to say which of them he’s parasitizing more.
@OzarkHillbilly:
People are weird, people who chose to be Nazis even more so. It could have been as simple as “wow you did an excellent job, your payment is you get to try to flee for your life”. Serial killers and mass murderers have been known to tip off people they liked or who just happened to be kind to them /did something acceptable beforehand. It’s actually a frightening behavior because they are so sure nothing is going to stop their carnage they don’t care that this particular person escapes or might sound the alarm. After all, does it matter if you spare a single ant on your way to destroy the colony? They do it because they can and because it really doesn’t matter if the person survives or not. Token kindness in the face of monstrous cruelty, doled out at whim for lives they think have no meaning.
@Liberal Capitalist:
Indeed, except I’d argue that there was no intent to induce the Danish people to vilify us. Popular wisdom has it that we were more integrated into Danish society, which was also comparatively much less anti-Semitic than other regions conquered by Germany. Because of this, it was easier and more productive in the bigger picture to allow us to escape from Denmark and in doing so avoid causing an upheaval of resistance from the Danish population. Indeed, there is historical evidence that all of the German patrol boats operating in Øresund were called in to be repainted shortly before the escape occurred. The evidence as a whole suggests that Best et al made a calculated decision to permit the exodus, not out of any sudden sense of compassion, but to mollify / avoid antagonizing the Danish population and make them easier to govern, thereby avoiding the scorched earth policy which was being advocated and which Werner Best opposed. No kindness involved, just cold hard analytics.
@KM:
It may be an instance of highly bigoted moral licensing: the monster spares a few victims, so he’s virtuous now and can kill all the others with a clear conscience.
@Scott:
Is there any actual proof, I mean at all, that any of this ever occurred besides the assertions being made by this one person?
I’m skeptical by nature under the best of circumstances, but decidedly more so when I’m viewing sole source allegations being levied by someone with a vested ideological interest in making them.
On the much lighter side of things, I hit upon a good balance of foamed milk and espresso at the office.
And let me tell you, the Veracruz dark roast coffee we have is far better than the uncertain origin burnt roast Starbucks peddles.
Also, last Saturday I bought a bunch of bananas, as I do every week. as I also do every week, I picked the greenest bunch I could find, as I begin consuming them on Monday and they have to last until Friday.
Well, this bunch was really too green. it’s Friday now, and exactly one banana has ripened enough to be nicely edible. On the upside, I’ve three left that can use another couple of days, and the latest wasted effort project at work left behind some samples, one of which was pancake mix. So Sunday I’m making banana coffee pancakes.
@Kathy:
I’ll be right down.
Meanwhile, in Portland, Oregon, federal agents without visible badges and in unmarked cars are sweeping up protestors.
“Federal law enforcement officers have been using unmarked vehicles to drive around downtown Portland and detain protesters since at least July 14. Personal accounts and multiple videos posted online show the officers driving up to people, detaining individuals with no explanation of why they are being arrested, and driving off.”
@OzarkHillbilly:
Surely that’s waaaay too late, right? You have to read people their Miranda rights before you kidnap them. Er, detain them.
Um, they read him his Miranda rights. That’s a ritual that only goes with being arrested.
Unless, of course, the spokesman meant “We didn’t arrest him; we kidnapped him.” Which I think legally is what happened, especially if they never identified themselves as law enforcement or showed badges before dragging him off.
IANAL, but this seems like a pretty slam dunk lawsuit.
@HarvardLaw92: I think the historical consensus up to now has been that it was Best’s second-in-command who let the cat out of the bag (“we’re going to round you up”) and encouraged flight. This is just moving one more link up the chain (looks like his boss was also in on the same policy.)
Best was supposedly most interested in keeping Denmark stable as a provider-of-food-to-Germany because that’s what he had been plonked into position for. I suspect he took a look at the situation and calculated that yeah, they could attempt to round up the Jews but at the risk of the population going into total revolt, with commensurate effects on the food supply chain to Germany. He might make all the “exterminate the Jews” people happy, but he’d still find his own neck on the line because of interruptions to the German food supply, and there were probably a bunch of fellow Nazis who were just waiting to be able to accuse him of incompetence and sabotage and get him overthrown. So by encouraging the Jews to escape, he would immediately be able to confiscate everything they had, avoided a show-down with the rest of the population, and could keep the food supply chain humming.
I don’t think it was out of mercy for the Jewish population or anything like that. It was Best’s own neck that he was saving.
It’s clear that I have no idea how the real estate market works. Why haven’t home prices dropped, at a time when 1/3 of homeowners have missed their last payments, evictions are soon to skyrocket (meaning there are fewer people who can pay rent), and nothing about the economy looks to get better any time soon? I’m very glad that people aren’t losing the equity in their homes. It just doesn’t make sense, from this admittedly ignorant observer’s vantage point.
@Kingdaddy:
It seems there were a handful of people who asked the same question about 13 years ago. They made a little money.
All cynicism aside…ah, nevermind why set it aside at this point?
@HarvardLaw92:
I completely agree that actual proof is needed before buying into these two people’s account. And the dark video provided to OPB by one of them isn’t good enough evidence. The Washington Post should be sending reporters and just not taking the OPB story and running with it.
But, considering the documented incident where Federal law enforcement shot and severely injured a protester last Saturday night by shooting him in the head with an impact munition, I would suggest skepticism be applied for all sides. The Feds haven’t earned any benefit of doubt.
@grumpy realist:
Indeed. I think we’re making the same point – Werner Best operated entirely out of pragmatic self-interest, not out of any latent sense of compassion for my people. He alleged at his trial that Duckwitz was able to provide that information (dates, etc.) only because Werner Best provided it to him for exactly that purpose. I’m inclined to believe, all things being considered, that he was probably being truthful in that statement.
The article’s ending:
The article also cites what you said about the entire German patrol fleet being in harbor for painting for the 3 weeks the exodus to Sweden was going on..
@HarvardLaw92: From the OBP story:
@Scott F.:
Agreed. I’m not saying it did or didn’t happen, or that the federal government would be above such tactics. I’ve just looked everywhere that I can find and all I come up with is one unavoidably biased alleged victim and one inconclusive (at best) video. You’d think if this sort of thing was as widespread as they’re alleging it to be, substantiation would be pouring out of the internet, but it isn’t.
Hopefully this won’t turn out to be another of those type of own-goal incidents where the guy alleging racism turns out to have spray painted his own house. We should get to the bottom of it, either way, but the Post dropped the ball here. They have the resources to do so, but seem to have just punted and ran with the OPB story.
@Kingdaddy: My neighbors husband died 3 years ago. She finally got to the point where taking care of her place was just too much and put it up for better than double what they paid for it in 2011. Signed a contract for the full amount with the first person to look at it.
Surprised the shit out of me.
@DrDaveT:
Taking Pettibone at his word (which as HarvardLaw92 notes should be done skeptically), the abductors were in camo and unidentified. The guy says he wasn’t processed. That makes it pretty easy for the U.S. Marshals Service to “honestly” state he wasn’t arrested by them, even if everything Pettibone experienced was real.
None of this smells right across all parties. Too much we don’t know.
@OzarkHillbilly:
I’m sure that some may have been properly arrested, but where is there any proof that this Pettibone person was? Indeed, where is there any proof that anything he’s alleging happened to him actually occurred? There is no record of his arrest.
I read the story, and all I see are a lot of unsubstantiated allegations being dutifully reported as gospel. That isn’t journalism. It’s stenographers taking dictation to push an agenda. OPB should be above that, I’d think, but the Port definitely should
@Kingdaddy:
Because too many people are unable to pay mortgages.
Mortgage companies are going to work with home-owners rather than deal with foreclosures (and, I believe most states require at least 3 missed payments before foreclosure can start–and then it takes several more months to complete). They don’t want all that capital sitting there with no one able to buy it.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Here’s my reason for doubt about the Portland story. Oregon has a Democratic governor, and Portland has a Democratic mayor. Why are they not screaming to the heavens?
@Kylopod:
I’ll go with Amy as well. Mitch isn’t a cuddly well loved Senator in KY. He has high negatives and low approval. In prior races his vote totals have lagged the R gubernatorial or presidential candidate also on the ballot. While the former reality TV host will win KY’s EV votes, that race will be closer than 2016. A large Dem turnout coupled w/a discouraged R base could put that seat in play.
The reality though is that Amy will need to thread a very small needle and her primary campaign showed she is a pretty unsteady candidate.
Well, the Marshals are saying they didn’t arrest him and they have no record of him being detained. Which is not exactly exculpatory in this time and place (at this point I have no faith whatsoever in any law enforcement statements without corroborating evidence) which is not to say Pettibones statement should be taken at face value.
The video here is very clear. Probably a different incident but it is very similar to what Pettibone says happened to him:
It sure doesn’t look right to me and somebody needs to do some serious digging to find out what is really going on.
ETA: Something I just realized. They didn’t even bother searching him for weapons. Just grabbed him and threw him in the van. They knew he wasn’t a threat.
@HarvardLaw92:
I hope this as well, but fabrication seems no more likely than realistic to my mind at this point. The incident fits too neatly into Trump’s recent rhetoric placing himself as the savior of cities lost to derelict Democratic mayors to dismiss out of hand. Trump desperately needs some kind of law & order win to bolster his narcissism.
This all allegedly happened last night. No need to rush to conclusion. The story is too sensational to not get a lot of scrutiny and the truth will out.
@Michael Reynolds: From the end of the OBP story:
They are being measured with their words, trying not to inflame things.
@Kingdaddy:
We’ve been mulling downsizing, so a couple of years ago my wife signed up for one of those property for sale alert emails. She still gets them and forwards them to me, but they show far fewer properties being listed. In March the alerts will rife with price reductions but then the listings dried up. So it’s supply and demand, the supply has shrunk as has demand, therefore prices have remained steady.
@Michael Reynolds: “Oregon has a Democratic governor, and Portland has a Democratic mayor. Why are they not screaming to the heavens?”
Don’t know if this will reach the heavens:
“Mayor Ted Wheeler and other local officials have said they didn’t ask for help from federal law enforcement and have asked them to leave. “A number of people have asked if I know DHS leadership is in town, and if I’m going to meet with them. We’re aware that they’re here. We wish they weren’t. We haven’t been invited to meet with them, and if we were, we would decline,” Wheeler tweeted Thursday. Democratic Gov. Kate Brown called Wolf’s visit “political theater from President Trump” and said he “is looking for a confrontation in Oregon in the hopes of winning political points in Ohio or Iowa.”
Hospitals Are Suddenly Short of Young Doctors — Because of Trump’s Visa Ban
There’s a Biden attack ad there waiting to happen.
On aviation news, currently just 30 passenger 747s are operating. This is more than I thought there would be, as who the hell needs much capacity right now? But on the other hand, it’s a low number compared to just a decade ago. The Queen is definitely on the way out, destined for a second act as cargo planes for decades to come.
Boom will unveil its XB-1 demonstrator (a two seat scale prototype of their proposed airliner) later this month, with test flights expected in 2021.
The finished product, now named Overture, is supposed to carry 55 passengers ar Mach 2.2, which is about half the capacity of the Concorde, and about 8% faster.
There is interest, and money, from Virgin Atlantic and Japan Air Lines involved, so the plane stands a chance. Whether it will succeed if it goes into production is a different matter.
@Scott F.:
I agree. I’m not inclined to summarily exonerate the Feds here / say it didn’t happen at all. I’m just troubled by this rush to report what amounts to gossip at this point as actual news. Certainly troubled that the Post just ran with it without seemingly lifting a finger to even dial a phone.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Here’s a report from a local television station (Wikipedia says it’s the local ABC affiliate) with far more comments from the public officials. From Senator Merkley:
“The senator says he talked to the deputy director of the U.S. Marshals Service on Thursday.
He said he refused to answer basic questions about the role of federal officers in Portland.
“What the rules of engagement are, what roles they’ve been playing on the streets of Portland, who decided what equipment they have or when to use it, they will not answer questions about the level of coordination they’ve had with Portland Police,” Merkley tells KATU News.”
Governor Brown is quoted saying:
“I told Acting Secretary Wolf that the federal government should remove all federal officers from our streets. His response showed me he is on a mission to provoke confrontation for political purposes. He is putting both Oregonians and local law enforcement officers in harm’s way. This, coming from the same President who used tear gas to clear out peaceful protesters in Washington, DC to engineer a photo opportunity.”
@Michael Reynolds:
Governor Kate Brown:
https://twitter.com/OregonGovBrown/status/1283913150014926848
Senator Ron Wyden:
https://twitter.com/RonWyden/status/1283868641549848584
@OzarkHillbilly: Thank you for the video. Some of the coverage said that videos of these arrests existed, but the articles didn’t link to them.
@Kathy:
British Airways is retiring their entire fleet (31 planes). BBC News
From Yahoo News:
Looks like the Trump administration is willing to claim a legitimate role in the Portland situation. This would appear to bolster the OPB story.
Few days ago, the Supreme Court refusal to grant AL voters ‘absentee ballots’ of the basis of the pandemic was given some time here. Thought I’d toss out that there also has been a refusal to grant the franchise to FL felons who are not rich enough to pay all fines and penalties related to their sentences.
Gosh, seems like a trend. Like ‘values’ or something.
State-by-state COVID-19 case rates in July, through yesterday. (Paste into Excel for legible formatting.)
State 7/1/2020 7/16/2020 Increase Growth
Virgin Islands 90 249 159 177%
Montana 1016 2231 1215 120%
Idaho 6370 13134 6764 106%
Florida 158997 315775 156778 99%
Texas 172368 305854 133486 77%
Alaska 975 1693 718 74%
South Carolina 37919 64083 26164 69%
Nevada 19101 31915 12814 67%
Oklahoma 14119 23440 9321 66%
Arizona 84105 134613 50508 60%
Tennessee 45315 71540 26225 58%
Alabama 38962 61088 22126 57%
West Virginia 2979 4657 1678 56%
Georgia 84242 131287 47045 56%
California 238681 364706 126025 53%
Oregon 8931 13509 4578 51%
Arkansas 21197 31114 9917 47%
Louisiana 60178 86411 26233 44%
Mississippi 27900 39797 11897 43%
Hawaii 926 1311 385 42%
North Carolina 66751 93708 26957 40%
Kansas 14830 20817 5987 40%
Puerto Rico 7537 10574 3037 40%
Utah 22716 31845 9129 40%
Missouri 22104 30873 8769 40%
Wisconsin 29199 39627 10428 36%
Wyoming 1514 2026 512 34%
Ohio 52865 70601 17736 34%
Kentucky 15842 21083 5241 33%
Washington 33435 44313 10878 33%
New Mexico 12276 16138 3862 31%
North Dakota 3615 4668 1053 29%
Iowa 29514 37350 7836 27%
Northern Mariana Islands 30 37 7 23%
Minnesota 36716 44347 7631 21%
Virginia 63203 74431 11228 18%
Indiana 45952 54080 8128 18%
Guam 267 314 47 18%
Colorado 33012 38708 5696 17%
Nebraska 19310 22134 2824 15%
Delaware 11510 13114 1604 14%
South Dakota 6826 7694 868 13%
Pennsylvania 91775 103075 11300 12%
Michigan 71089 79839 8750 12%
Maryland 67918 75664 7746 11%
Illinois 144013 159082 15069 10%
Vermont 1210 1325 115 10%
Maine 3294 3598 304 9%
District of Columbia 10365 11076 711 7%
New Hampshire 5802 6139 337 6%
Rhode Island 16853 17711 858 5%
Massachusetts 109143 112581 3438 3%
New York 394079 404775 10696 3%
New Jersey 171928 176501 4573 3%
Connecticut 46572 47750 1178 3%
@Moosebreath: Thanx. I was just reading this report by the same station.
From the article linked by @Moosebreath:
@OzarkHillbilly:
No problem. I think given Trump’s predilection for authoritarianism, this is a potentially big development.
@JohnMcC: That’s a good segue into another topic. Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland is now refusing to have ballots sent out to every voter, instead having absentee ballot applications sent out–which often leads there to be voters who don’t get forms even after requesting them. Furthermore, he’s ordering in-person polling stations to be opened.
Just like with Mitt Romney, it seems a lot of liberals and centrists have this naive desire to pick out “good Republicans” they can praise. You don’t know how many comments I’ve heard from Dems calling Hogan decent and principled, the kind of Republican they could vote for. I think this is a misunderstanding. As a Republican in the state of Maryland, Hogan doesn’t have the same incentives as one from Florida or Texas. It wouldn’t be in his interests to appear to be overtly pro-Trump. But at the end of the day, he’s still a Republican, and therefore slime.
@charon: We are in the middle of the Authorization and Appropriations season for FY21 which starts 1 Oct. The bills funding DHS has passed committee but not the House. House should threaten to zero out their budgets until they come to heel.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Given Trump’s corruption of the Inspector General system, good luck with that.
Justice Ginsberg says her cancer has returned. She has no plans to retire.
@OzarkHillbilly: I’ma go the other direction on this one and note that they can’t even Gestapo correctly.
He didn’t have anything on him–no weapons, papers, incriminating whatever
The guy conducting the search admitted he was a nothingburger
They couldn’t come up with any plans to persuade him to talk to them
They released him and then couldn’t even make a convincing denial of having taken him–how many people do YOU not arrest and detain where you identify them by their full names?
You call this a Gestapo? More like a clown show. They need to up their game. Step one–stop pulling random people of the street.
@Scott: I’m hoping for a Biden presidency.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: What do you expect? It’s trump’s Gestapo. 😉
@CSK:
I misspelled “Ginsburg.” Apologies. The justice said in a statement that the lesions on her liver have shrunk and that she is tolerating the biweekly chemotherapy well. I send my best to her, as I’m sure many million others do as well.
@charon:
Not even close to enough. They have city PD and Staties and if necessary National Guard troops to shut this down.
@Kathy:
People forget–or never realized in the first place–that Starbucks got their start in the coffee business as a jobber/purchaser of last resort. The fact that they figured out how to turn it into a business is remarkable, though. Most jobbers end up having to sell their wares steeply discounted in “the poorer quarters where the ragged people go” rather than upscale-ier supermarkets and designer coffee bistros.
ETA: And “me, too” on the banana coffee pancakes. 🙂
Laura Ingraham@IngrahamAngle
She really tweeted that.
Best response:
Frank116@Frank11612
@Kingdaddy:
Because the banks know that the market is a house of cards and that another set of foreclosures/defaults will set up another “too big to fail” scenario but this time with a Federal Government hard pressed to come up with the X-trillion dollars necessary for the bailout?
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
I’ve never thought they sold good coffee, but for a latte or cappuccino in a hurry, they are convenient.
@OzarkHillbilly: Frankly, I’ve always been impressed at the way my generation and our children speculated the fwk out of real estate to the point that working class people can no longer to afford to live where work is. That was quite an accomplishment. 🙁
@OzarkHillbilly:
What he actually asked for was a gazpacho, but nobody in the room could understand him, so they just assumed he wanted something dictatorial.
@Michael Reynolds: You need only ask.
@Kathy:
You don’t go to Starbucks for coffee but rather for sugar shocks and weird flavor combos. Most people put so many adulterants in the coffee there that the quality of it really doesn’t matter; if you’re drinking a Venti Skinny Caramel Macchiato Extra Shot, Extra-Hot, Extra-Whip, Sugar-Free you aren’t tasting coffee you’re being super picky about your not-sugar’s flavoring. Frapps are essentially vaguely coffee-flavored slushies with whipped cream piles. Tasty calorie-ladden gut busters but you could care less what you’re drinking is terrible quality.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: Driving 1-2 hrs each way to job sites was just part of the job for most everyone in construction. I did manage to work one big job for 9 months that was only a half hour away. I also had one that was less than 10 mins away but I’m not sure it even counts as it only lasted 6 days.
@Mu Yixiao: HA!
@Mu Yixiao:
That’s a great play on words, but I don’t think Trump is familiar with any food that isn’t Diet Coke, incinerated steak with ketchup, Filet-o-Fish sandwiches, fries, and two scoops of ice cream
@KM:
I must be a terrible Starbucks customer, then 🙂 All I order* are lattes, cappuccinos, or flat whites, and don’t add more than half a packet of Splenda and some cinnamon. Ok. One time I ordered a croissant, because I had an offer for a free one in the app.
It’s a wonder they let me in at all.
*While the flavored sugar drinks have no appeal to me, once or twice a year I order a hot mocha cappuccino without whipped cream.
“Million-Mile” Batteries Are Coming. Are They a Revolution?
Interesting. The first I’ve heard of this.
@CSK:
Yesterday he was promoting Goya, likely he asked what gazpacho was and it came out where’s the gestapo?
@OzarkHillbilly:
What’s not entirely clear is, are they claiming the battery has sufficient charge to power the vehicle for a million miles, which I’m skeptical about, or that the battery can be recharged enough times for the vehicle to travel a million miles. Currently the batteries in GM EV’s have a warranty of 8 years which likely means the expected usable life span is 10-14 years.
@KM and @Kathy:
And here I am just buyin’ a venti black. It’s a wonder I have never been marched out of the store.
@Sleeping Dog:
Now that I could see happening.
Sully’s farewell letter.
He’ll be bringing the Dish back as a weekly.
@JohnMcC:
It is actually far, far worse. Even if they have the money, the state isn’t telling anyone how much they owe.
One More Cup of Coffee
Dylan
1975
@Sleeping Dog:
Jeez, he’s turning into Sam Harris.
@Sleeping Dog:
What ever happened to the children’s taunt, sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me?
@Kylopod:
Perhaps, but it bothers me that a significant number of media types feel sufficiently threatened by someone’s written words that they would campaign against them and the gatekeepers would surrender. Fortunately, as Sully points out, the internet provides (for now) a forum for iconoclasts.
@Joe: I also order a Venti Black. Only it’s decaf.
@OzarkHillbilly: It’s not even a wild breakthrough. Here’s an article from a couple years back about a Tesla taxi driver with 93% capacity left in the battery after a quarter if a million miles. And last year there was a breakdown from some guy that ran a small fleet of Tesla’s as a taxi service in CA. If I remember correctly he replaced his first battery pack at somewhere north of 300k, maybe closer to 400k.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Extra kudos for the Simon and Garfunkel reference.
@Scott: Was in a Starbucks once. Asked for a cup of black coffee. There was some consternation but the … is he called a ‘barista’ — how strange! … got that figured out. Then he says ‘what size’. I told him “twelve ounces.” That took a while.
Didn’t think the coffee was that bad.
@Joe:
I can’t say for sure, but it may be because we tip the barista.
@Sleeping Dog:
Recharged enough times to last for a million miles.
the energy needed to move the mass of a car even at low speeds, say 20 kph, for 1.6 million kilometers, must be HUGE.
say a gas tank is good for 700 kilometers (I once traveled that long on a full tank, mostly on highways, before the warning light came on). You’d need 2,285.7 tanks of gas to drive 1.6 million kilometers. That won’t fit in your car, nor any reasonable equivalent energy source.
@Sleeping Dog: If the reason he was sacked is as he states, then that’s an unprogressive move by NYMag. That said, I have been reading him less and less. I realized that what I really liked about him was the give and take he engaged with people who disagreed with him. But in his column he gradually became more and more of a voice shouting down from the mountaintop. I hope the dish regains it’s old flavor, although without staff that might not work.
@sam:
If the communion wafer is transmuted into the literal body of Christ, and you get covid, does that mean Christ had covid? Is Christ being exposed to covid?
Seriously, though, I don’t see why the communion would be treated any differently than any other shared eating experience — different waiter, different food, but still, if you must do it, do it outside, with appropriate precautions and social distancing.
@JohnMcC:
Male baristas are known as baristadors.
Like matadors, but for beans instead of bulls.
@MarkedMan:
He implied there would be other writers, specifying that he hoped to give voice to younger writers who aren’t getting an opportunity at larger outlets.
I’ve read him less, but in part it has been because he’s writing only once a week and I need to make a special effort to go to the Intelligencer, as it is not part of my usual rotation. I’d agree that he hasn’t been as good in this space as he was at the Dish, but I wondering how much of that is a result of not writing daily. In the Dish days, he would often write shorter informative posts about an issue that was coming forth and follow that by a more, dare I say, philosophical piece where he ties his thoughts together.
@Gustopher: I miss my homeland. The one I was born in. Where coffee was called coffee and did not resemble custard and waitress/waiter were perfectly good words.
@Gustopher:
Look out Gus, the speech patrol is going to get you. baristas/baristadors, that’s sexist or will offend someone somewhere and the required term will be baristx.
@Gustopher:
Well, quelle surprise, she was tweeting HUA.
@Sleeping Dog: They are saying the batteries could go a million miles with some degrading of performance but not significant. Basically, the gbatteries will far outlast the car and most likely be repurposed for other uses.
@JohnMcC:
My parents, grandparents, and one of my uncles, really liked an Italian restaurant called Rafaello’s, and we ate there several times a year. So I knew lattes and cappuccinos from a young age.
@HarvardLaw92:
I think I would have rather had a well-planted false story than unidentified federal agents abducting people on the streets in combat gear and unmarked vans.
My impression of the Washington Post is that they are unlikely to run a story like this if they don’t have their own confirmation of the basic outline. They may not be showing all their work, and they may be publishing a bit ahead of confirmation of some of the details, but I expect that they have the basic outline right.
Is there some reason I shouldn’t have that impression? Past reporting that turned out to be completely false in cases like this?
Genuine question as to whether I should be raising my suspicion level with WaPo.
NYTimes lost a lot of credibility when they allowed themselves to be used as a mouthpiece for the Bush administration’s lies leading up to Iraq War II, and then again in the run up to the 2016 election when they were bothsidesing the many Trump scandals with “some people (Republicans) say the Clinton Foundation is corrupt… but 18 paragraphs later we have no evidence”
Has WaPo had similar problems?
@Sleeping Dog: It’s just the spanish, I’m sorry, it’s a gendered language. I am willing to accept that female bean wranglers also should be called baristadors.
We call female actors “actors” these days, rather than “actresses”, and I think we can do the same with “baristas”
@OzarkHillbilly: I was thinking more about how I make more in retirement than many of the people who do the jobs I worked make and how I pay more for rent (on a ~4oo sq. ft. studio) currently than the mortgage on my ~1500 sq. ft. condominium that would currently go on the market for roughly 6 times what I paid for it when I was working the blue collar job that was paying the mortgage on it.
But yeah, as construction moved out into places where people weren’t living yet, what you are describing happened, too.
@CSK: Well, he HAS to know “taco salad” because he was eating one at one of the Trump hotel coffee shops while he ran for office. Even identified it correctly, IIRC.
Now it didn’t look like a taco salad to me, but I’ll take the word of the people who said it was. From what I could see, it was only a bowl of chopped up stuff, but he was holding up his fork and had his “I eat kittens for breakfast” smile on (sort of like the one in the Goya beans pitch), so I assume the product was what he expected it to be.
@Kathy: Ma’am, I have to confess that ‘eating out’ was amazingly rare in my birth family and usually involved Howard Johnson’s.
It wasn’t a very nice world if you weren’t white and reasonably fortunate in your choice of parents. I understand. But I grew up there and understood it.
And I gather from your posts that Starbucks does not come up to the standards that Rafaels’ set. So we can perk a pot of coffee someday and share stories of how the modern world fails to measure up, eh?
@Sleeping Dog: “it bothers me that a significant number of media types feel sufficiently threatened by someone’s written words that they would campaign against them and the gatekeepers would surrender. ”
If I were Sullivan, I’m sure I’d be saying that I was fired because my truth was just too truthful for the other hacks at the magazine, too.
But I think the real reason is pretty obvious. I’m sure they were paying him a lot of money, and when they made the hire they made it a big, big deal. Clearly this wasn’t simply because they felt it would be good for the cause of belle lettres — they were expecting publicity, they were expecting quotes, they were expecting links.
And then… when was the last time before this whiny self-justification that you saw Sullivan quoted about anything? When did you see a link to anything he wrote in New York? Everything Chait writes get written about and linked to. Rebecca Traister, same. Olivia Nuzzi used to be on TV all the time (although I don’t think I’ve seen her lately). Sully? Crickets.
Sully has nothing left to say and no interesting way left to say it. He was as useful to NY Magazine as Michael Ovitz was to Disney, and he’s suffering the same fate. But he’s going to be dining out on the victimization on Bill Maher’s show for the rest of his life.
@JohnMcC: “I miss my homeland. The one I was born in. Where coffee was called coffee and did not resemble custard and waitress/waiter were perfectly good words.”
I, too, miss my homeland. Where you could go outside without a mask and without fear of contracting a fatal virus because the government refuses to do anything. Where my US passport would allow me access to foreign countries. Where we didn’t have anonymous federal agents seizing innocent people off the streets with no charges. Where we had a department of justice that wasn’t dedicated to eradicating the president’s personal enemies. Where we would have been annoyed to learn that Russia was paying to have our soldiers killed.
But I guess we’ve all got our priorities.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: Many different experiences of the same phenomenon.
@wr: Yeah! THAT ONE.
@KM: @Kathy: @Joe: You guys can get all uppity if you want to, but I still like a good mocha (although that probably means that I’m not going to Starbucks). 😉
@OzarkHillbilly: Certainly true. And I used to have a 45 minute commute that would have extended to 90 minutes if I hadn’t worked nights for most of my blue collar life.
@Sleeping Dog: @Sleeping Dog:
We’re just a bunch more fragile now. I think it’s the onset of osteoporosis.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: The avoidance of rush hour is a Godsend.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: On one job I worked with carpenter from Illinois. He said he had a brother on the MO side of the river. He swore that no matter how he pleaded he was always getting sent to jobs on the MO side of the river and his brother was always getting sent to jobs on the IL side.
He was certain they were just doing it to fck with him and his brother. (tongue in cheek)
@OzarkHillbilly:
Yes, that is what I believe they mean by a million mile battery. As @Kathy pointed out a battery large enough to hold a charge that could carry a vehicle a million miles would need to be huge or we would need an upgrade in storage density that is thousands if not millions of times thicker than currently. But a battery that can function for a million miles is realistic. As it has been noted, today’s EV batteries are capable of 200,000-300,000 mile duty lives.
Since few cars are on the road after 300,000 mile the opportunity to re-purpose the battery is significant, think energy storage for household/small commercial solar. Reuse will also help alleviate the future problem of how will we recycle all these batteries.
@Sleeping Dog: I wonder if range per charge has gotten significantly better.
@OzarkHillbilly:
IIRC the range on most of the EV’s is now 250-350 miles per charge. An ICE gets 350-450 per tank. Range anxiety should no longer be an issue for general use, a cross country trip, yes.
The three problems that EV manufacturers need to address are; increasing the number of public charging stations, recharge time and range degradation in cold weather. Note how often all the charging stations are in use at a highway rest area. Not only are you waiting for your car to charge you’re waiting for someone else to finish. It is one thing to need 3+hours for a 100% charge at home but not on the road. The industry claims that cold weather degradation is ~20% and that is probably accurate for a fleet average, but in places like Minnesota on a January day reliable reports claim 40-50% with anecdotal reports of up to 60%.
It’s technology, so we’ll eventually get there, though probably not while I’m still driving.
@wr: But it would still be nice to get a cup of coffee. You would think that if we have to live in a proto-fascist hellscape that’s denying the existence of a virus while demonizing latte-sipping-liberals, we would at least be able to get a simple cup of coffee.
If we latte-sipping-liberals were going to win on just one thing, I wouldn’t have picked the lattes.
@JohnMcC:
You know, ti’s been decades since I last visited Rafaello’s. I don’t recall whether their coffee was good or not. Back then, at age 12, the treat was having foamed milk and cinnamon.
The thing is, Mexico is a coffee exporter. We don’t have the cachet that Colombia or Jamaica or Hawaii have, but we have some dammed good coffee. Why, then, is it so hard to get good coffee commercially? The local brands in stores are average. You need to find the old fashioned coffee mills here and there, where they roast and grind coffee; and they’re better in their states of origin, like Veracruz or Chiapas.
The coffee at Starbucks ins’t bad, just average and roasted to a crisp.
@wr: Yeah, THAT one
Ooops, must’ve loaded slowly. Thought for a minute the previous ‘That one’ didn’t get posted.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
I like mocha. Coffee and chocolate, who doesn’t love that combination?
The problem is the sugar. Most places add either sweetened chocolate powder, or chocolate-flavored sugar syrup.
I’ve made a decent mocha by taking baker’s cocoa powder (Hershey’s is rather easy to find), and dissolving it in like 1/8th cup of boiling water, then adding that to a regular latte or cappuccino. But it’s a major PITA, so I don’t do it often.
I’ve been thinking of making a torta caprese without sugar, using baking Splenda instead, and adding instant coffee to the mix, sort of mocha torta caprese.
What I’ve lacked is the time and patience to blanch some almonds I’ve sitting on the freezer. Then they have to be, peeled, chopped and powdered in a food processor.
@Kathy: I’m inclined to think that the reason it’s so hard to get good coffee commercially is exactly because of the *commercially* factor. Commerce usually dictates that success is most represented by market share. The route to market share is, unfortunately, creating the most average (as in appealing to everyone) product.
Denny’s Restaurants deliberately chose to make less creative, more ordinary products for the purpose of being able to duplicate the experience of eating there wherever “there” is. When I’m on the road traveling, I stop at Denny’s (provided that there’s not a preferable choice of which I’m aware) specifically because I know exactly what I will get.
I just wish they’d move away from individual carafes of coffee with rubber stoppers. The coffee always tastes like it’s from the garden hose. 🙁
ETA: You clearly have much better culinary skills than I have. The only way I’d ever be able to have torta caprese would be to order it at a Neapolitan coffee bar.
I’m hopeful, but not very. Even so, that would definitely work for us on the in and out of town circuit.
You ain’t just a woofin’. I never took a Mexico trip that I didn’t bring back some coffee. Way under rated.
Heh, that’s funny, I will stop at some local dive specifically because I don’t know what I will get.
@OzarkHillbilly:
My battery-savvy colleagues tell me that it’s a multi-way trade space. It’s possible to get really great power densities, but only by trading away how many times you can recharge the battery before it won’t hold a decent charge any more. There are certain sweet spots in the trade space that have natural applications, and other spots where that combination of power/duration/rechargeability doesn’t really work for anything useful
@Kathy:
Because all of the good stuff either stays very local or gets exported to a place with higher prices?
I remember traveling to Scotland in the 1990s. I was excited that I would finally get to taste some of my favorite beers on tap, instead of from bottles. Yeah, right. When I got there, I discovered that all of the pubs were owned by one of 3 national chains (Samuel Smith, John Courage, don’t recall the other) and served only those (English) beers. No draft Fraoch or Skullsplitter or Traquair House or wee heavy… And bottles of those cost more in Edinburgh than they did in Pittsburgh.
@DrDaveT: “CAN YOU UNDERSTAND THE WORDS THAT ARE COMING OUT OF MY MOUTH???”
Thanx, I’m pretty sure I get the gist of what you are saying, but “power densities” and “trade space”, have no real meaning for this dumbass carpenter. 😉
Go ahead, laugh at me, I do.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
@DrDaveT:
Maybe something along those lines.
Fortunately we have operations in Veracruz and Oaxaca, and we can get good coffee from there.
About cooking, I’ve been pretty bad with deserts. I can make a few things. The torta caprese would be a major stretch. that holds me back, too.
@Kathy: Given the number of different things that can be called a torta, I think you need an all torta meal. Flatbreads, pies, sandwiches, cakes…
@OzarkHillbilly:
I did mention that I’m not the one of my colleagues who really knows this stuff, right? 🙂
Attempting to explain to my nephew would be good practice. Let’s see:
1. You want the flashlight to be really bright
2. You want it to stay bright as long as possible on one charge
3. You want to be able to recharge it over and over, just as bright
4. Pick which two of those you want most, because the other one will suck.
Representative John Lewis has died.
NPR: Rep. John Lewis, A Force In The Civil Rights Movement, Dead At 80
@Mister Bluster:
He was a giant.