Category: Who knows

Stars & Stripes reports that David Nieland, the fellow investigating the Secret Service hooker scandal in Colombia was himself involved with prostitutes in Florida;

Nieland has told congressional staffers that he was pressured to leave out of the report on the Secret Service scandal that a White House volunteer had brought a prostitute to his room. However, the congressional staffers and the White House have said that no evidence supported that allegation.

Officials briefed on the Nieland investigation said that in May, sheriff’s deputies in Broward County, Florida, saw him entering and leaving a building they had under surveillance as part of a prostitution investigation, the Times reported. Deputies later interviewed a prostitute who identified Nieland in a photograph and said he had paid her for sex, according to the newspaper.

Now, I hate to state the obvious here, but maybe he was doing research for his investigation. Sounds like the perfect excuse to me.

I am a lot of things, 2 of those things are a pretty good cook and a lover of all things chocolate.

I enjoy cooking,  so just a little while ago I decided to make homemade fudge.  I’m pretty sure the kitchen now qualifies as a disaster area, I may have to call in a hazmat team.

Amid all the carnage is a 9 inch by 9 inch pan that contains something that is almost completely unlike fudge. The truth is it’s unlike anything I have ever seen before. I do believe that God wanted fudge at some point billions of years ago and made the same mess I did tonight, when he tossed it became the primordial ooze.

At one point in making this ooze tonight I had something that was very much like lava. The pan boiled over and hit the burner, I had flaming lava. I kept at it and pretty soon I had boiling flaming lava.  During this madness I looked at the stove and remember thinking that I may be able to get it clean with a power washer.  I read the hershey website and the comments and they all agree that I didn’t get it hot enough.  Well hell it must be the stove, Its a GE but it does not have that optional surface of the sun setting or the pits of hell setting that is so well known on the newer models.   The website also says  things like “When the boil recedes”  I remeber that point it was about the same time I had the fire extinguisher in one hand and the phone in the other getting ready to call 911.  I was still at this point foolishly thinking that it would turn out ok.

As the smoke cleared and my eyes stopped watering I could see the remains of the pot.  The top of the stove was coated in a protective layer of chocolate as well as the burner. The drip pan looks like some that spent 10,00o years in a tar pit and Im thinking its about time for a new stove anyway, this one is over a year old… But I still think I can save the fudge.

The directions say to toss in the butter and the vanilla at this point so I do.  They also say to let it cool to 110 degrees. Oddly enough that is the exact same amount of time it takes to research the price and availability of a new stove as well as make a real effort at cleaning the old one.

Then I am to stir this hot mess with a wooded spoon until it thickens and starts to loose its gloss, who are they kidding?  Gordon Ramsey and Martha Stewarts love child that contained the reincarnated spirit of Julia Child couldn’t save this little bit of hell on earth. But I did it anyway.  I need some new wooden spoons, mine are now coated in the ooze, Its the damndest thing that crap hardened on the stove, the burner, the drip pan, the pan its self and the spoon but will not harden in the 9×9 pan.

In all fairness to Hershey and little old women everywhere I am sure this is a fantastic recipe.  I will at some point try it again.  There is some exaggeration in the above post. I never had a phone ready to dial 911.  I am not going to have to replace the stove, however I did consider it. I will have to get new drip pans and possibly a new burner. They are coated in hard chocolate.   The spoons are a lost cause.    I may have invented a new industrial sealant/adhesive.

As a comparison,   A few years ago I home hot salt blued a pistol. I used red devil drain cleaner and distilled water in a old stainless steel pot. I did it just to see of it would work and it did. The pistol came out great.  That mixture was so volatile that any organic material it touched either melted or burst into flame.  I was more worried about the Fudge lava that I ever was the blueing mix.

I am going to post the recipe below. The tips in italics are mine

 

Ingredients

Directions

Government never lives up to our expectations. Out here in the real world, when we pay someone to install a toilet in our house, we expect the toilet to work when he’s done. But, we don’t expect the same results from government. I’ve always said that the reason people who have been in the military for any length of time are conservative is because we’ve seen the government at it’s best and at it’s worst and it’s been our experience that there’s hardly any difference between the two. We’ve depended upon the government to bring us our food and our clothes when we need it most, and the government is unable to do the simplest things in a timely manner.

This whole Ebola thing should come as no surprise to anyone. The government is unable to protect us from the disease even though there is an agency with “disease control” right there in it’s name. Every morning, when I turn on the news, I feel like I’m in one of those bad movies where the government’s only concern is preventing panic in the population, rather than fixing the problem with which they are confronted.

Actually, instead of “disease control” the Center for Disease Control has been tasked with researching things that have nothing to do with it’s mission – things like gun violence policy and fat lesbians – to bow to their political masters, rather than science.

I’m not surprised at this particular strategy, I’m just surprised that no one else isn’t surprised that government is incompetent. Government is real good at telling we, the people, what to do, but they’re not so good at telling themselves what to do. We have government officials telling us not to panic and lying to us about the situation so we don’t panic, not understanding that the more they lie, the more panic they create. Just like in those bad movies.

We learn that there are are a few hospitals that are supposed to be equipped to handle Ebola patients, yet two nurses contract the disease in one of those facilities because they didn’t have basic equipment to protect them from Ebola.

The lesson of the last few years is that government is inherently incompetent, but, as we’ll probably see in the upcoming elections, no one has learned that lesson. In fact, we’re even willing to allow the same government that was unable to protect two highly-trained nurses in Dallas from Ebola infection to commandeer our own health care. Even after the government’s own health care system, the Veterans’ Affairs Department, has been nationally exposed as being incompetent – despite the fact that two presidents and four Congresses have been recklessly throwing piles of cash at the VA.

The reason that it’s been especially incompetent this year is because all of the crises that we’re facing are being viewed through a political lens, you know, with the mid-term elections looming next month. The political implications of certain decisions must be focus-grouped first and by the time a decision is made, it’s really too late for the decision to have a meaningful impact on the problem.

The only lesson of Big Government is that the more that you depend on the government in your life, the more you are going to be disappointed with the results. But, I’m pretty sure that isn’t the lesson the country is going to take away from this experience.