Monday, March 04, 2024

Tex-Mex Pork Chops and Rice Skillet in the Kitchen

Roy e-mailed to note a pork chops recipe.  Pork chops can be very tasty but they can also be dry.  Roy loves this recipe because he says: "It never results in dry pork chops."  From All Recipes, this is Tex-Mex Pork Chops and Rice Skillet:


Directions

  1. Heat olive oil over medium heat in a 12-inch skillet. Season both sides of pork chops with taco seasoning, cumin, smoked paprika, and salt.

  2. Place chops in the hot skillet and cook, turning once, until browned on both sides, about 2 minutes per side. Remove to a plate, and keep warm.

  3. In the same skillet, cook and stir onion and bell pepper, until the vegetables just begin to pick up a little color, about 2 minutes. Add garlic and cook until fragrant, about 30 seconds.

  4. Pour in diced tomatoes and green chilies, with their juices, and stir, being sure to scrape up any browned bits on the bottom of the skillet.

  5. Add chili powder and black pepper to the chicken broth, and stir in.

  6. Add thawed corn kernels, sliced zucchini, and uncooked rice. Stir until vegetables are evenly distributed, and make sure all the rice is submerged in the cooking liquid. Bring to a boil.

  7. Nestle pork chops into the skillet contents, and add any accumulated juices from the chops. Cover, reduce heat to low, and simmer about 20 minutes.

  8. Remove cover, and continue to simmer until rice is tender and all the liquid is absorbed, about 5 minutes more. An instant-read thermometer inserted into the center of pork chops should read 145 degrees F (63 degrees C).

  9. Garnish with flat-leaf parsley or cilantro and lime slices. Serve warm. 



Let me address a few e-mails.  What vegetables do I eat the most?

Probably the three As -- avocados, artichokes and asparagus.  I usually have a serving or a whole bowl of beans each day but not the same beans.  Right now, I'm eating my second bowl of 10 bean soup. Beans from Sprouts.  I was in the mood for 15 bean soup and thought I'd bought some but it was two bags of pinto beans.  So I had some delivered (more than just that though because you have to meat that certain price for delivery -- I got several bottles of Green Goddess dressing because I'm having trouble finding them in some grocery stores lately).  In the average week, I'll usually have a serving or bowl of black beans, a serving or bowl of pinto beans, a serving or bowl of red beans (often with brown rice), a serving or bowl of chick peas, two bowls of lentils and then either navy beans or lima beans or black eyed peas or, like right now, 10 bean soup (actually, usually 15 bean soup).  


And while I'm happy to note the ones I eat, you eat the ones that are best for you.  I can't stand Brussel sprouts, for example.  So I don't eat them.  If you love them, by all means, eat them.  In fact, I ate them until 2013.  What changed?  I ate them because they're good for you.

In 2013, my friend Ximena had a potluck dinner at her home.  A woman I don't care for was among the guests.  She brought steamed Brussel sprouts and made a big deal out of it.  She insulted a mushroom dish someone else brought -- "mushrooms are slimy and disgusting" -- and she insulted guacamole -- "avocados are disgusting" -- and it went on and on.  I had spooned on some sprouts to a plate and was going to eat them because they're good for you.  But with the way the woman acted, I instead said, "You know what?  This is a disgusting vegetable.  I can't eat it."  And I haven't since.


Kaywinn wonders about sardines.  Her son likes them, are they good to eat?  NBC's Today just did a story on them:


According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture database, one serving (or about a half-cup drained) of the average store-bought sardines packed in oil provides about:

  • 200 calories

  • 22 grams of protein

  • 13 grams of fat

  • 0 grams of carbohydrates

  • 0 grams of fiber

  • 0 grams of sugar

  • 250-350 milligrams of sodium

The standard serving size of sardines is one can, which is about 3 ounces or 85 grams. Canned sardines can be eaten whole, as the bones are small and soft enough to digest.

In addition to protein and healthy fats, sardines are rich in vitamin D, vitamin B12, calcium, phosphorus and selenium, Julia Zumpano, registered dietitian with the Cleveland Clinic’s Center for Human Nutrition, tells TODAY.com. They're also packed with potassium, iron, zinc and choline.

Are sardines a good source of protein?

Sardines are an excellent source of protein, Frances Largeman-Roth, a registered dietitian nutritionist, tells TODAY.com.

Just one can packs more than 20 grams of it. Healthy adults should consume 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight daily, TODAY.com previously reported. For an adult weighing 150 pounds, that’s about 54 grams of protein per day.

Canned sardines are also very affordable, says Largeman-Roth, starting at around $3 per can — which will last for years unopened.


So, yes, they are good for kids, they're good for adults.  I like to eat a can with crackers.  


This is C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot" for Friday:


Friday, March 1, 2024.  Marianne Williamson delivers a major speech in San Francisco, THE NEW YORK TIMES mythical rape 'report' continues to fall apart, instead of answering questions about that report the paper is trying to figure out who is speaking to the press, and much more.


Marianne Williamson announced Wednesday that she was unsuspending her campaign for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination and was back in the race..  She spoke at an event in San Francisco last night.


Excerpt.

Marianne Williamson:   The Battle of Gettysburg was the battle at which it was decisive.  Once the North won that battle, it was decisive that the Union would in fact survive.  So Abraham Lincoln himself went to the battlefield.  And his words, of course, in The Gettysburg Address is that the men who died there -- for the North -- he said that they had given their last full measure of devotion so that a government of the people and by the people and for the people would not perish from the earth.  My message to you is, once again, although we don't already know this, is it's perishing now.  It's perishing on our watch because we are for all intents and purposes a government of the corporations and by the corporations and for the corporations.  And ever since particularly CITIZENS UNITED and the unlimited permission given to corporate forces to flood our political system with the undue influence of their money, at this point, they hold Washington hostage. Washington is a system of legalized bribery.  I can tell you from being in the belly of that beast, this is how the system operates.  If you don't have, I mean huge money -- I don't mean money, I mean huge money -- Remember the President has a billion dollars for this campaign. If you don't have either huge amounts of money or access to people with huge amounts of money, you don't have a chance of being anywhere near the pinnacles of power in this country.  And that's why you might ask yourself, 'Well given all the things we've been talking about tonight, why don't they pass policies in Washington that make it better?  Why don't they pass policies that help the average American?"  That's because there are so few average Americans in that place.  And how much power is exerted to make sure the average American either doesn't get in or once they do get in they're manipulated to the point where there's just more suckers for the same establishment?  There's only one way to override this at this point. And that is for a peaceful revolution -- a peaceful revolution at the ballot box. John F. Kennedy said that those who keep us from peaceful revolution make violent revolution inevitable. So I believe that we are at a crossroad.  I think we all know that we're at a crossroad. But like I said before, this is a moment for data analysis.  I didn't say anything tonight that everybody here doesn't already know.  I mean maybe I gave a statistic or two that you might not have considered.  But in general it's like the dots are scrambled.  It's not like the dots aren't there.  And it's not that we're stupid people.  It's that we've been trained -- we've been trained to expect too little.  We've been trained to farm out our best critical thinking.  And we've been -- even those of us who are Democrats -- we've been trained to give up the democratic process.  We've returned to Tammany Hall politics -- to men around a table a hundred years ago who got together with cigars and decided who the candidates would be and would come up with these ridiculous policies like, "Oh, no, no, we don't primary an incumbent president." Tell that to those of us who remember Lyndon B. Johnson because Eugene McCarthy primaried him, Bobby Kennedy Sr. primaried him.  We didn't think that was weird.  We thought it was democracy.  People primary sitting senators all the time.  People primary sitting Congress people all the time. But we've just been 'oh! oh! oh!'  This is codependency now.  Because the DNC said "Oh, no, we have to go with Joe.  The DNC says we're going with Joe."  Who the hell is the DNC?    I'll tell you something, political parties are not mentioned in the Consitution. And George Washington, in his farewell address, warned us about them.  He said, he predicted -- and, man, this one rings true -- he said they could form factions of men who were more loyal to their party than to their country.  John Adams would then say he saw political parties as the greatest threat to our democracy.  And I -- many of us in this room -- grew up in a time when political parties sat in the background.  We still honored that democratic principal that political power lies in the hands of the people.  The people would make a decision in a primary who to nominate.  The party would have nothing to do with it until the people had chosen and then they would step in.  But, of course, they decided once Bernie Sanders came along, "Oh, we're not going to have any of that." And then they got away with that.  And then they did it the next time and they got away with that.  And now they don't even pretend. Now they don't even pretend. And we're just going along.  So I ran for president because I feel that we need an economic u-turn -- an economic u-turn in this country. Because I feel we're like a ship headed for the iceberg here and that one major party just heads right towards it and another major political party heading more slowly and will hit it at a different angle.  We have one major political party representing a total nose-dive for our democracy because you can't have a thriving democracy where you don't have a thriving middle class. And the other major political party is moving in the direction of a managed decline. These political parties do not just chop wood and carry water for these corporate forces, they are huge corporate forces.  So seems to me we need to turn the ship around. Now I was very enthralled by Franklin Roosevelt's Economic Bill of Rights which would include universal healthcare, Medicare For All, tuition free college and tech school, a complete elimination of the college loan debt by using   The Higher Education Act.  It would include all of the things we've mentioned.  It would include things like ramping down fossil fuel extraction rather than ramping it up which all of those presidents of the modern era -- Democrats and Republicans -- end up falling in line with Big Oil.  Now one of them pretends not to.  See, one of them has learned what we want to hear so will say things like "I'm the Climate President" and will even make sure that there are healthy investments in green energy in The Inflation Reduction Act and we say, "Oh, that's so good! There are these wonderful, wonderful, very beneficial in the Inflation Reduction Act.  Oh, yes.  Oh, yes."  Guess what?  It's a classic purse thief distraction technique.  That same president has given more oil drilling permits than even Trump did.  That same president okayed The Willow Project.  That same president must know that all of the investment in dirty energy completely nullifies the investments in healthy, green energy.  We are suckers if we're okay with that. And all of the presidents in the modern era -- Republican or Democrat -- are willing to fall in line -- obviously -- with the defense industries.  And so what we need is a guaranteed living wage.  What we need is guaranteed sick pay.  All of those things.  And we need to repudiate the permanent war machine.   Americans are figuring this out.  We need to play peace games, not just war games.  We need a peace academy, not just military academy.  We need armies of peace builders just like we have armies of military personnel. We need a peace academy, not just a military academy, because we need to learn to wage peace.  Even Donald Rumsfeld said we need to learn to wage peace. 


The speech was broadcast live on YOUTUBE (2,844 views -- those may not include live views) and TWITTER (9448 views).  (TWITTER -- I don't work for Elon Musk and I don't have to indulge him.)

It was a major speech covering many important topics and explaining why she was back in the race -- a candidate unsuspending their campaign is news -- it's always news in the rare times that it happens.  Most infamously, it happened in 1992 when H Ross Perot came back into the race.

So news outlets can hire reporters to cover just Taylor Swift or just Beyonce, but there's no one who could cover a speech in a major US city -- one also broadcast live over the internet?

That's rather sad and one more sign of a democracy in peril.

And I'd rather money be spent covering the arts than covering sports so let's add in all the reporting that took place after the Superbowl ended.  I think everyone who wanted to see it, watched it.  The coverage in the days after the game was not needed.






Gaza.

ELETRONIC INTIFADA continues to cover the mythical rapes of October 7th that have still not been documented.  And the revelations that THE INTERCEPT and others have turned up in the last days.




New doubts are emerging about the New York Times’s coverage of sexual violence during the October 7 Hamas-led attack — and the paper owes its readers an open and transparent explanation. 

What’s more, its reporting on this issue has become so questionable that it should assign new reporters to go over the entire story again.

The latest questions are centered around Anat Schwartz, an Israeli who co-authored several of the paper’s most widely circulated reports, including the now well-known and scrutinized December 28 article headlined: “‘Screams Without Words’’ How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.

Independent researchers scrutinized the online record, and raised serious questions about Schwartz. First, she has apparently never been a reporter but is actually a filmmaker, who the Times suddenly hired in October. You would expect the paper to look for someone with actual journalistic experience, especially for a story as sensitive as this one, written during the fog of war. Surely the paper had enough of its own correspondents on staff who could have been assigned to it.

Next, the researchers found that Schwartz had not hidden her strong feelings online. There are screenshots of her “liking” certain posts that repeated the “40 beheaded baby” hoax, and that endorsed another hysterical post that urged the Israeli army to “turn Gaza into a slaughterhouse,” and called Palestinians “human animals.”

(Just this morning, more evidence emerged online; Schwartz apparently also served in Israeli Military Intelligence.)

Finally, one of her co-authors on two of the reports was Adam Sella, who is her nephew. ********* [see note added below]*****

Let’s pause here. What would happen if the Times suddenly hired a Palestinian filmmaker with no journalistic background, who had recently publicly “liked” posts that called for “pushing Israeli Jews into the sea,” to co-write several of its most sensitive and contested reports? 

(We don’t have to speculate. The Times fired Palestinian photojournalist Hosam Salam in 2022 after one of the pro-Israel media watchdog groups protested about his social media posts.)

After Anat Schwartz’s online history became public, she locked down her accounts and then deleted much of the incriminating content.

The New York Times imposes strict rules on its reporters to maintain the appearance of objectivity. Reporters are not supposed to attend demonstrations of any kind, wear campaign buttons, or post opinions on social media. By hiring Anat Schwartz, the paper clearly violated its own guidelines, and it should publicly explain and apologize.


***********[Added 3/1/24 2:49 PM EST, not her nephew.  Jeremy Scahill explained that on today's DEMOCRACY NOW!

And her partner in this, Adam Sella, is the nephew of Anat Schwartz’s partner, and they’re not married. In fact, Amy, The New York Times, they requested a correction from us, because we had initially said that it was her nephew, which I think in the context of America and other countries you would say. If you’re somebody’s longtime life partner, you would say, “Oh, yeah, this is my nephew.” OK, they’re not blood relatives, and they emphasize that she’s not married. Fine, we corrected that.

My question is: Where are the corrections in The New York Times piece? The New York Times has grave, grave mischaracterizations, sins of omission, reliance on people who have no forensic or criminology credentials to be asserting that there was a systematic rape campaign put in place here. And to publish this article at a moment when Israel was intensifying, after that brief pause where captives were exchanged — intensifying its genocidal attack against the people of Gaza, this played a very, very significant role. And the more we learn about this, the more we discover that the reporting tactics that The New York Times used are certainly not up to the standards that the newspaper claims to be promoting. They will not issue any corrections on what has already been documented to be very problematic sins of commission and omission in this piece.

Use the link for Jeremy and Ryan Grimm's discussion with Amy Goodman on today's DEMOCRACY NOW!]



Jeremy Scahill, Ryan Grim and Daniel Boguslaw (INTERCEPT) reported Wednesday: