The Breakfast Club (Italian Ice)

First, a recipe for Gelato–

Ingredients

• 2 1/4 cups whole milk
• 1/3 cup heavy cream
• 3/4 cup sugar, divided
• 1 cup unsweetened cocoa powder (recommended: Pernigotti)
• 2 ounces bittersweet chocolate, finely chopped
• 4 extra-large egg yolks
• 2 tablespoons Mexican coffee flavor liqueur (recommended: Kahlua)
• 2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
• Large pinch kosher salt
• 8 chocolates, roughly chopped, optional (recommended: Baci)

Directions

Heat the milk, cream, and 1/2 cup sugar in a 2-quart saucepan, until the sugar dissolves and the milk starts to simmer. Add the cocoa powder and chocolate and whisk until smooth. Pour into a heat-proof measuring cup.

Place the egg yolks and the remaining 1/4 cup sugar in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment and beat on high speed for 3 to 5 minutes, until light yellow and very thick. With the mixer on low speed, slowly pour the hot chocolate mixture into the egg mixture. Pour the egg and chocolate mixture back into the 2-quart saucepan and cook over medium-low heat, stirring constantly, until thickened. A candy thermometer will register about 180 degrees F. Don’t allow the mixture to boil!

Pour the mixture through a sieve into a bowl and stir in the coffee liqueur, vanilla, and salt. Place a piece of plastic wrap directly on top of the custard and chill completely.

Pour the custard into the bowl of an ice cream maker and process according to the manufacturer’s directions. Stir in the roughly chopped chocolate, if using, and freeze in covered containers. Allow the gelato to thaw slightly before serving.

It’s hard to write about Art Music without getting trapped in the Romantics and especially the Germans and the Russians.  As I struggle to break free I look to the mild climes of Italy.

The reason the Brass players like Respighi is that there are a lot of parts for them and you don’t have to spend the concert flipping through pages of rests trying to look interested in a piece you’ve only heard a thousand times in rehearsal and to which your only contribution is an ear shattering blat at the end to wake up the audience and let them know it’s over.

Ottorino is another one of these ‘academic’ composers like Rimsky-Korsakoff and was a great aficianado of Medieval, Classical, and Baroque music and wrote a great deal of stuff that echoed their style, but he also bought into the Romantic ideal that Art should be expressive and emotive rather than formalistic and clever.

Because he was a Romantic Nationalist (though he didn’t overuse the whole ‘folk music’ trope) he was a particular favorite of Benito Mussolini and used what powers of persuasion he had to protect artists like Toscanini and scientists like Fermi from the repressive Fascist regime until his death in 1936.  

On the ship back home from Brazil, Respighi met by chance with Italian physicist Enrico Fermi. During their long conversation, Fermi tried to get Respighi to explain music in terms of physics, which Respighi was unable to do. They remained close friends until Respighi’s death in 1936.

Mistah Kurtz?  He dead.  A penny for the old Guy.

We are the hollow men.  We are the stuffed men.  Leaning together headpiece filled with straw, alas!  Our dried voices when we whisper together are quiet and meaningless as wind in dry grass or rats’ feet over broken glass in our dry cellar.

Shape without form, shade without colour, paralysed force, gesture without motion.

Those who have crossed with direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom remember us – if at all – not as lost violent souls, but only as the hollow men.  The stuffed men.

Ah.  This is the way the world ends.  This is the way the world ends.  This is the way the world ends.  Not with a bang but a whimper.

And our pointy wands strung with cat gut saw at rain wood boxes while brazen trumps blare and reeds vibrate to the complicated fingering of masters beaten by the conductor’s stick to the composer’s tune.

Is beauty truth?  What is beauty?

In the late Romantic period the Symphony was supplemented by the Tone Poem.  They were enormously popular (among the elite Art Music set) because they were revolutionary rule breaking masterpieces.

I’m sure Respighi never considered them that because they are in fact entirely conventional in form and execution.  Still, he would not have bothered writing them if they did not remind him of his experiences.  The three he devoted to Rome are quite famous and frequently performed.

Fontane di Roma

Pini di Roma

Feste Romane

Obligatories, News and Blogs below.

Obligatories

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

I would never make fun of LaEscapee or blame PhilJD.  And I am highly organized.

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.

–Julius Caesar (I, ii, 140-141)

This Day in History

News

Multicolored Snow in Russia? No Worries, Officials Say

By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN, The New York Times

FEB. 13, 2015

In Chelyabinsk, a city on the eastern side of Ural Mountains and known as the gateway to Siberia, the authorities were trying to reassure residents that there was no cause for alarm from the blue snow. However, some people who walked through it complained of sore throats and said they had also detected a sweet taste in their mouths.

…

“This snow melts inside, so we have blue water in all the offices around here,” said a woman interviewed on the local news site Telefakt. “We once had orange snow, but there hadn’t been blue before.”

As it turned out, Viteks, a nearby food products manufacturer, had an innocuous explanation: powdered dye intended to color Easter eggs.

“The bag with food coloring wasn’t leakproof,” Olga Gribova, a company spokeswoman, said in a telephone interview. “While the package was being opened, it spilled and got into the ventilation system.” The powder swirled in the air outside, and upon landing turned the snow a shade of baby blue.

The color deepened, Ms. Gribova said, as the temperature rose – above freezing in recent days in a city where it ranges from a low of 3 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 16 Celsius) to a high of about 19 (minus 7 Celsius) this time of year.

“It has been warm in Chelyabinsk, so the snow started to melt and the color turned very bright,” she said.

About 10 days before the blue snow in Chelyabinsk, the city of Saratov experienced a storm of orange snow, which turns out to be a bit more common than blue snow, according to weather scientists.

…

As Mikhail Boltukhin, the head of the regional meteorological service, explained to the Lenta.ru news site, a cyclone passing over the Western Sahara had carried sand across the Crimean peninsula and over southern Russia.

“The air mass has come to us from North Africa,” Mr. Boltukhin told the site. “Ordinary sand gives such an unusual color.

“There is absolutely nothing to be afraid of,” he added. “These weren’t rocks falling down.”

Republicans seize on HSBC scandal to hold up Loretta Lynch’s confirmation

by Paul Lewis, The Guardian

Friday 13 February 2015 17.25 EST

Senate Republicans are seizing on the global tax scandal engulfing HSBC to delay the confirmation of Loretta Lynch, Barack Obama’s nominee for attorney general, the Guardian can reveal.

The Republican chairman of the Senate judiciary committee, Chuck Grassley, was on Friday preparing a fresh tranche of questions for Lynch about the huge cache of leaked data showing how HSBC’s subsidiary helped conceal billions of dollars from domestic tax authorities.

…

Lynch negotiated a controversial settlement with HSBC in 2012, after the bank admitted to facilitating money-laundering by Mexican drug cartels and helping clients evade US sanctions.

Now there are questions over why she did not also pursue HSBC over evidence that its Swiss arm helped US taxpayers hide their assets.

…

One source close to Grassley said he believed the new disclosures about HSBC’s Swiss subsidiary raise “new and important” questions for Lynch. His staff were drafting those questions on Friday, demanding to know when Lynch became aware of the HSBC Swiss data and what she did about it.

The HSBC disclosures have reverberated across the world, raising tough questions for clients of the bank’s Swiss subsidiary and prosecuting authorities in the UK, France, Spain, Belgium, Denmark, India, and Argentina.

The response from Washington has until now been comparably muted, even though Lynch oversaw the settlement of a $1.9bn fine in her previous role as US attorney for the eastern district of New York.

Edward Snowden and Ron Paul Kick Off Libertarian Student Conference With a Little Kerfuffle About Russia

by David Weigel, Bloomberg News

Feb 13, 2015 8:10 PM EST

“As they take the private records of all our lives, and they aggregate a dossier, how can that be said to be constitutional?” asked Snowden. “Why have we funding and instituting this system of mass surveillance of people in our country and people around the world if there’s no track record that shows it works?”

…

As he honed in on his argument, Snowden tailored it to young libertarians — most of them college students. “I think many of the people in this room take a more pro-liberty pro-rights perspective than others in the U.S. political agreement,” said Snowden. “There’s an argument to be made that perfect enforcement of the law is not a good thing. In fact, it’s a very serious threat… law is a lot like medicine. When you have too much it can be fatal.”

…

In a small moment of irony, the Moscow-bound Snowden remembered how he’d talked to colleagues at the NSA, and found them quietly agreeing with his worries, but unready to expose the agency. “We had more on Americans than we had on Russians, for example,” he said. “Should we be focusing on ourselves more than we focus on our adversaries?”

After Snowden wrapped, a slightly smaller audience remained in chairs to hear former Texas Congressman Ron Paul chat with Fox News commentator Andrew Napolitano and Reason.com editor Nick Gillespie.

A foggy future in coal country

By Alia Malek, Al Jazeera

Published on Friday February 13, 2015

If there is a shared heart here, it was broken five years ago this April, when the explosion at Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch mine in Whitesville took the lives of 29 miners and forever scarred those of the family, friends and neighbors left behind.

While everyone might not agree about who is to blame for the explosion, the consensus has always been that something was bound to happen at that mine. Even if the disaster shocked the collective pulse of these hollows, locals weren’t surprised it blew. Not since Don Blankenship became head of Massey. The combative and now former CEO famously broke the unions here and drove a furious production pace that demanded shortcuts at the cost of miners’ health and safety.

What no one saw coming, though, was Blankenship’s federal indictment in November 2014, blaming his leadership for the tragedy. The corporate head had long been seen as untouchable.

But if his trial could offer the potential for accountability, justice and maybe even closure in this painful chapter, people here will have to wait for that as well. On January 5, the judge in Blankenship’s trial granted his motion to delay its start, set for January 26, until April.

Data on Payments From Drugmakers to Doctors Is Marred by Error

By Charles Ornstein, Ryann Grochowski Jones and Mike Tigas , The New York Times

JAN. 22, 2015

You’d think drug and medical device makers would know how to spell the names of their own products.

But when companies submitted data to the federal government last year on their payments to doctors, some got the product names wrong. Forest Laboratories misspelled its depression drug, Fetzima, as “Fetziima” 953 times – in more than one-third of all the reports on the drug. Medical device company Amedica Corp. sometimes called its Preference screw system “Preferance.”

…

The database mistakes surfaced as we developed an app, rolled out this month with The Upshot, to identify the drugs and medical devices that were most heavily promoted to doctors in the last five months of 2013, the period covered by the data. We found that many of the drugs with the highest spending weren’t cures or even medical breakthroughs, but rather “me-too” drugs that were little different than other drugs on the market.

…

Take H.P. Acthar Gel, an expensive injectable drug used to treat multiple sclerosis, kidney disease, lupus and other conditions. The drug’s maker, Questcor Pharmaceuticals, logged payments related to the drug under eight names, including Acthar, Acthar-Pulm, Acthar-IS, Acthar-Rheum and Acthar-MS. The payments associated with each name didn’t stand out much. But when they were all added together, the drug ranked in the top 20 for spending on doctors.

New frankenplant lets you grow tomatoes and potatoes at the same time

by Joanna Rothkopf, Salon

Friday, Feb 13, 2015 10:50 AM EST

Do you like french fries and ketchup? Do you want to go to the trouble of making them yourself but not the trouble of growing two separate plants? You’re not alone. That’s why a company called SuperNaturals Grafted Vegetables (yum!) has invented “Ketchup ‘n’ Fries,” or the TomTato, the top of a cherry tomato plant grafted onto a white potato plant, a feat that is possible because the two organisms are in the same family.

“It’s like a science project,” said Alice Doyle of SuperNaturals in an interview with NPR. “It’s something that is really bizarre, but it’s going to be fun to measure and see how it grows.”

…

“It’s not just any old tomato or any old potato,” said Michael Perry, a product development manager for Thomas & Morgan. “It’s actually a really good, all-around potato at the base. Then on the top you’ve got the potential to have up to 500 super-sweet fruit.”

Military reportedly approves hormone therapy for Chelsea Manning

by Luke Brinker, Salon

Friday, Feb 13, 2015 10:11 AM EST

So reports USA Today, which obtained a February 5 memo in which Col. Erica Nelson, the commandant of the Fort Leavenworth Disciplinary Barracks in Kansas, writes that “[a]fter carefully considering the recommendation that (hormone treatment) is medically appropriate and necessary, and weighing all associated safety and security risks,” she has approved treatment to aid Manning in her gender transition.

…

Noting that the medical community regards hormone therapy as essential for patients with gender dysphoria, transgender advocates championed Manning’s fight for the treatment. In a December op-ed for the Guardian, Manning wrote that U.S. officials were denying her fundamental rights as a transgender woman.

“A doctor, a judge or a piece of paper shouldn’t have the power to tell someone who he or she is. We should all have the absolute and inalienable right to define ourselves, in our own terms and in our own languages, and to be able to express our identity and perspectives without fear of consequences and retribution,” she wrote. “We should all be able to live as human beings – and to be recognized as such by the societies we live in.”

Chelsea Manning, Soldier Sentenced for Leaks, Will Write for The Guardian

By RAVI SOMAIYA, The New York Times

FEB. 10, 2015

Ms. Manning, formerly known as Pfc. Bradley E. Manning, will write on war, gender and freedom of information, said Katharine Viner, the editor in chief of Guardian US, the newspaper’s American operation.

She had contributed to the newspaper on a casual basis, a spokesman said, but the agreement has now been made formal. She will write when stories come up, and not on a set timetable or schedule.

Ms. Manning, 27, was incarcerated for providing more than 700,000 government files to WikiLeaks, including 250,000 diplomatic cables, dossiers on Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and incident reports from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. She is being held at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., and will be eligible for parole in about 2020. Ms. Manning began transitioning to a woman last year.

U.S. Is Escalating a Secretive War in Afghanistan

By MATTHEW ROSENBERG and ERIC SCHMITT, The New York Times

FEB. 12, 2015

“We’ve been clear that counterterrorism operations remain a part of our mission in Afghanistan,” Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, said on Thursday. “We’ve also been clear that we will conduct these operations in partnership with the Afghans to eliminate threats to our forces, our partners and our interests.”

The raids appear to have targeted a broad cross section of Islamist militants. They have hit both Qaeda and Taliban operatives, going beyond the narrow counterterrorism mission that Obama administration officials had said would continue after the formal end of American-led combat operations last December.

The tempo of operations is “unprecedented for this time of year” – that is, the traditional winter lull in fighting, an American military official said. No official would provide exact figures, because the data is classified. The Afghan and American governments have also sought to keep quiet the surge in night raids to avoid political fallout in both countries.

“It’s all in the shadows now,” said a former Afghan security official who informally advises his former colleagues. “The official war for the Americans – the part of the war that you could go see – that’s over. It’s only the secret war that’s still going. But it’s going hard.”

Analysis: NATO expansion at heart of Ukraine crisis

Associated Press

February 14 at 3:36 AM

Since the Soviet collapse – as Moscow had feared – that alliance has spread eastward, expanding along a line from Estonia in the north to Romania and Bulgaria in the south. The Kremlin claims it had Western assurances that would not happen. Now, Moscow’s only buffers to a complete NATO encirclement on its western border are Finland, Belarus and Ukraine.

…

When a new, pro-Western government took power in Ukraine, Russia reacted by seizing the Crimean Peninsula and making it once again a part of Russia. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev transferred the strategic region from Russian federation control to the Ukraine republic in 1954. Crimea remained base to Russia’s Black Sea fleet, and ethnic Russians are a majority of the population.

…

Putin, who so far has proven impervious to Western sanctions and crashing oil prices that threaten his entire economy, is a step closer to his goal of making certain there won’t be yet another NATO member along his Western frontier.

Blogs

• Loretta Lynch: Not Enough Evidence to Charge HSBC Banksters, By emptywheel
• A Proposed Definition of Market, By Ed Walker, emptywheel
• Merlin’s Testimony: “It’s Lie,” “I Don’t Remember,” and “I Don’t Know”, By emptywheel
• Military Just Can’t Kick Its Afghanistan Habit, Picks Up Pace of Night Raids, By Jim White, emptywheel
• Fair Use: The Foundation Of Jon Stewart’s Success, by Jonathan Band, Tech Dirt
• Thank Snowden: Internet Industry Now Considers The Intelligence Community An Adversary, Not A Partner, by Mike Masnick, Tech Dirt
• Cads and dads, The Economist
• David Brooks’ pity party: Why his defense of Brian Williams is really about the 1 percent, by Elias Isquith, Salon
• Obama Seeks Authority to Commit More War Crimes, Big Al, causcus99percent
• Exercise Swift Response, Big Al, causcus99percent

Bonus Video- Yellow Snow Suite