21 month-old boy dies after H1N1 vaccination

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A week ago the parents carried their son to his grave. “He had an unbelievable willingness to live. We never thought for a second that he wouldn’t make it,” said his mother.

Boy in Agony After H1N1 Nasal Flu Mist

Codex Alimentarius Update: Vitamins and Herbs Becoming Illegal

Fluoridation Increases Infant Death Rates

VOXY
November 17, 2009

“For the Ministry of Health to continue promoting fluoridation when there is this kind of evidence that it is real health risk is inexcusable” says Mark Atkin, Fluoride Action Network (NZ)’s co-representative on the Fluoridation-free NZ Coalition, adding “Only a few months ago we had further confirmation that fluoridation increases teenage male bone cancer rates. As has been said before, those who continue to promote fluoridation do so at the risk of future legal action against them.”

The subhuman slumdogs from the shithole subcontinent can’t even make a decent fountain pen. So whenever they attempt to build something that’s more complicated, it usually ends in disaster. The sheer incompetence of the savage slumdogs has resulted in the murder of seven newborns on Sunday. The seven hapless babies had suffocated to death in a slumdog hospital because they were put in “faulty” slumdog-built incubators and neglected by the slumdog hospital staff.

While this incident is a shocking case of typical slumdog incompetence and negligence, it must be remembered that the subhuman slumdog Indians are world’s most dangerous baby killers. Slumdogs are known to murder their own babies if they happen to be girls. The Hindu hoodlums abort hundreds of thousands of female fetuses every year. The subhuman slumdog “doctors” even run organized female feticide rackets in different parts of the shithole called India.

Seven newborn babies die in hospital due to faulty incubators and negligence

HYDERABAD: The Andhra Pradesh government on Monday ordered a probe into the death of seven newborn babies, allegedly due to faulty incubators at a government-run hospital.

Health Minister D. Nagender ordered an enquiry into the incident that took place at Old Government Hospital in Vijayawada city…

…The parents alleged that the babies died due to faulty incubators, failure of the oxygen system and the negligence of the doctors.…

Times of India

Shameless subhuman Indian scumbags! Filthy perverted pigs! Smelly incompetent bastards! Greasy curry-munching, untouchability practising Hindu hoodlums! Girl killing goons! Parasitic cow-piss drinking feral slumdogs from the shithole subcontinent! Slimy sons and dotheaded daughters of slumdogs and slumbitches!

MUST READ!
A Surge of Miscarriage Reports From Pregnant Women After Taking Swine Flu Vaccine Hits The Internet – Tell Every Pregnant Woman You Know!

Organic Health Advisor
November 11, 2009

In the very short video posted below, you will see one health expert explain to Sean Hannity that even the swine flu vaccine package insert says that it is safe for pregnant women…

The following video highlights a retraction made by a medical doctor, Dr. Roby Mitchell, after he initially advised a group of nurses to take the H1N1 Swine Flu vaccine. Once he had read the actual package insert which comes with the vaccine and realized that the vaccine makers themselves admit it is untested and may cause a myriad of disorders to include paralysis, neurological damage, possible sterilization and may cause fetal harm in pregnant women (one of the high priority groups targeted to get the vaccine), he retracted his advice so that they would have informed consent. 1

Here are a few screen-shots from the FLUVIRIN package insert:

The reality is that if you are pregnant, you need to hear what both sides have to say before ever subjecting your baby to the swine flu vaccine. You do NOT want to end up like one of the mothers above. Please help us out by sharing this information with as many people as you can. If you know of any additional H1N1 swine flu vaccine miscarriage horror stories please post them below in the comments section.

Check out this amazing UK Times article. (H/T ECM)

First, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold:

“Harris wore a ‘Natural Selection’ T-shirt on the day of the killings. They made remarks on video about helping out the process of natural selection by eliminating the weak. They also professed that they had evolved to a higher level than their classmates. I was amazed at the frequent references to evolution, and that the press completely ignored that aspect of the tapes.”

[...]As the attorney for the families of six of the students killed at Columbine, the Denver lawyer Barry Arrington has come across more in a similar vein. “I read through every single page of Eric Harris’s journals; I listened to all of the audio tapes and watched the videotapes? It became evident to me that Harris consciously saw his actions as logically arising from what he had learnt about evolution. Darwinism served as his personal intellectual rationale for what he did. There cannot be the slightest doubt that Harris was a worshipper of Darwin and saw himself as acting on Darwinian principles.”

And Pekka-Eric Auvinen:

Before he embarked on his shooting spree, Auvinen posted a lengthy apologia on the internet. Styling himself a “social Darwinist”, he said that natural selection appeared not to be working any more — had maybe even gone into reverse. He had noticed that “stupid, weak-minded people reproduce faster than intelligent, strong-minded ones”. The gene pool was sure to deteriorate if society continued to guarantee the survival of the second-rate. He had pondered what to do about this problem. He understood that life was just a meaningless coincidence, the outcome of a long series of random mutations, so there might not be much point in doing anything at all. But eventually he had decided he would do his bit by becoming a natural selector, aping the pitiless indifference of nature.

Auvinen left a special plea for his motivation to be taken seriously and for the world not merely to write him off as a psychopath, or to blame cult movies, computer games, television or heavy metal music, before concluding: “No mercy for the scum of the Earth! Humanity is overrated. It’s time to put natural selection and survival of the fittest back on track.”

The article continues:

One conclusion implicit in evolutionary theory is that human existence has no ultimate purpose or special significance. Any psychologically well-adjusted person would regard this as regrettable, if true. But some people get a thrill from peering into the void and acknowledging that life is utterly meaningless.

Darwin also taught that morality has no essential authority, but is something that itself evolved — a set of sentiments or intuitions that developed from adaptive responses to environmental pressures tens of thousands of years ago. This does not merely explain the origin of morals, it totally explains them away. Whether an individual opts to obey a particular ethical precept, or to regard it as a redundant evolutionary carry-over, thus becomes a matter of personal choice. Cheerleaders celebrating Darwin’s 200th birthday in colleges across America last February sang “Randomness is good enough for me, If there’s no design it means I’m free” — lines from a song by the band Scientific Gospel. Clearly they see evolution as something that emancipates them from the strict sexual morality insisted upon by their parents. But wackos such as Harris and Auvinen can just as readily interpret it as a licence to kill.

Darwin himself thought that his theory warranted racism and genocide:

Darwin looked forward to a time when Europeans and Americans would exterminate those he termed “savages”. Many of the anthropomorphous apes would also be wiped out, he predicted, and the break between man and beast would then occur “between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon; instead of as now between the Negro or Australian and the gorilla”. He took a sanguine view of genocide, believing it to be imminent and inevitable. “Looking to the world at no very distant date,” he wrote to a friend in 1881, “what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world.”

Convinced that the various races of mankind had travelled different distances down the evolutionary highway, and that two races could be fairly described as more or less evolved even when both had a track record of cultural achievement, Darwin insisted that natural selection explained why the Europeans had been able to see off serial invasions by the Ottoman Turks. Some of today’s Turks understandably resent being designated as genetically second-rate, which perhaps explains why the editor of Turkey’s most popular science magazine was instructed by his proprietor to cancel a special edition celebrating Darwin’s anniversary.

[...]Nowhere was the toxic doctrine of racial superiority more enthusiastically taken up than in the Third Reich. The Nazis believed that the Aryan race was already the most highly evolved, but could evolve further if defective genes could be eliminated. To purify the German gene pool, they decided to exterminate all the physically and mentally handicapped.

Darwin summed up his moral philosophy by saying that a man could “only follow those ideas and impulses that seem best to him”. Darwinian ideas, eugenics and its ugly sister, eugenic euthanasia, were accepted by the mainstream of the German scientific and medical professions. Indeed, so convinced were the staff of the clinic at Kaufbeuren-Irsee in Bavaria that they were acting rationally that, even after Germany’s surrender in 1945, they carried on killing handicapped people under the American occupation, until a US officer led a squad of GIs to the hospital and ordered them to desist.

The modern pro-abortion movement is rooted in the thought of Darwinian eugenicists like Margaret Sanger, who was quite explicit about weeding out the poor, the “unfit” and “inferior” races. Many people on the secular left believe that some people are not fit to live, and that these people should be weeded out by force. For example, Obama’s science czar advocates controlling the reproduction of undesirable people and that born babies are not human beings.

After you finish reading the UK Times article, check out this post over at Uncommon Descent. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

When we teach our children that their existence is an ultimately meaningless accident and that morals are arbitrary byproducts of random genetic fluctuations and mechanical necessity, should we be surprised that they place a lower value on human life than someone who is taught that all humans have inherent dignity and worth because they are made in the image of God?

[...]There are three and only three options.

1.  We can continue to fill our children’s heads with standard Darwinian theory (which Dennett rightly calls “universal acid”), understanding that at least some of them are going to put two and two together and realize that the acid has eaten through all ethical principles – and act accordingly.

2.  We can try to come up with a secular noble lie.  “OK kids.  You might have noticed that one of the implications of what I just taught you is that your lives are ultimately meaningless and all morals are arbitrary, but you must never act as if that is true because [fill in the noble lie of your choice, such as “morality is firmly grounded on societal norms or our ability to empathize with others”].

3.  We can teach our children the truth – that the universe reveals a wondrous ordered complexity that can only be accounted for by the existence of a super-intelligence acting purposefully.  And one of the implications of that conclusion is that God exists, and, reasoning further, He has established an objective system of morality that binds us all, and therefore the moral imperatives you feel so strongly are not just an epiphenomenon of the electro-chemical states of your brain.

This reminds me of the essay “Men Without Chests” in C.S. Lewis’ “The Abolition of Man”. Lewis writes that moral relativists undermine objective morality, which cannot be grounded rationally by atheism, and yet they are surprised when people actually act as though moral relativism is true.

The good news is that Darwinism is false. The bad news is taxpayer money from working parents is funneled into politicized government-run schools that teach children that Darwinism is true. High taxes ensure that parents are kept away from their children, since they must both work to pay for the government-run schools. The left’s opposition to stay-at-home mothers and fathers, (e.g., sex education, abortion, unilateral divorce, same-sex marriage, subsidies for single motherhood, etc.),  ensures that the government-run schools have more influence on children than the parents do.

Former Planned Parenthood director Abby Johnson with Coalition for Life Director Shawn Carney (photo: Coalition for Life)

Planned Parenthood, the organization that kills babies for profit, is having more of its evil deeds brought into the light thanks to one woman who is not afraid to speak the truth. This woman is Abby Johnson, a former clinic director for the Texas Planned Parenthood branch. A woman who, after watching an ultrasound-guided abortion, courageously walked away from the murder mill (gives us hope to continue to pray for others).

Now, she is causing more of a stir by revealing Planned Parenthood’s abortion quotas. Yup, you read that correctly, quotas. Quotas where the murdering of helpless babies is tallied and forecast in heartless indifference like a company might do with their inventory. One can almost hear the directors telling their employees, “It’s just business boys and girls; we are behind our quota this month so get to it and round us up some more pregnant ladies so we can slaughter a few more babies and make the numbers.”

Although my quote is speculative sarcasm, the truth of the matter according to Abby in a WorldNetDaily article titled, “Planned Parenthood’s abortion quotas exposed”, is that,

There are definitely client goals,” former clinic director Abby Johnson said. “We’d have a goal every month for abortion clients and for family planning clients. ¹

Later on, in the same article, Abby goes on to reveal that,

Abortion is the most lucrative part of Planned Parenthood’s operations,” she said. “Even though they’re two separate corporations, all of the money goes into one pot. With the family planning corporation really suffering, they depend on the abortion corporation to balance their budget, help get them out of the hole and help make income for the company. ²

As one can imagine Planned Parenthood is in an uproar about Abby Johnson exposing their darkness. To read the rest of the story, you can find the article here.

End Notes:

1 – Schilling, Chelsea. “Planned Parenthood’s abortion quotas exposed.” WorldNetDaily. 04 Nov 2009. Accessed: 5 Nov 2009. http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=115000>.
2 – Ibid.

The former director of a Planned Parenthood clinic in southeast Texas says she had a “change of heart” after watching an abortion last month — and she quit her job and joined a pro-life group in praying outside the facility.

And we wonder why the pro-abortion zealots go absolutely out of their minds when pictures of murdered babies are displayed by pro-life activists. Actually seeing what happens to the most innocent and defenseless class of our society when a woman enacts her “right” to murder her child tends to change people.

See the Fox news piece here.

Amen!!!

Via Moonbattery via Gateway Pundit which has video:

Planned Parenthood has been a part of Abby Johnson’s life for the past eight years; that is until last month, when Abby resigned. Johnson said she realized she wanted to leave, after watching an ultrasound of an abortion procedure.

“I just thought I can’t do this anymore, and it was just like a flash that hit me and I thought that’s it,” said Jonhson.

She handed in her resignation October 6. Johnson worked as the Bryan Planned Parenthood Director for two years.

Johnson now supports the Coalition For Life, the pro-life group with a building down the street from Planned Parenthood. Coalition volunteers can regularly be seen praying on the sidewalk in front of Planned Parenthood. Johnson has been meeting with the coalition’s executive director, Shawn Carney, and has prayed with volunteers outside Planned Parenthood.

As Moonbattery poster Gregory of Yardale adds:

And immediately there fell from his eyes as it had been scales: and he received sight forthwith, and arose, and was baptized. – Acts 9:18

For more on why exactly seeing what an abortion looks like might make Abby Johnson become pro-life instead of pro-infanticide, see the following:

• The Silent Scream – Ultrasound Video of a Baby Being Brutally Aborted

• Everyone Against Abortion, Please Raise Your Hand

• Pictures of Aborted Fetuses – They Look Human, They ARE Human

• Full, Uncensored Video Footage of Abortion on Spain TV

• You Reach Your Right Hand In, And Pull The Baby’s Brains Out

• Hey, Do You Think We Should We Kill Babies? – Then I inserted my forceps into the uterus and applied them to the head of the fetus, which was still alive, since fetal injection is not done at that stage of pregnancy. I closed the forceps, crushing the skull of the fetus, and withdrew the forceps. The fetus, now dead, slid out more or less intact.”

Hi,

I hope that you enjoyed the first episode of Garrow’s Law yesterday.  As they said in the opening sequence, the show is inspired by real cases from the time.  Below I mention a few of the things that helped play a role  in inspiring part of Sunday’s episode.

One of the themes of Episode 1 was Thieftakers.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, they were a bit like a cross between private detectives and policemen.   You may remember the exchange where Forrester the Thieftaker gets the better of Garrow?  Garrow asked him how long he had been in the honourable business of thieftaking, and Forrester comes back with the line ‘Longer than you’ve been a counsellor.’ And also the exchange “What, there was no blood money last Sessions? – If there were no thieves, how would you get a brief?”  Well, have a look at an actual exchange between Garrow and a Thieftaker in a case from 1785 where the Thieftaker gave as good, or better, than he got from Garrow!

http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/images.jsp?doc=178501120038

The Thieftaker case in the Episode was about highway robbery.  There are loads of cases like this during our period.  A great place to go if you want to find out more is the website of the Old Bailey Proceedings Online.  If you are interested, go to www.oldbaileyonline.org and then select ‘Highway Robbery’ on the advanced search options.  I suggest looking at this case, with Garrow defending a Mr Pace accused of Highway Robbery. Garrow lost and Pace was sentenced to death. http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=t17881022-23-off105&div=t17881022-23#highlight

Another case you might enjoy is this one, again a Highway Robbery case with Garrow unsuccessfully defending and the accused being sentenced to death.  Here, Garrow goes into a lot of detail about the identity of a grey mare that was used in robbery:  http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=t17881022-19&div=t17881022-19&terms=grey|mare|garrow#highlight

Infanticide was the theme of the main case in Episode 1.  It was a special because in infanticide cases, the burden of proof was the opposite to what it was today. Whist on the one hand, if the woman was married and was prosecuted for killing a newborn child, the offence would be of murder and she would be presumed innocent.  However, if she was unmarried, like Elizabeth Jarvis in our episode, she would be presumed guilty, and the offence would be infanticide / concealing a birth.

A number of cases and played a part in helping to  inspire the case created for the show. Elizabeth Jarvis is the name of a woman accused of infanticide in 1800. She was found not guilty. http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=t18000115-20-off104&div=t18000115-20#highlight

The cutting of the throat of a child happened in a number of cases during the 1700s.  If you would like to look at examples of cases where a cord was wrapped around the neck and the neck cut by mistake, I suggest looking at the following three infanticide cases. One ( http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=t17570526-22-off111&div=t17570526-22&terms=throat#highlight ) refers to a cord around neck, throat cut by mistake with a knife; a second, http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=t17570526-22-off111&div=t17570526-22&terms=throat#highlight  turned on the use of scissors and accidental cutting of neck; and third case http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=t17810530-1-off2&div=t17810530-1&terms=throat#highlight was about a poor wretched woman cutting cord with rough knife.

There are references in the Old Bailey archive to the ‘ hydrostatic test’ being used in evidence in infanticide cases. We also took some inspiration from a practice that was used whereby doctors would remove the dead babies’ lungs and try to float them, if they floated, the child breathed, but if they sank it was stillborn. This idea of floating a child’s lungs to see whether it breathed dates back a long way and was first used in the Old Bailey as an argument as early as 1737 http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=t17370420-18-off88&div=t17370420-18&terms=floated#highlight , and was used in court on several occasions subsequently. But by Garrow’s time, as he showed in his cross examination of the Doctor, medical authorities were beginning to move on.

Do you remember when Garrow was complaining about the thinness of his papers?  All of the restrictions that he faced – like not being allowed to address the jury – are true.  I’ll try to post some stuff about it this week if I get a chance.

If there are any other aspects that you’re interested in hearing more about, don’t hesitate to post a comment and I’ll do my best to help.

With best wishes

Mark Pallis

Liberalism has many slippery slopes that makes it one or tops two steps from outright communism. Let’s look at the similarities. Liberalism evidently doesn’t value life. Communists have killed over 100 million people since 1917. Liberalism has, through abortion killed 50 million babies in a massive infanticide. They are also pushing the legalization of doctor assisted suicide. Communism’s stance on life: worthless. Liberalism’s stance on life: Worthless except when you are a criminal. Then you are a poor person indicted by an unfair justice system.

Liberalism and communism are separate somewhat in the areas of private property. Communists see that all property should be owned in common and overseen by the governing authorities. Liberalism doesn’t mind having private property as long as everyone else’s is taxed enough to provide for the common good. Evidence Michael Moore: He rails against capitalism in his new propagan… er, I mean documentary yet when questioned by Sean Hannity about his own personal wealth he him-hawed around the questions surrounding how he became so exorbitantly wealthy. The truth is, liberals don’t mind wealth so long as yours goes towards their goal of social justice and redistribution of wealth.

Taxes is another area where libs and commies are similar. Both want high taxes to support a behemoth government that takes care of everyone. Liberals also take it a step further by making taxes not only a way to pay for government, but also to make up for real and supposed injustices in the past. They want rich people to pay A LOT more than what they are paying now so they can give that money to the poor disadvantaged people that have been taken advantage of through the evil, greedy corporate culture of capitalism. Liberals will never admit that America through it’s capitalist system has raised more people from poverty to middle class status than any socialist country in the world. Nay, than ALL the socialist countries in the world.

Liberals also seem to revel in praising socialists and communists. At least four of Obama’s key administration officials have praised communists. Anita Dunn and the FCC chief are the two most prominent. There is no doubt in my mind that Obama admires some of the tactics and ideas of socialists.

Americans need to wake up to the evil of liberalism. I think that the movement is already beginning. With conservatives being more numerous than liberals by a two to one margin, Americans are diametrically opposed to the liberal viewpoint. But we need to be vigilant and begin to reverse the trend of liberalism in the arts, medicine, media and other areas. Liberalism in its most basic form is akin to communism and fascism.

I found several articles. Just this one here for now:

The Truth About UNICEF
by Leslie Tignor

Neocutis Death Cream

. . . be sure to ask what kind of facial cream she uses.  You see, “processed skin proteins” is code for aborted baby body parts:

Neocutis’ key ingredient known as “Processed Skin Proteins” was developed at the University of Luasanne from the skin tissue of a 14-week gestation electively-aborted male baby donated by the University Hospital in Switzerland.  Subsequently, a working cell bank was established, containing several billion cultured skin cells to produce the human growth factor needed to restore aging skin. The list of products using the cell line include: Bio-Gel, Journee, Bio-Serum, Prevedem, Bio Restorative Skin Cream and Lumiere.  But Vinnedge is calling for a full boycott of all Neocutis products, regardless of their source.

I have finally had a successful attempt at baking a bit of bread! Randomly deciding to have another go at it the other day, I found that the only recipe I had on hand was the Brioche in my copy of the French Laundry Cookbook, and so that’s what I made. Above is a photo of all the ingredients required, with the exception of the yeast, which I didn’t realize had been excluded from the photo until deep into the rising process. It’s OK, though, as it was just your run of the mill yeast. In the past, I have tried and failed to make a decent loaf of bread approximately once a year, for the past five years, and have previously been so dismayed by the results that it would take the ensuing year for me to build up the courage to try again. However, that epoch has now passed. As can be seen below, it is basically perfect– the crumb, the crust–what more can I ask for? This is the bread that the Croque Madame is intended to go on, but in the past instead of just biting the bullet and making my own, I would spend hours trying to find a decent loaf at some bakery or another (a surprisingly difficult item to find.) Nevermore!







Well on Sunday, I had to come up with something to do while the bread was rising, so Gabrielle and I decided to venture on over to Mississippi Ave. (Portland, OR). We were delighted to happen upon the new food cart village, the Mississippi Marketplace that has sprung up over there. I had heard about it peripherally because a lot of folks were stoked about Jesse Sandoval’s cart Nueva Mexico being there, but I didn’t really give it much thought beyond that. However, the digs are pretty sweet. There’s a huge canopy tent down the center with tons of tables for adults and children, and the whole lot is out-fitted with some pretty incredible looking carts. I ordered the Carne Adovada Sopapilla from Nueva Mexico, because the suspense was killing me, and I just had to get it over with. Naw! The real reason was that last winter I tried to use ’sopa’ as a word for a kind of sandwich in a game of Scattagories and was denied by a one Christy Linden who stated, if I remember correctly, that it was soup! Honestly, I didn’t know what a sopa(pilla) was either, but now I have to say that it could pass for a type of sandwich in a game of Scattagories. It’s basically a piece of fried, lightly sweetened dough that’s filled with things. It might depend on what your definition of bread is. I hear someone around here has a cheeseburger on on a glazed VoodooDoughnut, so where does that argument end? Anyway, it was a pretty good plate, all and all, but what really made it for me was the pinto beans. Those were killer. What happened was that now I’m going to have to chill out on all these canned beans and get off my duff and make some fresh beans from scratch. Simply incomparable.



Gabrielle visited the cart named Ruby Dragon. They served up a pretty awesome never-ending cup of maté, and the special that day was very tasty—ginger quinoa blueberry gluten-free pancakes with a side of yammies. However, I have to say that if circumstances dictate that your costumer will have to wait upwards of 30 minutes (1 of 3 costumers at the time), and then only receive a single pancake (for $8), thus rejecting almost everyone’s idea of the term ‘pancakes’, then in my opinion a bit of a strategic overhaul is in order. Gabrielle thinks that what happened was that they had run out of her first choice, and then she decided on the special as her second choice, and that they didn’t want to admit that they had run out of her second choice also, and therefore scrambled to make more, instead of simply admitting that they were out of the pancakes as well. My take is that if you are out of something, at least as a food cart, then that is a good thing. It means that people are buying your food in numbers greater than you expected them to, which is a totally awesome scenario for a couple of reasons, but one that stands out in these circumstances is that you will be able to exuberantly tell costumers that arrive after you have sold out that they were so popular that you SOLD OUT of them! Anyway, it was really good, but took way too long to arrive, and we were expecting at least two. That, and excellent maté.







Next we meandered down Mississippi weaving in and out of specialty shops, reading menus here and there, wandering through the ReBuilding Center (which helped us realize that we know nothing about houses, among other things) with our ultimate destination being The Meadow. Ahhh, where to begin with this one. Gabrielle is still mulling it over. We learned many things about salt on Sunday at The Meadow, a salt specialty shop, but specifically we discovered that the universal acceptance of kosher salt (an agent of dessication) as Salt was equivalent to the universal acceptance of, say, “infanticide”. When asked if that might be a bit of a stretch, Mark Bitterman, owner, Selmelier, and crusader for overexageration replied with a “hmmm. . . I don’t think so.” Later on we learned from a second source, a one General Patrick Ripton, that “people who use kosher salt are indeed not like Hitler, but in fact are Hitler.” I’d like to remind everyone that we’re talking about salt here, or rather, Salt and Sodium Chloride. Where does that leave us? From now on, every time I blanch vegetables or boil pasta will I have to face the consequences of essentially being a baby killer? That’s a lot of guilt, and I’m so desperate that I actually bought some of the fancy salt.



When we got back home the brioche was bursting over the rim of the bread pan, begging to be baked, and so I obliged its need. For the next 35 minutes I drank a cup of coffee, and did a lot of nail biting. You’d think I’d reinvented the zipper or something, I was so ecstatic to pull such an awesome loaf from the oven. To celebrate, I made this Grilled Ham & Cheddar Sandwich on it:







1 This isn’t actually the first full slice from the loaf it’s the 3rd. With the first full slice I tried something that had intrigued me when I saw it on the daily board at Addy’s Sandwich Bar: Chocolate, Sea Salt, and Olive Oil. While the bread was still warm, I broke off 3 pieces of a Chocolove Toffee & Almonds 33% Milk Chocolate bar (a brand of bar which comes packaged with a love poem), laid them out width-wise along the bottom of the slice, drizzled them in Olive Oil, and sprinkled a bit of the fancy salt, namely the Fleur de Sel de Guérande from my Finishing Salts starter kit from the Meadow, folded it in half, and ate, polishing the half-sammy off in three bites, one for each chocolate square. The experience was sweet, and savory with just the right amount of textural crunch from the toffee bits and salt. Addy prepares hers on a small baguette from Little t bakery, which I suspect is probably a better bread match for the combination, being that baguettes are much chewier and crustier than a brioche could ever hope to be, the chewiness and crustiness of which I can’t help but think would lend a textural component that would be unparelled in this paricular combination of ingredients.



2 The cheese used here is Black Diamond White Cheddar, the sharpest that was for sale at Pastaworks. It was good, but not any different than Tillamook, really, which I think I’ll stick with in the future because it has a better price point, and is a bit more local than Canada.



3 The onion slices are from a Purple Torpedo, which I could not help but try because of it’s fantastic shape. Surely, these must be a cross between a shallot, and a red onion, because indeed it resembled a shallot multiplied by a factor of 4 or 5, and sported a coat somewhere in between the purple skin of the red onion, and the bronze skin of a shallot. The flavor profile leaned more towards that of a shallot, however, being quite strong, and pungent. Recommended for those who truly love a powerful onion.



4 A good smoked ham is hard to find. I can’t even count on three fingers the times that I have eaten truly unforgettable ham, and here I’ve been able to purchase some of the best caliber from the butcher at Pastaworks, just across the street from me, and I hadn’t even realized it. In the past I have bought Boar’s Head, which is fine, I guess, but nothing special. It’s your basic deli meats. The difference is that the ham pictured above is extrordinary, and it is less expensive. It’s sourced from Voget Meats in Hubbard, OR, a mere 30 minutes outside of Portland. I’m tempted to make a trip down there on my next day off work, but I’d be hard pressed to eat a 16 lb smoked ham on my own. But still, I am indeed tempted.



5 I try not to buy too many products sourced from other countries (with the exception of salt, haha), but in the case of this avocado, I was hoodwinked. The sign said it was of Californian variety, but later on as I peeled off the ‘Purity’ tag I read there in tiny font that the source was instead Chile. I’m don’t feel as much guilt about this misstep as I do about my decidedly suspect support of infanticide, but there is a pang, meaning that I think about it, but then let it fall from concioussness, and try to do better next time. I did a search in order to try and find the correct term for the outer layer of the avocado, be it the skin, or peel, or what have you, and came upon this page, hosted at avocadosource.com, “dedicated to the dissemination of avocado knowledge” (this being the type of statement which always kills me, because it never ceases to amaze that there is always someone to disseminate any information that you could ever dream of.) In the article they refer to the avocado as a berry, which surprised me a great deal, and that the scientific term for the outer layer is the exocarp, but the skin or rind are acceptable for layman’s terms. What struck me most in the article (from the 1940’s) was that there was a participant by the name of Haas A.R.C., and what I thought was, well, Haas, that is the leading seller of avocado’s right? The Haas Avocado. But right now, I’m having trouble coming to terms with the idea that a ‘Haas’ Avocado doesn’t exist, and that I am just one of many, many people who have fallen for the common misspelling, as the ‘Hass’ Avocado wikipage, and website are leading me to believe. There is an incongruity here that I need to solve, and only close observation at the grocery stores will be able to solve this for me. In any case, I web searched the ‘Haas’ avocado, a search I made because the study lists 5 varieties of avocados that were included in the research, and in my mind, I can only think of one variety by name (the Haas), and the first hit was the Hass site, a company whose flippant motto (for any one who cares about seasonality, or at least the grossly absurd idea of a winter tomato) , or slogan, is “Always in Season.” Is it? Are they. . . always in season? They can’t possibly be, and if they are, at what cost? The avocado season is spring. That means that in the Northern hemisphere they fruit and ripen sometime around April, give or take a few months. I just learned that myself, so we’re together here, unless of course you are a seasonality wonk. For the normal, everyday grocery shopper, the idea of seasonality doesn’t exist. If it’s in the store, it means that it’s growing somewhere, and that’s the end of the thought process–it’s available, so lets eat it. Which brings us around to the fact that the avocado I bought was shipped here from Chile, a distance of 5,500 miles by sea, where it is Spring now, so that I, and many others in this hemisphere, could eat one in the fall. Is all that matters is that it is in season somewhere?



6 More cheese, with a sprinkling of fancy salt.



7 I butter the bread before it goes in the pan. I did the same with the first slice, too. I used to heat the pan up and butter it just before I laid the sandwich into it, but those days are gone. It always led to inconsistent toasting, and to rebutter the pan in between the flip was always a pain to me. Once I discovered the joys of spreadable butter, that antiquated technique fell from the repertoire.



8 The consistent result of pre-buttering is pretty evident in this photo



9 Sometimes I have trouble deciding what I’d like to go with my sandwiches. In this case, I went with a handful of Kettle Chips, and fresh black radish chips paired with a sprinkling of Turkish Black Pyramid salt. I think that in reality it should be one, or the other. Choosing both is a product of my inability, at times, to make simple, sound decisions, instead opting to bounce between one option and the next until they become so blurred and indistinct that the only course is to choose either all or nothing. So I’m left considering all my choices in an interminable debate with inconsequential results. Gabrielle thinks that this carries over into a lot of my blog posts, her prime example being the one concerning our cat, Rigel. In other words, she called me long-winded. So in response, I decided to footnote this post so that I could further articulate some of the things that were on my mind without them impinging on the general trajectory of the post-prime. I think that there are readers who read footnotes, and readers who don’t, which is surely an important distinction in readers, and an important decision that those individual readers have made for themselves. I had a roommate who read Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and skipped all the fancy parts, and loved it, where as I found the book an unreadable bore, and I’m a fan of footnotes. One of the reasons that I’m doing this, I think, is that I just read The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker, and it renewed my admiration for the footnote. I had been living under a false assumption (perhaps the second that I’ve recognized this week!) that David Foster Wallace revolutionized the use of footnotes, but how untrue. While he certainly didn’t invent the footnote, it would seem that Baker is reponsible for elevating them to a higher status as a literary devise. DFW simply took it and went fucking crazy with the idea.