This Week in Our Dumb World
Gangster vs. Nazis
Look, if I need to explain why I was (or you should be) interested in the story of how the jewish mafia took down nazi sympathizers then I don’t know what you’re doing here or how we would even know each other.
In his memoir, Cohen tells what then happened. The two Nazis tried to move away but Cohen grabbed them before they could. “I started bouncing their heads together,” he recalled. “With the two of them, you’d think they’d put up a fight, but they didn’t do nothing. So I’m going over them pretty good. The windup is that they’re climbing up on the bars, both of them, and I’m trying to pull them down. Now they’re screaming and hollering so much everybody thinks it’s a riot,” said Cohen.
The noise and tumult brought the police on the run. By this time Mickey had moved back to his seat and was nonchalantly reading a newspaper. The officer in charge went over to Cohen and demanded to know what happened. “What are you asking me for,” said Cohen. “I’m sitting here reading the newspaper. Them two guys got into a fight with each other. I don’t know what happened. I didn’t want to mix in with them.” After he was released, Cohen enjoyed telling his friends how good he felt about beating up anti-Semites.
As news of the incident spread, Cohen began getting calls from Jewish organizations and leaders asking him to help them oppose the Nazis. One of his callers was a Jewish judge who informed Mickey about a Nazi Bund meeting. “I told him all right, don’t worry about it,” said Cohen. Cohen gathered together some of his Jewish mobster friends and raided the Nazi meeting. “We went over there and grabbed everything in sight—all their bullshit signs—and smacked the shit out of them, broke them up as best we could,” said Cohen.” Nobody could pay me for this work. It was my patriotic duty. There ain’t no amount of money to buy them kind of things,” he said.
The Thanksgiving Assault On The South
I realize that I missed thanksgiving, but let me assure you that I’ve been busy and I’m not sorry.
I AM Sorry that I didn’t get to share this with you in time for you to appreciate that Thanksgiving is an act of Northern Aggression agains the Confederacy.
Pumpkin Pie is an act of Northern Aggression.
Happy Thanksgiving.
Hale was not the only one to associate pumpkin pie with Thanksgiving and Northern tradition. Two pumpkin pie recipes appear in American Cookery, alongside other Thanksgiving favorites such as cranberry sauce and turkey. Considered the first “American” cookbook, American Cookery is known as an example of traditional New England fare. Plus, pumpkin pie calls for Northern ingredients such as squash and molasses. As more states—mainly in the North—recognized Thanksgiving, the pie became closely associated with Northern tradition.
Hale’s cheerful, relentless, and decades-long campaign spread Thanksgiving to 29 states by the early 1850s. But simultaneously, tension was growing over the strengthening abolitionist sentiment in the North. Soon enough, this ignited Hale’s goal of a nationwide (or even trans-national) Thanksgiving.
Southern leaders attacked Thanksgiving as the North’s attempt to impart Yankee values on the South. Virginians, especially, retaliated against Hale’s campaign. In 1856, the Richmond Whig published a scathing editorial on the District of Columbia’s “repugnant” declaration of thanksgiving, arguing that the holiday did nothing but rob men of a day’s wages and encourage drunkenness. As for the Northerners who started the celebration: “They have crazy society within New England’s limits, where they have been productive of little but mischief—of unadulterated and unmistakable injuries to sound religion, morals, and patriotism.”
The Egg McMuffin And The Best America
I’m sorry to do bullets twice in a newsletter, but it’s a useful (lazy) writing device and as I said, I’m quite tired. I don’t know if even said that. Well… I am.
The Egg McMuffin really does serve as the perfect example of American innovation. For its time, it’s a wild innovation. It seems impossible to imagine, but pre-McMuffin*, the idea of to-go breakfast was basically unheard of. But once it exists, it makes all the sense in the world.
If you’d like to read a much longer and more thorough piece about the decline in American innovation, you can find it here. It’s worth your while. But I love Egg McMuffins, so this is my headliner.
The idea that there is a decline of innovation is hotly contested both in terms of why it is happening and whether or not it exists. For my money, it does exist. I spend my time on both the entrepreneur and the money side of start up world and the number of people who are pursuing new ideas and the number of people willing to fund actual new ideas is very very small. Far too many people with money are worried about losing it and people with actual new ideas need money too much to take real risks.
I would also add that the spiraling cost of living also depresses innovation because it narrows the boundaries of who can be an entrepreneur. If you’ll pardon my oldness, but there was a time when a person might be able to get a small loan with a modest deposit and open a business. We have made that punishingly hard these days in economic and regulatory terms and that process does a lot of work to put a velvet rope on innovation. Among the reasons I am so staunchly in favor of some universal health insurance program is because it will remove on of the most pernicious barriers to people being able to absorb the risk of being an entrepreneur.
Entrepreneurship is one of the best things about America, but, like all good things about America, if we do not shepherd and protect that thing, it will turn on us and become grotesque.
Egg McMuffins are delicious.
It’s hard to imagine America changing that dramatically again, partly because the success that companies like McDonald’s found through local entrepreneurs like Peterson left less room for later innovation and imagination. We may fancy our own moment as the golden age of entrepreneurship, but outside the (already suspect) Silicon Valley garage start-up mythos, Americans have been taking fewer chances on big ideas for decades. As David Sax, author of “The Soul of an Entrepreneur,” notes, the number of Americans who are self-employed and starting businesses has fallen by half over the past 40 years. Meanwhile, the share of employees working for new businesses in the United States has dropped from 14 percent in 1982 to 9 percent in 2018, the most recent year for which data is available. This lack of fresh enterprises disproportionately translates into fewer new jobs, less economic growth and productivity, limited innovation and less creativity.
The innovation lag can be seen everywhere, from the seeming sameness of online brands to the concentration of industry in a few big cities. It’s also visible in the same world that spawned creations such as the Egg McMuffin 50 years ago. Today, many of the prevailing trends in fast food appear to be driven less by empowered tinkerers like Peterson and more by nostalgia, influencers and partnerships with other giants. While Burger King, for example, is giving away cryptocurrency to win new customers, McDonald’s has tapped Mariah Carey for its latest celebrity campaign, which draws more on repackaging existing items than creating new ones. Even as popular chains find ways to deploy new technology, they’ve grown too big and centralized to be able to change easily or stray beyond a core set of ingredients. Ghost kitchens, one of the biggest culinary trends to emerge in the pandemic, are an innovation, albeit one designed mainly to be built on top of existing businesses, making food that is exceedingly familiar to consumers to be delivered by workers with no benefits. And despite the savory magic inherent in the past two years of fried-chicken-sandwich wars, at the end of lunch, they’re still just chicken sandwiches.
The Worst Michelin Starred Restaurant, Ever
I’m generally not that interested in bad reviews.
Scratch that.
I love bad reviews, but that love often makes me feel bad.
This is not because of “don’t yuck someone else yum” because whatever. You can like something and I can hate it and my hating it doesn’t impact you’re liking it. By the same token, people who love to yuck someone else’s yum should also have the spine to handle it when they are called jerks. If you want to say “that thing you love sucks” then you should probably be prepared to hear “well, maybe you suck”
I’m off track.
I feel bad about bad reviews because so often things that are reviewed are the result of the passionate work of hundreds of people who absolutely tried their best and even if the result is shit, I still feel bad for all those people.
The exception for me is high pretentious bullshit.
So I absolutely devoured this vicious poison pen review of a bullshit molecular gastronomy restaurant.
It’s as though someone had read about food and restaurants, but had never experienced either, and this was their attempt to recreate it.
What followed was a 27-course meal (note that “course” and “meal” and “27” are being used liberally here) which spanned 4.5 hours and made me feel like I was a character in a Dickensian novel. Because – I cannot impart this enough – there was nothing even close to an actual meal served. Some “courses” were slivers of edible paper. Some shots were glasses of vinegar. Everything tasted like fish, even the non-fish courses. And nearly everything, including these noodles, which was by far the most substantial dish we had, was served cold.
Amassing two-dozen of them together amounted to a meal the same way amassing two-dozen toddlers together amounts to one middle-aged adult.
2013 Wikipedia Star Trek Into Darkness controversy
Please donate to wikipedia so they we might continue to preserve important human knowledge. Like this article about an elaborate fight over how to title the wikipedia article for a start trek movie.
But seriously, Wikipedia is one of the last best parts of the internet and we should all support it. If you’re on the fence, please imagine how awful it would be is Disney bought wikipedia.
Over 40,000 words were written on the article's talk page before a consensus was reached to capitalize the "I"