Epicurious.com editors got together and selected 3 menus for your end time dining pleasure.  The first one is based on actual Mexican and Guatemalan cuisine and consists of a Shrimp Ceviche (Ceviche de Camaron), Chicken Tamales with Tomatillo/Cilantro Sauce, Chayote Slaw, Braised and Fried Pork Carnitas, a Chocolate Flan, and a Tropical Fruit Margarita “because if the end has come, a little inebriation is in order.”

Tropical Fruit Margarita

(serves six)

Rimming-

• Lime wedges
• Sugar (for rimming)

Drink-

• 3 cups Homemade Sweet-and-Sour Mix for Margaritas
• 1 cup gold tequila
• 3/4 cup papaya nectar
• 3/4 cup guava nectar
• 1/2 cup canned cream of coconut available in the liquor department of most supermarkets.
• 16 ice cubes
• 6 lime slices

Rim 6 glasses.

Combine 1/2 your sweet-and-sour mix, tequila, papaya and guava nectar, cream of coconut and ice cubes in blender. Process until blended. Repeat. Pour into 6 glasses. Garnish each with lime slice.

Rest of the recipes below the fold.

If you happen to be a terrorist and drug syndicate money laundering operation.

Where is Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy on Big Bank Crimes and Obama?

Monday, December 17, 2012

Matt Stoller, Naked Capitalism

Last week’s big revelation on banking is that it is now official Department of Justice policy under Obama that big banks and their executives are above the law. HSBC was caught laundering money for both terrorists and drug dealers, and DOJ officials told the New York Times that they would not prosecute the bank under money laundering statutes, lest the financial system be destabilized. This was shocking, but consistent with policy made explicit by DOJ’s Head of Criminal Division Lanny Breuer back in September.

One key question is why it is that Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, a former prosecutor, is utterly unwilling to do any investigation or oversight into this critical policy question? Leahy runs the Judiciary Committee in the Senate, and it would be impossible to find a more obvious topic for that committee to address. It’s not that there isn’t interest in the Senate. Senator Chuck Grassley, a Republican, and Senator Jeff Merkley, a Democrat, both blasted Eric Holder for this decision.

…

Eliot Spitzer is also outraged, and said that Breuer should be “gone tomorrow”. Matt Taibbi penned a diatribe. Rep. Brad Miller called for the big banks to be broken up (which is something Neil Barofsky argued was necessary in order to prosecute these banks in the interview I did with him a fw weeks ago). The rationale from the other side doesn’t hold water. The argument is that a guilty verdict would cause the bank to lose its charter, which means it could not operate in the United States. DOJ officials would not even bring a case under the bank secrecy act, which would carry a much less severe penalty. Even if we accept this rationale, there is still no reason not to prosecute the individuals at HSBC who helped launder this money.

This isn’t just an Obama administration policy, it also belongs to Congress. Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, by doing no oversight, has consented to this policy framework. He has to date said nothing about the dramatic policy implied in the HSBC decision. Yet, last May, Leahy gave a pat on the back to FBI Director for doing a better job regarding fraud. The FBI and the Justice Department, he said, “have also worked hand in hand with us to make great strides toward more effective fraud prevention and enforcement.”

…

So at this point, it’s worthwhile to ask, when the US government has explicitly defied Congress’s will and put big bank executives above the law, where is Chairman of the Judiciary Committee Patrick Leahy?

Originally posted September 23, 2011.

Pretty damn bad.

What Chained CPI Means, and Why a Cut in a Time of Inadequate Social Security Benefits Makes No Sense

By: David Dayen, Firedog Lake

Monday December 17, 2012 2:45 pm

Let’s just make clear what chained CPI is all about. The idea here is that you should not measure the cost of living simply based on the consumer price index, and then raise the costs accordingly with the rise in prices. Instead, economists say, you have to account for the substitution effect in response to price shifts. When someone cannot afford steak, maybe they buy more chicken, the theory goes. By “chaining” the CPI to account for the substitution effect, you’re really shrinking the inflation in the index, because you’re assuming that the individual will spend less by changing their lifestyle. As a result, cost of living adjustments based on a chained CPI will rise more slowly that COLAs based on an unchained one.

…

(T)he idea of chaining medical treatment, as if you can just substitute a hip replacement with something cheaper, is silly. Overtreatment does exist, but the concept of a senior citizen shopping for cheaper medical care is actually kind of cruel.

Shifting to CPI-E would actually reflect the real costs of seniors, and would have their cost of living adjustment keep up with their actual needs. But of course, that’s not the goal of public policymaking. It’s to “save money,” in this case at the expense of the elderly, particularly those over the age of 80.

Chained CPI only makes sense if you think Social Security benefits and the cost of living adjustment are currently adequate enough for seniors. The fact that 15.1% of seniors are in poverty, according to the newest measure, shows that this is not at all the case. We need higher, not lower, Social Security benefits, as retirement security outside of the program withers. But adequacy is not the goal of those who want to slash benefits. And Democratic enablers call it something they can “live with.” Obviously none of them are 80 or older.

Obama’s Latest Fiscal Slope Offer: I’m Missing the Part Where Republicans Give Up Something

By: David Dayen, Firedog Lake

Tuesday December 18, 2012 6:00 am

From where I’m standing, this is a deal for the President to break his promise on tax rates, allow half of the fiscal slope to go forward, probably cut as much as 2% from GDP in 2013, and enact permanent benefit cuts to Social Security (and other government benefits) as well as unspecified cuts to health care programs, in exchange for…

1. a routine extension of unemployment insurance;
2. no more than $50 billion in infrastructure, probably less;
3. a permanent extension of things Congress does annually like clockwork (making them permanent is good public policy, but doesn’t functionally change much);
4. the chance to do this again in two years.

Meanwhile, Republicans give up tax rates that were going up anyway, an unemployment extension that they have yet to fail to pass, and a bit of infrastructure. That’s it, in exchange for cuts that will put discretionary spending well below traditional levels, cut Social Security benefits and basically ensure smaller government through caps and cuts.

More on Chained CPI, the Benefit Cut for Social Security on the Table in Fiscal Slope Discussions

By: David Dayen, Firedog Lake

Tuesday December 18, 2012 6:45 am

First of all, this is a benefit cut of about 0.3% a year, as Dean Baker points out. He adds that “This loss would be cumulative through time so that after 10 years the cut would be roughly 3 percent, after 20 years 6 percent, and after 30 years 9 percent.” Actually if we started using chained CPI in 2002, we’d be 3.6% behind today. That’s well over $1,000 a year, and the situation grows worse over time. So the greatest impact would be on the oldest seniors, which happens to correlate with the poorest.

If you think that senior citizens have had it too good for too long, getting that sweet sweet cost of living adjustment to make them unfairly wealthy, then maybe you think chained CPI is a solid idea. If you think that the highest expense for a senior is medical costs, that seniors don’t exactly comparison shop when they need medical care, that they cannot substitute along those lines, and that a cost of living index that features that substitution effect prominently doesn’t correspond to the real costs seniors face, well, you would be right.

…

(A)s supporter of a Social Security deal Kevin Drum says, adopting chained CPI for Social Security by itself is a terrible deal. Even if all of the savings from it get plowed back into reducing the long-term income gap, it doesn’t do enough by itself to eliminate that. It reduces the trust fund gap by about 1/3. Which means that fiscal scolds would still be clamoring for a deal to “fix” Social Security, and the fact that the solutions were entirely on the benefit side this time around won’t matter. This is just an invitation to more cuts down the road.

Paul Krugman tries to rationalize and bargain and basically gives a lifeline to cutting these benefits, at a time when senior poverty is on the rise. Ask yourself: are Social Security benefits, which average around $13,000 a year, currently adequate to serve this population, especially when 40% of seniors rely on it for over 90% of their income? Is the solution to 15.1% of seniors in poverty to cut their benefits slowly over time? Should the centerpiece of a deal to reduce the budget contain a benefit cut to a program that has its own dedicated funding stream and no budgetary impact?

UPDATE: First, Krugman has a new post up, saying he is now “marginally negative” on the deal after being “marginally positive.” He ignores the $800 billion in extra budget cuts in the deal.

Also, if anything I undersold the impact of chained CPI, since it would affect federal employee benefits that are tied to COLA, like postal workers.

Here is what Atrios (trained economist BTW) says-

To The Phones

White House

202-456-1111

Your senators

Your House member.

No cuts to Social Security.

Gaius Publius @ Americablog offers this helpful digest-

What are we protecting?

We’re protecting three social insurance programs. These are:

    ■ Social Security

    ■ Medicare

    ■ Medicaid

What are we protecting them from? Anything that:

    ■ Reduces benefits

    ■ Turns the program from insurance to welfare (which only the “deserving” have access to)

How are these programs being threatened?

As near as I can tell, these are the threats. Note to foxes – this is the hands-off list. Each of these seven items is a benefit cut:

Social Security

    1. Raising the retirement age

    2. Chained CPI instead of current COLA

    3. Means-testing benefits

Medicare

    4. Raising the eligibility age

    5. Increasing Part B premiums

    6. Increasing “cost-sharing”

Medicaid

    7. Shifting costs to the states by any means, such as “federal blended rate,” etc.

Zombies everywhere.  Originally posted September 22, 2011.

Originally posted September 21, 2011.

Serious People Could be Seriously Embarrassed: Why It’s Important that We Not Go Off the "Fiscal Cliff"

Dean Baker, CEPR

Friday, 14 December 2012 09:51

Much of the media has spent the last month and a half hyping the impact of the “fiscal cliff,” the tax increases and spending cuts that are scheduled to take effect at the end of the year. They have been warning of a recession and other dire consequences if a deal is not struck by December 31st. As we are now getting down to the final two weeks and the prospect that there will not be a deal becomes more likely, many in the media are getting more frantic.

What they fear is yet another huge embarrassment, if people see the deadline come and go and the economy doesn’t crash and the world doesn’t end.

…

In other words, if January 1, 2013 comes and there is no deal, we will likely see that the Serious People were again out to lunch. This will be yet another blow to the credibility of the people who are telling us that we have to cut Social Security and Medicare and do all sorts of other things that somehow always seem to have the effect of hurting the poor and middle class.

Of course many may say that the Serious People have recovered from past humiliations. After all, how long did it take them to get over the fact that not one of them was able to see the $8 trillion housing bubble whose collapse wrecked the economy? And there can be little doubt that they will quickly rewrite the history so that none of them was actually issuing the dire warnings we keep hearing about the fiscal cliff.

But some people will remember, and there will always be people rude enough to bring up past mistakes. So the Serious People really do have a lot at stake here. If we go past January 1 and there is no deal, they will be very unhappy.

Crafting a boom economy

By: Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen, Politico

December 11, 2012 04:35 AM EST

What is striking, though, is that if you put everyone from President Barack Obama and Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin to House Speaker John Boehner and Portman on truth serum, they basically agree: Washington could set the economy on a very safe course, if not on fire, through a half-dozen policies that are not partisan.

The country’s most influential CEOs, who have been meeting with Obama and congressional leaders on these very topics, are telling them if they do some or all of this, investment, market growth and jobs will quickly follow.

Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan said long-term commitments to measures such as tax reform and trade would provide a “certainty premium” that would help bring corporate cash off the sidelines. “If we can just allow people to keep their confidence up by getting some of these issues off the table,” he said, “you would see the economy grow and momentum continue to build, and unemployment continue to ease down, and housing starts [go] up and housing prices [go] up. All that will continue to build on itself.”

…

Officials largely agree Congress should cut domestic spending, including a nice chunk out of defense, because the budget is bloated, outdated and often designed to placate specific lawmakers or defense contractors. But it will take entitlement changes, which both sides say are inevitable, to get U.S. debt levels where they need to be, which in turn plays into investment into everything from U.S. companies to Treasury bills.

“The critical problem is entitlement reform, and if taxes even have to go up to get an entitlement deal done, that still solves the vast majority of the issue,” said Kenneth Griffin, who founded Citadel LLC, a hedge fund, and is worth an estimated $3 billion. He is a Republican.

Nearly every lawmaker and staffer will tell you privately that they know the Social Security retirement age needs to go up, the rate of growth of benefits needs to be slowed on a sliding scale that protects the poor, the cap on income subjected to the tax that finances the program needs to rise and the rich should get smaller or no payout from the program.

They will also tell you Medicare, which is on pace to be insolvent in 12 years, is a much, much bigger mess and threat to long-term economic vitality – and much harder to solve. Yes, the rich need to get smaller benefits, but that is almost meaningless in terms of fixing it. Ultimately, many Americans will have to get less generous benefits that start to kick in at an older age – and those changes need to start a decade from now. Otherwise, the math simply doesn’t work.

Delusions of Wisdom

Paul Krugman, The New York Times

December 11, 2012, 3:33 pm

In said (above) piece they talk to various Very Serious People, and divine the insider consensus on What Must Be Done – which mainly seems to involve, naturally, cutting Social Security and Medicare while reducing corporate tax rates.

What I find remarkable about this piece is that after everything that has happened these past five years or so, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen still take it for granted that these people actually know what they’re talking about; the whole premise of the article is that the insiders really do have the key, not just to good policy, but to achieving a dramatic rise in the growth rate.

Now, they don’t tell us everyone they talked to; but I think we can safely assume that, with few exceptions, the insiders in question:

• Believed that financial deregulation was a great idea, because bankers had really learned to manage risk
• Did not believe that there was a housing bubble
• Insisted that budget deficits, even in a depressed economy, would send interest rates soaring any day now
• Insisted that austerity measures would promote recovery, not hurt it, because of the confidence fairy

…

The whole theme of the Politico piece is that great things would happen if only the insiders could override all this messy democracy stuff. But the real lesson is that those insiders are not only self-dealing, but profoundly ignorant and wrong-headed. It’s too bad that so many journalists still can’t see that.

Why is Washington Obsessing About the Deficit and Not Jobs and Wages?

Robert Reich

Thursday, December 13, 2012

So why are we debating how to cut the deficit when we should be debating how best to use the cheap money we can borrow from the rest of the world to put more Americans to work?

Because too many Democrats inside and outside the Beltway have ingested the deficit cool-aide that the “serious people” on Wall Street have serving for two decades.

And the President has been all too willing to legitimize their deficit obsession by freezing federal salaries, appointing a deficit commission, and, now that the election is over, going back to deficit-speak.

A month after the election Obama was on Bloomberg Television saying business leaders need “a deal on long-term deficit reduction” before they’ll increase hiring.

That’s just not true. Before they’ll increase hiring they need customers.

Tar and Feathers.

Higgs Hiccup: Contradictory Results Show Up at LHC

By Adam Mann, Wired

12.14.12 2:08 PM

Ever since physicists found a particle that looks very much like the Higgs boson in July, they have been probing its properties, essentially running their experimental hands all over it to check out its features. They do this by smashing protons together at insanely high speeds in the Large Hadron Collider and watching the resulting rain of particles that gets produced. Within this melee, several Higgs bosons appear and almost immediately decay into other particles.

The LHC can detect the Higgs decaying in two different ways. One channel produces two characteristic photons while another creates four particles known as leptons. The two decay paths each give scientists a distinct value for the mass of the Higgs. But there’s a little problem.

“There turns out to be a slight tension between the two masses,” said physicist Beate Heinemann of the University of California, Berkeley, who works on ATLAS, one of the LHC’s Higgs-searching experiments. “They are compatible, just not super compatible.”

The two photon channel is saying that the Higgs mass is 126.6 gigaelectronvolts (GeV), or about 126 times the mass of a proton. The four lepton decay route suggests the mass is 123.5 GeV. A very tiny disagreement that is nonetheless very strange because the Higgs should have one identifiable mass. ATLAS scientists noticed the discrepancy in their data previously and thought it might simply be a problem with calibrating their machinery. Yet even after calibration and analyzing more data, the difference remained.

We looked for one. We may have found two.

Vasudevan Mukunth, The Hindu

December 15, 2012

There was initial surprise in Kyoto about the dilepton-decay data being suppressed. However, the experimental data of the Higgs’ decay into the other combinations of particles coincided (fairly) perfectly with the theoretical predictions, easing physicists toward the conclusion that the Standard Model had done a good job… again.

And now, the reason for suppression has been revealed! On December 13 (exactly a year to the day the first tentative spottings were announced), a new round of data from the ATLAS detector was revealed at CERN, showing that the Higgs boson seemed to be decaying into two photons twice as often as allowed by the Standard Model. Not just that: the elusive particle also seemed to exist at two different masses – almost as if there are two kinds of Higgs bosons, not one.

…

The “second mass” observation was derived from results of the particle’s decay into four leptons. More specifically, at 4.1 standard-deviations (a confidence level of 99.534 per cent), the mass of the Higgs boson from this channel was calculated to be 123.5 +/- 0.9 GeV, which is conspicuously lower than the mass observed from the diphoton-decay channel (by about 3 GeV).

Before we start jumping up and down: The ATLAS collaboration has also announced that the two masses are compatible only at 2.7 standard deviations, which represents a lower statistical confidence than is required to assert evidence. Moreover, results from the CMS collaboration will also have to be factored in before anything is confirmed, and the next batch of data-release from CERN is expected in March, 2013. And last, it’s quite unlikely that the Higgs would have a twin so close in mass – if you’ve already walked 122.6 m, would you consider another 3 m as requiring a lot more energy than what you’ve already spent?

But, if true, this result invalidates the ‘Standard Model‘.  Brains.

Why a Zombie Movie Made by Physicists is the Best Kind of Science PR

By J. Bryan Lowder, Slate

Wednesday, Dec. 12, 2012, at 2:15 PM ET

Decay is totally ridiculous, in the best sense of the word. The 75-min, $3,500 movie is remarkably well-made, given the creative team’s lack of experience. It’s studded with all the gratuitous gore, cheap shocks, and absurd plot twists that zombie fans crave. Science nerds and those who love them will bask in its shameless use of sci-fi clichés like “the results are inconclusive at best,” and “my research is too important!”

Hydrocarbons as a store of energy.

Triumph of the Will gave Riefenstahl instant and lasting international fame, as well as infamy. Although she directed only eight films, just two of which received significant coverage outside of Germany, Riefenstahl was widely known all her life. The propaganda value of her films made during the 1930s repels most modern commentators, but many film histories cite the aesthetics as outstanding. The Economist wrote that Triumph of the Will “sealed her reputation as the greatest female filmmaker of the 20th century”.

Zero Dark Thirty: CIA hagiography, pernicious propaganda

Glenn Greenwald, The Guardian

Friday 14 December 2012 10.03 EST

In US political culture, there is no event in the last decade that has inspired as much collective pride and pervasive consensus as the killing of Osama bin Laden.

This event has obtained sacred status in American political lore. Nobody can speak ill of it, or even question it, without immediately prompting an avalanche of anger and resentment. The news of his death triggered an outburst of patriotic street chanting and nationalistic glee that continued unabated two years later into the Democratic National Convention. As Wired’s Pentagon reporter Spencer Ackerman put it in his defense of the film, the killing of bin Laden makes him (and most others) “very, very proud to be American.” Very, very proud.

…

The fact that nice liberals who already opposed torture (like Spencer Ackerman) felt squeamish and uncomfortable watching the torture scenes is irrelevant. That does not negate this point at all. People who support torture don’t support it because they don’t realize it’s brutal. They know it’s brutal – that’s precisely why they think it works – and they believe it’s justifiable because of its brutality: because it is helpful in extracting important information, catching terrorists, and keeping them safe. This film repeatedly reinforces that belief by depicting torture exactly as its supporters like to see it: as an ugly though necessary tactic used by brave and patriotic CIA agents in stopping hateful, violent terrorists.

…

(T)he idea that Zero Dark Thirty should be regarded purely as an apolitical “work of art” and not be held accountable for its political implications is, in my view, pretentious, pseudo-intellectual, and ultimately amoral claptrap. That’s true for several reasons.

First, this excuse completely contradicts what the filmmakers themselves say about what they are doing. Bigelow has been praising herself for the “journalistic” approach she has taken to depicting these events. The film’s first screen assures viewers that it is all “based on first hand accounts of actual events”. You can’t claim you’re doing journalism and then scream “art” to justify radical inaccuracies. Serwer aptly noted the manipulative shell-game driving this: “If you’re thinking of giving them an award, Zero Dark Thirty is ‘history’; if you’re a journalist asking a question about a factual error in the film, it’s just a movie.”

Second, the very idea that this is some sort of apolitical work of art is ludicrous. The film is about the two most politicized events of the last decade: the 9/11 attack (which it starts with) and the killing of bin Laden (which it ends with). George Bush got re-elected running on the former, while Obama just got re-elected running on the latter. It was made with the close cooperation of the CIA, Pentagon and White House. Everything about this film – its subject, its claims, its mode of production, its implications – are political to its core. It does not have an apolitical bone in its body. Demanding that political considerations be excluded from how this film is judged is nonsensical; it’s a political film from start to finish.

Third, to demand that this movie be treated as “art” is to expand that term beyond any real recognition. This film is Hollywood shlock. The brave crusaders slay the Evil Villains, and everyone cheers.

While parts of the film are technically well-executed, it features almost every cliche of Hollywood action/military films. The characters are one-dimensional cartoons: the heroine is a much less interesting and less complex knock-off of Homeland’s Carrie: a CIA agent who sacrifices her personal life, disregards bureaucratic and social niceties, her careerist interests, and even her own physical well-being, in monomaniacal pursuit of The Big Terrorist.

Worst of all, it does not challenge, subvert, or even unsettle a single nationalistic orthodoxy. It grapples with no big questions, takes no risks in the political values it promotes, and is even too fearful of letting upsetting views be heard, let alone validated (such as the grievances of Terrorists that lead them to engage in violence, or the equivalence between their methods and “ours”).

There’s nothing courageous, or impressive, about any of this.

Do the defenders of this film believe Riefenstahl has also gotten a bad rap on the ground that she was making art, and political objections (ie, her films glorified Nazism) thus have no place in discussions of her films? I’ve actually always been ambivalent about that debate because, unlike Zero Dark Thirty, Riefenstahl’s films only depicted real events and did not rely on fabrications.

…

Do defenders of Zero Dark Thirty view Riefenstahl critics as overly ideological heathens who demand that art adhere to their ideology? If the KKK next year produces a superbly executed film devoted to touting the virtues of white supremacy, would it be wrong to object if it wins the Best Picture Oscar on the ground that it promotes repellent ideas?

I have a very hard time seeing liberal defenders of Zero Dark Thirty extending their alleged principles about art to films that, unlike this film, are actually unsettling, provocative and controversial. It’s quite easy to defend this film because it’s ultimately going to be pleasing to the vast majority of US viewers as it bolsters and validates their assumptions. That’s why it seems to me that the love this film is inspiring is inseparable from its political content: it’s precisely because it makes Americans feel so good – about an event that Ackerman says makes him “very, very proud to be American” – that it is so beloved.

Originally posted September 19, 2011.