Hing Fried Chicken

KFC, Popeyes, and your grandmother all have their secret recipe of herbs and spices for fried chicken. So did my mom. Pepper, L***ys seasoning salt and paprika… as I remember, anyway. Fried chicken night was the best. Next to spaghetti night, also the best. Alas, there are times you may want to change up the taste of your grandmother’s fried or grilled chicken. Try this:

• 1/2 tsp coriander
• 1/2 tsp garlic powder
• 1/2 tsp hing (asafetida), may substitute onion powder
• 1 tsp ground mustard powder
• 1/2 tsp paprika
• 1/2 tsp rubbed sage
• 1/2 tsp thyme
• 1/2 tsp salt if you need it.

Grind spices together in a mortar, set aside.

Fried Chicken: Beat 1 egg in a bowl. Place flour or bread crumbs in a second bowl. Dip pieces of chicken in egg, then coat with flour or bread crumbs. You may have your favorite way of coating your chicken, so by all means use that.

Preheat the frying pan with a light cooking oil like canola (in my opinion, this is a rare time I would not use olive oil), and then add the UNSEASONED, coated chicken pieces to the pan. With your fingers, pinch small amounts of your seasoning mix from the mortar and sprinkle on each piece of chicken. Repeat the process after turning the chicken, sprinkling the other side. Cover and cook, removing the lid several minutes before serving to vent steam and reduce water from the pan. Once the bottom of the pan is just sizzling oil, remove from heat and serve. OR fry the chicken with your know-how.

Grilled Chicken: Sprinkle season on each side of each piece of chicken, then grill however you prefer.

I titled it Hing Fried Chicken because I have never heard of hing, but wow! is it tasty.

Good beef soup is all in the Spices

Tired of canned vegetable beef soup? Make your own!

Cut up your favorite vegetables. Carrots, celery, peas, pearl onions, etc. Dice up 8-12oz of the cheapest cut of beef you can find. You know the stuff – tastes like beef, but it’s super tough so most people don’t want it because cooking it takes time they don’t have. Add 1/4 cup barley or farro, or a diced potato or sweet potato, or any combination of them for some starch to thicken. Sweet potato is great – give some time and it will dissolve into the broth.

Add vegetables to:

• 4 cups of water
• 1/4 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1 tsp ground coriander
• 1 tbsp chopped garlic
• 1/2 tsp ginger powder
• 1/4 tsp mace
• 1/4 to 1/2 cup diced onion
• 1/4 tsp smoked paprika
• 3/4 tsp turmeric
• salt to taste*

Let that simmer until thick and bubbly and meat is shred tender. Add extra water when needed as it reduces during simmering. *Add your salt, to taste, near the end.

Prep time: 15 minutes. Cook time? Depends on the meat. Using a crockpot lets you walk away for a few hours. Simmering on the stove requires you to keep a watchful eye. I go stovetop. I love being retired!

A look at the Math Behind India’s Low Covid Death Total

Here is a comparison of some basic India vs America numbers. (11/18/2020 source date)

• India’s population: 1.385 Billion, 4 times the size of America.
• India’s Gross Domestic Product: 2.875 trillion dollars, 1/8th that of America’s GDP.
• India’s per capita GDP: $2075, to America’s per capita GDP $64,400.
• India’s average life expectancy: 69 years, to America’s 79 years.
• India’s total estimated Covid tests: 122 million (1 test per 11.4 people), to America’s 172 million(1 test per 1.9 people).
• India is testing rate is about 900,000 tests per day, to America’s 1,800,000 per day.
• At current testing rates, it will take India nearly 5 years (January 2020 start date) to have performed per capita testing of 1/1 (1.385 billion tests), while America will acheive the goal in 13 months or less.
• India’s reported Covid total deaths 11/19/2020: 131,000, to America’s 250,000.
• India’s reported Covid deaths per capita 9.5 per 100,000, to America’s 75 per 100,000.

There are two ways you can look at this massive disparity.

1. Extreme poverty, illiteracy, and terrible national health infrastructure are the global solutions to the Covid crisis, because Covid is a plague from God, singling out wealthy, sinful nation-states. OR…
2. Poor, Third World nations simply do not have the resources to accurately test, diagnose, and report Covid cases accurately, therefore their current numbers are extremely underreported and simply worthless. In America, if you need a test you are going to get a test. In India, if you need a test, you have less than a 15% chance*. These countries also have a much lower life expectancy, and Covid primarily targets the elderly, so First World nations generally have higher per capita populations vulnerable to the virus.

Countries like the U.S. and the U.K. are the data standards. The U.S. is performing 1.8 million tests a day. For India’s statistics to be worth anything, they would need to be testing upwards 7.2 million tests daily. They perform only 900,000 tests daily. For India’s statistics to mean anything, they would need to focus on the more accurate PRC test (jabbing the swab up your nose, looking for live virus) rather than the less accurate, Rapid Test, looking for antigen. They don’t.

So the next time CNN, MSNBC, the BBC, or any of the Brotherhood of Fake News, try to sell you choice No. 1, you can take your money and go elsewhere.

*This assumes that through 11/18/2020 the number of tests performed in a country should be at least 50% of that nation’s population in order to make on-demand testing readily available to the entire population. If India had kept pace with America, they would have performed 700 million to our 172 million tests. This is no fault of India’s. The development and global distribution of Covid tests is still in its infancy. The point being, the U.S. should not be penalized by statistics when the numbers reported by most countries are grossly incorrect at this time.

 

The United Kingdom’s Covid Death Rate is High than the America’s

I wish the BBC would stop lying and implying that America’s death rate is high than the U.K.’s, and has more deaths than any country in the world.

The BBC, in another anti-American fit, tries to imply America’s per capita death total is the highest on Earth.

As of 11/19/2020, the U.K. has lost 53,775 people to Covid related illnesses out of a population of about 67 million. That translates to 80.3 deaths per 100,000 in population.

The U.K.’s death total may be lower than the U.S.’s, but not their per capita death total.

As of the morning of 11/19/2020, the U.S.A. has lost 249,670 people to Covid related illnesses out of a population of about 332 million. That translates to 75.2 deaths per 100,000 in population.

America has the best health system in the world. We test, diagnose, and report at the highest per capita rate in the world.

That 5 people per 100,000 differential translates to 16,500 Americans who would have died if America’s response to Covid had been identical to the U.K.’s.

The reportedly low death totals from large, impoverished nations with poor healthcare infrastructure, like China, India, and Brazil, are all lower than America’s simply because they little resources to test, diagnose, and report Covid deaths in their population. China wouldn’t tell the truth, anyway. Neither would Russia. Too embarrassing.

The fact is if you trust every nation’s reported Covid-19 death totals, 1,364,479 as of 11/17/2020, the global death total is only 17.4 per 100,000 in population. The math just does not work. If First World nations like America and England, with access to the best treatments and protocols, have death totals ranging from 75 to 80 per 100,000, you know damn well that it is worse EVERYWHERE else.

There are 7.826 billion people on Earth, with a total ‘reported’ deaths of 1,364,479. That equals a global death total of 17.4 per 100,000, blowing the doors off of First World nations per capita death totals. If the BBC is telling the truth, the best defense against Covid is poverty and a lack of medical resources.

When the BBC passes this tripe for journalism, they just give themselves away as more leftist, anti-American fake news. Seriously, I could debunk the BBC every single day, but it gets boring after a while.

Saffron Squash Soup

For the past several years I have been writing all things conservative. Today is a change of pace, just to let you know I have more than one dimension.

I love cooking. It certainly can be a challenge when you work full-time, have a family to feed along with all your other chores, but take all those worldly distractions away and it becomes art. The pantry is the canvas. The spice cabinet is the paint. Your mood is the brush. Your family and friends are the victims. Trust your sense of smell. Your nose can tell what spices mix and do not mix and when. I can easily spend an hour coming up with a combination of spices that reflect my feelings about the meal. Sometimes I nail it. Sometimes it is good, but not as imagined, and rarely I toss it and make tuna melts. It is art so every day is a fresh start.

This is a recent success inspired by an early October snowstorm dumping six inches at my home. I had been retired a matter of days and had an old spaghetti squash in the pantry at risk of going bad. I had just picked some saffron for the very first time, so decided to mix those flavors and make soup.

Saffron Squash Soup:

1 squash, any type, 15-20 oz. Acorn, butternut, delicata, spaghetti, etc.
1/2 cup finely diced onion
3 cups chicken broth
12 oz can evaporated milk
1 tbsp crushed garlic (more or less to taste)

1&1/2 tsp curry powder
1&1/2 tsp ginger powder
1&1/2 tsp uncrushed marjoram or 1 tsp ground
1&1/2 tsp tarragon leaves
*1/3 tsp saffron strands (Saffron is tricky to measure. A 3/8th inch cluster or so, maybe 30 strands)
3/4 tsp salt (more or less to taste. I don’t use much salt these days.)

Mixed and grind dry spices in mortar and set aside.

Split, gut, and cook squash. I find placing the split squash skin-side up on a plate with a tablespoon of water, and microwaving it to be the best. Timing can be 5 to 10 minutes depending on your unit.

When cool, remove squash from skin (messy, so be a kid and enjoy getting your hands gummed up) and place in pot, along with chicken broth, diced onion, and crushed garlic. Bring to boil, then simmer on low and add spices, stirring regularly. You can use a potato masher to help the squash dissolve. Once smooth, add evaporated milk. Reheat for a few minutes, but do not boil, as boiling may make the milk curdle – it tastes the same, but loses the creamy appearance. Serve.

Estimated prep time 60-75 minutes. Makes 4-6 servings.

Try adding grilled chicken or pork to make it more of a stew.
Too thick? Add a little water. Too thin? Simmer without boiling to reduce. Reduction is best done before adding milk.

Let me know if you try and what you think. Bon appétit!

Thinkin’ About Going to Pharmacy School? Don’t Do It!

I just wrapped up my thirty-year pharmacy career a few weeks ago. It is not that I did not have a little juice left in the tank to carry on a few more years, it is that working conditions in retail community pharmacy have become unbearable. I spent my last thirteen years working for Walgreens. In that time, they gradually cut pharmacy staff in half per prescription. The company stopped raises five years ago, and all newly hired pharmacists are taking substantial pay cuts. Benefits are a shell of what they were when I started with the company in 2007 and the demands the company makes on its pharmacists have become impossible to meet… even for the best of teams. It used to be hard work, and I sometimes enjoyed it. Today it is just an abusive relationship where pharmacists are treated like indentured servants. Do you recall the old saying, “The beatings will continue until morale improves!”? At Walgreens, it is just, “The beatings will continue.”

Why are they doing this, you ask? Simple answer, because they can. Here is pharmacy history 101.

Thirty years ago, as I was about to graduate, America had a lot of regional drug chains competing for new grads. Most of these chains were bent on organic growth, expanding operations to accommodate an aging population. Insurance plans still paid relatively well, and the work environment was relatively healthy. Then the industry had a convergence that created a shortage of pharmacists. At the same time when small and mid-sized chains were rapidly expanding, the industry lost an entire graduation class of pharmacists nationwide. Thousands. Before the 1990s, the standard pharmacy degree was a bachelor of science. In the early 1990s, every school across the nation began converting to doctoral programs producing the PharmD degree. This added an additional year to each program, thus the equivalent of losing an entire class.

The basic rules of supply and demand are, if something is in short supply, the price goes up. If the market has a glut, the price goes down. Easy idea, right? Well, from the early 1990s through about 2010, there was a relative shortage of pharmacists. Pharmacy chains were forced to do three unspeakable things.

• Treat their pharmacists with a modicum of respect.
• Give them regular raises to retain them as employees.
• Pay sign-on bonus’s to steal them from competitors.

You can imagine the amount of corporate resentment that built up over these years.

Nature abhors a vacuum. As a response to the shortage, universities all across the country began opening schools of pharmacy. I suspect major pharmacy chains, like Walgreens and CVS, donated significant funds to get these schools opened as a matter of self-interest. Students flooded these new schools, lured in by pharmacy’s reputation for high wages and job security. By the early 2010s pharmacy reached equilibrium, and since then there has been a growing glut of pharmacists to the tune of tens of thousands.

By 2015 a second convergence occurred. Chain pharmacy over-expanded in the 1990s. Organic growth, building shops from the ground up, is expensive. Add in the rising cost of hiring and retaining pharmacists, and it was a formula for financial trouble. Financial trouble is the root of mergers, acquisitions, and store closures. Out of school, I worked for Fred Meyer, a company involved in five mergers and acquisitions since 1980, ultimately becoming part of Kroger in 1998. I did not like Fred Meyer, so I signed on with an up-and-coming chain called Drug Emporium, who was then swallowed up by Longs Drugs, who was then swallowed up by CVS, who closed my store. I signed on with Walgreens, a company that gave up on organic growth a decade ago. Their expansion over the last ten years has been through mergers and acquisitions while closing underperforming locations.

The overall net result has been a contraction in community pharmacy by about two thousand shops nationwide over the past five years. Add to that the growing glut of new graduates, and job scarcity with lower wages are the results. All those students who took on enormous debt, hundreds of thousands of dollars for some, on the promise of good, stable, high wage jobs, are now scrambling to find any sort of work at all. They scour the nation for job openings and end relocating to Podunk, USA for a mercilessly high stress job at 70 cents on the dollar. For twenty-five years pharmacist wages beat the pants off of inflation. $20/hour in 1990, a typical pharmacist wage, adjusted for inflation, is $40/hour today. Pharmacy wages peaked in the $60/hour range in 2014. The industry, nationwide, plans on rolling all that back. By 2025 wages will likely drop to $35 to $40 per hour simply because of supply and demand. New grads need to readjust their expectations.

There are some healthcare careers worthy of passionate practitioners. Pharmacy is not one of them. Sure, there are a few clinical jobs where the pharmacist plays a key role in patient care, but the vast majority of jobs are retail jobs that combine elements of urgent care and fast food operations. Today’s pharmacists are the equivalent of the finest chefs from Europe stooping to manage a Denny’s to make ends meet. If you are thinking of applying to pharmacy school, don’t do it. Your student debt will effectively make you an indentured servant and you will be miserable.

With Google I am “There” and “Not There” at the Same Time

Quantum superposition. That’s the only answer. Schrödinger’s cat, both alive and dead at the same time. In this case, it is Google’s conservative blogger, both searchable and unsearchable at the same time.

If you search for:

Knight’s Dictionary of Real Definitions for Social Justice Vocabulary

I do not exist no matter how many pages you check. BUT…

If you search for:

“Knight’s Dictionary of Real Definitions for Social Justice Vocabulary”

I exist. Right off on page one. Front and center. All alone. Just 3 results.

If you use Google’s competitor, DuckDuckGo, and search for:

Knight’s Dictionary of Real Definitions for Social Justice Vocabulary

I exist at the top of page one, followed by hundreds of other results.

This is just another priceless example of Google, along with all the other big-tech players like Twitter and Facebook, engaging in censorship of conservative content. It explains why my Google referrals have dropped 90% and my readership has dropped 70% since 2016.

All I did was add quotation marks

 

No quotation marks needed at DuckDuckGo

Voter Fraud: Arizona’s Smoking Gun in Plain Sight

*The voting numbers in this article are based on Arizona’s November 12th counts and are ultimately near approximations.

In 2016 businessman Donald J. Trump beat the favored candidate, Hillary Clinton, by nearly 100,000 votes in Arizona, 1,021,154 to 936,250. Since then the population in Arizona has risen about 6%, with about 160,000 being non-citizens, legal and illegal. The best estimate of Arizona’s current non-citizen population is approximately 600,000, with more than 500,000 over the age of 17 years. Voting age.

While Arizona does not offer ADLs to illegal aliens, the state does offer both driver’s licenses and DMV voter registration to non-citizen residents, opening the door for both legal and illegal aliens to obtain both… and vote… and it looks like well over 125,000 of them did to the tune of more than 4% of Arizona’s total vote in the Presidential race.

“What?” you say, “That can’t be right. Only American citizens can vote in American elections!”

Sorry, but yes, non-citizens in Arizona are able to register to vote without proof of citizenship according to Arizona Secretary of State, Katie Hobbs (D).

“A person is not required to submit proof of citizenship with the voter registration form, but failure to do so means the person will only be eligible to vote in federal elections (known as being a “federal only” voter). A “federal only” voter will become eligible to vote a “full ballot” in all federal, state, county and local elections if he or she later provides valid proof of citizenship to the appropriate County Recorder’s office.”

Legal aliens (and illegal aliens with quality stolen identities) are encouraged to register to vote in Arizona every time they make a trip to their local DMV. For the 2020 election cycle, every single non-citizen that registered to vote received a special ‘Federal Only” ballot in the mail. This special ballot allowed the non-citizens to vote for the Federal Senatorial, House of Representatives, and Presidential races, but not on any state or local issues. The party that promises amnesty, provides sanctuary cities, and promises to dismantle ICE will be the beneficiary of the lion’s share of the non-citizens’ votes.

Mathematically the formula looks like this:
(Total citizen vote) = (Total Arizona state/local vote)
(Total citizen vote) + (Total non-citizen vote) = (Total Arizona Federal vote)
(Total Federal vote) – (Total citizen vote) = (Total non-citizen vote) = (Total of fraudulent votes)

Here are the numbers:
3,247,686 = Total votes for Arizona’s most controversial statewide proposition, Prop 207, the legalization of marijuana.
3,346,289 = Total Arizona votes cast in the Federal Senatorial race. McSally vs Kelly.
3,372,933 = Total Arizona votes cast in the Presidential race. Trump vs Biden.

Senator Martha McSally (R) lost by 80,000 votes but should have won by 20,000.
Tiffany Shedd (R) lost the District 1 race by 11,355 votes but likely won the citizen vote.
President Trump (R) lost the Presidency by 12,290 votes but should have won by 112,957.

And that, my friends, is a smoking gun in plain sight.

Unusual Trends in Voting Support Ballot Harvesting Theories

There is nothing special about Joe Biden. At least nothing good, anyway. His corrupt ties to foreign governments through his son, his obvious signs of age-onset dementia, his refusal to answer spontaneous questions from the press, his flippy-floppy position against America’s energy independence, and his overall fatigued and listless behavior, make him the weakest Democrat candidate in my lifetime. He will not be his own man as President, rather he will be an advised man. A rubber stamp.

Unlike President Trump, who has a real base with real, patriotic support, Biden is an empty suit with a D next to it. He garners no enthusiasm and never even attempted the feat. Sure, he poked his head out a few times during the campaign, often rambling incoherently, but voters did not show any real support for the man that is Joe Biden. So how did he “win” with a rabid landslide of voter support that eclipsed the support for the Democrat party’s most popular candidate in modern history, Barack Obama? Seriously, Joe Biden is officially more popular than Barack Obama?

This is how. States sent out vote-by-mail ballots to every address they had in their voter registration databases. Living, dead, legal citizen, illegal alien, current resident, former resident, married name, maiden name, without checking anyone’s status. There was pretty much no attempt to verify that the votes cast were an honest vote cast by the addressee, and that that addressee had the legal right to vote in America. And that eclipsed 2008’s phenomenal voter turnout of 129.4 million with nearly 146 million votes. That is an increase of 16 million votes that would have never shown up at the polls. 16 million votes that did not show ID. At least 10 million of those votes went to Joe Biden. Likely more than 10 million, as President Trump and the Republican party do not have the Deep State tools to pull of such a massive scheme.

Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin all had unusually high shifts towards the Democrat candidate.

In 2008 Barack Obama won with 69.5 million votes against John McCain’s 60 million votes. I did not like either candidate as McCain a RINO and Obama was politically in the opposite corner from me. Obama was wildly popular with his base and he won. He repeated his performance against a more polished RINO, Mitt Romney in 2012.

In 2016, the election was a national referendum against the Clintons. Donald Trump won with a weak 63 million votes simply because Hillary Clinton leaves a bad taste in everyone’s mouth. Then something peculiar happened. President Trump kept his promises. He moved our embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. Despite Nancy Pelosi fighting him tooth and nail, he built over 370 miles of wall to help secure our southern border against illegal migration. He crushed ISIS and de-escalated our military overseas, losing fewer soldiers overseas than any president in the past 30 years. He opened American energy production, making us energy independent for the first time in modern history. Through tax cuts and deregulation, he brought back manufacturing jobs to America and oversaw record low unemployment rates across all sectors. He put us on much better trade footing with China, Mexico, and Canada. His response to Covid-19 was as good or better than any major world leader. The list goes on, all while he drained enough water out of the Deep State swamp to reveal many of the bad players beneath the surface. In fact, President Trump did a hell of a good job in the face of the greatest political opposition any president has ever seen in the history of the United States. That made him wildly popular among his base, to the tune of 71 million legitimate votes in 2020. More popular than Barack Obama at his best.

America has been riled up, Left vs Right, for three straight elections, yet could not break the 130 million vote mark. Our population has increased by about 8.5% since 2008 and this is another contentious political battle, so some increase is in order, but not twice the population growth. At a maximum, only 140 million Americans should have voted, and that is with 2008’s level of super-enthusiasm over America’s first black candidate. Hence voter fraud and ballot harvesting are real concerns. Especially in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin. Statistically, anyway. These states all showed Biden with unusually high gains in popularity.

 

Is Leftwing Voter Fraud a Real Possibility? You Bet!

If President Trump wins a second term, a lot of corrupt, deep state actors, will go to prison. The Deep State simply cannot allow that to happen. Their only option to defeat President Trump is voter fraud. Leaving things to chance, with a President so popular he won 71 million votes, would be worse than letting Jeffrey Epstein take the stand in open court. It is a gambit worth the risk.

In the 2020 presidential election, America had about a 13% increase in voter turnout, eclipsing both 2008’s voter energy with Barack Obama and the hard-fought Trump vs Clinton campaign of 2016. The increase in voter turnout is so great, the 2020 election is rife with rumors of voter fraud and ballot harvesting.

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE DATA

Quick Facts:
In 2000, George Bush won the popular vote and electoral college with about 50.5 million votes.
In 2004, President Bush won with about 62 million votes.
In 2008, Barack Obama won with about 69.5 million votes.
In 2012, President Obama won with about 66 million votes.
In 2016, Donald Trump won with about 63 million votes.
In 2020, President Trump garnered about 70.8 million votes, an all-time American record, and still lost to Vice President Biden’s approximate 75 million votes.

The Question:
Did the extra 13% turnout fall evenly for both candidates, or did one of the candidates receive votes in excess of what the laws of averages would dictate?

Methodology:
Examine each state’s voter turnout compared to 2016’s hard-fought campaign between Trump and Clinton, along with election data going back to 2000. Compare the increase in votes Biden received over Clinton’s 2016 campaign against each state’s overall increase in voter turnout. In theory, if Biden won a state with 51% of the overall vote, he should win the additional turnout in the same fashion. If his percentage of support is lopsidedly high compared to Clinton’s support in the same state with the same voters from 2016, fraud is a very real concern.

Results:
Arizona had a 34% increase in voter turnout. Biden won with 50.3% of the vote, but when compared to Clinton’s 2016 Arizona counts, appears to have garnered 56.8% of the extra votes. That comes to a total of 30282 potentially harvested ballots in a state he won by 20573 votes. 11 electoral votes.

Georgia had a 23.9% increase in voter turnout. Using the same method, I come up with a potential of 61.5% of Georgia’s increase went to Biden. That adds up to nearly 67,000 votes harvested in a state he won by 7248 votes. 16 Electoral votes.

Wisconsin had a 16.2% increase in voter turnout. Once again, Biden carried an adjusted 50% of the total vote, yet 54.8% of the increase, which is a boost of 11071 in a state he won by just 20540. 10 electoral votes.

Pennsylvania had a 12.9% increase in voter turnout. Biden appears to have received 55.2% of those votes when he only received 50% of the regular votes. That is a boost of 20650 votes in a state he won by just 34458 votes. 20 electoral votes.

Maine was an easy win for Biden, but the stats say 75% of the excess turnout went to Biden in a state he won with 54.5% of the vote.

That all adds up to 57 electoral college votes to add to President Trump’s 214. And that wins the presidency.