Month: August 2014

Maxine’s Fresh Orange Squares

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I have mentioned before that my grandmother died a few years ago and one of the best things I received when we were cleaning out her house was a giant box of recipes. In the box are some recipes from her friends as well. Yesterday I tried Maxine’s Fresh Orange Squares and they came out pretty well.

I bought a giant bag of oranges from Costco last week and frankly, they are pretty bad. I hate wasting, so went to the recipe box to look up a recipe to try to use a few of them.

Ingredients:

1 cup packed brown sugar
1 egg
1 cup flour
2/3 cup finely chopped peeled orange (about 1 large)
1/2 cup chopped walnuts
Orange glaze*

*Orange glaze: Mix 2 tbsp. grated orange peel, 1/3 cup sifted confectioners sugar and 2 tsp water until smooth

Heat oven to 350. In small mixing bowl, beat sugar and egg on high for 3 minutes. Stir in flour, orange and nuts. Spread in greased 9x9x2 pan. Bake 30 to 35 minutes or until golden brown. While warm spread with glaze. Cool, cut into 1.5″ squares.

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Below is the finished product:

The squares were pretty dense. I substituted almonds for the walnuts because that is what I had laying around and it worked fine. The orange glaze is delicious on top. I imagine this would be even better with good oranges.

Cross posted at LITGM.

Investing Related Items

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Over at Trust Funds for Kids I’ve been updating the portfolios and researching relevant topics for detailed analysis.

One interesting item to me is ADR’s or American Depository Receipts, which represent foreign stocks trading in US markets. “Sponsored” ADR’s trade on NYSE and NASDAQ and “unsponsored” ones trade on the OTC or “pink sheet” markets. Recently one of my stocks (Siemens) went from a sponsored to non-sponsored ADR status and I started researching it here.

I also researched the impact of currency moves on a portfolio, focusing on the Australian dollar vs. the US dollar and its effect on a particular Australian Bank Westpac. It is interesting to view the two elements in an intertwined fashion, since the US dollar was a poor performer over the last 5 years relative to many other currencies.

Finally I look a bit at performance over the last year and marvel about how easy it is to assess performance these days with free graphing and overlay tools, compared to the manual effort in past years’. It still is difficult to always properly factor in dividends and the timing of cash flows (investments), but that’s a different story.

Cross posted at LITGM

Two Surveys About Israel and the Palestinians

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Survey by Pew Research conducted 7/24-27 and survey by Gallup conducted 7/23-24.  There are some notable differences in the results…while the questions asked weren’t precisely the same, they seem pretty close, and the response gaps seem pretty significant.

Effect of age:  When asked about Israel’s response to the conflict with Hamas, in the Pew survey, only 22% of those in the 50-64 and 65+ age ranges say “gone too far,” whereas about 30% of those in the 18-49 range give this response.  With the Gallup survey, the question was whether Israel’s actions are “justified” or “unjustified”…about 30% of those in the 50-64 and 65+ ranges said “unjustified,” whereas 51% of those in the 18-29 range, and 43% of those in the 30-49 category, gave this answer.

Effect of race:  In the Pew survey, 14% of whites, 27% of blacks, and 35% of Hispanics said that Israel is most responsible for current violence.  In the Gallup survey, the justified/unjustified question resulted in 34% of whites saying that Israel’s actions were unjustified, with 49% of nonwhites giving that response.

Effect of gender:  With Pew, 19% of both men and women say that Israel is most responsible for the current violence.  With Gallup, 32% of men but 49% of women say that Israel’s actions are unjustified.

Effect of political affiliation:  With Pew, 13% of Republicans but 26% of Democrats say Israel is most responsible for the violence.  With Gallup, 21% of Republicans and 41% of Democrats say Israel’s actions are unjustified.

These opinion numbers are important not only from the standpoint of Israel’s survival and well-being, but also for the survival and well-being of the United States and the entire world, as they are largely (though not completely) proxies for attitudes which greatly affect our long-term ability to conduct a rational foreign and military policy in the face of radical Islamic terrorism.

Medicine as a government benefit.

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Obamacare is having serious trouble as I have discussed. The success stories, like California, are an example of what I have called Medicaid for All.

“It’s a total contradiction in terms to spend your public time castigating Medicaid as something that never should have been expanded for poor people and as a broken, problem-riddled system, and then turn around and complain about the length of time to enroll people,” said Sara Rosenbaum, a member of the Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission, which advises Congress.

Most of the new enrollees are Medicaid members and those enrolled in “private insurance” learn that they have severely restricted choice of doctor or hospital.

Now we have a new development.

Read more

Don’t Buy Any of It….

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From a comment I left at SWJ:

“Thank you for writing a piece that is thoughtful, rational and calm. How difficult it has been to find a calm voice.
 
The hysteria surrounding this tragic incident and the rush to politicize the incident by various stakeholders on all sides-Russian, Ukrainian, American, various militaries and NATO–is dishonest and dangerous.
 
I met someone who was on the Lockerbie flight, if only briefly. A favorite novelist of mine once wrote that a character who had just lost a child was “living the curious aftermath of a life.” What pain for the families, what they must be suffering.
 
Some days ago, I posted an article from June discussing the poor equipping and training of the Ukrainian border forces and how material was crossing the border. I had asked, “if this is a crisis of sovereignty, why is everyone so silent about this and discussing everything else?” And now I find this article:
 
From May 7:

The U.S. Embassy in Ukraine used Pentagon money to go shopping in Kiev for supplies, including concertina wire for Ukraine’s ill-equipped border guards, Pentagon officials said Tuesday.
The Defense Department funds also bought fuel pumps, car batteries, spare parts, binoculars and communications gear for the guards, who would be the first line of defense if the 40,000 Russian troops on Ukraine’s borders invaded.
 
Embassy personnel bought the goods locally in Kiev, said Army Col. Steve Warren, a Pentagon spokesman.
 
Warren did not have an initial cost estimate for the supplies, but Evelyn Farkas, a deputy assistant defense secretary, told Congress that the Defense Department has given Ukraine’s military and border guards a total of $18 million in non-lethal aid to date.
 
In testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Farkas said that Ukraine’s requests for additional aid “vastly outstrips our abilities to meet them.”

 
Link
 
We spent how many BILLIONS on”democracy promotion” in Ukraine already? And now Americans struggling with a flat economy and uncertain economic prospects have to scrape together nickels and dimes for more when Ukraine is awash with wealthy oligarchs and Europe has a collective GDP that parallels the US?
 
So this is the great crisis that requires a new Cold War? I don’t buy any of it.
 
1. I don’t believe NATO – a bureaucracy fishing for funds and increased prominence after the Afghanistan drawdown.
2. I don’t believe hawkish Senators that are grandstanding for votes or who have emotional problems with buckling down and doing the nation’s work and prefer strange pseudo-ideologic crusades.
3. I don’t believe a President that is looking for a foreign policy win.
4. I don’t believe a Pentagon–or an Army–still looking to milk the American people for their own needs. Missiles in Poland! Oh, please.
5. I don’t believe ‘independent’ analysts–or their contractor and arms selling friends–bought and paid for.
6. I don’t buy the Michael McFaul, retired military Cold Warriors that look at the world through ideological lenses and think the world is a playground for regime change and democracy promotion.
7. I don’t buy the Special Forces hype that see everything as an unconventional war to be countered by training troops, regardless of the strategic wisdom of doing so.
8. I don’t buy the British Chatham House crew, the Polish right, the American transatlanticists and the NATOists that are only concerned with harnessing American power for their own personal or national or ideological or money-making reasons.
9. I don’t buy the middle aged nostalgics for the Cold War and the armchair warriors that view war as a game, an entertainment for boring everyday lives.
10. I don’t buy the neoconservatives who are trying to derail an Iran deal with the Ukraine crisis.
11. I don’t buy the State Department line. State has never gotten over the Cold War and thus its attitudes toward Iran, Pakistan, Russia, and Eastern European nations that it hasn’t helped on any level because they are still so dependent on outside funds.
 
Elements within Russia, the US, Ukraine, the EU/NATO “axis” are all grandstanding and maneuvering for their own selfish interests.
 
If anyone in the vaunted West really cared, the borders would have been the first thing worked on decades ago. And I don’t buy that it’s all just lack of funding. Oligarchs have money. They also like to bring in outside money from Russia and the West and pocket a bit of it and some people might not mind porous borders, if you get my drift. Which no one will because no one really cares.
 
I don’t trust people that talk about unconventional warfare and can’t even be bothered to vet the experts they cite, experts like Michael McFaul or Anne Applebaum. I don’t know if people are stupid, dishonest, ideologues, unwilling to think new thoughts, or what. But I don’t have to buy any of it.
 
Don’t start World War III, Washington Consensus, NATO, Russian hawks, and the rest of you. How will you be able to spend all those ill-gotten gains if you aren’t around for it to be spent?