Welcome to The Coffee Shop, just for you early risers on Monday mornings. This is an Open Thread forum, so if you have an off-topic opinion burning a hole in your brainpan, feel free to add a comment. ___________________________________________________________
This dish is a postmodernchop suey, a tasty dish with multiple meanings, given the complex reason for naming it after General Tso (Zuo), the hero of a Qing Dynasty civil war that took the lives of at least 20 million people.
Chef Peng Chang-kuei, General Tso’s Chicken Inventor, died last week at 98; he served as a Kuomintang banquet chef before bringing a sweet and sour chicken dish to the US.
Donald Trump or his puppet masters are attempting to destabilize the PRC via contacting Taiwan (Thanks, Bob Dole) while concurrently preparing to deregulate US industries including the food supply. Trump is now playing (with) eponymous chicken as he provokes both the PRC and Taiwan versions of their respective “one China policy”.
And the chicken dish in question was prepared for a key figure in the MIC Revolt of the Admirals, the US civilian-military dispute over the joint force elements of the 1950s nuclear deterrent, during a time when the Korean War was being fought with conventional arms. We are still living through the same strategic doctrines of projecting power around the world and seemingly playing the same chicken games.
Secretary of Defense Louis A. Johnson’s idea of an executive was someone who gave orders, and those orders were to be carried out immediately and without question. When the naval officers had the audacity to question his decisions on weapons and strategy (Such as the cancellation of the super carrier USS United States), he took that as a sign of unparalleled insubordination. When unsupported attacks appeared against his character, he wanted those responsible to be severely punished. This could explain the animosity he felt for the Navy at the time of the admiral’s revolt.
Proponents of the Air Force doctrine saw the Korean War as an anomalous event, the demands of which were not relevant to dealing with the very real strategic nuclear threat from the Soviet Union.
Ultimately Soviet aggression never materialized thru a massive nuclear attack and this can be attributed, in whole during the decade of the 1950s, to the existence of the US Air Force’s and NATO’s strategic bomber forces.
The weirdness of the current PEOTUS snafu in China is that whoever is giving the Orange Sauced Gasbag the advice, is re-litigating the Cold War in the same region that gives us General Tso’s Chicken with the possibility that similar millions of people could die, primarily because of the ex-generals who might populate the Trump Cabinet.
What has now become weird is the delusional discourse (Pizzeria-gate(sic)) created in the RWNJ subculture that now seems to have kept the Trumpist hoards motivated. That meme was iterated by MSM or at least some agenda setters and gatekeepers. So the Trumpian chickening has intersected generations, cuisines, and paranoia.
For several years now, Right Wing think tanks and other revisionists have striven to convince us that “Black Slavery Wasn’t as Bad as You’ve Been Taught.” Since the people putting this theory out there are white, and have no personal experience of being slaves, it’s difficult to understand how they could have acquired this knowledge.
My husband was recently watching a documentary that was supposed to be about General Sherman’s ‘March to the Sea’ during the Civil War, but spent much more time on the filmmaker revisiting his old girlfriends. One of his ex-sweethearts put forth the idea that “If people want to be slaves, the government should let them.” I was called into the room so I could see this remarkable footage for myself. Suddenly this documentary about the past became very much connected to our present.
One of the things which makes a story or a poem memorable is the “telling detail,” an unexpected connection between events or ideas or unlikely people, or a single object that becomes the symbol of what’s really under the surface of the poem. Pay close attention to the details in this week’s poems – there’s a lot going on.
Narrativity gets to take it in the neck next year as the electoral shock wears off, only to continue the strategy of tension necessary for the current state of nonlinear political warfare.
No one can predict the future – we learned that lesson the hard way a month ago. But if you were to imagine what impending American fascism would look like, you couldn’t place the pieces on the board any more neatly than they’ve been placed in the last year… At worst, we’re headed down an extraordinarily dark road where the things that make America America simply cease to exist. A president who won on a campaign of anti-immigrant furor, who believes in casting aside freedom like litter, who craves constant validation and can’t abide criticism or satire – that’s a tyrant in the making.
Last year we envisaged President Trump and Brexit.
Trump’s popularity soars in his first weeks in office as an energized Republican Congress passes a huge fiscal stimulus.
However, new waves of protests rise after he’s inaugurated and signs executive orders reversing Barack Obama’s legacy.
A movement emerges combining college students, Black Lives Matter activists, former Occupy Wall Street protesters and anarchists. Trump attempts to impose emergency restrictions and curfews in major cities.
California emerges as the center of opposition to Trump, with some branding the movement “Calexit.” The state defies Trump’s rollback of environmental regulations. Billionaires Elon Musk and Sheryl Sandberg emerge to lead a progressive alliance against Trump in 2020.
All of this causes deep divides in Trump’s ruling coalition. The GOP splits in Congress and Trump’s team of White House mavericks are soon at each other’s throats.
It was recorded on November 23, 534 BC, that Thespis of Icaria became the first actor to step out of the chorus and portray a character onstage. Now celebrated as International Thespian Day.
To the Disputed Woman Who First Graced the English Stage as Desdemona
by Nona Blyth Cloud
December 8, 1660 – A woman– likely Margaret Hughes, but possibly Anne Marshall – appears on an English public stage for the first time, in the role of Desdemona in a production of Shakespeare’s play Othello
How careless men are with our histories! How easily one pretty face confused for another. Perhaps they were so beguiled
By a glimpse of feminine ankle, Or the sighs raising your womanly bosom, They never noticed your face at all.
Even now, the first thing ‘historians’ tell us Is whose mistress you probably were.
This photograph was taken from a Japanese plane during the torpedo attack on ships moored on both sides of Ford Island shortly after the beginning of the Pearl Harbor attack. Unknown – Official U.S. Navy photograph NH 50930.
This view looks about east, with the supply depot, submarine base and fuel tank farm in the right center distance. A torpedo has just hit USS West Virginia on the far side of Ford Island (center). Other battleships moored nearby are (from left): Nevada, Arizona, Tennessee (inboard of West Virginia), Oklahoma (torpedoed and listing) alongside Maryland, and California. On the near side of Ford Island, to the left, are light cruisers Detroit and Raleigh, target and training ship Utah and seaplane tender Tangier. Raleigh and Utah have been torpedoed, and Utah is listing sharply to port. Japanese planes are visible in the right center (over Ford Island) and over the Navy Yard at right. U.S. Navy planes on the seaplane ramp are on fire. Japanese writing in the lower right states that the photograph was reproduced by authorization of the Navy Ministry.
It is a few minutes before eight in the morning as I sit on the veranda of the hotel here on Waikiki Beach, Hawaii. The sky is mostly clear, the wind is nearly calm, and the temperature is pleasant, like it was seventy-five years ago today. The Pearl Harbor Visitor Center is packed, as I knew it would be. We were there yesterday where I met five of the living survivors of that terrible day. One, Lauren F. Bruner was offering his book “Second To The Last To Leave USS Arizona 12.7.1041.” Lauren and five others were in the aft gun director station, near the top of the aft mast when the ship exploded, sending flames from the burning gun powder more than five hundred feet above his head. Surviving the blast was just the first part of his story. He and the others escaped the inferno by climbing down a rope thrown to them from a brave sailor on the USS Vestal, a repair ship tied along side.
![CzME0fyUUAANrHD[1].jpg](https://flowersforsocrates.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/czme0fyuuaanrhd1.jpg?w=576&h=432)
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