TheVat

Ghirardelli has a good "intense dark" at 72%. Just the right note of bitter for my palate. Amano Madagascar is also a good small batch dark. My main criterion is a short ingredient list. And all brands have tested with some cadmium and lead, so that suggests saving for special occasions. As with a lot of foods, I would suspect that pretty high consumption is needed to get to noticeable toxicities. I've heard theories that some of Van Gogh's problems related to his use of cadmium yellow pigment.

I prefer the Belgian - more cacao less milk. Really, straight dark is the best. And Belgium and France both do that well. Happy 2026, you Limeys and random Euro trash! 😃

Some of the pub grub when I was in London was not bad, and filling, if you had walked for miles and needed calories. But when it came to truly good food (with actual roughage) my mainstay was a Greek restaurant, with Indian a close second.

Pretty familiar with all that, but (as your industry handbook makes clear, and thanks for posting that) there would be some technical expertise involved there - possibly beyond a lazy man (me) in a home kitchen. As I said, there are commercial brands that take that extra step, but haven't seen them on the shelves hereabouts. Let me provide a summary of Chapter 11: Fart. Fart again. Keep farting. DO NOT sit down (this will trap the farts and pain will ensue). It is my pleasure to close out the year with this public service message.

Good luck. I haven't found any cultures that make milk real digestible for me, and I was warned that most cultured milks still retain some lactose unless they specifically start with a LF milk. I think you need high temps to caramelize lactose, and the commercial ones I've seen go with adding lactase enzyme. If you simmered per a dahi recipe, then maybe you caramelized the lactose pretty well. And maybe also got some Maillard reaction as well, if there was browning at all. I've settled with a skyr that's made from oats, or sometimes coconut and yellow pea protein. IIRC, authentic skyr differs from yoghurts by adding a yeast species during the low temperature part of the process. It also uses the common bacteria like S. thermophilus, L. bulgaricus, plus some Icelandic legacy cultures. The stuff I buy doesn't use yeast, probably due to spoilage issues with large scale commercial production and shelf life requirements. Hint of cucumber sounds pretty good.

That must be nice for the male employees. I was in a group, in a small French town, which was invited to meet the mayor shortly after debarking. I was dead tired and didn't anticipate that he would serve us the wine produced by his family's vineyard and that it would be an insult to turn it down. It struck like vodka. Tasted better, though (vodka has always tasted like liquified Band-Aids to me). Anyway, it fixed the jet lag by advancing my clock several hours past CST.

I take @Genady point about defining what values constitute "real" freedom. As others have gone into at considerable length, a lot of freedoms (when defined as capabilities to do things) originate from being social animals who can work cooperatively and thus don't have to spend all their time fending off starvation and danger. Capability freedoms (e.g. I want to climb Everest) are launched from platforms of freedom from bare subsistence. Then there are expression freedoms (e.g. artists or social critics), which depends not only on a social web to ease subsistence, but also on cultural structures that allow challenging, fringey, cringey themes to reach a public. Related category of freedoms might be spiritual freedoms, which allow choices within a social structure as to how one finds meaning in life, the universe, etc. And there's freedom from political oppression, which influences all the others I mentioned in the context of modern nation-states. If you start to look at how these different categories interact, maybe you can get an idea of what freedoms have value and are real.

It would be useful, given how multidisciplinary food science is. Food science extends through agronomy, ag engineering (food production and processing), biochemistry, sensory science, physiology, cell biology, medicine, and microbiology (including fermentation). Could be an Other subforum maybe.

This works on a planet with something like 50 million hunter-gatherers spread across the more temperate regions where there are reliable sources of fresh water, plant foods and game. 160 X that population, 8 billion, cannot achieve that type of free living as a HG. Especially with so many regions ecologically compromised. You describe something only a wealthy person owning a large preserve of wild land could ever hope to do. If you, not being wealthy, went deep into the Amazon rainforest, you would be constantly having to hide from illegal miners and poachers, law enforcement patrols, and unfriendly tribal groups in some areas. That would not feel free for very long. And you would lack the lifetime of experience that native tribes have and which allows them to get adequate nutrition and avoid dangers.

Yes, the potato based aquavit is really more a vodka, having neutral clear spirits and not oak aged or any grain notes. The grain based aquavit is closer to a whiskey, but might still be closer to vodka due to a higher proof and more neutral spirit. I know if you go over a certain proof, it ceases to qualify as whiskey. Personally, I think adding dill or caraway to anything like that won't go well for the taste. One can only guess at such clusters of vowels, if not Scots. This is the only frog libation I've encountered. https://www.tequila.net/tequila-reviews/blancos/senor-frogs-tequila-plata.html

The Swedes have a spiced whiskey which is called aquavit. Usually flavored with dill and caraway seeds. I'd advise staying on a soft carpeted or padded area while consuming. Wasn't aware of the whisky/whiskey spelling issue. I just thought whisky was what whisk brooms were.

I was reminded after sandwich guy's acquittal about Sol Wachtler's famous line that district attorneys could get grand juries to "indict a ham sandwich". But even indictments are proving difficult on some of the more merit-free charges from the TDOJ. I would expect some seriously silly theatricals if someone tried to prosecute signage editing (restoration) on the KCPA.

Turnip has been obsessed that Christians are being killed in N Nigeria by IS splinters (never mind that other groups are also being killed as well). He seems to have somehow persuaded Abuja to sign off on this. This is also grossly inconsistent with Turnip's stated doctrine of reducing foreign entanglement and intervention in Africa/Europe and shifting towards the Pacific and Latin America. Meanwhile, Turnip's own attack on Christian refugees crossing our border continues...

Ethical questions raised by this thread may also pertain to how we respond to domestic surveillance. Reading in Politico this a.m. about how ICE plans to expand their surveillance was sobering. At what point would wire cutters and opaque spray paint (or hacker attacks on SM monitoring) be contemplated as ethical violence against fascism? https://www.politico.com/news/2025/12/26/ice-high-tech-surveillance-lower-privacy-guardrails-00705401 ICE also plans to expand its use of social media surveillance, WIRED reported in October, scouring billions of online posts to find leads for immigration enforcement operations. As the agency upgrades its tools, it has also sent signals it wants to expand its mission from finding immigrants to tracing critics and stopping threats to its agents... ...Privacy advocates argue that this new technological capability — and the mission of tracking threats against agents — widens ICE’s surveillance scope beyond immigration enforcement in dangerous ways.... ...“ICE is already well beyond their initial responsibility and is fully into the realm of political policing of protesters and dissidents,” Matthew Guariglia, a senior policy analyst on surveillance and technology at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has been tracking the growth of government surveillance capabilities. “They’re building up this mass automated surveillance infrastructure,” he added, “and the question we have to be asking is: What is it for?”

And a jolly stateless Bakuninmas to you. 🧔🥳😵‍💫

Here you go. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uninhabited_island Note that some have no fresh water, or forbidding climates. Pack extra socks.

I see others have suggested either kakistocracy or subordinate refusal to do a proper cover-up. Grand Cheetoh can't replace everyone on the lower rungs of agencies. Virgin Islands? Not anymore. (sorry)

Thanks, Genady. Good to hear from you. The way the US fed government is going, we're all going to be on "Island Time" pretty soon. I hope that, if you visit the US, they don't require you to show five years of your social media activity, which new rules are asking for some visitors. I'm sorry, I don't recall your citizenship status - maybe it's not a problem.

Haha. I stand by what you said, too. And no worries, making Canada a US state would require a degree of competence that I'm not seeing in Metamucilini and his lackey cesspool. Me, too, and you would think (as Ghideon noted) it's a poor business model. Really shabby way to treat a customer. Imagine that approach IRL. You go into a store and another customer starts punching you; clerk runs up and throws YOU out.

Also humorous is the notion that Scotch whiskey would be transported in a tanker ship. That'd be quite the party, somewhere. A couple shots of tanker Scotch and you won't even notice that metallic tank aftertaste anymore. 🤪

Search engine: how the retina changes with aging in mammals The results of this or a similar search will refer you to scientific studies published in journals, information pages at eye clinic websites, popular magazine articles, etc.

Still, this sounds like a DDOS attack, which is directed and not just background radiation from Santa's robotic elves eager to sell us Laplander porn or freeze dried reindeer steaks or whatever. It didn't take out other sites at random, did it? And it came a day or so after several of us had posted some highly critical comments on the Letters to the President (US) thread. (Nothing quite as effective as shitty government to ratchet up Kafkaesque levels of paranoia) This is my post (uh oh), and note the three following it, especially MigL's last line. https://www.scienceforums.net/topic/135496-messages-to-the-president/page/4/#findComment-1305023 You see why I'm wondering about what @exchemist referred to as "some shadowy organisation." I agree with him, it seems unlikely, but still...

And yet you keep coming to this website and engaging in extended conversations with us on a vast range of issues and interests. Odd.

Worthless? Now, now, perhaps it runs on zero point energy. Why let a basic QM violation stop us from releasing some ZPE? 😜

Dear malignant manchild of the United States, Thanks for your gross violation of the memory and legacy of John F. Kennedy, by putting your name above his on the Kennedy Center. Though you are an inflamed ass pimple on the Presidency, you have shown your superiority to JFK at petty and puerile political games and narcissistic posturing. In this very narrow category of achievement you are a BIG WINNER!! However, I would ask you to honor the basic concept of a memorial dedication of a building by kindly dropping dead. Thanks!