Ten core exercises

Michael Jarosky recommends 10 exercises to get great abs without sit-ups:

1. Kettlebell swings
2. Farmer's walk
3. Single leg push-ups
4. Sprints
5. Side planks
6. Woodchopping
7. Clean and press/jerk
8. Barbell ab rollout
9. Burpees
10. Mountain climbers

How exercise helps the brain

Gretchen Reynolds explains How exercise may help the brain grow stronger, at least in mice.

World War II and the danger of being liberated

The George C Marshall Foundation hosted three eminent historians, Gerhard Weinberg, William Hitchcock and Mark Stoler to discuss World War II Myths, Misconceptions and Surprises. Each gave a presentation and then they answered questions at the end. William Hitchcock's presentation was interesting because he talked about how the Allies were not always greeted with joy when liberating parts of France and Belgium. This was basically because many civilians in those places were killed in the fighting to liberate them. I think he mentioned the number of French civilian casualties on D-Day, mostly from Allied bombing, were similar to Allied causalities.

Garlic Bread

Darren Robertson and Mark LeBrooy's Doozy garlic bread with chilli.

Are the policies of American political parties realigning to their base?

In This Is What the Future of American Politics Looks Like Michael Lind argues that we're seeing an earthquake in American politics. He argues support for the two major parties will align on policy grounds rather than the current partisan alignment. That is, the Republican Party  has become the party of the white, southern and mid-western working class and we will see it's policies align accordingly (nationalistic, anti-immigration, anti-free trade, pro Social Security and Medicare). He argues the reason Trump has won the Republican Party presidential nomination is because he has espoused these policies.

By contrast the Democrats will become the party of multiculturalism and globalisation.Its support base will be "an alliance of upscale, progressive whites with blacks and Latinos, based in large and diverse cities".

The Yom Kippur War on US military doctrine

In Yom Kippur War & The Development of U.S. Military Doctrine John Suprin explains how lessons from the Yom Kippur War changed American Army doctrine and weapons.

The Americans were able to inspect captured Russian built equipment after the war and were surprised to discover that the tanks were built for a NBC battlefield. He later relates a conversation he had with a Ukrainian General (formerly of the Red Army before the fall of the wall and the break up of the USSR) where the Ukrainian explained the Red Army's plan to user nuclear weapons right from the beginning of any land war in the Europe.

Asian mushroom hotpot recipe

Neil Perry's Asian mushroom hotpot recipe.

Great rappers deconstructed.

I had no idea of the complexity in rap music and the skill needed to write it. Watch Deconstructing the greatest rappers of all time by Estelle Caswell and Martin Connor.

KPGM arguing for a boost to education and infrastructure

In Coalition and Labor fighting the last war while a different battle looms Michael Pascoe argues that neither the ALP or the Liberal Party are really addressing the needs of Australia. He bases his argument on a KPMG report.

Meanwhile, the nation's future needs, the big economic issues the next government should be focusing on, are highlighted by a KPMG report that suggests there's a great deal more genuine political leadership should be doing instead of chanting that the other side is a tool of the unions/banks/dole bludgers/tax avoiders/socialists/neo-cons/whatevers.

The bottom line of KPMG's The Global Economy – Is This As Good As It Gets? paper is that our would-be leaders should be competing to offer the most credible boost to productivity-enhancing investment in infrastructure and education.

Personally, I think the ALP is much closer to KPMG's recommendations than the Coalition.

GMO used in cheese production

In You Can Thank Genetic Engineering For Your Delicious Cheese Levi Gadye explains how the cheese industry turned to genetically modified bacteria to make up for a potential short fall in rennet.

These enzymes, called rennet, are secreted by mucous membranes that line the calf’s fourth stomach. Harvesting rennet the old fashioned way requires slicing this stomach open, which in turn requires slicing open the baby bovine itself. This, as they say, kills the cow.

Rennet is used to make hard cheeses.

Article with tips on handling cake emergencies

Solve your cake emergency: baking tips and fixes has some baking tips.

Why civilisation was built on grains and not tubers

In The sinister, secret history of a food that everybody loves Jeff Guo looks at work by some economists that counters the generally accepted argument that civilisation arose because of an excess of food from agricultural production.

In his 1997 bestseller “Guns, Germs and Steel,” historian Jared Diamond argued that the availability of nutritious and easily domesticated plants and animals gave some societies a head start. In the Middle East there was barley and wheat; in Asia there was millet and rice. “People around the world who had access to the most productive crops became the most productive farmers,” Diamond later said on his PBS show. And more productivity led to more advanced civilizations.

Going against the generally accepted theory are those societies that depended on tubers (such as potato, tapioca and sweet potato) as their main cultivated food source. These societies had an abundance of food, tubers are generally more productive and nutritious than grains, but never developed the technical and political complexity of societies that depended on grains.

The study, published last year by economists at the United Kingdom and Israel doing novel work on archaeological and anthropological evidence, attempts to explain a strange pattern in agricultural practices. The most advanced civilizations all tended to cultivate grain crops, like wheat and barley and corn. Less advanced societies tended to rely on root crops like potatoes, taro and manioc.

It's not that grains crops were much easier to grow than tubers, or that they provided more food, the economists say. Instead, the economists believe that grains crops transformed the politics of the societies that grew them, while tubers held them back.

How crops changed the world

The argument depends on the differences between how grains and tubers are grown. Crops like wheat are harvested once or twice a year, yielding piles of small, dry grains. These can be stored for long periods of time and are easily transported — or stolen.

Root crops, on the other hand, don't store well at all. They're heavy, full of water, and rot quickly once taken out of the ground. Yuca, for instance, grows year-round and in ancient times, people only dug it up right before it was eaten. This provided some protection against theft in ancient times. It's hard for bandits to make off with your harvest when most of it is in the ground, instead of stockpiled in a granary somewhere.

So grains can easily be stolen or taxed. There for they more easily support an infrastructure to defend them, on built on the gains from taxing them.

Is gluten the culprit?

Sarah Berry in Going against the grain: why bread-denial is bad explains that some people who think they're gluten intolerant may not be - they may just be intolerant of the way modern mass produced bread is made.

Has neoliberal capitalism had its day?

In Developed economies are not suffering from the consequences of a financial crash, but from a structural crisis of neoliberal capitalism, an extract from his book, David M. Kotz writes that the current global economic slowdown in developed economies is due to a structural crisis of the "neoliberal form of capitalism".

What explains the current malaise in developed economies across the world? In my book, The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Capitalism, I analyse the roots of the economic crisis that began in 2008 and the free-market, or ‘neoliberal’, form of capitalism from which the crisis emerged. I argue that the stubborn stagnation afflicting many of the developed economies cannot be understood simply as the fallout of a severe financial crash or as an unusually severe ‘Great Recession’, but instead is a structural crisis of the neoliberal form of capitalism. This means that the continuing stagnation cannot be resolved by policy measures alone within the constraints of neoliberal capitalism. Rather, a resolution requires major institutional restructuring.

...

I argue that both theoretical considerations and historical precedents indicate that the neoliberal form of capitalism can no longer give rise to sustained economic growth. The stagnation will put increasing pressure on all the affected groups in society to find an alternative route to resuming normal economic growth. I suggest that a return to a statist economy is the likely outcome, although that can take different forms, ranging from a right-wing nationalist version to a new round of social democracy or even a shift away from capitalism toward socialism. While the neoliberal form of capitalism is unlikely to survive, which statist form will replace it cannot be predicted in advance and will depend on the outcome of economic and political battles among various groups and classes in the coming years.

Growing concensus that we now need active government

In A shift in political thinking is giving Labor a sense of purpose Lenore Taylor argues that there's a new wave of thinking in economics and politics stating the old open model is now reducing growth because of rising inequality.

Australian thinkers, and political parties, have been grappling with a growing wave of thought that the economic challenges of the 2010s cannot be solved by the old 1980s political consensus – the consensus that said economic growth is best achieved by market deregulation and lower taxes and lower spending that generate growth, and allow “all boats to rise” by providing the revenue for governments to pay for social programs and do something or other about poverty.

The rethinking has been going on for quite a while internationally, from Thomas Piketty through to the major international economic institutions. And it turns the old consensus on its head – arguing that rising inequality harms growth, that smart social spending is not the kindly thing governments do after they raise the revenue, but rather a first order revenue-boosting exercise in itself, and asserting that governments need to intervene more to get their economies through this economic transition.

The IMF now says income distribution matters for growth. “Specifically, if the income share of the top 20% (the rich) increases, then GDP growth actually declines over the medium term, suggesting that the benefits do not trickle down. In contrast, an increase in the income share of the bottom 20% (the poor) is associated with higher GDP growth. The poor and the middle class matter the most for growth,” an IMF discussion paper said.

Trump and the disconnect between the Republican elites and their base

Martin Wolf makes some interesting observations in Donald Trump embodies how great republics meet their end.

Why has this happened? The answer is that this is how a wealthy donor class, dedicated to the aims of slashing taxes and shrinking the state, obtained the footsoldiers and voters it required. This, then, is “pluto-populism”: the marriage of plutocracy with rightwing populism. Mr Trump embodies this union. But he has done so by partially dumping the free-market, low tax, shrunken government aims of the party establishment, to which his financially dependent rivals remain wedded. That gives him an apparently insuperable advantage. Mr Trump is no conservative, elite conservatives complain. Precisely. That is also true of the party’s base.

Authoritarians and Trump

In The rise of American authoritarianism Amanda Taub describes the almost linear correlation between how much someone supports Trump and their level of authoritarianism. One of the experts she interview was PhD student Matthew MacWilliams.

MacWilliams studies authoritarianism — not actual dictators, but rather a psychological profile of individual voters that is characterized by a desire for order and a fear of outsiders. People who score high in authoritarianism, when they feel threatened, look for strong leaders who promise to take whatever action necessary to protect them from outsiders and prevent the changes they fear.

The Republican rank and file are revolting

In The Great Republican Revolt David Frum writes about the war inside the Republican Party.

The angriest and most pessimistic people in America aren’t the hipster protesters who flitted in and out of Occupy Wall Street. They aren’t the hashtavists of #BlackLivesMatter. They aren’t the remnants of the American labor movement or the savvy young dreamers who confront politicians with their American accents and un-American legal status.

The angriest and most pessimistic people in America are the people we used to call Middle Americans. Middle-class and middle-aged; not rich and not poor; people who are irked when asked to press 1 for English, and who wonder how white male became an accusation rather than a description.

Mini Tim Tam Cheesecakes recipe

Mini Tim Tam Cheesecakes from Buzzfeed.

Ingredients
80g Butter
350g Tim Tams (crushed)
450g Cream cheese
1 TBSP Vanilla extract
2 Eggs
½ Cup of sugar
½ Cup of sour cream

Mushroom burgers recipe

Mushroom burgers with haloumi by Caroline Velik.