• 6. The Tastiest, Best-Overall Pancake: Alison Roman’s Perfect Crispy Pancakes

• This recipe makes delicious, classic-tasting pancakes. The ingredients are once again pretty standard, although it does include an equal amount of baking soda to baking powder (only one other recipe used baking soda), along with flour, sugar, and salt. The wet ingredients are buttermilk, eggs, and melted butter. It has the best ratio of sugar and salt to flour, and the mix of leavening creates a fluffy pancake with the ideal thickness. The addition of baking soda helps neutralize the acidity of the buttermilk, so even though there is a lot of buttermilk, the pancakes are tender and ever-so-slightly chewy but not sour.

• One notable difference in the method that makes the batter smoother and easier to mix is that you first stir beaten eggs and buttermilk into the flour mixture to combine, and then you stir in melted butter. This added step helps prevent the butter from seizing in the cold dairy. The batter wasn’t completely smooth — it still had a few small lumps you expect in a pancake batter — but everything was well dispersed, and all the pancakes sampled tasted the same. 

• Like many other recipes, you need to adjust the heat when cooking so they don’t burn, but even so, these pancakes cook up a shade or two darker than some others. The darker color enhances the rich flavor of the pancakes, though, so don’t worry that they look too dark. 

• The recipe suggests cooking in coconut oil, which isn’t an ingredient common to cooking pancakes, but it is worth trying over the optional vegetable or canola oil. The pancakes do not taste like coconut, but it does add a different, pleasant taste and helps crisp the edges. Looks like this recipe is going to continue to be my go-to for now.

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• Behalve één: die van een linkse meerderheid die een progressieve regering steunt.

   

• Van alle kanten klinkt de eis: ‘Brussel heeft dringend een regering nodig’. Maar dus niet eender welke. Enkel een progressieve regering beschikt over een coherente meerderheid in de twee taalgroepen. Dit is echter niet de enige reden voor deze oproep.

   

• In Brussel is er voor een linkse politiek nog steeds een meerderheid, zowel in de stembusuitslag als in het parlement. Door hier een regering te vormen heeft links vandaag de macht om te tonen dat een andere weg mogelijk is.

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• die eerder in Le Soir verscheen. Daar staat ook de volledige lijst met alle ondertekenaars.

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• Tragically, Sankara was assassinated in a hail of gunfire, betrayed by his close friend Blaise Compaore.

• African Hub calls Thomas Sankara the best president in Africa’s history. During Sanakara’s four years as leader he:

      

   

• Sold off the government fleet of Mercedes cars and made the Renault 5 (the cheapest car sold in Burkina Faso at that time) the official service car of the ministers.

      

• As President, he lowered his salary to $450 a month and limited his possessions to a car, four bikes, three guitars, a fridge and a broken freezer.

      

• He opposed foreign aid, saying that “he who feeds you, controls you.”

      

• He was later killed in a French backed coup in 1987.

   

      
• African Hub calls Traoré, “The youngest and most loved President in the world.”
• especially given that Traoré is said to have survived 19 assassination attempts.

• Traoré himself came to power through a coup against another coup leader Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba who fled to Togo. Traoré was disillusioned by Damiba’s failure at handling the “jihadist” insurgency in his country. Armed jihadist groups, purportedly linked to Al Qaeda, are fighting Burkinabè government forces.

      

• Since coming to power in 2022, Traoré has quickly burnished his anti-imperialist and socialist convictions. Burkina Faso is a resource-rich but economically impoverished country. Traoré seeks to overturn that economic contradiction by removing the colonialists who exploited Burkina Faso. Traoré is quoted as saying: “We have been receiving French aid for 63 years, yet our country has not developed, so cutting it off from us now will not kill us, rather it will motivate us to work and rely on ourselves.” (Quoted by Qiraat Africa, published by the South Sahara Research Center, UK)

      

• Yet the West still has strings to pull on. Burkina Faso, Niger, and Mali were suspended from the western-backed Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). Subsequently, the three countries formed their own anti-imperialist grouping as the Alliance of Sahel States (AES).

      

• In 2023, French troops were ordered to leave Burkina Faso. The French embassy in the capital Ouagadougou is closed and French diplomats have been expelled. Some French passport holders have been detained on suspicion of espionage.

      

• Russian troops have since arrived to help Burkina Faso bolster its security. Nigeria’s Afro Page also reports the “arrival of 1700 Russian commandos, armed, coordinated, and highly trained” in Burkina Faso “not in secret … but boldly in broad daylight…. This is a message from the Kremlin to Washington.” In addition, 700 North Korean troops are said to have arrived in Burkina Faso.

      

• Gaining control over the resources of Burkina Faso is also underway. Burkina Faso has started to nationalize resources, particularly its gold mining sector. Burkina Faso’s prime minister Jean Emmanuel Ouédraogo realizes, “Our gold represents our greatest opportunity for economic resilience during these challenging times.”

      

• Africa Hub quotes Traoré: “We will mine our gold ourselves not for France, but for our people!”

      

• To achieve this, Traoré’s proposal is: “Targeting foreign exploitation, particularly by France, Traore has pushed to nationalize gold mines, like Boungou and Wahgnion, and approved a state-owned gold refinery in 2023 to process 400 kg daily, aiming to retain profits for local development.”

      
• If Langley (whose basic pay is estimated by Deepseek at $203,700 per year) had done his homework, instead of making unsubstantiated accusations, he would know that Traoré revealed his net worth at $128,566. He might also know that Traoré refused a presidential salary, continuing instead to receive the same salary he earned as a soldier. Malawi24 was impressed: “Traore’s decision is a stark contrast to the actions of his predecessors, signaling a new era of leadership focused on public service rather than personal enrichment.”

• It is abundantly evident that Traoré has the support of the people, as did Sankara. Despite Traoré having reportedly booted out French and American media from Burkina Faso, even the BCC, a media organ of empire, admits that Traoré “has captured hearts and minds around the world.”

      

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• Some chefs have switched from plastic cutting boards to wooden alternatives. One study of plastic cutting boards found that they shed as many as dozens of grams of microplastics per person per year.      MyImages_Micha/Getty Images/iStockphoto      hide caption 

   

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• About 460 million metric tons of the material are made each year, according to the United Nations

• Home cooks chop into plastic cutting boards, heat up plastic containers, sauté with plastic cooking utensils, encase ingredients in plastic wrap and toss plastic detergent pods in the dishwasher — all of which are possible vectors for microplastics exposure.

• Plastic food containers can be replaced with glass or metal ones. Public health experts warn against heating food in plastic.      Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images      hide caption 

   

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• "If that's happening in fish and in rodents in experiments that are being peer-reviewed and published, it's probably happening in us too," Brander said. "We just haven't demonstrated it yet."
• Maybe when it breaks, replace it,"

• Instead of using a plastic cutting board, she uses wooden ones. One recent study called plastic cutting boards a "potentially significant source of microplastics in human food" and found that a polyethylene chopping board could shed between 7.4 and 50.7 grams of microplastics per person per year.

   

   

• Bonneau stores food in glass or metal containers and saves all her jars to reuse later. Heating plastic containers can cause millions of microplastics and billions of nanoplastic particles to be released, one study found. (Microplastics have turned up in takeout food containers, plastic water bottles, paper coffee cups and more.)

• Home cooks can also use stainless steel or cast-iron pots and pans rather than nonstick cookware, which is often made with PFAS, a group of chemicals that have been linked to health problems in humans.

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• Insisting that Slovakia was “liberated” by the Soviets, Slovakia’s prime minister, Robert Fico, is the only EU and Western leader who traveled to Moscow to commemorate the end of World War II in the company of Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Brazil’s Lula da Silva on May 9.

• As a former Communist Party member, Fico may be sincere in being a Soviet nostalgist. He certainly seemed determined to join Vladimir Putin on the Red Square: Not only did he brave the disapproval of Slovakia’s neighbors and many of his own constituents, but after the Baltic countries closed down their airspace to Slovakia’s government plane, he found a circuitous workaround over the Black Sea.
• Slovakia’s deputy prime minister and Fico’s coalition partner, Tomáš Taraba, who entered politics through the country’s neo-Nazi circles
• His historical hero isn’t Stalin, though, but Jozef Tiso, the Catholic priest who served as president of the wartime Slovak state and sent tens of thousands of its Jewish citizens to Nazi death camps.
• Fico, for instance, is eager to portray the “angry and frustrated” Winston Churchill and his Fulton speech, delivered when “bodies of the last dead soldiers were still warm,” as responsible for erecting the Iron Curtain. Ľuboš Blaha, one member of Fico’s delegation and a member of European Parliament, posted a video from Moscow in which he argued that the war itself had been a culmination of “centuries” of Western efforts to destroy Russia and Slavic nations

• What makes these controversies extra extraordinary is that those minimizing Soviet and Russian tyranny are often the same ones who consider themselves defenders of national sovereignty against the real or imagined diktats of Brussels.

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• The story of European politics in the twentieth century can be told many ways: As the story of freedom or dictatorship; fragmentation or integration; north vs. south or east vs. west. But another way of telling it—especially in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and to some extent Hungary—is as the story of the right of small states. Yet somehow, a story of self-determination has, in a few years, been overtaken by a crude realism, accepting that the powerful do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must. But that view of international politics is hardly the epitome of small-nation patriotism—rather it is a reflection of arrogant imperialist thinking coming from the Kremlin, and now also from the White House.
• What is more difficult to understand is how the likes of Fico came to dominate the politics of their countries, especially under the banner of phony patriotism.

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• To use Thomas Piketty’s terminology, the “merchant right” has long understood that they needed to forge a coalition with middle-status people against the “Brahmin left.” They had to give them something, so they offered cultural issues that matter less to them than perpetuating their wealth.

   

• Trump innovates on this tradition. He’s brilliant at it. He genuinely feels condescended to and rejected by elites — the high New York elites, not the Brahmin left — and people sense his authentic anger against elites. He performs a certain strain of masculine toughness that conveys dignity among blue-collar men, saying, “I’m going to tell it like it is. I’m not mealymouthed like those white-collar professionals who suck up to each other. I’m a straight shooter.”

   

• Compare that to Hillary Clinton’s recent op-ed titled “How Much Dumber Will This Get?,” the first line of which is “It’s not the hypocrisy that bothers me; it’s the stupidity.” This type of condescension appeals to elites but not to middle-status people, who often feel they’re on the receiving end of this attitude from elites.

    

   

     

   

   
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• Both Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris faced what I call “the tightrope” — women must balance being seen as competent without seeming unlikable, or likable without seeming incompetent. It’s extraordinarily difficult. Whitmer and Gluesenkamp Perez show it’s possible, but whether it’s wise for Democrats to run a woman for president at this point — that’s a tight space.

    

   

     

   

   
• In truth, the Democrats have actively abandoned middle-status people for fifty years.

• Then my generation of hippies arrived with antiwar, abortion rights, and environmental concerns, followed quickly by race and gender issues. They were all noble causes, but what’s missing? If you already have a stable middle-class life, you can worry about the end of the world. If you don’t, you’re worried about the end of the month, as the yellow vest protesters in France put it.

   

• Democrats were seduced away from the politics of the New Deal coalition by neoliberalism: self-regulating free markets, consumers benefiting from globalization. What a vision! But the consummation wasn’t what they had hoped. After World War II, productivity and wages grew together — then, with the introduction of neoliberalism, wages stalled while productivity grew eight times faster. If wages had maintained that growth line, they’d be 43 percent higher today. Three-fourths of that decline happened in the fifteen years after 2000.

   

• I’m not sure Democrats realize this. They seem intent on rescuing neoliberalism. Right now, in response to Trump’s tariffs, they’re basically saying, “We need a return to the perfectly functional global economic order. Trump has rocked the boat too much.” That strikes me as ignorant of how dissatisfied middle-status Americans are with existing conditions.

    

   

   

   

   

• That’s another terrible message. You’re trying to appeal to voters who’ve been royally screwed by the establishment for fifty years, and your argument is that we should defend the established order?

   

• Issue by issue, there are certain nonnegotiables. We won’t embrace racism, simply put. But the conversation can’t stop there. Many people of color voted for Trump, not because they’re racist but because he was communicating in a register they understood and liked. We need to figure out how to talk to them.

   

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• "Democrats could make huge progress quickly with a simple formula: try to persuade the middle-status noncollege voters whom you’ve lost. There’s plenty to work with. Look at Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Fighting Oligarchy Tour — people in red states flocked to hear them rail against the rich."

   
• I agree, up to a point - the point being that  the big corporations and wealthy donors who control the political system through both parties would never allow a left social democrat to admnister it unless they gave clear evidence they were disavowing their anticapitalist rhetoric and agenda. The widely popular Corbyn and Sanders campaigns were the most recent to drive that point home  Despite their best efforts to neutralize this effect, they were seen as too risky. Right populists like Trump and Vance are an entirely different matter. They belong to the ruling class, embrace its interests and values, and can be reliably depended upon to  follow its dictates. 

   
• Unfortunately, the two-party system is rigged in multiple ways to prevent the emergence of third parties with an anticapitalist agenda, as we've seen time and again in North America and Europe.  It will take an economic collapse for things to change - either from reform at the top as under the New Deal or, more fundamentally, from the bottom in a revolutionary crisis when the masses of necessity organize independently to overthrown the system. Meanwhile, initiatives like the Fighting Oligarchy campaign are the only means through which Marxists can today reach a mass audience to promote the need for fundamental change. 

   

         

     

        

   

     

       

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