Month: September 2018

One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America

One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America

One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America by Kevin M. Kruse, Jeff Cummings
Published by Brilliance Audio on May 3, 2016
Format: audiobook
Genres: Domestic Politics, Nonfiction, Religion
See it @ Goodreads


Synopsis

Conventional wisdom holds that America has been a Christian nation since the Founding Fathers. But in One Nation Under God, historian Kevin M. Kruse argues that the idea of “Christian America” is nothing more than a myth—and a relatively recent one at that.

The assumption that America was, is, and always will be a Christian nation dates back no further than the 1930s, when a coalition of businessmen and religious leaders united in opposition to FDR’s New Deal. With the full support of Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s, these activists—the forerunners of the Religious Right—propelled religion into the public sphere. Church membership skyrocketed; Congress added the phrase “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance and made “In God We Trust” the country’s official motto. For the first time, America became a thoroughly religious nation.

Provocative and authoritative, One Nation Under God reveals how the comingling of money, religion, and politics created a false origin story that continues to define and divide American politics today.

The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age

The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age

The Perfect Weapon: How the Cyber Arms Race Set the World Afire by David E. Sanger
Published by Penguin Random House on June 19, 2018
Pages: 384
Format: hardback
Genres: 21st Century U.S. History, Technology, World Politics
See it @ Goodreads


Synopsis

From the premiere New York Times Washington correspondent, a stunning and incisive look into how cyberwarfare is influencing elections, threatening national security, and bringing us to the brink of global war.

Behind the Russian cyberattacks that may have thrown the 2016 election; behind the Sony hack; behind mysterious power outages around the world and the disappearance of thousands of personnel records from poorly guarded government servers are the traces of a new and powerful weapon, one that has the potential to remake global conflict like nothing since the invention of the atomic bomb. The Perfect Weapon is the riveting story of how, in less than a decade, cyberwarfare displaced terrorism and nuclear attacks as the greatest threat to American national security.

Cheap to acquire, difficult to defend against, and designed to shield their user's identities so as to complicate retaliation, these weapons are capable of an unprecedented range of offensive tactics; they can take us just short of war, allowing for everything from disruption to theft to the cause of widespread damage of essential infrastructure systems. And the vulnerability of those systems has created a related but equally urgent conflict: American companies like Apple and Cisco must claim allegiance to no government in the name of selling secure products around the globe yet the US intelligence agencies want the help of such companies in defending against future cyberattacks.

Reported and written with unprecedented access by New York Times chief Washington correspondent and bestselling author David Sanger, The Perfect Weapon takes readers inside war rooms and boardrooms, into the secret cyberdens of American and Chinese military, to give the deep-background story of the increasingly pitched battle between nations, their governments, their cyberwarriors, and their corporations.

Garden Fresh Pesto

Basil from 2018 Garden
a packet of basil seeds can provide enough basil for a winter’s worth of pesto.

This year I did get around to planting basil in one of my new replacement raised bed stock tanks. The new containers have worked out well. I use this recipe and a freeze the ready-made pesto in old Tupperware containers used for making and freezing hamburgers. Once frozen I remove them and seal them into food saver packets.

Pesto Recipe

  • 2 cups fresh basil leaves (packed)
  • 1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese
  • 1/2 cup Olive oil
  • 3 Tbs pine nuts or walnuts
  • 3 garlic cloves (finely minced)
  1. Place basil leaves in small batches in food processor and whip until well chopped (do about 3/4 cup at a time). Add about 1/3 the nuts and garlic, blend again.
  2. Add about 1/3 of the Parmesan cheese; blend while slowly adding about 1/3 of the olive oil, stopping to scrape down sides of container.
  3. Process basil pesto it forms a thick smooth paste. Repeat until all ingredients are used, mix all batches together well. Serve over pasta. Basil pesto keeps in refrigerator one week, or freeze for a few months.
  4. Remove 1/2 cup of the cooking liquid before draining the pasta. Toss pasta immediately with the pesto sauce and the reserved cooking liquid. Serve at once with additional cheese, if desired.