if you found a treasure worth, possibly, billions of dollars in your church basement?

That’s what happened in India not long ago:

When a team of unlikely explorers, including former judges and temple officials, started opening the vaults of a Kerala temple last week, they didn’t expect to find gold and precious stones worth $22 billion, according to preliminary estimates. A complete inventory of the artifacts found in the 16th century Hindu temple is expected to be filed to India’s Supreme Court next week.

With the findings, Kerala’s Sree Padmanabhaswamy temple joins the ranks of the world’s top treasure troves. After eluding explorers and archeologists for years, these were found stashed in hidden vaults, secret chambers and caves.

Like the discoverers of this great treasure, you probably wouldn’t know what to do. My understanding is that they’ve rewalled up the treasure until they can figure out what to do.

As you might expect, the security issues are enormous. This previously sleepy temple is now under armed guard by state security officers. If I were a government official in the Indian state of Kerala, I’d check the security officers’ pockets when they left work.

A curator is being appointed by the court to assess the treasure’s value, identify to whom it belongs, and produce a plan for what to do with it. I look forward to pictures. The preliminary reports are of, literally, tons of gold coins, precious jewels, and artifacts, including many that are hundreds of years old.

I think I’ve finally hit upon the winning formula for a pie recipe I’ve been working on. Here’s the recipe.

Pie shell
¾ Tbsp. gelatin
½ cup sugar
¼ tsp. nutmeg
¼ tsp. salt
¾ cup milk
4 eggs
2 tsp. vanilla
1 cup whipping cream

1. Prepare and bake a pie shell using your favorite recipe.
2. Combine the dry ingredients and mix well.
3. Separate the yolks from the whites of the eggs, retaining both.
4. Beat the egg yolks.
5. Add the milk and beaten egg yolks to the dry ingredients.
6. Mix well.
7. In heavy saucepan heat the mixture over low to medium heat, stirring constantly, until it forms a thick cream.
8. Remove it from the heat.
9. Add the vanilla into the mixture.
10. Allow it to cool until it begins to set.
11. Beat the egg whites until they form stiff peaks.
12. Fold the beaten egg whites into the custard mixture.
13. Whip the cream until it is stiff.
14. Fold the whipped cream into the custard/egg white mixture.
15. Fold the entire mixture into the baked pie shell.
16. Let the pie set for at least three hours.
17. Top with fresh fruit of your choice or just serve it as it is.

In this case I topped it with fresh raspberries and blueberries for a nice, red, white, and blue effect. Fresh strawberries, all raspberries, all blueberries, or fresh peaches would be great, too. The crust is all butter and uses a combination of white and wheat flours. It’s one of the best crusts I’ve ever made.

This recipe is derived from Aunt Chick’s Chiffon Custard Pie with Cream. “Aunt Chick”, whose real name was Nettie McBirney, had a column for years in the Tulsa Daily World. Her book, Aunt Chick’s Pies, published 70 years ago and something of a scarce commodity, has a collection of the best pie recipes I know of. I’ve been tinkering with some of her recipes and this is my first truly successful result. Onwards to lemon chiffon!

My wife was very busy over the weekend as you can see. She laid a pad for the grill, something we’ve been meaning to do for some time. I helped a little by carrying a few of the flagstones she used. Here’s a close up:

The highlight of a Sauganash 4th of July is the annual parade. The parade begins at Sauganash Park, about a mile from here, and, eventually, passes right in front of our house, ending at the war memorial on Forest Glen.

The parade begins with a representative of Chicago’s Finest:

followed by a firetruck:

That’s usually followed by one or more cars full of politicians and their families (more in an election year). My attempts to catch a picture of Marge Laurino, our alderman, weren’t good enough to post. The scouts usually march:

and there are usually a couple of small floats:

This year we had a small marching band. They weren’t bad, especially when you consider how little practice they probably had:

The real highlight of the parade is the people of the neighborhood. Marchers come in all shapes, sizes, hues, and species:

The Sauganash Parade follows the Irish tradition. “Parade&#148 is a verb. It’s something you do not just something you watch. I’d guess that the number of people who marched, cycled, drove, and rode in the parade outnumbered those who watched 3:1.

Bruce Krasting recounts his role as provocateur at a 4th of July party that included enough entrepeneurs, Wall Street folks, Social Security recipients, young people, and public employees to make things interesting:

It was a mixed crowd. A few local business folks (my plumber was there). Mostly commuters to the Big Apple. Lawyers, a doctor or two. I met one accountant. The Madison Avenue types are always a laugh. A number of Wall Streeters (more women than men). And one blogger.

So I started an argument. It got out of hand. Some spouses had to break it up. One lady later accused me of pushing the row; I was ‘raining’ on the holiday fun. And anyway, “there were kids around”. What type of example were “we” setting arguing like that?

The fireworks began long before sunset. It’s both amusing and terribly, terribly sad.

Read the whole thing.

This post is something of an elaboration on a post by James Kwak at Baseline Scenario and I encourage you to go on over there to read it in full. That post is nominally about the difficult position that the Congressional Budget Office is in with respect to predicting the long term path of the federal budget and it includes several graphs from the CBO that are important in understanding this post (and the fix we’re in).

The definitions

“Republicans win”

This is shorthand for no tax increases in any form: no reduction in “tax expenditures” (eliminating deductions), no increase in rates, no new taxes. Tax revenues remain at about 18% of GDP.

“Democrats win”

This is shorthand for no reductions in entitlement spending: no change in COLAs for Social Security, Social Security retirement age remains the same, and Independent Payment Advisory Board have no effect on Medicare spending.

The assumptions

The Congress won’t allow the IPABcontinues to adjust the AMT and pass the “doc fix” year after year as it has done for the last decade. The “Bush tax cuts” are, effectively, made permanent.

There is also an assumption that defense spending, adjusted for inflation, remains constant. IMO this is among the weakest of the assumptions but it’s still pretty fair.

I should also mention that there’s an implicit assumption in the CBO estimates: continued GDP growth at 3% or higher. Since I believe that GDP growth is more likely to continue at around 2%, I also believe that the situation is more dire than the CBO estimates would lead you to believe. And those are already pretty discouraging.

Don’t complain to me about the definitions or the assumptions. The definitions are Dr. Kwak’s and the assumptions are those of the CBO’s “alternative scenario”. Complain to them.

Now let’s consider four different scenarios.

Democrats and Republicans both win

That’s the CBOs alternative scenario. IMO the CBO’s projections have a significant defect: interest payments are specifically excluded from consideration. It’s hard to predict what we’ll need to pay to borrowing but, since interest rates are presently at historic lows, it’s a pretty fair assumption that the rate will be higher and, since the principal sum will continue to grow, the amount of interest we pay will be pushed higher both by the increased amount we’ll need to borrow but by the rate we’ll pay to borrow it.

Primary default occurs when you need to borrow in order to make your interest payments. This scenario inevitably leads to primary default. There’s a further complication. The U. S. is the world’s largest economy by a substantial margin and IMO is likely to stay that way. The graphs in Dr. Kwak’s post illustrate not spending but spending related to GDP. Is the vast amount of money we will need to borrow actually be forthcoming at an interest rate we’ll be able to pay without primary default?

I believe that this is the worstcase scenario and it’s the path we embarked on.

Republicans win/Democrats lose

In essence this is the scenario described in the Ryan budget. I’ve already critiqued that here: I think it solves the federal government’s problem with healthcare without correcting the systemic problems in healthcare. An increased burden would fall on state and local governments, already in serious difficulties. More seniors would become wards of the state at increased cost over the degree of independence they’re able to maintain now. The result would be an unprecedented wave of defaults among state and local governments and an inevitable political reaction.

Democrats win/Republicans lose

As I see it the problem with this scenario is deadweight loss. Excepting the tech bubble of the late 90s and the housing bubble of the Aughts, real GDP growth has been steady but nothing like 3% and employment growth has fallen short of the level necessary to accommodate the natural increase. When you discount employment growth in construction very few sectors have seen employment growth other than the healthcare sector. IMO the healthcare sector in combination with an outsized financial sector produce a level of deadweight loss that will ensure that the remainder of the economy sees a lot less growth than it otherwise would. Since two-thirds of healthcare is dependent on government spending that either means more taxes or more borrowing. If it means more taxes and taxes growing sharply faster than income, we’re back to the “cat and rat farm” I’ve written about previously. If it means more borrowing, it also means that it hastens primary default.

Everybody loses

Ironically everybody (in the sense of both Democrats and Republicans) losing is the only way that everybody (in the sense of all Americans) wins. We need to increase revenues and reduce spending with the bulk of savings coming from spending cuts so that we’re living within our means.

Not too long ago my wife and I finally got around to finishing watching Ken Burns’s documentary series, Jazz. It only took us ten years. Thank goodness for Netflix streaming! We streamed the entire series to our TV via our Roku device and were able to watch it on our schedule without needing to remember to tape it or have it take up space on a DVR or checking it out of a library. The convenience of it all encouraged us to watch this truly monumental series.

If you haven’t seen it and you’re interested in music, history, show business, personalities, or American sociology, I’d recommend it highly. It’s in the expected Burns format: a narrated collection of still photographs, old film footage, some television kinescopes and videotape sections, and testimony from historians, promoters, and jazz musicians, skillfully arranged to tell a story. And this brings me to the point I wanted to make about Jazz.

Ken Burns is a storyteller and a homilist, not a journalist. Jazz is a story, not an encyclopedia. Burns made choices in selecting the material to facilitate telling the story he wanted to tell. He concentrates on trumpet and saxophone players, a handful of vocalists, composers, arrangers, and band leaders. But that’s not the whole story of jazz.

In doing so he largely passes over the entire rhythm section. It’s possible to have a jazz band without a trumpet player or saxophonist. It’s possible to have a jazz band that consists solely of a rhythm section. A jazz band without a rhythm section, even if it consists just of a piano, a string bass, or a drum set is practically inconceivable.

Other stories can be told about jazz than the one that Burns elected to tell. For example, jazz can be thought of as the story of a life: Louis Armstrong’s life. Jazz began around the time he was born and it died when he did. This particular story has the advantage of providing a definition of jazz, something that the Burns documentary can’t do. Jazz is what Armstrong played. If Armstrong didn’t play it, it might have been good, beautiful, virtuosic, and important, but it wasn’t jazz.

Seventy years is a good, long run for a musical style. It’s longer than bel canto or verismo lasted in opera and it’s longer than the Romantic style of Beethoven and Brahms in classical music.

I’m not precisely complaining about the emphasis placed on Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, and Billie Holliday. Telling the story of jazz without mentioning Armstrong would be as inconceivable as telling the story of baseball without mentioning Babe Ruth. Ellington is probably the most important and enduring composer to come out of jazz, Charlie Parker (along with Armstrong) the greatest virtuoso, and Billie Holliday by many people’s reckoning the greatest vocalist. However, Fats Waller sold as much sheet music and as many records in the 30s as Ellington and Ethel Waters sold more records than Billie Holliday did. They’re barely footnotes.

If, in the heyday of jazz during the 1930s and 40s, you had stopped a random passer-by and asked him or her to name ten jazz musicians, the odds are pretty good that nine of the ten named would have been white. There have been many important and accomplished white jazz musicians. You would not receive that impression from Jazz. I note, in passing, that although the words “Hoagy Carmichael” do not occur in Jazz, his importance as a composer of jazz standards can hardly be overestimated, and he sold a heckuva lot of sheet music and records.

The ASCAP strike in the 40s, its effect on popular music (jazz was the popular music of the 1940s), and the rise of Latin jazz that resulted is completely unmentioned.

The focus on jazz as an African-American phenomenon results, I think, in a misunderstanding of the nature of jazz. In my view jazz is a conversation. It’s a conversation among black musicians, among and between black and white musicians (particularly, in the early days, white Jewish musicians), and among and between musicians who are self-taught and classically-trained musicians. De-emphasizing this conversational aspect of jazz in favor of great virtuosos necessarily emphasizes the very phenomenon of self-indulgent virtuosity for its own sake decried at one point in the documentary by Branford Marsalis as a perversion of jazz, not jazz.

My foregoing comments notwithstanding I recommend Jazz wholeheartedly. If you have any of the interests mentioned in the second paragraph of this post you’ll enjoy it and are likely to learn something. If you don’t have any of those interests, there are plenty of reality shows.

the Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin:

For his new project, Err, artist Jeremy Hutchison contacted various factories around the world, and asked if one of their workers would produce an ‘incorrect’ version of the product they make every day: in doing so, the functional objects became artworks.

“I asked them to make me one of their products, but to make it with an error,” Hutchison explains. “I specified that this error should render the object dysfunctional. And rather than my choosing the error, I wanted the factory worker who made it to choose what error to make. Whatever this worker chose to do, I would accept and pay for.”

Pictures of the results at the link.

Hat tip: Tyler Cowen

Yesterday I completed my third consecutive 9 week exercise program using EA Sports Active 2. I reported on the two prior 9 week programs here and here. This time around my schedule allowed me to perform each of the workouts of the plan, four workouts a week over nine weeks, without skipping a single workout.

This series the program was at the highest level of intensity and the final workout consisted of a grueling, 50 minute series of squats, lunges, running in place, leg lifts, and a variety of other cleverly arranged upper body, lower body, aerobic, and core exercises, preceded by appropriate warm-up exercises and succeeded by appropriate cooldown exercises. According to the program’s meter, guided by the heart rate and motion-sensing monitors that are part of the program, I burned about 550 calories.

My experience satisfies me that the simple thermodynamic model of weight loss is inadequate. I control my diet rigorously—I weigh practically everything that goes into my mouth and I have a solid, painstakingly acquired knowledge of the composition of the things that I eat. I have not consumed more while on my exercise regimen than before. I have not changed what I eat (except, possibly for the better). I do not cheat. Cumulatively, in the three 9 week programs I’ve gone through since late last year I have burned more than 30,000 calories more than I would otherwise have done and the simple thermodynamic model predicts that I should have lost about 9 pounds. I lost a few pounds at the outset of the first 9 week program. Since then my weight hasn’t varied by a pound.

Fortunately, weight loss wasn’t my primary objective in this exercise regimen. My primary objective was to reduce the size of my waist so that I maintain the 8 inch drop (a variance of 8 inches between jacket size and waist size) that I have had for nearly five decades. I achieved that objective by the end of the first 9 week program.

I don’t have the secret to weight loss in humans. If I did I’d be a billionaire. I think there’s some merit in the simple thermodynamic model but my own experience tells me that there’s probably some merit in the “set point” theory as well. I suspect that heredity may be determinative, particularly later in life.

Since starting the exercise regimen my strength has increased and I am told that my stamina has increased as well. I have exercised muscles that I ignored for more than a half century. I guess that’s the advantage of a formal, systematic program.

The gains have not come without costs. The commitments of time, effort, and sweat (I am literally wringing wet at the end of each workout) have been substantial. In addition I have a neurologically-based chronic pain condition. The pain involved in my regimen has been excruciating. Only the skills of mental and physical control that I acquired through decades in the martial arts have enabled me to persist. I was not unaware of what my exercise regimen was likely to entail when I began it.

I have not entirely decided what will come next. I will undoubtedly repeat the last 9 week program. It’s possible I’ll tweak it a bit to increase the intensity. Or I may add additional activities outside the formal program. I’m wary of that due to the possibility of my not regulating such activities sufficiently.