Octopus Overlords

Its roots can be traced back to 1852 when American baker Samuel German developed a type of dark baking chocolate for the Baker's Chocolate Company. The brand name of the product, Baker's German's Sweet Chocolate, was named in his honor.
...
The possessive form (German's) was dropped in subsequent publications, forming the "German Chocolate Cake" identity and giving the false impression of a German origin.

Isgrimnur wrote: ↑Thu Apr 08, 2021 11:42 pm German's is the name of the chocolate company.

Its roots can be traced back to 1852 when American baker Samuel German developed a type of dark baking chocolate for the Baker's Chocolate Company. The brand name of the product, Baker's German's Sweet Chocolate, was named in his honor.
...
The possessive form (German's) was dropped in subsequent publications, forming the "German Chocolate Cake" identity and giving the false impression of a German origin.

There are no coconuts native to Germany.

Jaymann wrote: ↑Fri Apr 09, 2021 12:03 am But what if a swallow...

Isgrimnur wrote: ↑Thu Apr 08, 2021 11:42 pm There are no coconuts native to Germany.

Carpet_pissr wrote: ↑Fri Apr 09, 2021 11:31 am Now somebody do “Black Forest Cake”.

I mentioned that that cake was probably my favorite to a German acquaintance, and she looked at me like I had said “Nazi Cake”. Said she had never heard of such a thing (and not in a very polite way I might add).

FWIW: if you forced me to choose between a slice of German Choc cake or Black Forest cake, it might drive me insane. I love both. Maybe slight preference for BFC.

Black Forest gâteau or Black Forest cake (American English) is a chocolate sponge cake with a rich cherry filling based on the German dessert Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte (pronounced [ˈʃvaʁt͡svɛldɐ ˈkɪʁʃˌtɔʁtə]), literally "Black Forest Cherry-torte".

The dessert is not directly named after the Black Forest mountain range in southwestern Germany.

According to one school of thought, the name is derived from the specialty liquor of that region, known as Schwarzwälder Kirsch(wasser), which is distilled from tart cherries. This is the ingredient that gives the dessert its distinctive cherry pit flavor and alcoholic content flavor. Cherries, cream, and Kirschwasser were first combined in the form of a dessert in which cooked cherries were served with cream and Kirschwasser, while a cake combining cherries, cookies / biscuits and cream (but without Kirschwasser) probably originated in Germany.

Some sources claim that the name of the cake is inspired by the traditional costume of the women of the Black Forest region, with a characteristic hat with big, red pom-poms on top, called Bollenhut.

Jaymann wrote: ↑Fri Apr 09, 2021 11:55 am Ein Deutsche Hund.

stessier wrote: ↑Fri Apr 09, 2021 12:41 pm

Jaymann wrote: ↑Fri Apr 09, 2021 11:55 am Ein Deutsche Hund.

Ein deutcher Schaferhund

I had to look it up, but I only went looking because you mixed the genders on your adjectives and I couldn't remember which was correct.

Unagi wrote: ↑Fri Apr 09, 2021 1:10 pm cherry pit flavor ?

Smoove_B wrote:

Carpet_pissr wrote: ↑Fri Apr 09, 2021 10:54 pm

Smoove_B wrote:

Says the blue freak wearing a feather collar.

But it appears that competitive pressures and a lack of a response from Giuliani and his representatives on deadline helped push the stories in the wrong direction.


“We weren’t rigorous enough,” conceded Times editor Dean Baquet in an interview Monday.

Baquet said the Times reporters scrambled to match what appeared to be a major Giuliani scoop by The Post after it was published Thursday. “I think we all tend to drop our guard when we get beat and are trying to catch up,” he said. “We need to grill sources more to make sure we understand exactly what they’re confirming. We’ve all discussed it, corrected it, and we need to do better. Dealing with anonymous sources in law enforcement and intelligence is always hard.”

Adeel Raja, who lists himself as a freelance contributor for CNN on his LinkedIn, came under fire after he tweeted 'The world today needs a Hitler'
The tweet comes as tensions continue to rise between Israel and Palestine
It was just the latest in a series of anti-Semitic tweets he has posted
In 2014, he tweeted that the only reason he was supporting Germany in the FIFA world cup was because of Hitler who 'did good with those Jews'
The very next day, he tweeted 'Hail Hitler'

Defiant wrote: ↑Sat May 22, 2021 4:07 pm CNN Drops Rick Santorum After Comments on Native Americans

Our democracy is under attack. Washington journalists must stop covering it like politics as usual.

Back in the dark ages of 2012, two think-tank scholars, Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann, wrote a book titled “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks” about the rise of Republican Party extremism and its dire effect on American democracy.

In a related op-ed piece, these writers made a damning statement about Washington press coverage, which treats the two parties as roughly equal and everything they do as deserving of similar coverage.

Ornstein and Mann didn’t use the now-in-vogue terms “both-sidesism” or “false equivalence,” but they laid out the problem with devastating clarity (the italics are mine):

“We understand the values of mainstream journalists, including the effort to report both sides of a story. But a balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon distorts reality. If the political dynamics of Washington are unlikely to change any time soon, at least we should change the way that reality is portrayed to the public.”

Nearly a decade later, this distortion of reality has only grown worse, thanks in part to Donald Trump’s rise to power and his ironclad grip on an increasingly craven Republican Party.

Positive proof was in the recent coverage of congressional efforts to investigate the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol.

The Democratic leadership has been trying to assemble a bipartisan panel that would study that mob attack on our democracy and make sure it is never repeated. Republican leaders, meanwhile, have been trying to undermine the investigation, cynically requesting that two congressmen who backed efforts to invalidate the election be allowed to join the commission, then boycotting it entirely. And the media has played straight into Republicans’ hands, seemingly incapable of framing this as anything but base political drama.

“ ‘What You’re Doing Is Unprecedented’: McCarthy-Pelosi Feud Boils Over,” read a CNN headline this week. “After a whiplash week of power plays . . . tensions are at an all-time high.”

Is it really a “feud” when Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy performatively blames Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for refusing to seat Republicans Jim Jordan and Jim Banks — two sycophantic allies of Trump, who called the Jan. 6 mob to gather?

One writer at Politico called Pelosi’s decision a “gift to McCarthy.” And its Playbook tut-tutted the decision as handing Republicans “a legitimate grievance,” thus dooming the holy notion of bipartisanship.

“Both parties have attacked the other as insincere and uninterested in conducting a fair-minded examination,” a Washington Post news story observed. (“Can it really be lost on the Post that the Republican party has acted in bad faith at every turn to undermine every attempt to investigate the events of Jan. 6?” a reader complained to me.)

The bankruptcy of this sort of coverage was exposed on Tuesday morning, when the Jan. 6 commission kicked off with somber, powerful, pointedly nonpolitical testimony from four police officers who were attacked during the insurrection. Two Republicans, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, even defied McCarthy’s boycott to ensure their party would be sanely represented.

This strain of news coverage, observed Jon Allsop in Columbia Journalism Review, centers on twinned, dubious implications: “That bipartisanship is desirable and that Democrats bear responsibility for upholding it — even in the face of explicit Republican obstructionism.”

This stance comes across as both cynical (“politics was ever thus”) and unsophisticated (“we’re just doing our job of reporting what was said”). Quite a feat.

Mainstream journalists want their work to be perceived as fair-minded and nonpartisan. They want to defend themselves against charges of bias. So they equalize the unequal. This practice seems so ingrained as to be unresolvable.

There is a way out. But it requires the leadership of news organizations to radically reframe the mission of its Washington coverage. As a possible starting point, I’ll offer these recommendations:

Toss out the insidious “inside-politics” frame and replace it with a “pro-democracy” frame.

Stop calling the reporters who cover this stuff “political reporters.” Start calling them “government reporters.”

Stop asking who the winners and losers were in the latest skirmish. Start asking who is serving the democracy and who is undermining it.

Stop being “savvy” and start being patriotic.

In a year-end piece for Nieman Lab, Andrew Donohue, managing editor of the Center for Investigative Reporting’s Reveal, called for news organizations to put reporters on a new-style “democracy beat” to focus on voting suppression and redistricting. “These reporters won’t see their work in terms of politics or parties, but instead through the lens of honesty, fairness, and transparency,” he wrote.

I’d make it more sweeping. The democracy beat shouldn’t be some kind of specialized innovation, but a widespread rethinking across the mainstream media.

Making this happen will call for something that Big Journalism is notoriously bad at: An open-minded, nondefensive recognition of what’s gone wrong.

Top editors, Sunday talk-show moderators and other news executives should pull together their brain trusts to grapple with this. And they should be transparent with the public about what they’re doing and why.

As a model, they might have to swallow their big-media pride and look to places like Harrisburg, Pa., public radio station WITF which has admirably explained to its audience why it continually offers reminders about the actions of those public officials who tried to overturn the 2020 election results. Or to Cleveland Plain Dealer editor Chris Quinn’s letter to readers about how the paper and its website, Cleveland.com, refuse to cover every reckless, attention-getting lie of Republican Josh Mandel as he runs for the U.S. Senate next year.

These places prove that a different kind of coverage, and transparency about it, is possible.

Is it unlikely that the most influential Sunday talk shows, the most powerful newspapers and cable networks, and the buzziest Beltway websites will change their stripes?

Maybe so. But, to return to Ornstein and Mann in 2012, it’s a necessity.

“We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional,” they wrote.

They probably couldn’t have imagined the chaos that followed November’s election, the horrors of Jan. 6, or what’s happened in the past few weeks.

The change they called for never happened. For the sake of American democracy, it’s now or never.