The Musings Of The Consensus

 This little blog post is about a bit of economic history that tends to be glossed over in many history books, at least those without a strong economic focus. In fact, it's both ingenious and moronic in equal measure, but the Nazis made heavy use of it to rearm for what would be World War II and I wanted to cover it. First some background. After World War I, Germany was forbidden to rebuild their military beyond a pitiful level, mostly because the guys who won did not want Germany trying to go for round 2. Of course, the Nazis had every intention of going for round 2, but they needed to find a way to pay for the rearmament expenses without getting caught, and also do so without scaring away people because they were a terrible credit risk. It's really hard to do both because credit requires public records of your ability to pay back debts to act as a basis for your ability to get credit. At least, that's how it usually works. The Nazis thus had to get a ton of money by hook ...

 Before I continue, please refer to this post, where I explain why I took my mods off Nexus Mods and why any further contributions there are permanently off the table as far as I'm concerned: https://gethn7.blogspot.com/2024/08/a-little-more-information-as-to-why-my.html With the above in mind, I have elected to restore some of my old Nexus work to Bethesda.net. Note, not all, because some were already there, and some I cannot be sure works now, and I wish to wait until I have time to do this. Bethesda.Net has not, to this date, given me the slightest hassle about what I post off their site that has to do with my personal worldviews, all they care about is game mods. I expect no trouble with them, unlike Nexus Mods, Bethesda just wants to make money and promote their games and I just want to make mods with the tools they graciously provide. I don't even make mods that touch on social or political topics, mostly just patches, gameplay alterations, and the rare model or texture m...

 This is going to be a short blog, but it's on a cheese I've long wanted to try and my sister again came in for the clutch and managed to find it for me. Without further ado, let's cover the first German cheese on my cheese-tasting journey, Butterkäse. Butterkäse ( pronounced as "boo-ter-kay-zuh" ) is a German semi-soft pasteurized cow milk cheese. Literally meaning "butter cheese" (because of its taste and texture being very butter-like) and "ladies cheese" (due to its very mild taste and appearance), this is a cheese of wide renown in Germany and Austria, and American cheesemongers in Wisconsin are also known to make their own. Here are some facts before I begin the taste testing. First off, this is a young cheese aged about a month at most with a high degree of milk fat. While it is made from the curd and the whey is drained off in the process, there is little attempt to drain any and all moisture from the curd, meaning the curd remains soft...

 I would like to dedicate my latest cheese-tasting blog to my sister, who was gracious enough to see about procuring the cheese I tested for this review from her local cheesemonger and sending some my way. This is not going to be an overly long post, as I only tasted two new varieties, but both are fairly unique and deserve some discussion. The first cheese I tasted was Westminister Rustic Red Cheddar. Red cheddar is a bit interesting in that its creation was the result of a happy accident. Specifically, it was originally created by the accidental mixture of Lactobacillus helveticus starter culture into what was meant to be a cheddar cheese. This starter culture is commonly used in Swiss and Emmental-style cheese, so the original cheesemaker was worried it would taste terrible. To their pleasant surprise, the final product tasted great. As the name suggests, it's distinctly dark orange-red in color. The texture is similar to cheddar but more crumbly like an Italian hard cheese. The...

 This is just a retrospective post on what I vowed to myself when I decided to become a regular games reviewer (and this applies to all other relevant media). This is NOT anything with official backing or sanction from my current employers at ChristCenteredGamer, this is just my personal code of honor, though to my knowledge none of it is in conflict with the expectations of my current employer. 1. The subject I'm reviewing must be the primary topic, and nothing else. These days, some of my more politically and socially partisan brethren in the games journalism business will typically derail a review about a game to complain about not enough people of some sort of minority group, how capitalism is evil incarnate, sexual identity and gender politics, and other things that are clearly more interesting to them. The game review part is practically a sidebar to what they actually want to talk about. Not me. I work as a volunteer, but even if I were paid, my first duty is to primarily di...

 I have been a longtime Bethesda game fan. Their Elder Scrolls and Fallout games haven't been the greatest, and often are deeply flawed, but each had its own unique charm that Starfield lacked, which is the core of why I just could not enjoy it, so let's do a retrospective. Be advised, will contain spoilers. Arena was the first Elder Scrolls, and I'll admit, never really got into it. It was clearly a game that was more a tech demo experiment repurposed from a completely different game concept (it was to be generic arena fighter before it became an open-world RPG prototype), and it had some really cool ideas married to horrible balance, a game engine that was clunky even when it first released for DOS, and wasn't even a true open world game, the open world being more a series of looping randomized maps with some unique dungeons. That said, even then it had a few good ideas I hope to see fleshed out in a better game. Daggerfall was my first RPG love. Sure, it was even MOR...

 Today, I had to make the incredibly painful but necessary decision to cease, now and in the future, having anything to do with contributing to the website Nexus Mods. I have broken no rules there, I had no posted any comment in any fora there that was the slightest bit mean, cruel, inflammatory, or hateful. In fact, I made a point to avoid causing trouble there. Unfortunately, it seems certain people from there (whose names and identities I will not reveal out of respect for them) found my blog here, and took severe umbrage to a certain blog post I made and my comments, particularly my opinions on transgenderism and being nonbinary. This, to be exact: https://gethn7.blogspot.com/2021/06/i-was-recently-globally-banned-from.html The party in question contacted me via private message about their offense to what I wrote OFF the Nexus and revealed they considered it a personal attack (it was never intended as such, that was their choice). I told them yes, I wrote it, and would not reca...

 These days, if anyone asks what political affiliation I am, I generally reply "The popcorn affiliation". I of course have actual political stances, but I find it less stressful to get into political arguments than I do to munch popcorn as other people get flustered over the same, the drama is rather amusing. On a serious note, however, a recent discussion I was in about monarchy and its being bound to the same law it enforces had me thinking hard about my ideal political leader. The 'Code of Hammurabi" the oldest known legal code, has this in its lede as to why Hammurabi considered it his duty to make sure there was a legal code; When Anu the sublime, the King of the Annunaki and Bêl, the lord of heaven and earth, who fixed the destiny of the country, had committed the whole of mankind to Marduk, the son of Ea, the god of right, when they made him great among the Egigi, had pronounced the sublime name of Babylon, made it great upon earth, had established in it an et...

     To continue a trend from my last review, I went again for young, low-sodium (or at least far less sodium than my usual choices) and my mother and grandmother taste-tested some lemon ricotta, fresh cheddar cheese curds, and some young Parmigiano-Reggiano. Ricotta is an Italian classic dating back to the Bronze Age and a long staple of their cuisine. It comes from the word meaning "recooked", as it goes through at least two preparation phases that result in cooked, slightly sweet curd. It is also made from buffalo's milk as opposed to cow. We got some lemon-flavored Ricotta in a small puck (even resembling a rather large hockey puck), and it was a massive hit. We all found it was rather like cheesecake, and we unanimously considered it an ideal breakfast, dessert, or snack cheese. Bit expensive in large quantities, but it is rather low sodium and very sweet, hardly tastes like cheese at all, though the texture is unmistakably that of a cheese, albeit a very soft and ap...

 This review of cheese was prompted by my grandmother, who I wanted to invite to enjoy some cheese, but her requirements for a low-sodium diet for health reasons limited my options. Not to be deterred, I decided to find some low-sodium cheese she could enjoy. To that end, I purchased some Caciocavallo, lightly salted Mozzarella, and Paneer. Caciocavallo is a "pulled curd" cheese (also called pasta filata) of Italian origin. It's similar to provolone cheese in texture, though closer to mozzarella in taste. I ordered some very young caciocavallo, and I found it's a fairly soft cheese, with a hard outer rind. The rind is edible, but I recommend against it. My grandmother found it a very pleasant cheese, and my mother commented she considered it an excellent snacking cheese. If you want a gentle-tasting cheese with low salt but prefer something that isn't straight-up mozzarella, I'd certainly recommend this,  The Mozzarella I got was the OG Italian cheese, not the...

  Some weapons are truly terrible and badly designed from the start, and doomed to incur the historical derision of anyone competent to appreciate firearms. Some are well-designed masterpieces that continue to hold honor and esteem as they did when first used by soldiers in combat, and some are not overly elegant yet reasonably functional. And then we have the Breda 30, a light machine gun that escapes being completely terrible, but sadly does not rise to the level of being of average performance, having to settle for being highly underwhelming. As the name implies, the Breda 30 (Fucile Mitragliatore Breda Modello 30) was officially issued for service for the Kingdom of Italy in 1930. It was the standard light machine gun of Italy until the end of World War 2, and while it did prove an effective enough weapon to be combat-worthy, it was a mix of odd design decisions that made it rather poor in terms of performance and ergonomics. * The magazine feed system was a fixed design, loadi...

 It's been a while since my last cheese review, so let's make up for that, shall we? This time I ordered a pound each of Asiago Pressato, green waxed Irish Cheddar, and Pecorino Calabrese The first, Asiago Pressato, this was something I got Mom (my fellow taste tester) because she adores the softer cheeses. In fact, this cheese is a D.O.P.-protected cheese of Italian origin made with pasteurized cow's milk. It's a very, very young cheese, barely almost a month old, and very, very soft. This is a super gentle, buttery-tasting cheese that very easily melts on the tongue and hardly resembles her harder and drier Italian cousins like Asiago D'Allevo. Mom considered it the kind of cheese she'd both snack on and use in cheese dishes, and I would have to agree. Its storage life isn't as long as most other Italian cheeses, so be sure to store it promptly and finish it within a week or two after opening. The next cheese we tried could not have been more different. Ir...

 My father just passed April 1, 2024 6:36 PM. For those reading this, I want to make absolutely clear the world lost a great man named John Edward Vaughan. I am Daniel Cullen. Legally, we share no blood, and legally he'd only be my stepfather, but our bond was beyond mere ties of blood. I must confess before he entered my life, I had no father. The worthless waste of a human soul who raped my mother is why I'm here, and she chose to not punish me for his unimaginable crime but to raise me as her son, for which my mother will have my undying loyalty. But until she married John "Johnny" Vaughan, I had no one in my life I acknowledged as my father. Even my grandfather, he was still just my grandfather. She married two other men earlier, both of which amounted to nothing and their departure from her life was one I have no regret over. When she decided to get married a third time, both he and her made a step that was quite unusual at the time but says a lot, more than I re...

 This will not be a long post, but I just want to make clear, as someone who was involved in the first go-round of Gamergate, I want no part of any notional sequel. For starters, I already found my niche as a games reviewer for ChristCenteredGamer, a place where I feel free to review games on their merits with no chains on my work save our Christian focus and my own conscience, and that is enough for me. My only service to the world as regards gaming is to continue to review games as honestly as possible on their technical merits, unbiased by anything else, and I'm pleased to remain doing so as a reviewer for CCG. That aside, I want to make perfectly clear I do not want to get in the trenches of any sequel (which appears to be on right now). For those that do, on any side, you do you, but I found my place in the world, I shall stay uninvolved.

 It's been awhile since I and my mother got some cheese to review, but we recently sampled four different types of cheese, two of Italian extraction, two being wildly different Gouda-style cheeses. First, let's start with the cheese I got free thanks to my regular cheesemonger Murray's tossing it in free with my order. That being a Parmigiano-Reggiano, aka that cheese most people have put on their Italian dishes in powder format. I got a fresh if aged by 5 years slice of said cheese, and the taste in general is not much different from the powdered variety. Like the powdered version, it is a raw cow's milk cheese given a protracted aging process and made with a high density of salt to promote the flavor of Parmesan-style cheese most are familiar with. However, in its fresh state, it lacks much of that concentrated tanginess the powdered, condensed variety often has, while still retaining a gentler flavor despite being a hard cheese. If you want to have Parmesan without i...

 In my last post on the Mormon faith, I established why I consider their doctrine heretical, inconsistent, and so full of contradictions I believed it and still believe it to be lies. In that post, I mostly pointed out where it contradicted the Bible it claims its own literature is deuterocanonical too. This post is going to point out the flaws in in it's "brick and mortar" arguments, specifically, the real-world facts it does not line up with as regards historical plausibility and where it cannot possibly make logical sense when compared to its own logic with real-world fact. For the Mormon reader, no, I am not going to going to go for the low-hanging fruit and attack Joseph Smith as a charlatan (though I believe he was). I will not go after any "picky points" about real-world Mormon practices, we could argue the validity of that for years and get nowhere. Instead, I'm going to show why, by Mormonism own logic and that of the Christian faith it claims to be...

 Recently, I had a little incident where I offended a devout Mormon by throwing shade on the Book of Mormon as a fanfic that does not withstand the light of scrutiny. Out of respect for the party in question, whom I apologized to for being unduly rude, I shall not name names nor discuss exactly where it happened or the circumstances. However, because this is my personal blog, I shall set forth my views on Mormonism, with no evasion or sugarcoating, just to clarify my beliefs. If any devout Mormon wishes to offer a rebuttal, I shall accept that maturely and welcome it.  The only caveat I ask is that the rebuttal give evidence for its views from secondary sources to back up the TANGIBLE claims made by Mormon doctrine (such as geological facts and historical events that should be provable by historical evidence of some kind or backed up by a secondary source). The reason I make this distinction is that Christians and Jews can easily meet this test with their holy books and belief...