This Week in Pie Making, Jan 16-22

This week's pie: Kahlua Fudge Brownie in a Yogurt Crust.

If the crust recipe works out, I'll post it. In other culinary news, your pie maker made calzones this weekend with goat's milk Gouda and a sauce made with rendered ham skin, tomato paste and onion. Cooking with animal fats is basically awesome, and your pie maker will soon be investigating grass-fed and organic farms in the DC area. Reports to follow.

Onto the news. It's been a big week for a lot of the major pie-related indicators. First of all, the Great Finger Pointing Game continues as attempts to impose bureaucratic stability on people who genuinely reject big government continues to falter. Speaking of, we got reminders from the capitals of the Western Hemisphere's richest and poorest nations that once a people have accepted the government as legitimate, they most want it to provide prosperity. Your pie maker gladly acknowledges this, and is simply trying to move the goal posts towards a pie-friendlier definition of it.

The Chua thing continues to percolate, and your pie maker loves it. This is the first time in his memory that there has been a national discussion of the relative merits of different cultures' norms without invoking mutual accusations of bigotry.

On the technology front, there were a couple of big stories related to sustainable pie making. The first is that research into car platooning took a big step forward in Sweden. It's more likely to be implemented on specially equipped trucks and buses than passenger cars, but since intercity bus travel is on the rise and infrastructure spending in the US is flat or declining, it's nice to see someone trying address the problem instead of just complain about it. On the defense side, your pie maker is very interested in developments in shipbuilding and armament, since it would appear that while we are moving towards more ships built to commercial, instead of military, standards, there is also a move away from kinetic and into electromagnetic weapons. The civilian take-aways from such developments include higher density power generation that really emphasizes efficiency and surge capacity. Coupled with the success of NASA's latest solar sail test, the long term future of humanity is pretty bright indeed.