The National Gun Victims Action Council has declared a Valentine's Day boycott of Starbucks to protest the coffee chain's support for American gun laws.
The antis are planning a boycott. Let's counter with a BUYcott. On February 14, please make the effort to go to Starbucks and buy something. Don't like their coffee? Get a tea, a cocoa, a pastry, anything. Thank the clerk for Starbucks' support of the Constitution.
(If possible) Pay with two dollar bills. Thomas Jefferson, Mr. Liberty himself. If Starbucks sees a huge influx of payment in two dollar bills, people in general, and Starbucks management in particular, are sure to notice. In addition to their regular menu, Starbucks also has a "secret menu" of things they will make on request. I'll put it in the comments.
Short Cappuccino (Italian style. Less milk and a stronger flavor)
Cafe au Lait (Misto without foam)
Marble Mocha Macchiato (White mocha on the bottom with no whip, shot on
the top and mocha drizzle)
Short Drink (Just a small coffee)
Cheapo (A double shot of espresso on ice with few packs of brown sugar)
The Dirty Hippy (Chai Tea Latte with soy instead of regular milk)
Dirty Chai (Chai latte (hot or iced) with a shot of espresso)
Double Dirty or Extra Dirty (two shots)
Widow Maker (Half iced black tea, half iced black coffee)
London Fog (Earl Grey tea w/vanilla flavoring)
Poor Man's Latte (An Iced Americano with no water and half ice and then
add the half and half available at the milk and condiments table)
Poor Man's Chai Latte (Chai Tea Misto with extra foam, two tea bags and
half cinnamon-half vanilla syrup)
Apple Juice Orange Blossom (Tazo Orange Blossom Tea steeped in steamed
apple juice with no water)
Red Eye (Coffee plus 1 shot of espresso)
Black Eye (Coffee plus 2 shots of espresso)
Green Eye (Coffee plus 3 shots of espresso)
French Pressed Coffee (any coffee)(highly recommended)
Frappuccinos:
Affogato-Style (Order any Frappe "affogato-style" and you'll get a shot
of hot espresso added on top of your drink as opposed to having it
blended in)
Banana Cream Pie (Vanilla Bean creme with vanilla and hazelnut syrups,
whipped cream, and a whole banana)
Biscotti
Cake Batter
Captain Crunch (hazelnut or toffee nut syrup in a Strawberries and Creme)
Chocolate Cream
Cinnamon Roll
Cookies & Cream
Crunch Berry
Grasshopper (Mocha with java chips and peppermint syrup)
Samoa (mocha coconut with caramel drizzle
Snickers (Java Chip with two pumps of toffee nut and a caramel drizzle)
Super Cream
Thin Mint (Tazo Green Tea Creme with chocolate syrup and java chips)
Posted by: Cincinnatus Chili ||
02/11/2012 16:14 Comments ||
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#5
Don't usually go to Starbucks. It's a block or so away from the office and the coffee in the office isn't all that bad. But maybe I'll take a walk on Valentine's Day.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
02/11/2012 17:43 Comments ||
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#6
I'll take my best girlfriend to celebrate her birthday. She just discovered the joy of shooting guns -- despite her MS -- and loves to shock her fellow Jews by announcing that she got American citizenship so she could vote Republican. She even went up to Washington, DC on a TEA Party bus to lobby Congress a few weeks ago. She'll appreciate it properly. :-)
#4
texhooey, AFAIU that's pretty much what happened. Papdemos (whatever) was the handpicked ECB technocrat that was supposed to force all the German austerity measures through the recalcitrant Greek parliment.
#6
This is easy. Sell some of those islands. Isnt that how the US got Alaska and Florida? I know some buyers. The Russians want a warm water port - and then perhaps might then not need to protect Syria'a back (and its Syrian port used by the Ruskies). The Turks have always thought some of those islands are theirs. (the actual ownership has transfered many times) The Palastinians need a real home. And the Isrealites need land (so it seems) The Brits need a warm water island to vacation on as does all the Northern Europe countries. This could all be done and the blessed Euro saved from serious depreciation. I am a synic of course. The Greeks main source of revenue is tourism and they are doing a great job of reducing that to rubble. The Greeks only represent 2and half percent of Europes GDP. Why fund this nonsense. Sell those islands!
#8
The American schadenfreude with respect to the Europeans will be on the other foot when the Greeks leave the Euro and EU only to petition to join the Dollar and the U.S.
As a self-governing "Commonwealth" just like Porto Rico has been for over a century.
#9
"the Greeks leave the Euro and EU only to petition to join the Dollar and the U.S."
They can petition all they like.
Not only no, but HELL NO.
Posted by: Barbara ||
02/11/2012 19:58 Comments ||
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#10
..well, newc, there's always trading California to China for all those US Treasury debts they're holding, with a 100 year retention lease on the San Diego area with option to buy back.
'Thanks to Allah', as our cricketers would say, "Just 40.1 per cent of the 5-16 age group [schoolchildren in Pakistain] could do two-digit subtraction sums (with carry) whereas a mere 23.6 per cent were able to do three-digit division sums. Only 41.8 per cent could read a sentence in Urdu or their mother tongue (English is a far cry). Far fewer could read a story," revealed the nuclear physicist Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy in his column yesterday, quoting the recently released Annual Status of Education Report.
You bet if the nationwide survey done for the said report had included questions like 'how to drink water according to Islam', 'what to recite in Arabic before you embarked on a journey' or 'which foot be placed before the other whilst entering or leaving a mosque', the students consulted would have come out shining with brilliance.
Primary school textbooks are now replete with such day-to-day knowledge that will win you brownie points in the hereafter. Wasn't it the founder of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, who whilst on a visit to Bloody Karachi ...formerly the capital of Pakistain, now merely its most important port and financial center. It may be the largest city in the world, with a population of 18 million, most of whom hate each other and many of whom are armed and dangerous... in the 1970s was asked how his country could help Pakistain become an economic power, and he had remarked with words to the effect, that how can you even begin to think helping a people who believe that real life starts after death? Obviously, we were yet to shape our blasphemy laws back then, and the dignitary left this country in one piece.
The thing is that we are a unique nation of a unique people living in a unique country with a unique, past, present and future, as the very learned and respectable Mr Javed Jabbar has argued in his recent book to present his case for Pakistain. It is this sheer uniqueness that demands that perhaps our children's abilities too, should be judged by a unique yardstick which is tailor-made to judge Pak intellect, and not the run of the mill surveys based on the wisdom of 'one size fits all'. Tune into a quiz show and you'll get your answers.
Here is a hypothetical example: please don't be surprised if many schoolchildren would not know the name of the only Pak to have won the Nobel Prize, and at the fact that those few who might know the right answer, would also hasten to add that Dr Mohammad Abdus Salam, despite his name, was not a Mohammedan. That's why it was important that the state remove the word 'Mohammedan' from his epitaph in the Rabwah graveyard, which originally proclaimed him as the 'First Mohammedan scientist' to have won the coveted award.
Ours is also a country where young adults in a Pak-Afghan border area barely know the name of the country they live in; many do not know the name of the President or the Prime Minister, as a televised interview by journalist Saleem Safi revealed the other day. But surely, if asked, the same bunch would have denounced America as a reincarnation of Satan in our times and hailed Bin Laden as their lost Messiah. And they would certainly also tell you what constitutes blasphemy, and why women should be locked up.
The knowledge being disseminated from the pulpit (including TV televangelist shows) and the textbooks is simply frightening. It is frightening in the literal sense of the word, because it is aimed at instilling the fear of God in your hearts and minds via the most ferocious of interpretations of the religious dogma. This leaves one incapable of thinking for oneself.
Here's an example: Tibb-e-Nabawi or treatment through recourse to medicines, herbs and curing techniques used by the Prophet of Islam is today a growing field. An entire brigade of pious, qualified doctors and homoeopathists has jumped on to the bandwagon. Many are administering treatment through Hijama, which is Arabic for an old Chinese technique that extracts toxins from the body by superficial incisions made on the skin and drawing blood, using vacuum cups, hence, 'cupping'.
The Prophet must have used it and also recommended it for its curative properties, but to call it a divinely-guided cure for all ailments, from pain in the back to diabetes and hernia, is really stretching it, especially the divine part of it. This is precisely what Hijama practitioners claim as they urge you to recite Ayat-ul-Kursi (a Koranic verse with healing and helpful qualities whilst in distress) as they administer 'cupping'. And thanks to Allah, many are cured.
Who needs arithmetic, reading or writing stories in a worldly language, God forbid, when we have our own unique, divine mechanisms, and Arabic, to guide us through this transitory life on Earth?
Posted by: Fred ||
02/11/2012 00:00 ||
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#1
B.F.D.(Big fukin deal)
Posted by: Redneck Jim ||
02/11/2012 11:39 Comments ||
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#2
"to guide us through this transitory life on Earth?"
Because, you know GODLY living is just too hard to muster.
#6
They're allowed to say such things, in English, in Dawn. Say it in Urdu, however, and you,ll want to check that no visitors have explosive headgear, and that the family gardener isn't regular in his mosque attendance.
[Dawn] PITY the people of Pakistain. The government, the one the people look to in hope for some relief in their everyday lives, has been the victim of criticism and besieged by other institutions and political opponents. It is hard to imagine any government anywhere in the world being able to deliver while its very survival is so often under threat. But there's even worse in store for the people when the government they look to in hope offers only the narrowest of self-interested 'governance'. So it is that with a general election on the horizon, the core committee of the PPP met on Wednesday and decided to provide 'relief' to the people in the budget and to shake up the cabinet. The reasons are not hard to fathom. 'Relief' through budgetary measures is a thinly veiled reference to patronage politics while the budget shake-up will help placate allies in an unwieldy coalition. What constitutes sound and responsible policy and politics is hardly of concern.
Of course, the game of politics is such that all sides are responsible for the mess the country is in; four years of the PPP-led government can hardly be blamed for structural and systemic flaws that prevent the country and its people from fulfilling their potential. And yet, it is surely the case that the PPP has worsened the predicament for both itself and the people of Pakistain on the lam. Patronage politics as a tool of political survival cannot be wished away but the crudeness of it under the present government is unsettling. The focus on its base in rural Pakistain (whether through favourable agricultural pricing or social-protection schemes) and the virtual ignoring of the urban sector squeezed hard by job losses, inflation and power shortages has aggravated the economic downturn. And by recklessly adding to government borrowing without increasing revenues in any significant way, the entire population has been put at risk of an economic meltdown. If a cabinet shake-up is needed, it is to bring competent and motivated individuals in positions of power and influence. Pandering to coalition allies will only worsen the country's predicament.
Posted by: Fred ||
02/11/2012 00:00 ||
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[Dawn] RECENT setbacks have clearly failed to result in any soul-searching within Pakistain's security agencies. A series of stories confirm that they continue to operate with stunning impunity despite questions about their conduct. On Tuesday, four Jamaat-ud-Dawa ...the front organization of Lashkar-e-Taiba... activists were taken away from police custody in Rawalpindi. Yesterday brought reports of the disappearance of a forced-marriage suspect from a cop shoppe, allegedly by military personnel who claimed the sweeper for an army unit could not be incarcerated without notifying the military. Police claim that an officer was temporarily picked up as well. Meanwhile, ...back at the scene of the crime, Lieutenant Queeg had an idea: there was a simple way to tell whether Manetti had been the triggerman -- just look at his shoes!... reports continue to filter in about the alarming Adiala prisoners' case. A Beautiful Downtown Peshawar hospital has said that the four who died, and others currently hospitalised, were brought for medical care at death's door. Also, the dead bodies of Baloch activists continue to turn up in the province. The liquidations of both Saleem Shahzad and members of Balochistan ...the Pak province bordering Kandahar and Uruzgun provinces in Afghanistan and Sistan Baluchistan in Iran. Its native Baloch propulation is being displaced by Pashtuns and Punjabis and they aren't happy about it... MPA Mir Bakhtiar Domki's family still remain murky, and a number of different enmities could have been behind them. But the backgrounds of these victims suggest that intelligence agencies may have been involved, and until responsibility is fixed the sceptical Pak public will continue to regard them as the most likely culprits.
There is more than one reason for concern here. Police stations are hardly bastions of fair play, but at least have procedures in place that govern the detention, registration and investigation of suspects. When people are whisked away by unknown personnel of intelligence agencies, everything from their locations to their crimes is wiped off the map, let alone the right to a fair trial. Second, these instances demonstrate how military and intelligence personnel are eroding the authority of the police.
By taking away suspects from police custody, or hampering police investigations, as in Mr Shahzad's case, they are both weakening this civilian institution and strengthening public perceptions about its ineffectiveness.
It is also clear that the recent questioning of the security establishment has made no difference to its conduct. Mr Shahzad's case created a global furore over its role. The Raymond Davis incident, the late Osama bin Laden's ... who was potted in Pakistain... presence in the country and the raid that killed him, and the attack on PNS Mehran all raised questions about its effectiveness, resulting in the appearance before parliament of the intelligence and military chiefs. The Supreme Court continues hearings in the case of the missing persons and has now taken up the issue of the Adiala prisoners. But no amount of bad publicity or judicial questioning has, it seems, lessened the security establishment's attraction to the quick 'solution' of extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances.
Posted by: Fred ||
02/11/2012 00:00 ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
s. Only 41.8 per cent could read a sentence in Urdu or their mother tongue (English is a far cry). Far fewer could read a story," revealed the nuclear physicist Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy in his column yesterday, quoting the recently released Annual Status of Education Report.
[Dawn] RECENT setbacks have clearly failed to result in any soul-searching within Pakistain's security agencies. A series of stories confirm that they continue to operate with stunning impunity despite questions about their conduct. On Tuesday, four 
