In honor of Rantburg Ramadan and all things haram, Ye Olde Rantburg Ramadan Saloon is hereby declared officially open for business. Please feel free to post your favorite cocktail or beverage recipes plus any other alcohol related anecdotes you might like to share.
Bloody Mary Morning After Hangover Cure
Preparation Time: 2 Minutes
Serves: 1 Person
Ingredients:
œ -1 Cup Tadich Grill Bloody Mary Mix
1-2 Shots Vodka (PRN)
Wedge of Lime
Dash Louisiana Crystal Hot Sauce
Dash Worcestershire Sauce
Dash Angostura Bitters
Dusting of Celery Salt
Cracked Black Pepper
Celery Stalk to Garnish
Ice Cubes
Optional:
Beef broth (for a Bullshot)
Motts Clamato juice (for a Bloody Caesar)
Motts Beefamato juice
Del Monte Snap-E-Tom Tomato and Chile cocktail
Preparation:
Fill glass with ice. Squeeze lime wedge over rocks. Add Crystal hot sauce, Angostura bitters and Worcestershire sauce. Dust with celery salt and cracked black pepper. Pour in vodka and top off with Tadich Grill Bloody Mary mixer. Stir well and serve immediately.
Repeat as needed.
Notes: Painstaking and exhausting investigative research has revealed that the addition of Angostura bitters is the secret for the best possible flavor. It adds a missing vegetable note and creates an appealing counterpoint to the sweet tomato background.
Rinse a Martini glass with a splash of Whiskey. Pour the vodka over the shaker filled with ice. Shake furiously for fifteen seconds. Allow to rest for another twenty seconds.
Pour the Whiskey out of the Martini glass (choose your method), and strain the vodka Martini into the chilled glass.
Posted by: Brian Lequator ||
10/21/2006 13:56 Comments ||
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#5
Cafe Diablo
This showy drink combines spiced brandy, Grand Marnier, and a strong African roast such as Kenyan or Sumatran.
Mason's Restaurant used to create this popular drink tableside, using a saucepan and igniting the brandy before ladling the potent drink into a demitasse cup. It is no longer available at the restaurant (for the obvious fire-hazard reasons), but can certainly be recreated in your own home for special guests. The proportions have been changed to accommodate a coffee mug.
Gently heat all of the ingredients except the coffee in a chafing dish or, if one is not available, a saucepan. Pour the hot coffee into coffee mug. The brandy should begin to release its aroma after a few minutes. At this point, ignite the brandy and allow the flames to burn for 15-20 seconds, and then ladle the brandy mixture over the hot coffee. Mix the coffee and brandy together.
Serves one.
Posted by: Jack Bross ||
10/21/2006 21:03 Comments ||
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#1
Well, this directly reinforces our thoughts. Islam is a cult invented by a murdering criminal, so it is no wonder that it appeals to the criminal class who view themselves as downtrodden, victimized, and "not guilty" for taking what they "deserve." Second, these people(scum) are indoctrinated. This is a direct result of Saoodi Wahabbism being spread worldwide by OUR petrodollars. We must convert to other energy sources and starve these bedouin bastards so that they have to cook with dried camel shit once again.
#1
Lol! If he wants to be a politician, maybe he should go into politics.
Reminds me of a neighbor who was convinced the coach of his football team should be listening to him and his pals. In fact the media really has become like "that guy" who always manages to sit behind you at a ball game - drunk and abusive, screaming at the ump and acting like he knows it all.
Maybe one day Pincus will actually get the connection between falling media stocks and the medias decision to become politicians without the annoyance of that whole election thingy.
President Bush has for the first time conceded a similarity between events in Iraq and those in Vietnam 40 years ago. Asked in a television interview on Wednesday if he now saw a similarity between the recent escalation of American losses in Iraq and those suffered in the Tet offensive of 1968, he admitted that the rise of casualties in the past weeks had given ground for making a comparison. The President's admission will probably trigger a feeding frenzy in the American media, which has been seeking to equate Iraq with Vietnam ever since the insurgency started to inflict significant casualties.
It has to be said, however, that the President's admission will come as a surprise to those with long historical memories. Indeed, it is a surprise that the President allowed himself to be drawn. I recently had the opportunity to discuss Iraq with the President in the Oval Office at an intimate meeting with a small group of historians.
Mr Bush then early September did not want to discuss Iraq, but larger issues of the culture clash between radical Islam and the Christian West. Indeed, he has been ill-advised to rise to the bait. Many of those who took sides over Vietnam are still alive and active, still animated by the passions that transfixed the American people in the 1960s. His admission can do nothing but harm, certainly to him and to his administration, but also to the US forces in general and to the servicemen in Iraq in particular.
A large part of the reason for that is the lack of comparability between Iraq and Vietnam. Anyone familiar with both situations will be struck by the dissimilarities, particularly of scale and in the nature of the enemy.
By January 1968, total American casualties in Vietnam killed, wounded and missing had reached 80,000 and climbing. Eventually deaths in combat and from other causes would exceed 50,000, of which 36,000 were killed in action. Casualties in Iraq are nowhere near those figures. In a bad week in Vietnam, the US could suffer 2,000 casualties. Since 2003, American forces in Iraq have never suffered as many as 500 casualties a month. The number of casualties inflicted in Iraq are not established, but are under 50,000. In any year of the Vietnam war, the communist party of North Vietnam sent 200,000 young men to the battlefields in the south, most of whom did not return. Vietnam was one of the largest and costliest wars in history. The insurgency in Iraq resembles one of the colonial disturbances of imperial history.
There is a good reason for the difference. The Vietnamese communists had organised and operated a countryside politico-military organisation with branches in almost every village. The North Vietnamese People's Army resembled that of an organised Western state. It conscripted recruits throughout the country, trained, organised and equipped them.
The Iraqi insurgency, by contrast, is an informal undertaking by a coalition of religious and ex-Ba'athist groups. It has no high command or bureaucracy resembling the disciplined Marxist structures of North Vietnam. It has some support from like-minded groups in neighbouring countries, but nothing to compare with the North Vietnamese international network, which was supported by China and the Soviet Union and imported arms and munitions from both those countries on a large scale.
North Vietnam was, moreover, a sovereign state, supported explicitly by all other communist countries and by many sympathetic regimes in the Third World. The Iraqi insurgency has sympathisers, but they enjoy no organised system of support and are actively opposed by many of their neighbours and Muslim co-religionists.
The recent upsurge of violence in Iraq in no way resembles the Tet offensive. At Tet, the Vietnamese new year, the North Vietnamese People's Army simultaneously attacked 40 cities and towns in South Vietnam, using 84,000 troops. Of those, the communists lost 45,000 killed. No such losses have been recorded in Iraq at any place or any time. The Tet offensive proved to be a military disaster for the Vietnamese communists. It left them scarcely able to keep up their long-running, low-level war against the South Vietnamese government and the American army.
Indeed, insofar as Tet was a defeat for the United States and for the South Vietnamese government, it was because the American media decided to represent it as such. It has become a cliché to say that Vietnam was a media war, but so it was. Much of the world media were hostile to American involvement from the start, particularly in France, which had fought and lost its own Vietnam war in 1946-54. The defeat of Dien Bien Phu rankled with the French and there were few who wanted to see the Americans win where they had failed.
It was, however, the American rather than the foreign media who decided on the verdict. The American media had begun by supporting the war. As it dragged on, however, without any end in sight and with the promised military victory constantly postponed, American newspapers and critically the evening television programmes began to treat war news as a bad story.
The media were extremely influential, particularly at such places as university campuses and the firesides of American families whose sons had been conscripted for service. When casualties of 150 a week began to be reported, the war began to be increasingly unpopular. President Johnson, who was temperamentally oversensitive to criticism, believed that one particular broadcast by Walter Cronkite in February 1968, just after Tet, lost him Middle America. "If I've lost Kronkite," he said to his staff, "I have lost the war."
President Bush must now expect that America's television anchormen will be looking for a similar opportunity to damage him. If they find it, the blame will be the President's alone.
The Vietnam war was not lost on the battlefield, but in the American media's treatment of news from the front line.
#1
I think Dubya's point was that the current push by the jihadis and insurgents is similar to Tet: they hope to demoralize the folks at home by showing that the fighting can go on and on. Bush knows that the Tet offensive was a military disaster for the Viet Cong (not so much for the NVA), and he's aware of the publicity angle.
So the question is, if the current fighting is a Tet, will we be smart enough to recognize it?
Posted by: Steve White ||
10/21/2006 11:38 Comments ||
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#2
Those of us who do, need to educate those around us who may not see what's going on.
"The Vietnam war was not lost on the battlefield, but in the American media's treatment of news from the front line."
That's what's going on now with MSM. Just look at that CNN shit. And, like then, the military is being held back by incompetent civilian leadership. This is Bush's real failure. He can't communicate with the American public. He should have said at the outset that Americans were going to inflict their wrath on this enemy , wherever it was found. And, that would mean unrestricted killing of those who wish harm to Americans. He should have said that it would result in loss of American soldiers, but the real toll would be on those enemies who would be guaranteed to lose millions in population. Had he done this initially, the public could have digested it, and would have supported it. Then, results could have been achieved. Now we're back in the Viet Nam pit. The MSM is doing their best to undermine the government, and most uninformed citizens are being led. And, this election may be lost. Just like for Johnson in '68.
On October 20, the media reported insurgents had taken over police stations in Amara in Iraq, showing the police were no better than two years ago and the insurgents were, shall we say, resurging.
End of sound bite.
Fact: It was not al-Qaeda, not insurgents, not even the usual sectarian violence, just a simple gang war for local power.
Cant tell the players without a scorecard:
Mahdi Army is Shi'ite - Badr Corps is Shiite
Mahdi Army is loyal to al-Sadr - Badr Corps is loyal to SCIRI
Mahdi Army is nationalist - Badr Corps is trained in Iran
Mahdi Army is a militia - Badr Corps controls the police department
Mahdi Army dominates the region - Badr Corps control the police department
The play:
1. The Madhi Army assassinated a police official, trying to assert their power
2. The police and/or the Badr Corps kidnapped and/or arrested five guys, including a brother of Madi Army bigshot
3. The Mahdi army retaliated by attacking the police/Badr Corps in the police stations
4. News media stringers show up, film at 11.
5. Media reports hopeless quagmire
6. Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki sends in the Army, and the violence stops.
note that today (10/21), according to the Jerusalem Post, Iraq's main Sunni Arab party on Saturday strongly backed a fledgling agreement between Sunni and Shi'ite religious figures aimed at ending sectarian bloodletting. Maybe a positive outcome from yesterday's violence?
(A much longer, more detailed discussion of events, which is the basis for the above summary, is reprinted in the footnote below, for those with a longer attention span.)
So whats the point? A little perspective:
The St. Valentine's Day massacre is the name given to the shooting of seven people as part of a Prohibition Era conflict between two powerful criminal gangs in Chicago, Illinois in the winter of 1929: the South Side Italian gang led by Al "Scarface" Capone and the North Side Irish/German gang led by George 'Bugs' Moran.
On the morning of Thursday, February 14, St. Valentine's Day, seven members of Moran's gang were lined up against the rear inside wall of the garage of the S-M-C Cartage Company in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago's North Side. They were then shot and killed by five members of Al Capone's gang (two of whom were dressed as police officers).
The massacre marked the end of Moran's power on the North Side, and his gang vanished into obscurity, enabling Capone to take over the area; however, the event also brought the belated and full attention of the federal government to Capone and his criminal activities. This was ultimately Capone's downfall, for it led to his conviction and imprisonment on the Volstead Act and income tax evasion charges in 1931.
Did the press say the Chicago police were no good, and that the City of Chicago was hopeless and should be abandoned to the gangsters? I imagine some folks thought that.
Did the press call for a new President of the United States because of a gang war in Chicago? I doubt it, although President Calvin Coolidge, Jr. was replaced by Herbert Hoover less than three weeks after the Massacre on March 4, 1929.
It was Inauguration Day; Hoover had been elected President in November, 1928.
Again, you ask: Whats the point?
The press is reporting inaccurately (see the footnote) and does not give any background. The press thinks every story is about the failure of something and is not interested in anything more complex, especially on the evening news.
Saddam controlled this sort of activity by crushing one or both sides. Remember he drained thousands of square miles of marsh to punish the Marsh Arabs. Even such an enormous environmental catastrophe as that was not well reported. I read about it in Civil Engineering Magazine, in an article written by an Iraqi civil engineer who fled the country in 1991. There were no doubt other atrocities that were not reported at all, in this country.
With Saddam in the slammer, Pandoras Box has been opened, just like in Yugoslavia after strongman Tito died. The violence in Iraq pales compared to the genocide in Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia, and there are still thousands of NATO troops in the region.
The point: The war in Iraq is not lost just because the press only reports failures. A bit of balance:
The US State Department reports weekly to Congress on the war. (See the whole report at - http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/74934.pdf Earlier weeks are available, too.) This week they reported a total of 312,000 Iraqi police and army have been trained and equipped. The Iraqi Army has taken total control of Ramadi, the so-called Hotbed of the Insurgency. The insurgents tested them a few days later with a complex, three-pronged attack. The Army repelled the attack with no losses.
The average Baghdad resident gets 6 hours of electricity a day; for the rest of the country, it is 12 hours a day not good, but better than last year. Oil production hovers quite close to the Iraqi Ministrys goal of 2.5 million barrels a day, and Iraq is exporting about half that.
The real point: Slanted, short-sighted, stupid press coverage really makes me angry.
Footnote:
From the leftist Juan Cole:
..Amara is the capital of Maysan province (pop. 770,000). Maysan province in general and Amara in particular support the nationalist Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Maysan and its capital are among the places to which the Marsh Arabs were displaced when their swamps were dried up by Saddam in retribution for the uprising in 1991, and they are often desperately poor and very tribal, and they seem to have joined the Sadr Movement en masse during the past 3 years.
When the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) controlled the Interior Ministry in 2005 and until May, 2006, it used the ministry's national oversight of local police forces to infiltrate members of SCIRI's paramilitary, the Badr Corps, into the Amara police force. There is a bubbling low-level feud between the Sadrists in Maysan and the SCIRI police.
So recently the Mahdi Army assassinated Qasim al-Tamimi, a police official who was also a member of the Badr Corps. The Badr Corps was formed in Iran and trained by the Revolutionary Guards, and is viewed by many in the Iraqi-nationalist Mahdi Army as the tool of a foreign power.
Then the police arrested or abducted (when militia are in police, how could you tell?) 5 men, including the brother of a Mahdi Army leader in Amara.
Then protests escalated into fighting, and the Mahdi Army took over several police stations and killed or wounded dozens of police/ Badr Corps militiamen.
The Western press is mostly reporting this story backwards, as a pro-Iranian Sadr Movement taking over Amara. In fact, the Sadr Movement already dominated Amara politically, but the (Iranian-trained) Badr Corps had this unnatural niche in the police. It was Badr that had "taken over" the security forces in a largely Sadrist city. The Mahdi Army was attempting to align local politics with local power.
Muqtada al-Sadr, the young spiritual leader of the Sadr Movement and the Mahdi Army, demanded that his men stop fighting and said that he washed his hands of anyone who disobeyed his orders, according to Aljazeera.
Posted by: Bobby ||
10/21/2006 13:10 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
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#1
Yum! I do enjoy intelligent analysis, especially when it includes history I didn't know. Thank you, Bobby.
The Muslim world has youth, numbers and global ambitions. The West is growing old and enfeebled, and lacks the will to rebuff those who would supplant it. It's the end of the world as we've known it. An excerpt from 'America Alone'. Long, see link.
#1
Steyn presents us with quite a challenge. I think we can handle it - but the real test actually begins here at home, with those who don't care what agent brings us down, just as long as America falls.
#5
My copy of America Alone arrived the other day, and it's a damn good read; it ought to be part of the Core Curriculum here at Rantburg U.
Europe's problem is spelled out neatly by our old buddy Mullah Krekar:
"We're the ones who will change you," the Norwegian imam Mullah Krekar told the Oslo newspaper Dagbladet in 2006. "Just look at the development within Europe, where the number of Muslims is expanding like mosquitoes. Every Western woman in the EU is producing an average of 1.4 children. Every Muslim woman in the same countries is producing 3.5 children." As he summed it up: "Our way of thinking will prove more powerful than yours."
It'll prove more powerful than ours, too, if we don't wake the fuck up-- and quick. Multiculturalism is suicide.
Posted by: Dave D. ||
10/21/2006 8:57 Comments ||
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#6
NS - Cool beans - sorry if I over-punctuated, lol.
We have some tough domestic chores to handle, methinks, before we can address the "away games" properly - with full malice aforethought, lol. This hands-tied-behind-our-backs shit is getting good people killed. And it can be traced to the domestic asshats. I realize that only a minority here agree with my assessment, at least in terms of what needs to be done and how, but I believe the proof is pretty obvious and hanging onto skewed worldviews, cuz they make us happier or whatever, is insane. Lots of it going around.
Just as "islamofascism" needed to enter the public dialog - and generated the expected response, so do "traitor" and "sedition". Overdue, IMHO, since the lag time for social / cultural changes is so long. To put a finer point on it:
When the MSM is prosecuted and assets are seized for seditious leaks, when the leakers are imprisoned or shot as traitors, when judges who pass down insane squishy decisions against terrorist enablers are removed from the bench and disbarred, when KSM is finally stood against the wall and shot like the dog he is, then we'll know the "dialog" is underway.
As for who we try to help "out there", and who we wave bye-bye to, well - that's a damned tough one.
#7
"We have some tough domestic chores to handle, methinks, before we can address the "away games" properly..."
Anymore I'm thinking that handling those "domestic chores" is a prerequisite to actually accomplishing anything in this war to defend ourselves against Islam: until we do, we're just spinning our wheels, wasting time, money and lives.
I'm baffled and infuriated by the willingness of our political leadership to meekly accept the constraints imposed by the Left-- multiculturalism, cultural relativism, political correctness, and identity politics-- instead of actively working to remove those constraints. By force, if necessary.
Because until we do, the trajectory we're on does NOT lead to victory.
Posted by: Dave D. ||
10/21/2006 9:43 Comments ||
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#8
We need to immediately ban Muslims from our societies. Once in , they are completely destructive. Of course their breeding cows will out populate us. While existing on Western dole ,yet. Stupidity is our problem. Lack of attention is our problem. Lack of will is our problem. We have to act now, before the population crisis arrives.
#10
Steyn would be right if the status quo is projected into the future. I think we will come to our senses and at long last deal with the global cancer of jihadism. We are fighting something larger that personal terrorism.
#12
it is true that islam is united in purpose and we are a house divided. But in the end, Islam can't win. Islam has nothing to its credit. No industry, no education, nothing but oil. Were it not for the oil and the funding that comes with it the only countries that had any measure of success were those that embraced some forms of secular governments. The tyrants were/are all funded by oil.
Will we have bloodshed? Yes. Can they get control of some countries in Europe? Perhaps. At some point, the tide of public opinion will turn. PC will go out the window. And when the fighting really starts - they may be ruthless but they are not effective. They are in trouble when our methods of ruthlessness begin to match their own.
#13
Actually, the Muslims better have most European countries in hand when the true fighting begins : remember, the Europeans have proven themselves masters of industrial scale slaughter when it served their purposes. If the Muslims do not have most of Europe under their heel when the gloves come off, then they will die in droves as the Europeans go from country to country looking for the "other" in that outbreak of Muslim-induced tribal warfare.
#14
it is true that islam is united in purpose and we are a house divided. But in the end, Islam can't win. Islam has nothing to its credit. No industry, no education, nothing but oil.
Agree that Islam has nothing to its credit, but disagree that they can't win. Look at the the fall of the Roman Empire. The Goths and the Vandals pretty well put paid to the Western Empire by their simple lawlessness - proof that nothing can replace something. I hope that we will come to our senses and develop the will to expell and defeat the barbarians before they pass their tipping point.
#15
Rome had pretty well hollowed itself out by the time the Goths and the Vandals came along, at least the Western Empire -- tax revenues down, the independent farmers become slaves or dole-receiving city slum dwellers, the aristocratic families feuding amongst themselves and stealing from the public purse, the vaunted Roman Army legions partially manned, and that mostly by borderland barbarians. Just as the Eastern Empire was ready to topple when the Muslim hordes came a-conquering. Europe may well have reached that point, but despite the best efforts of American's Progressives, we are most certainly not anywhere near that point in the U.S.
#16
there was no sense on the Continent that our Big Idea had beaten their Big Idea.
That is because Europe has yet to push socialism under the wheels and embrace capitalism, which is the Big Idea that beat communism. Right down to supplying Europe with much of the military might needed to fend off the Soviets while America worked hard to bankrupt the communist regime.
With the best will in the world, it's hard to credit the citizens of France or Italy as having made any serious contribution to the defeat of Communism. Au contraire, millions of them voted for it, year in, year out.
Case closed.
By "demographic," I mean the Muslim world's high birth rate, which by mid-century will give tiny Yemen a higher population than vast empty Russia.
One word: Jawdropping.
By "geopolitical," I mean that, if you think the United Nations and other international organizations are antipathetic to America now, wait a few years and see what kind of support you get from a semi-Islamified Europe.
This notion had better sink into our politicians minds damn quick. It is the formula for unilateralism that America will need to follow if it wants to survive.
As more and more of the evidence piles up, it seems to me that we will end up using nuclear weapons to achieve bulk sterilization of the Middle East. Islam's agenda is unrelenting and it has no compunctions about destroying the most treasured achievements of any other culture so long as its own continues to advance.
It is time to quite fooling ourselves about there ever being a chance of coexisting with Muslims. They must all be deported and Islam banned from America, immediately. Anything less is tantamount to national suicide.
#17
Zen, you are ahead of time. The notion you present is predictable, but the problem is that there is not too many Zens out there at the present time.
So, the result will be that we would win, but after a long slog and we'll have to pay a heavy price.
On the positive side of the ballance sheet, the reaon why there are no muslims in Star Trek would be apparent. ;-)
#18
Agree TW, but Ward-Perkins suggests that the Vandals caused the fall of taxes by simple lawlessness. Then capped the process by destroying the rich provinces in N Africa. The Romans were not able to be strong everywhere, and they were at first unable, and later unwilling to bring the barbarians to decisive, pitched battle.
Seems analogous to the situation in Europe now, and our reluctance to put a serious hurt on the Jihadists and their fellow travellers, especially in Iraq.
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.
