Saturday, July 24, 2010

More Media Lapdogs

Serenity has the perfect example of the Democrat Propaganda Machine in action.  Let's roll with the facts, shall we?

Only 21 states saw job increases in June, the lowest this year.  650,000 people have given up looking for work.  The layoff of temporary census workers, which the government used to puff up their economic numbers, has the chickens coming home to roost, and businesses are not hiring.

Now, given all that, what do you think the headline on that story is?  Anyone?  Anyone?  Bueller?

How about:  "Unemployment rates fall in 39 states in June"

I shit you not.  All we heard when Bush was in office was economic disaster, when the unemployment rate was around 5%.  HALF that of the Liberal Lord and Messiah!  But thanks to the economic hellhole created by St. Hope and Change and the Democrat American Communist Party, we have unemployment hovering around 10%, and the propaganda whores of the media have sunshine shooting out their asses as they desperately try to pull their Marxist Master out of the hole he's created.

I would love it if every major newspaper burned to the ground overnight.

Shirley Sherrod is a gift

That keeps on giving.

I don't know if this is a gift that landing into Andrew Breitbart's lap, or if he orchestrated this entire thing.  Given the way he handled ACORN and their repeated lies, it can go either way.  However, the way the Obama administration and the NAACP has been jumping around, you know he's struck a nerve and struck it hard.  And the more you watch the video, the more you're struck with the fact that the audience, a bunch of NAACP members, were applauding Sherrod's act of racism even if it happened decades ago.  So the act was old, and the approval was up to date.

It still shows a bunch of racism at the NAACP.  Breitbart doesn't owe anyone any kind of apology.

Friday, July 23, 2010

Thursday, July 22, 2010

Walking the Dog

Took the dog to the park.  Tossed a tennis ball for him.  While I was walking around, I met an old gent who was planting a tree.  His name is Charlie Palmer.

He was a "Water Boy", a water filtration apecialist, with the 95th Division in Europe during World War Two.  His company landed at Normandy four days after the battle was over.  He spent three years and eight days in the US Army, and proudly says that he made the rank of PFC three times.  He lives in a house darn near in the middle of the park, and enjoys it because it gives him a steady stream of pretty girls to look at.  Claims that if he ever looses the urge to ogle the ladies, he might as well cash his chips in right then and there.

I shook his hand, and told him that I was damn proud to meet him.  These days, your chance of shaking the hand of a WWII vet is slim to none, and I wasn't about to pass up the opportunity.

He finished with his planting, we gave our salutations and I headed back home, just a little bit richer.

Scary

Via GOC I found this little quiz, and got all 11 questions correct.


Political-Quiz-Charts_11.png


What scares the shit out of me is that the questions aren't that hard.  And I scored better than 95% of the other people who took the test?  I need my readers to go take it to raise that particular side of the bell curve.

Dear TSA

To the TSA agents at Indianapolis International Airport,

At least you had the good graces to look somewhat embarrassed as you gave me a body cavity search and swabbed the inside of my notebook that had my rank and last name on the ACU cover.  Seriously.  I've flown to Kuwait with an M-16 on board, yet one machine beeps in Indy and they start whipping out the long latex gloves.  You would think that at some point, someone would look at the situation and say "Um....  no, he ain't gonna blow up a plane."  Especially when you have my military ID in your hands, with my non-muslim name right there in front of you.  How many terrorists who attacked us were named "Dave", anyways?  Even little Johnny Taliban gave himself a muslim name before he started killing Americans.

I am NOT a terrorist.

However, the free WiFi at the airport rocks.  Keep that up.

Signed,

Ragin' Dave

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

This is my shocked face

The media was in collusion to get their Liberal Lord and Messiah elected?  Say it isn't so!

Others went further. According to records obtained by The Daily Caller, at several points during the 2008 presidential campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect their favored candidate. Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage.
In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.”
Michael Tomasky, a writer for the Guardian, also tried to rally his fellow members of Journolist: “Listen folks–in my opinion, we all have to do what we can to kill ABC and this idiocy in whatever venues we have. This isn’t about defending Obama. This is about how the [mainstream media] kills any chance of discourse that actually serves the people.”
“Richard Kim got this right above: ‘a horrible glimpse of general election press strategy.’ He’s dead on,” Tomasky continued. “We need to throw chairs now, try as hard as we can to get the call next time. Otherwise the questions in October will be exactly like this. This is just a disease
How long have I been saying that the media is nothing more than the propaganda wing of the Democrat American Communist Party?  Do you need more proof?  The old Media in America cannot be trusted.  They have a political agenda, and they'll use their influence in the media to push that agenda on America.  All their claims of objectivity are a lie.  All their claims of non-bias is a lie.  Everything out of their mouths is a lie, designed to push their political ideology, and nothing more.

Let them all choke.

The New Media Wins Again

A USDA official who's racist speech was videotaped and then played over the internet has resigned.


The Agriculture Department announced Monday, shortly after FoxNews.com published its initial report on the video, that Sherrod had resigned.
“There is zero tolerance for discrimination at USDA, and I strongly condemn any act of discrimination against any person,” Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in a written statement. “We have been working hard through the past 18 months to reverse the checkered civil rights history at the department and take the issue of fairness and equality very seriously.


Good.  Every time the Obama administration has to jump because of the New Media, that's a good thing.  Keep them jumping.  Light is the only cure for the corruption in D.C.  You can see the video referenced at the link.  "I took him to his own kind" is not the words I ever want to hear coming from a government official's mouth.  But the Obama administration revels in racial strife - it's how he got elected, and he's going to ensure that there's more than enough to go around while he's in office.

Monday, July 19, 2010

How to make mead

First thing you need to know is this - if you ask five people how to make mead, you're going to get five different answers.  So all I'm going to do is give you a basic description, because anything after that is going to cause various other winemakers to snort and say "That's not the way to do it!  THIS is how it's done!"

Mead is a honey wine.  It's the earliest form of alcohol, and probably the simplest form of alcohol to make. You need honey, water, and yeast.  And something to ferment it in.  And gas locks (bubblers).  And sanitizer.  Lots and lots of sanitizer.  So, the process goes like this -

First, you sanitize anything that's going to come in contact with your mead.  Yeast, while really really good at turning sugar into CO2 and alcohol, it's not that much of a fighter.  So other bacteria, viruses and fungi who also love to eat sugar will crowd out the yeast if they get half a chance.  Therefore, don't give them half a chance.  We use an alkaline sanitizer that we buy at a local home brew shop.  It'll turn organic matter into goo if it sits for a while, so use gloves.  Or use a different sanitizer, but we like the alkaline stuff.

You need large bottles.  We separated our batch into five different gallon bottles, but if you want you can ferment the entire batch in one big container.  The reason we separate is that we like to mess around.  The Ragin' Mrs. made a container of pomegranate mead this time.  One container we used honey that had separated, so it has a different flavor.

(FYI, mead with fruit added is called a "melomel")

Once you sanitize the bottles, you add the honey and water.  Mix it first, trust me on this.  You don't want to spend your day shaking bottles full of honey and water trying to mix it up.  The ratio is roughly three or four pounds of honey (a little over one quart) to each gallon of water.

Yes, this means you're going to end up with about six gallons of honey/water mix.  It's called "must".

Once you have your must in it's sterilized fermentation container, you add the yeast.  Again, we got it from a local home brew shop.  We used Sherry yeast for this batch, which means we'll get an alcohol content of about 15%.  Once we reach that level of alcohol, the yeast die off, so it's pretty much self regulation on that score.  There are a ton of different kinds of yeast out there, and they'll all give you a different alcohol level, different flavors, yada yada yada.  If you can find a home brew shop, talk to 'em.  Better yet, if you can find a home brewing or wine-making club, talk to THEM.  Chance are they'll not only give you more advice than you can use, but they'll have lots of equipment they might let you borrow.

While the yeast is fermenting, it's going to let off a lot of CO2.  That's what the gas lock is for.  Oxygen is alcohol's enemy, so you want something that will let the CO2 escape while keeping oxygen out.  When the yeast is fully working, the gas lock will actually bubble.  You let the mix sit in it's bottle and ferment for about two weeks.

After two weeks, you siphon it out of one bottle and transfer it to another and let it ferment all over again.  This is called "racking".  It re-energizes the yeast, helps remove sediment and prevents the mix from getting....  well, really bad flavors from all the dead yeast sitting around in it.

After two more weeks, you siphon once again (and filter it if you want) and then put it in it's last bottles, where it'll sit for anywhere from three months to a year.  If you've got a good bottling system, you can let it sit for a couple of years.  This isn't a red wine here, you don't let it sit for decades.  Once it's a year old, it's drinkable.  Hell, depending on the sugar content and the yeast you use, you could drink it in three months.

As long as you keep everything sterilized before you use it, you should have no problem.  And there you have it.  It sounds a lot more complicated than it is.  The biggest things to remember is keep everything sterile.  The more honey you add, the sweeter your mead will be.  And different yeast will give you different results.  Don't go buy bread-making yeast and dump it in.  You won't get the flavor you want.  You can find sherry yeasts, champagne yeasts, you name it and it's there.  The shop we use has about twenty different kinds of yeast for sale.

That's the basics.  Everything else is negotiable.  You can infuse your mix with tea leaves, mint, fruit, extracts, pure fruit juice, or anything else you think you might like the flavor of.  You can use different yeast.  You can change the ratio of honey to water.  All of that will give you different flavors.  You can serve it different ways as well - you can put it in a crock pot and warm it up with a sachet of clove, cinnamon, nutmeg and allspice to get mulled mead, which flat out rocks on a cold winter night.  For those of you in more southern climes, chill it and serve it with a good tart fruit that'll cut through the sweetness.  Maybe some good really dark chocolate.

Any questions?

Yesterday

Went to church.
Dug up potatos from the garden.
Harvested beans.  Ever heard the phrase "a hill of beans"?  I now own that hill.  They're drying on the front porch as we speak.
Started a five gallon batch of mead.

Today?  Back on my head.  Ever heard that old joke about a man who dies and has to choose between heaven and hell?  He chooses hell because heaven is people standing chest deep in shit, and hell is people standing in shit that's up to their calf.  Only after he chooses hell, Satan comes in and says "OK People!  Break's over!  Back on your heads!"

That's my phrase for my little lovely office.  "BACK ON YOUR HEADS!"

Sunday, July 18, 2010

More and More

The Obama Administration reminds me of the Soviet Union.  The "Senior Policy Advisor for Healthy Food Initiatives"?

Comrade Citizen Advisor for Ensuring Correct Thin-ness!  It helps if you say it with a Russian Accent.

To Do List, revised

Bought honey.
Cleaned Garage
Bought ammo.
Cooked dinner.

Hot damn, I made it through three out of four things on my list yesterday!  Of course, that just means that I have another list today, but still.....  three out of four!