A Recipe for Masala Chai (tea)

This is a recipe for Masala Chai (tea). In Hindi, masala means spice and chai means tea so we are talking spice tea here.  While I am very fond of Stash's Chai teas, I am a loose tea person. Teabags are filled with tea fannings or tea leaves that have been milled into tiny pieces which loose their aromatic components vary quickly. This is particularly noticeable in teas with delicate flavors such as Darjeeling and Dragon Well. That is a tragedy with Darjeeling since the highly volatile components along with the muscatel flavor component are what makes Darjeeling teas so satisfying. This led me to make my own Masala Chai to vary the spice flavors thus avoiding the consistent flavor of the commercial Chai teas and lastly, to avoid teabags.

I use an FTGFOP1 (Finest, Tippy, Golden, Flowery, Orange Pekoe) Assam tea for my black tea based Masala Chai. Assam teas are very robust and full bodied so they balance the spice flavors better than a more delicate and complex flavored tea such as Darjeeling. Irish Breakfast tea is a blend of Assam and Keemun teas and is intended to be fullbodied to hold up well to milk and sugar. Adding spice to it is just the next step. I haven't yet tried Keemun but I plan to. I will also try using Irish Breakfast as a tea base. The Assam base is working well.

For a masala chai based on green tea, to get those catechins to fight the free radicals, I'd use something like a Chinese Sencha which has a more robust flavor characteristic, highly vegetal, than many of the other Chinese green teas and would better balance the spices. I suspect that one would use less spices with the green tea than one would use with the black tea. I haven't tried this but I suspect 60 to 80 percent of the spices used for a black tea would be best for a green tea.

My teapot holds 3 cups (24 fl. ox.) of water, so you can scale the recipe accordingly for your teapots and serving sizes. This is a single spice chai. Adjust according to what you like.  These measurements are approximate.  Only be anal if you want to reproduce the results exactly.

1. 3 tsp.  Assam loose tea
2. 1/8 tsp. ground cinnamon
3. 1/8 tsp. ground ginger
4. 1/8 tsp. ground allspice
5. 1/12 tsp. ground cardomom
6. 1/16 tsp. ground coriander
7. 1/16 tsp. ground nutmeg
8. 1/16 tsp. ground cloves

Other spices I'd like to try added one at a time are:

• licorice
• star anise
• ground aniseseed

Steep for at least 10 minutes in initially boiling water.  If desired, add milk, cream, or half and half to taste and sugar to taste.

WARNING: Milk prevents your body from absorbing the antioxidants present in the tea.  The sugar does not.  I sometimes use agave nectar to slightly sweeten my masala chai but I normally drink it without milk and sugar.

The spices used are all Ayurvedic spices with well documented therapeutic benefits.  While masala chai is not considered to be 'medicine,' it is considered to be a beneficial 'health' drink.  If you add licorice, do some research on the safe daily dosage.  Licorice is good for you provided you do not eat too much.  It causes retention of potassium so if you are taking an ACE inhibitor I'd eat even less.

If you want this to taste more like Stash's chais, increase the cardomom to 1/8 teaspoon.  Yummy.  Enjoy playing with the spice quantities and try just sprinkling the spices in to get varying flavors each time for that variation is a good thing outlook.

Bursting some Delusions of the Self-Servatives.

Objectivists, Tea Party Protesters, the Religious Wrong (Christofascists), and Neocons (fascists) are all Self-Servatives that refuse to acknowledge that they have responsibilities to other people in society by virtue of being a member of society. They claim to be self contained and not responsible for anyone else because they neither ask for or take anything from others in society. They do not grok that calling the fire department when their house catches fire is taking. Calling the police is taking. Using public roads and bridges is taking. This article explores various aspects of their delusions about not being a sharing member of society and not recognizing their duties to that society.

The self-servatives say "The people in Massachusetts are opposed to Health Care Reform."

The people in MA voted the way they did exactly because the Senate's bill was exactly like what MA has. Everyone in MA now must buy insurance from insurance companies and they all have $3000 deductibles per person. So you get to pay insurance premiums for what used to be called major medical AND you get to pay for your doctor and pharmaceuticals yourself. I have type 1 diabetes and I would not fill up that deductible in a year without being hospitalized. The people in MA are very unhappy with the HCR as proposed by the corporatists in DC. It's exactly like what they have and what they have blows chunks. I talked to my friends in MA to ask them what was going on because I surmised that I could not trust the BS from the corporate propaganda dispensers that call themselves a news media.



They also say "Socialism is bad and doesn't work. Medicare and Social Security are going bankrupt."

The proper way to fix medicare and social security is to stop stealing from its revenue stream to pay for other things. The Congress have been stealing from social security to pay for things like SDI and MX missiles forever. Daniel Moynihan was bitching about stealing from social security in 1972. The practice never stopped and it got expanded to stealing from medicare under Reagan. Reagan reduced 'taxes' by reducing income tax rates a bit and then raising Medicare and Social Security deductions which are not considered a 'tax' even though they are. If you were actually paying attention instead of listening to the neocon bullshit you would have noticed that the amount deducted from your paycheck actually went up, not down. When you consider how State and local taxes went up after Reagan's cuts, the typical middle class person's total tax burden increased significantly during the 1980s in spite of the neocon rhetoric about 'tax cuts'. Only the very wealthy benefited from tax cuts as the Capital Gains tax cut was an actual tax reduction which does not usually help the middle class very much if at all.


The self-servatives say "Health Care is not a Right. It's not listed in the Constitution as a right."

They read the bill of rights and can't find health care and so it's not a right. This is a reading comprehension problem. The bill of rights clearly states that is is not an exclusive list of rights, it only lists the ones that might not be obvious and that there is a large number of inalienable rights that are not listed (such as privacy, which the wrong wing is hell bent on doing away with.).

In the preamble of the constitution it clearly states that one of the responsibilities of the federal government is to promote the general welfare. If having forty-five thousand citizens die every year because they do not have a means to obtain health care is promoting the general welfare, then I am a horseshoe crab.

I wonder why we wrote into the Iraq constitution that health care is a right. We are paying for Iraq to have socialized health care. WE pay so that they can have something we don't even provide for ourselves.

Why did WE pay to build nice new hospitals all over Iraq? Could it be that Cheney wanted to give lots of money to Halliburton and KBR at taxpayer expense? Could this all really be about corporate welfare? We throw bailout money at banks and their executives give themselves billions in bonuses. Now we throw God knows how much at the insurance cartel.

The insurance cartel is a parasite. They exist only to bleed money from the revenue stream into their own pockets. With insurance cartels operating at a 20 to 40% cut of the health care revenue stream, THEY ARE THE MAJOR COST IN THE HEALTH CARE SYSTEM. And yet they do not provide any service that contributes to health care. They are money pipes and reservoirs which leak heavily. They should be replaced with a system that doesn't leak. It's our money they are taking for providing nothing but grief.

If you are serious about reducing costs, you'd kick those bandits to the curb. They increase costs at the service providers by forcing them to have to hire people just to interface with insurance companies and then argue with them when they refuse to approve a procedure to be done. Since I have diabetes I have much more experience with the insurance cartel weasels. They provide no health care and only make providing health care more difficult. The quicker we replace them with a single payer system, the better off we'll be.

Throughout the world, the highest singly payer overhead is around %3.5. I think that was Spain, but I could be wrong. Medicare currently operates at 1.5% overhead so there is no reason to expect that Medicare for All would run any higher than a 2% overhead. Gee, thats one tenth the overhead of the lowest overhead insurance company. In the single payer system, the stockholders receive health care, not dividends.

I have no idea why the wrong wing fights so hard to protect unnecessary middlemen. It's voting against your own best interests. They don't want to provide help to people that can't work, but they'll throw billions at companies that provide no useful service. The insurance cartel is in the 'we make money without doing anything useful to anyone' business. Once upon a time what they do would have been called a protection racket. I'm rather annoyed that misinformed ideologues want to keep the racketeers in business.


Wrong wing self-servatives are always saying "I got mine, screw everybody else" and "I take care of myself, I shouldn't have to support a bunch of losers who can't take care of themselves." and they say "I pulled myself up by my own bootstraps."

This is because they are defective socially. They live with the absurd notion that no one needs anyone else. They can get by without the help of anyone. They isolate themselves and refuse to learn anything from anyone else. They live on their virtual island denying the fact that they actually depend on society.

Anti-social twatwaffles*.

Back when we were hunter-gatherers, these clowns would have been ejected from the tribe to starve. Tribe members that refused to share were a huge liability. Hunter-gatherer tribes were a highly integrated (socialized) survival collective. Every tribe member depended on every other tribe member. Humans are a highly social species that are normally highly interconnected. Since the antisocial members were ejected to starve on their own, antisocial genetics were weeded out. This has broken down in our broken current society. The anti-social are no longer being ejected to starve. They benefit from society while loudly proclaiming that they do not. They are delusional and tiresome.

You can take the individual out of the collective but you can't take the need for the collective out of the individual.

Many do not realize that humans from 20 thousand years ago are virtually identical to ourselves in every way but size (we've been getting larger over time). Our needs dictated by genetics are the same. The social collective need is hard coded in our DNA. The greedy selfish pricks were always ejected from the tribe to die by themselves. This caused genes with social skills to be passed on to future generations while selfish genes were pruned out of the gene pool. Apparently the genes causing selfishness is is a mutation which keeps coming back into the gene pool and since we no longer eject them to die, we are overrun by self-servatives.

That's one of my theories to explain their anomalous behavior. Our collective has developed our technology well beyond anything our ancestors could have imagined. Even with greedy self-servatives fucking things up and pretending they pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps. They didn't pull themselves up. They were standing on the shoulders of their ancestors. As we all are.

They expect us to believe that their parents taught them nothing. They never attended school or read a book. No other human ever taught them anything.

We still rely on each other. You aren't born with knowledge of computer systems pre-existing in your head. You read books written by others and were taught by others and yet you don't need anyone else? I'm not sure how that works. Your job exists only because your company needs specialists that can perform your specialized job function. All those other humans at your place of work are the reason your job exists. You are dependent on a very large number of people. Do you grow your own food? Do you build your own transportation system?

• George Washington Bridge - socialism
• Subways - socialism
• Military - socialism
• Public Schools - socialism
• Public Libraries - socialism
• Interstate Highways - socialism
• Fire and Police services - socialism
• Every road, bridge, water and sewer system - all socialism

Our lives would be so much improved if we did away with socialism. Everyone that wants to cross the Hudson should hire their own contractors to build their own bridge.

I have to pay to install pipes to carry your shit, but you are unwilling to pay to provide health care. How about you take care of your own shit. You don't need anyone else.

There is nothing in the constitution about bridges, roads, and sewers either but we aren't stupid enough to dream up asinine reasons to prevent those from being built.

I love the Tea Party Protesters. They drive on public roads to go stand on public sidewalks and in public parks or at public libraries so that they can protest socialism. The irony is so thick it's choking me. If cluelessness is a virtue, they are mightily virtuous.


Then they say "Aren't we a little more advanced then hunter-gatherers?"

Only technologically.

Socially, physiologically, and psychologically we are identical. Human behavior within their own collectives has not changed. Our collectives have gotten larger because technology allows for much larger tribe sizes.

Don't fool yourself into thinking you are any smarter then the hunter gatherers. They just hadn't invented written language, Laplace transforms, semiconductors, and nuclear weapons yet and these are all the result of our interdependence which allows for specialized skill sets. The hunter gatherers also utilized specialization. The most skilled at crafting Clovis points did nothing else. The most skilled at hunting did nothing else.

The notion of being self sufficient, self contained, and pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps is a fairy tale. It's a line of BS the corporate overlords feed to the gullible masses.  Why?  It's called divide and conquer.  As individuals we are powerless.

The playing field has never been level. Bill Gates' parents gave him 20 million to start Microsoft. My parents couldn't give me 20 million. You couldn't even get venture capital for a company like Microsoft then. I tried to get VC to start a UPS company in 1982. Couldn't get any because no one believed the product would sell. We had a great business plan. Four or five years later someone with family money started APC, then VC money rolled in for them.

The playing field is far from level.

* twatwaffle n.

An elitist that is totally unaware of their own faults and limitations but is highly critical of others.

On the terms 'fascism,' 'fascist' and Silly's usage of them.

I specialize in writing about stories that our corporate propaganda machinery, that pretends to be a news media, are ignoring. Ignoring stories is the most subtle form of propaganda. These stories include, but are not limited to, election integrity, censorship, illegal spying on citizens, war crimes of the US government, war protests, health care issues that are being suppressed such as the overwhelming popularity of a single payer solution, corporate misbehavior, and Israel's genocide against Palestinians.

I am very strongly anti-fascist. They are my primary target. They are destroying this planet with their blatant disregard for balance while pursuing their eternal quest for profit maximization which benefits only a tiny percentage of the total populace.

The first amendment protects my right to criticize anyone, even the fascists. I've criticized China for their behavior in Tibet. I've criticized Iran for murdering their own citizens. I've criticized Israel for their genocide in Gaza, and I've criticized the US for our genocide in Iraq and Afghanistan. I will continue to do so regardless of many times I'm accused of being any number of nasty things. Fascists always deploy brown-shirts to shout down criticism. It's just another thing that confirms the diagnosis of fascism. If they don't like being called fascists then they should stop behaving like fascists.

I don't use fascist as an insult. I have a degree in political science as well as engineering and I use fascist as a label to specify a particular governmental/economic system in which the government and corporations cooperate closely and the populace is indoctrinated with strong nationalism. This is Mussolini's own definition of Fascism. I consider him an expert on the subject.

From Wikipedia: Benito Mussolini
"Mussolini was among the founders of Italian Fascism, which included elements of nationalism, corporatism, national syndicalism, expansionism, social progress and anti-communism in combination with censorship of subversives and state propaganda."

Note that subversives includes any and all critics.

Sounds like the US and Israel to me except the US deleted social progress from the agenda. If it walks like a fascist and talks like a fascist I'm very likely going to call it a fascist.

"How to Save Health Care Reform" In 4 Minutes

My friend Lee Stranahan has put together a wonderful video which describes what we need to be doing right now in order to get the kind of Health Care reform that we need. This not quite four minutes of video will tell you everything you need to know.


The insurance lobby does not want true reform. They only care that their profits be protected. Your actual health is an externality in their economic model. Lee has more to say about the insurance lobby's real priorities.

Randall Terry: Christofascist Terrorist

The delusional Christofascist Randall Terry does not grok the separation of church and state. At all. He apparently thinks that the founding fathers intended the United States to be Fundamentalist Christian Republic, a theocracy, in spite of all of their writings which say the exact opposite. Never let reality impede your ideology.

Randi Rhodes seemed a bit harsh unless you consider that she already knew all about this Christofascist Terrorist who leads the storm troopers for Christ who call themselves Operation Rescue. She's well informed of the intolerance of this group and the tactics of intimidation and threats they use as a matter of course while claiming to be doing God's work.

From this Media Matters article, "Who is Randall Terry", from 2005 we find this quote from a Terry speech.

As the Fort Wayne (Indiana) News Sentinel reported on August 16, 1993, at an anti-abortion rally in Fort Wayne, Terry said

"Our goal is a Christian nation. ... We have a biblical duty, we are called by God to conquer this country. We don't want equal time. We don't want pluralism. ... Theocracy means God rules. I've got a hot flash. God rules."

In that same speech, Terry also stated that

"If a Christian voted for [former President Bill] Clinton, he sinned against God. It's that simple."

According to a March 18, 2004, press release, Terry declared on his radio program that

"Islam dictates followers use killing and terror to convert Western infidels."

I think this makes it pretty clear that Terry's goal is a Christian Fundamentalist Republic. The theocracy that our founding fathers rejected as dangerous to freedoms is what this little fascist terrorist desires. He wants authoritarianism, with him and his 'Christian Theocrats' deciding what is right and wrong. Any obstacles to this goal must be eliminated. That means you and I.

His behavior since the assassination of Dr. Tiller can only be described as callous and cavalier. This Talking Points Memo article documents what I mean. Randall Terry was a close associate of James Kopp, the executioner of Dr. Barnett Slepian in Ahmerst, New York in 1998. Mr. Terry seems to have meet or known virtually all of the assassins involved in killing doctors who performed abortions, legal abortions.

Randall Terry recently said, just after Dr. Tiller's assassination, "George Tiller was a mass-murderer." Dr. Tiller was an OB-GYN who performed perfectly legal medical procedures. A jury confirmed this when a crooked Attorney General bowed to pressure from vicious thugs like Terry and brought spurious charges against Dr. Tiller. The Jury exonerated Dr. Tiller and that Attorney General is now an ex-AG. It is very, very clear that Dr. Tiller was breaking no laws, but Terry says

"Those men and women who slaughter the unborn are murderers according to the Law of God. We must continue to expose them in our communities and peacefully protest them at their offices and homes, and yes, even their churches."

So this fascist twatwaffle thinks that God's law supercedes the laws of the land and excuses the assassination of medical doctors. This is not the sort of fascist storm trooper I want anywhere near the reins of power.

If you do a Google search on Randall Terry you will find a very large amount of information documenting the behavior that causes me to declare him a domestic terrorist. Operation Rescue's first weapon is intimidation. Randall Terry's first weapon is intimidation. This vicious un-American thug should be arrested as a domestic terrorist. He is a much larger threat to OB-GYNs than anyone from the middle east.

Return of the Monarchs

Two weeks ago we had caterpillars chomping on milkweeds in the Tampa Bay area. Seven to ten days ago they disappeared. Today these are emerging. What a difference a week can make.



[click on picture for full size image]

Pat Buchanan, Racist Fossil

I've already awarded this white supremacist bigot a Heads on Pikes Award for his blatant racism. This man is a living fossil, a throwback to the 50s when white men ruled everything and everyone else 'knew their place'. Pat stumbles exceedingly slowly towards the tar pit that awaits him. I wish someone would just hurl him in and stop our torture. His 'ideology' is a vicious toxic cesspool that only degrades our society.

Pat's recent antics are receiving deserved criticism in the liberal blogosphere. Last evening Bob Cesca, who is without a doubt one of the finest political bloggers in the U.S., published an excellent article "A Brief for Pat Buchanan: The Invincible Race-Baiter" over at Huffington Post. If you haven't read this, do so.