Thursday, July 31, 2025

The Pedophile Palace

All  I want is jail for the Evil Narcissist 

He is DISGUSTING and CORRUPT beyond belief

He's outright stealing from AMERICA

 and depriving everyone of affordable food and healthcare

clean air and water 

He's building cages for humans. 

 and a palace ballroom for his boot-lickers, brown-nosers, and yes-men

He's controlling the media and the government colleges and institutions

He DESTROYED the supreme court 

HE'S trying to imitate PUTIN 

I've got nothing good to say about this guy. 

Prof. Feynman: You can always recognize truth by its beauty and simplicity.

Rev. Benjamin Cremer: One of the most successful deceptions of our time was getting many Americans to fear diversity more than racism, equality more than misogyny, democracy more than fascism, immigrants more than authoritarians, the poor more than corrupt billionaires, and empathy more than cruelty.

Larkin Poe - Preachin' Blues

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84aNOLPm7yU

The most overpriced thing people keep paying for is validation. They spend years chasing approval from people who do not care, trading peace for attention and authenticity for applause. In the end, it costs more than money—it costs identity. Denis Nero

Willie Handler: Thank you for screaming into the void. Your scream is important to us. We're busy serving other screamers but someone from the void will scream back at you shortly.

Julie K Brown

"We were stupid stupid children," one victim told me. "All I remember is I was wearing the same pair of shoes for three years and I thought I could give a man a massage and finally get new shoes." When you are 14 years old, and have little or no parental guidance, or you've already been on the street and sexually abused, yes you are "innocent." Anyone who thinks otherwise needs to understand the nature of sexual abuse. Predators, like Epstein and Maxwell, knew how to groom their prey. They promised these girls the moon, and when the girls realized what they got themselves into, and tried to get out, they were threatened. Their parents and loved ones were threatened. If the girls/women came from overseas, their passports were taken from them. Julie K Brown
 
 Julie K. Brown’s 2018 Perversion of Justice investigation revealed how the U.S. Justice Department gave the now-deceased sex trafficker the deal of a lifetime and cut his victims out of the process.

Author's note: In the late eighteenth century, we still had sages, but no exact photometric instruments. Now we have the most sensitive instruments to measure the brightness of the stars but no sages. So it always goes. – Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

I’m a known money launderer. Nickels, dimes, quarters and occasional bills.

Amanda Ciafone: At this moment we may want to import something else from Mexico: leadership in public health.

At this moment we may want to import something else from Mexico: leadership in public health. There, health advocates and regulators have developed education campaigns and public policy about sugar-sweetened beverages, including those Mexican Cokes, the products of a business model exported from the US, and their links to obesity, type 2 diabetes, and heart disease. They’ve implemented soda taxes, required clearer nutrition labeling, restricted marketing to children, and banned the sale of sugary drinks in schools. They’ve treated the issue not as a matter of personal taste but of public health.

As a historian, I won’t weigh in on whether cane sugar is healthier than corn syrup. That’s a question for nutritionists and scientists. But I do know this: a president’s personal preferences are no substitute for robust public institutions. You can’t regulate a food system by tweet. You can’t protect consumers with nostalgia. You can’t set policy by piecemeal targeting of products based on particularistic agendas and transactional politics. And you certainly can’t build a healthier nation by dismantling the very agencies tasked with safeguarding it.

If we’re serious about health, we might take a page from Mexico. Because in the end, it’s not about which Coke tastes better. It’s about which country is doing more to protect its people from the consequences of unchecked sweetness and power.

Amanda Ciafone is associate professor of media and cinema studies and history at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of “Counter-Cola: A Multinational History of the Global Corporation.”  https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/07/31/opinion/trump-mexican-coca-cola/

Wednesday, July 30, 2025

Strawberry Barley Scones

 https://wholegrainscouncil.org/recipes/strawberry-barley-scones

Tabbouleh

Our regular PRICE RITE has a new shelf of grains from Haiti and bulgur and millet are just two of the ones I have purchased so far. 

Last week a friend gave me a bunch of flat leaf Italian parsley and so I made tabbouleh. I had to cook it in the instant pot for 10 minutes because the grains were not as fine as in this recipe but it came out great. I used fresh lemon juice and olive oil, with the Italian parsley chopped, and chopped fresh garlic, chopped red onion and peeled tomatoes chopped by hand. It was excellent!! I soaked and cooked chick peas to go with it. We ate it on Romaine lettuce with a carrot salad and hard boiled egg.

https://www.loveandlemons.com/tabbouleh/

The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe, he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life. Henry Miller

Sometimes things become possible if we want them bad enough. T.S. Eliot

 I want my City to have a pool for youth to learn to swim.

For last year's words belong to last year's language And next year's words await another voice. T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go. T.S. Eliot

To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man's life.T.S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism

This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper. T.S. Eliot

T.S. Eliot: Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

  T.S. Eliot

Victor Hugo: To put everything in balance is good, to put everything in harmony is better.

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace: Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly. It is the one thing we are interested in here.

 A month before her passing in 2017, Louise L. Hay wrote something that still resonates deeply: 

 I’ll be turning 90 this Saturday. My younger years were filled with fear, but now my days are filled with trust and confidence. 

My life didn’t really start to make sense until my mid-40s. At 50, I began writing—on a very small scale. My first year, I earned just \$42. At 55, I ventured into the world of computers, which terrified me, but I took classes and overcame my fears. 

 Today, I own three computers and travel everywhere with my iPad and iPhone. At 60, I planted my first garden. Around that time, I joined kids’ art classes and started painting. In my 70s and 80s, I became even more creative, and my life just kept getting richer and more fulfilling.

 I still write, give talks, and teach by example. I’m always reading, learning, and growing. I run a successful publishing company and two nonprofits. I’m an avid organic gardener and grow most of my own food. 

 I love people and parties, have many loving friends, and have traveled the world. I still paint and take classes. My life has become a treasure trove of experiences. 

I want to encourage you to consciously shape your later years and realize that they can be the most rewarding chapter of your life. Your future is always bright, no matter your age. Let these years become your treasure years.

 With love, Louise Hay

 Grace Paley was giving a lecture at 2 P.M. Grace Paley was—and remains—one of my heroes. I went straight to the auditorium and claimed a front row seat. For the next hour, Paley talked in her no-nonsense, Brooklyn-accented way about writing. “Every story is two stories,” she said. “The one on the surface and the one bubbling beneath. The climax is when they collide.” I wrote it down. I whispered it to myself as I walked back to my dorm room. Every story is two stories. I thought of every story I loved, from The Great Gatsby to “The Lady With the Pet Dog.” Every one of them, I realized thanks to Paley’s advice, two stories. Ann Hood

Carl Sagan: If something can be destroyed by the truth, then it deserves to be destroyed by the truth.

Karun Pal: Introverts are kind people, but if you piss them off, they'll ignore your whole existence. They're givers. They love. They care. They reciprocate. They'll give you chances after chances. Over & over again. But once they've had it, they don't revenge, they just disappear forever.

The main reasons are resentment, insecurity, and fear.

READ by Tom Nichols

Photovoltaic pavement is generating power in Barcelona. In the Netherlands, sidewalks and bike lanes double as linear solar farms. With urban space at a premium, some cities are working toward their climate goals by embedding green energy infrastructure where no one will notice it: directly underfoot.

 

Open Faced Peanut butter Sandwich topped with Salsa

Peanut Salsa

 https://www.gimmesomeoven.com/peanut-chipotle-salsa/

 SHIU-MIN BLOCK'S STUFFED CHINESE PANCAKES

(MOO SHU ROW)

"Rather like the traditional way of eating Peking duck, here thin white flour pancakes are lightly smeared with a little sweet hoisin sauce and used as a covering to roll around stir-fried vegetables. The trick to making these thin pancakes is to stick three well oiled balls of dough together and roll them out at the same time.

For a party or for the family, these are fun to eat, as everybody has to roll up the pancakes for themselves.

For those who like hot food, any hot sauce, such as chile paste with soybean or chile paste with garlic, or even Tabasco, may be added to the hoisin sauce.

Even though I have listed the ingredients for the pancakes and stuffing separately, I tend to prepare all the ingredients for the stuffing first, then make the pancakes, and finally stir-fry the stuffing, which only takes a few minutes. The ingredients needed for serving the pancakes may be prepared while the dough is resting."

FOR THE STUFFING:
1 loosely packed cup dried day lily buds
8 dried Chinese black mushrooms
1/2 loosely packed cup dried small black tree ear fungus (also called cloud ears and mo-er mushrooms)
3 tablespoons peanut or canola oil
2 eggs, beaten
2 scallions, each cut crosswise into 2-inch sections and the white part cut lengthwise in quarters
6 thin slices of fresh ginger, cut into fine strips
1 (8 ounce) can sliced bamboo shoots, drained and the slices cut lengthwise into fine strips
1/2 small green cabbage (about 1/2 pound in all), cut into fine, long strips (this is best done if the cabbage head is quartered, cored, and then cut lengthwise into strips)
3 tablespoons Chinese light soy sauce
1/2 cup water
1 garlic clove, lightly crushed and peel left whole
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon sugar
1 teaspoon oriental sesame oil
FOR THE PANCAKES:
2 1/4 cups water
4 cups unbleached all-purpose white flour plus extra for dusting
3 tablespoons oriental sesame oil
4 tablespoons peanut or canola oil
FOR SERVING:
5 tablespoons hoisin sauce thinned out with 2 1/2 tablespoons water
5 scallions, the bottom 3 inches only, cut lengthwise into fine, long slivers

TO PREPARE THE INGREDIENTS FOR THE STUFFING:
Soak the dried day lily buds in water to cover them generously for 30 minutes. Soak the black mushrooms in hot water to cover them generously for 30 minutes. Soak the tree ear fungus in water to cover them generously for 30 minutes. Use plenty of water, as they expand considerably.

Drain the day lily buds and rinse well. Snip off the slightly knotted tops and then pull the buds into long shreds.

Lift the mushrooms out of their soaking liquid (the liquid may be strained through a cloth and saved for stock). Cut off and discard the coarse stems. Cut the caps into fine, long shreds.

Lift the tree ear fungus out of its soaking liquid. Feel each piece carefully and snip off any hard, knotted areas. Rinse well and set aside.

Prepare or measure out all the other ingredients for the stuffing and set aside.

TO MAKE THE PANCAKES:
Put the flour in a large bowl. Put 2 1/4 cups of water in a jug. Start to pour the water over the flour as you stir with a pair of chopsticks or a wooden spoon. When the loose flour is all gone and you have lumps of dough (you will probably use up all the water), empty the contents of the bowl onto the counter (or other kneading surface) that has been lightly sprinkled with flour. Knead for 1 minute, dusting every now and then with flour. Form a ball and cover with an upturned bowl. Set aside for 20 minutes. (This is a good time to prepare the ingredients needed for serving the pancakes.)

Knead the dough again for 2 to 3 minutes, dusting it now and then with flour. It should no longer stick to your hands. Make a long roll with the dough, about 1 1/4-inches in diameter. Break this off into 18 pieces. Roll each piece in flour and then form balls with a light hand. Press each ball down with a light hand to make 2 1/2 to 3-inch patties.

Combine 3 tablespoons each of the sesame and vegetable oils in a wide, shallow bowl-like dish.

On a lightly floured surface, roll each patty out into a 4 1/2-inch round. The Chinese way of doing this is to roll from the center out and turn the patty slightly after each roll. Roll out each patty this way.

Dip the bottom of 2 patties in the mixed oil and then stick them to each other as if the oil were some kind of glue. Use this "glue" generously. Dip the bottom of a third patty in the mixed oil and stick it to the other 2. You should now have a small 3-layered "cake" of dough patties. Make 5 more "cakes" the same way.

Dust the work surface again with a little flour. Put down 1 "cake" and roll again going from the center out and turning a little after each roll, until a 9-inch round. Put it between 2 sheets of wax paper. Make 5 other pancakes exactly the same way, layering each pancake between sheets of wax paper putting one on top of the other.

Heat 1/2 teaspoon oil in a large, heavy, nonstick frying pan over medium heat. When hot, put in 1 pancake. Let it cook for about 1 1/2 minutes, or until it is translucent. Turn it over and cook the second side for about 20 seconds. Turn it over again, slapping the pancake down hard into the pan. Cook for 5 seconds. Turn again, slapping the pancake down hard. (This begins to separate the layers.) Turn quickly 2 more times, each time slapping down hard. Remove the pancake and separate the 3 layers. Put the 3 pancakes on a large plate and cover with foil or an upturned plate. Keep covered in a warm place. Make all pancakes this way, separating the layers and keeping them warm with the others.

TO MAKE STUFFING:
Quickly stir-fry the stuffing. Put 2 tablespoons of oil in a nonstick wok or large nonstick frying pan and set over high heat. When hot, add the eggs. Scramble them quickly and remove them as soon as they are cooked. Break up the scrambled egg into smaller pieces.

Add another tablespoon of oil to the wok or frying pan and put in the mushrooms, scallions, and ginger. Stir twice and add the lily buds, tree ears, and bamboo shoots. Stir twice and add the cabbage. Stir briefly and add the egg and the light soy sauce. Stir for a minute. Now add 1/2 cup of water, the garlic, salt, and sugar. Stir for a minute. Add the sesame oil. Stir to mix and turn off the heat. The garlic may be removed.

TO EAT:
Each diner should put about 1 teaspoon of the hoisin mixture down the center of the pancake, then scatter a few shreds of raw scallion if desired on top of the hoisin, and finally put some of the stuffing on top of the scallion. Now the pancake can be rolled up and eaten.

Makes 18 large pancakes
Source: Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian: More Than 650 Meatless Recipes From Around the Globe by Madhur Jaffrey
MsgID: 0312245
Shared by: Betsy at Recipelink.com
Board: International Recipes at Recipelink.com

Chili Crisp & Chinese Tea Eggs

 Years ago I watched Shiu-Min Block, a family friend, make this when I stayed at her house. She used star anise (maybe) and sesame seeds green onion, fresh chopped garlic and chilies.

 

This recipe below is much more complicated but you can riff off of the two.

https://www.chilipeppermadness.com/recipes/chili-crisp/

then she made https://thewoksoflife.com/chinese-tea-eggs/ 

Tuesday, July 29, 2025

Mark Twain: No Amount of Evidence will Ever Persuade an Idiot.

TC Boyle took this photo of a clown cupboard

 Image

Vacation is Between your Ears

In Rhode Island, a North Providence municipal employee is accused of poisoning a coworker's Gatorade with windshield wiper fluid. The town employee who ingested the wiper fluid was hospitalized and has not yet returned to work.

In my many years of food writing, I’ve realized this: Dining out is about far more than eating. It’s also live theater. Restaurants are a hotbed of anthropological fodder, a chance to witness human behavior, quirks, oddities, and foibles — performance art that can slip into comedy or tragedy, depending on how the experience unfolds. Kara Baskin

Keith McNally: When describing the menu, never say “I have.” Always “we have.” Saying “I have” is affected, and an insult to the cook who made the dish.

  New York restaurateur Keith McNally released a best-selling memoir, “I Regret Almost Everything.”

Korean Cucumber Salad

 https://christieathome.com/blog/korean-cucumber-salad/

  • 1 English cucumber

Dressing

Home Made Rhubarb Sauce mixed with Yogurt and Dried Cranberries

 Steam chopped rhubarb and add some sugar or honey or both. Then when it's cold enjoy with yogurt and cranberries.

Gliding in freestyle swimming from Instagram

Gliding in freestyle swimming—the brief pause or streamlined position after a stroke—plays a crucial role in efficiency and speed, especially over longer distances. Here’s why gliding matters in freestyle:


 1. Maximizes Momentum
• After a strong pull, your body has forward momentum.
• A short glide lets you ride that momentum without extra energy output.
• This is similar to coasting on a bicycle after a hard pedal stroke.


 2. Reduces Drag
• During the glide, you’re in a streamlined position, with one arm extended and your body aligned.
• This position minimizes resistance from the water, making you more hydrodynamic.


3. Promotes Balanced Stroke Timing
• Gliding helps prevent “rushing” the stroke.
• It creates a smoother rhythm between arm pulls and body rotation.
• Especially useful in distance swimming to conserve energy and maintain form.


4. Builds Awareness and Control
• Practicing glide teaches swimmers to be aware of body alignment and posture.
• Helps correct overreaching, crossing the centerline, or early pulling.


5. Helps with Stroke Efficiency (Not Speed Alone)
• In sprint events, gliding is almost imperceptible.
• But in middle and long distances, brief, controlled glides lead to better stroke efficiency and endurance.


 Too Much Glide Can Hurt Speed
• Over-gliding leads to loss of momentum and energy as you fight drag without propulsion.
• The key is a short, purposeful glide—not a pause.



✅ Summary:

Gliding in freestyle swimming helps you move efficiently, conserve energy, and maintain good technique. It’s especially valuable in distance swimming, as long as it’s not overdone.

 

Spaghetti Puttanesca (Spaghetti With Capers, Olives, and Anchovies)

 "Puttanesca" literally translates to "in the style of prostitutes," supposedly because the pungent aromas of garlic, anchovies, capers, and olives tossed with pasta were how Neapolitan sex workers would lead customers to their doors. This is one of those stories that seems apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate. 

https://www.seriouseats.com/spaghetti-puttanesca-pasta-week-capers-olives-anchovies-recipe

“Remember what you must do
when they undervalue you,
when they think
your softness is your weakness,
when they treat your kindness
like it is their advantage.

You awaken
every dragon,
every wolf,
every monster
that sleeps inside of you
and you remind them
what hell looks like
when it wears the skin
of a gentle human.” 


Nikita Gill, Wild Embers: Poems of Rebellion, Fire and Beauty  

 “It is eerily terrifying that there is no sound when a heart breaks. Car accidents end with a bang, falling ends with a thud, even writing makes the scratching sound of pencil against paper. But the sound of a heart breaking is completely silent. Almost as though no one, not even the universe itself could create a sound for such devastation. Almost as though silence is the only way the universe could pay its respect to the sound of a heart falling apart.”

Nikita Gill

“Your heart will fix itself. It’s your mind you need to worry about. Your mind where you locked the memories, your mind where you have kept pieces of the ones that hurt you, that still cut through you like shards of glass. Your mind will keep you up at night, make you cry, destroy you over and over again. You need to convince your mind that it has to let go…because your heart already knows how to heal.”

Nikita Gill

 

“Tell your daughters how you love your body.
Tell them how they must love theirs.

Tell them to be proud of every bit of themselves—
from their tiger stripes to the soft flesh of their thighs,
whether there is a little of them or a lot,
whether freckles cover their face or not,
whether their curves are plentiful or slim,
whether their hair is thick, curly, straight, long or short.

Tell them how they inherited
their ancestors, souls in their smiles,
that their eyes carry countries
that breathed life into history,
that the swing of their hips
does not determine their destiny.

Tell them never to listen when bodies are critiqued.
Tell them every woman’s body is beautiful
because every woman’s soul is unique.”
Nikita Gill, The Girl and the Goddess: Stories and Poems of Divine Wisdom

You must understand: they fear you. There is nothing scarier in their minds than a girl who knows the power of her flames. Nikita Gill

Nikita Gill: I hope you find someone who knows how to love you when you are sad.

Only the brave and the broken are kind in this world. Nikita Gill

Some days I am more wolf than woman, and I am still learning how to stop apologizing for my wild. Nikita Gill

Let it hurt. Let it bleed. Let it heal. And let it go. Nikita Gill, Your Soul is a River

 “The monsters were never
under my bed.
Because the monsters
were inside my head.


I fear no monsters,
for no monsters I see.
Because all this time
the monster has been me.”
Nikita Gill

Nikita Gill: We have calcium in our bones, iron in our veins, carbon in our souls, and nitrogen in our brains. 93 percent stardust, with souls made of flames, we are all just stars that have people names.

Noam Chomsky: As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome.

Mae Moxie: Has Scotland discovered Trump's kryptonite? This wind instrument drowns out the windbag & his lies. We need bagpipes at every press conference!

Interview

 https://kenyonreview.org/2016/09/just-kid-bronx-delillo-power-language/

“How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are deep and real. Shouldn't they paralyze us? How is it we can survive them, at least for a little while? We drive a car, we teach a class. How is it no one sees how deeply afraid we were, last night, this morning? Is it something we all hide from each other, by mutual consent? Or do we share the same secret without knowing it? Wear the same disguise?”
Don DeLillo, White Noise

 

In a curious way I liked my job--in the beginning, at least. It made me think and see as I had never done before.In those early days I visualized my mind as a dark room with many doors. I functioned best with several doors open. Sometimes I opened more doors, let in more light, risked the truth. If anyone semed to perceive a distant threat in my remarks or actions, I closed all the doors but one. That was the safest position. Don DeLillo Americana

The Child and the Shadow by Ursula LeGuin

 https://www.johnirons.com/pdfs/shadowleguin.pdf

John DeLillo: Ask Jack if he’s ever driven cross-country before. Ask him if he knows how boring it can be in the deepest contiguous sense of that word. I’ve done it a number of times, windshield wipers beating in my brain. Americana (Contemporary American fiction)

Prof. Feynman @ProfFeynman · 2h No idea is true just because someone says so. Test ideas by the evidence gained from observation and experiment. If a favorite idea fails a well-designed test, it's wrong. Feynman

If you’re constantly trying to turn somebody into what you want them to be, you’ll never see who they truly are. Juliane Cartiano

ThePsychoSocialist: DSM-6 creators are probably getting drunk together and being like, “Mental illness is whatever we say it is.” And they’re unfortunately more or less correct.

Willem de Kooning, Judgment Day, 1946, Oil and charcoal on paper

 

"Kiss your ghosts. Laugh at yourself. Weep in the shrubs. Keep going." Alina Stefanescu

Become a minor writer. Give up on the master discourses and the idea of greatness and write the book you can’t resist. Write the ones that obsess and distress you. Read until your eyes sting. Kiss your ghosts. Laugh at yourself. Weep in the shrubs. Keep going. Alina Stefanescu

'If I'm authentic, I won't be loved anymore. If I am not loved, I won't survive.' This is the source of all pathology whether it's physical or mental.

Dr. Gabor Mate Quotes on Trauma and Healing.

"We were hurt in relationship, which means we are going to heal in relationship. Relationships can be the ground for healing when approached properly."

"All our dysfunctions. our relationship problems, the pain that we carry, the resentment that we harbor, the anger that we generate at our partners originates in early childhood trauma."

“Trauma isn't what happens to you, it is what happens inside you."

"We may not be responsible for the world that created our minds, but we can take responsibility for the mind with which we create our world."

"In the real world there is no nature vs nurture argument, only an infinitely complex and moment by moment interaction between genetic and environmental effects."

"I can pretty much tell you from the way they speak and feel about themselves and the health conditions they have, the type of childhood they had."

"Not why the addiction but why the pain."

"Collect them before you direct them"

"Autonomy is impossible as long as one is driven  by anything."

"No society can understand itself without looking at it's shadow side.”

“What we call the personality is often a jumble of genuine traits and adopted coping styles that do no reflect our true self at all but the lose of it."

"While nervous tension may be a component of stress, one can be stressed without feeling tension."

"'If I'm authentic, I won't be loved anymore. If I am not loved, I won't survive.' This is the source of all pathology whether  it's physical or mental."

"Addiction floods in where Self-knowledge and therefore divine knowledge- are missing. To fill the unendurable void, we become attached to things of the world that cannot possibly be compensate for the loss of who we are."

"Everything that is 'wrong' with you began as a survival mechanism in childhood."

"It is impossible to understand addiction without asking what relief the addiction finds, or hopes to find, in the drug or addictive behavior.”

Gabor Mate: I can pretty much tell you from the way they speak and feel about themselves and the health conditions they have, the type of childhood they had.

Monday, July 28, 2025

Carrot Cake Mini Orange

https://www.twopurplefigs.com/best-orange-carrot-cakes/

https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/240469/isaacs-carrot-cake/

Put Chili Crisp on…Ice Cream?

 https://www.americastestkitchen.com/articles/5562-put-chili-crisp-on-ice-cream

grow up! get strong!

Age 65, 66, 74, and still trying to please abusive narcissistic deceased parents. Age 38, 39, 53 and still trying to please narcissistic parents. No matter, grow up, and get strong!

Why did I know at age 13 it was hopeless to try for acceptance or approval from my awful parents? That was a stroke of luck. I started collecting small cast iron frying pans at flea markets and planning my escape. 

Jimi Hendrix

watch and listen

Marcel Proust: Everything great in the world is done by neurotics; they alone founded our religions and created our masterpieces.

Narcissistic Generational Legacy

view

And what is the joy of Christ? The joy and delight which springs forever in His great heart, from feeling that He is forever doing good; from loving all, and living for all; from knowing that if not all, yet millions on millions are grateful to Him, and will be forever. Charles Kingsley (1819–1875) English clergyman, historian and novelist Source: Attributed, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 78.

Wisdom consists in doing the next thing you have to do, doing it with your whole heart, and finding delight in doing it. Meister Eckhart (1260–1328) German theologian

The secret of joy in work is contained in one word — excellence. To know how to do something well is to enjoy it. Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer The Joy of Children (1966)

Do what you love. Do what makes your heart sing. And NEVER do it for the money, Go to work to spread joy. Marianne Williamson

Ursula Le Guin: “A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart.The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skilful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well, - this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.

Sunday, July 27, 2025

Governor Dan McKee: He's been watching over Rhode Island since 1899. We figured he earned a beach day.

 Image

I want there to be a place in the world where people can engage in one another’s differences in a way that is redemptive, full of hope and possibility.

 “Usually adult males who are unable to make emotional connections with the women they choose to be intimate with are frozen in time, unable to allow themselves to love for fear that the loved one will abandon them. If the first woman they passionately loved, the mother, was not true to her bond of love, then how can they trust that their partner will be true to love. Often in their adult relationships these men act out again and again to test their partner's love. While the rejected adolescent boy imagines that he can no longer receive his mother's love because he is not worthy, as a grown man he may act out in ways that are unworthy and yet demand of the woman in his life that she offer him unconditional love. This testing does not heal the wound of the past, it merely reenacts it, for ultimately the woman will become weary of being tested and end the relationship, thus reenacting the abandonment. This drama confirms for many men that they cannot put their trust in love. They decide that it is better to put their faith in being powerful, in being dominant.” ― bell hooks 

 “When we face pain in relationships our first response is often to sever bonds rather than to maintain commitment. ” ― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions 

 “Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.” ― bell hooks

 “All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm's way.” ― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions 

 “Genuine love is rarely an emotional space where needs are instantly gratified. To know love we have to invest time and commitment...'dreaming that love will save us, solve all our problems or provide a steady state of bliss or security only keeps us stuck in wishful fantasy, undermining the real power of the love -- which is to transform us.' Many people want love to function like a drug, giving them an immediate and sustained high. They want to do nothing, just passively receive the good feeling.” ― bell hooks 

“If any female feels she need anything beyond herself to legitimate and validate her existence, she is already giving away her power to be self-defining, her agency.” ― bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics 

 “I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else's whim or to someone else's ignorance.” ― bell hooks 

 “For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?” ― bell hooks 

 “But many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.” ― Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions 

 “To return to love, to get the love we always wanted but never had, to have the love we want but are not prepared to give, we seek romantic relationships. We believe these relationships, more than any other, will rescue and redeem us. True love does have the power to redeem but only if we are ready for redemption. Love saves us only if we want to be saved.” ― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions 

“the wounded child inside many males is a boy who, when he first spoke his truths, was silenced by paternal sadism, by a patriarchal world that did not want him to claim his true feelings. The wounded child inside many females is a girl who was taught from early childhood that she must become something other than herself, deny her true feelings, in order to attract and please others. When men and women punish each other for truth telling, we reinforce the notion that lies are better. To be loving we willingly hear the other’s truth, and most important, we affirm the value of truth telling. Lies may make people feel better, but they do not help them to know love.” ― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

 “Love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust.” ― bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love

 “The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control.” ― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

 “Living simply makes loving simple.” ― bell hooks 

“No black woman writer in this culture can write "too much". Indeed, no woman writer can write "too much"...No woman has ever written enough.” ― bell hooks, Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work

 “As all advocates of feminist politics know most people do not understand sexism or if they do they think it is not a problem. Masses of people think that feminism is always and only about women seeking to be equal to men. And a huge majority of these folks think feminism is anti-male. Their misunderstanding of feminist politics reflects the reality that most folks learn about feminism from patriarchal mass media.” ― bell hooks 

 “Individuals who want to believe that there is no fulfillment in love, that true love does not exist, cling to these assumptions because this despair is actually easier to face than the reality that love is a real fact of life but is absent from their lives.” ― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions 

 “One of the best guides to how to be self-loving is to give ourselves the love we are often dreaming about receiving from others. There was a time when I felt lousy about my over-forty body, saw myself as too fat, too this, or too that. Yet I fantasized about finding a lover who would give me the gift of being loved as I am. It is silly, isn't it, that I would dream of someone else offering to me the acceptance and affirmation I was withholding from myself. This was a moment when the maxim "You can never love anybody if you are unable to love yourself" made clear sense. And I add, "Do not expect to receive the love from someone else you do not give yourself.” ― Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions 

“Often men who have been emotionally neglected and abused as children by dominating mothers bond with assertive women, only to have their childhood feelings of being engulfed surface. While they could not 'smash their mommy' and still receive love, they find that they can engage in intimate violence with partners who respond to their acting out by trying harder to connect with them emotionally, hoping that the love offered in the present will heal the wounds of the past. If only one party in the relationship is working to create love, to create the space of emotional connection, the dominator model remains in place and the relationship just becomes a site for continuous power struggle.” ― bell hooks 

“Being oppressed means the absence of choices” ― bell hooks

  “I am passionate about everything in my life--first and foremost, passionate about ideas. And that's a dangerous person to be in this society, not just because I'm a woman, but because it's such a fundamentally anti-intellectual, anti-critical thinking society.” ― bell hooks

“To love well is the task in all meaningful relationships, not just romantic bonds.” ― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions 

 “The process begins with the individual woman’s acceptance that American women, without exception, are socialized to be racist, classist and sexist, in varying degrees, and that labeling ourselves feminists does not change the fact that we must consciously work to rid ourselves of the legacy of negative socialization.” ― bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism 

 “Visionary feminism is a wise and loving politics. It is rooted in the love of male and female being, refusing to privilege one over the other. The soul of feminist politics is the commitment to ending patriarchal domination of women and men, girls and boys. Love cannot exist in any relationship that is based on domination and coercion. Males cannot love themselves in patriarchal culture if their very self-definition relies on submission to patriarchal rules. When men embrace feminist thinking and practice, which emphasizes the value of mutual growth and self-actualization in all relationships, their emotional well-being will be enhanced. A genuine feminist politics always brings us from bondage to freedom, from lovelessness to loving.” ― bell hooks 

 “Contrary to what we may have been taught to think, unnecessary and unchosen suffering wounds us but need not scar us for life. It does mark us. What we allow the mark of our suffering to become is in our own hands.” ― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

  “Love is an action, never simply a feeling.” ― bell hooks

 “Honesty and openness is always the foundation of insightful dialogue.” ― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions 

 “The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is-it’s to imagine what is possible.” ― bell hooks

 “I want there to be a place in the world where people can engage in one another’s differences in a way that is redemptive, full of hope and possibility. Not this “In order to love you, I must make you something else”. That’s what domination is all about, that in order to be close to you, I must possess you, remake and recast you.” ― bell hooks, Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies 

 “A generous heart is always open, always ready to receive our going and coming. In the midst of such love we need never fear abandonment. This is the most precious gift true love offers - the experience of knowing we always belong.” ― Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions 

bell hooks

The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem. bell hooks in "The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love" (2004) 

Rev. Benjamin Cremer: How can you tell when people worship power? They will justify the most depraved people in positions of authority for the ends they want. All while demanding the harshest enforcement of the law for even the most minor infractions towards ordinary people they don’t even know.

In the Olden Days

I was raised in the olden days when the world was sepia-colored and there were no bright colors except hot pink and orange in 1965. This was back when parents beat their children and accidentally sexually abused them. I remember my sister being beat up. She still has the don't kill me startle on her face, stuck and frozen from when she was eleven. Abuse and narcissism was what our parents learned from their parents and grandparents. I knew at age five that I never wanted to be a mother. I wanted our family dog to be my mother. I would curl up with Teddy on his rug and whimper, hoping he would adopt me. The fact that he was a male Scottish Deer Hound didn't matter. He was a better mother to me than my mother would ever be. I even loved the scent of his breath when he would pant in the back of the station wagon on long car trips.

I enjoyed taking walks with him around the brook in our neighborhood. I was a dreamer and I imagined living in the thatched-roof cottage that was on my walk. I spotted water-rats and frogs and mostly just day-dreamed. I was not afraid of anything except my biological father who I suspected was driving by slowly while spying on me. "Get the license plate," my mother would say. I never remember cleaning up after my dog. I never remember him even pooping. He must have!

Nutrition for the Whole Family

Eat at least four servings of vegetables and three servings of fruits a day. Snack on fruits and veggies if you get hungry between meals.

Have whole grains, such as brown rice, barley, and whole-wheat bread and pasta and home made granola.

Choose from a variety of beans and peas: rinse soak overnight and cook in a pressure cooker or Instant pot.

Make marinades for chicken and or turkey using buttermilk. Broil. 

Use healthy fats, such as olive oil, vegetable oils, avocados, nuts, nut butters and nut oils. But keep in mind that even healthy fats are high in calories. (sunflower & sesame)

Limit foods and drinks that have added sugar but natural sugar in fruit is OK.

Choose low-fat or fat-free dairy products like home grown lowfat buttermilk and nonfat yogurt.

Focus on eating fresh local seasonal foods. 

Drink water or seltzer with lime or lemon! 

The art of noticing is the bedrock. Start with your eyes open, and you’re more than halfway there.

Maybe…start your story with your notebook closed, and tap out a few descriptions without consulting it. Then you can open the notebook and confirm the details with your notes. Or — my favorite technique — tell the story out loud to a friend and listen to what naturally bubbles up in the telling. If you’re a writer, you ought to be a good storyteller, with instincts for what makes a listener perk up. Pay attention to what you tell your listener, and you’ll be able to translate that to the page. This all assumes one essential behavior: Namely, that you pay very close attention when you’re collecting information for a story. Worry less about your notes and more about absorbing the experience — really absorbing it, so you know it deeply. The art of noticing is the bedrock; the craft is taking what you’ve noticed and arranging it well on the page. Start with your eyes open, and you’re more than halfway there.

SUSAN ORLEAN

Saturday, July 26, 2025

FDR:The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little. Inaugural Address, January 20, 1937.

Alex Padilla: Immigration judges are blowing the whistle — Trump is firing them to rig the courts and prevent due process and justice. This is a direct attack on the rule of law. First, it’s immigrants. Who do you think is next? We’re fighting back in the Senate to stop this abuse of power.

People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. Aldous Huxley, July 26, 1894 – November 22, 1963.

I think the greatest invention is the wooden spring clothespin. We need a holiday to celebrate this invention.

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy. Franz Kafka

My solitude does not depend on the presence or absence of people; on the contrary, I hate who steals my solitude without, in exchange offering me true company. Nietzsche

Standing Room Only

 https://health.clevelandclinic.org/benefits-of-standing-desks

Habit of the Mind

Becoming a writer was partly a matter of acquiring technique, but it was just as importantly a matter of the spirit and a habit of the mind. It was the willingness to sit in that chair for thousands of hours, receiving only occasional and minor recognition, enduring the grief of writing in the belief that somehow, despite my ignorance, something transformative was taking place. It was an act of faith, and faith would not be faith if it was not hard, if it was not a test, if it was not an act of willful ignorance, of believing in something that can neither be predicted nor proved by any scientific metric.

VIET THANH NGUYEN

Anne Lamott: I've always thought I could use my brain and my heart to jockey everyone around to the good. But life is not jockeyable. When you try, you make people infinitely crazier than they already were, including or especially yourself.

Anne Lamott: As a child I was always the ball bearings for my whole family; I thought I was indispensable to their survival, preventing hard metal from grinding against hard metal, so the family didn’t come to a broken, screeching, metallic halt.

Wow!! Rep. James Talarico says: “The only minority destroying America is the billionaires.”

Marinated Chicken Breasts in Homemade Buttermilk (first the buttermilk is over incubated to become cheese) Then add Cheese & Whey with hot sauce and adobo to make the chicken breast marinade

Unbelievably DELICIOUS!! 

I marinate the 3 large chicken breasts for 24 hours in the fridge and then I fish them out and broil them in my cast iron grill pan for 12 minutes a side. It has a cheesy taste and is so good. 

Slice thin and add to salads, sandwiches etc... 

Sourdough multigrain homemade toasted with peanut butter fresh basil leaves and chipotle sauce (sandwich)

 Mexican Thai sandwich

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.” ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 

 “Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.” ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 

“The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.” ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 

“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.” ― Marcus Aurelius , Meditations 

“Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.” ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 

 “If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.” ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 

 “When you arise in the morning think of what a privilege it is to be alive, to think, to enjoy, to love ...” ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.” ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 

 “The soul becomes dyed with the colour of its thoughts.” ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 

“It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.” ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 

 “Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together,but do so with all your heart.” ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 

“Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.” ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations  “Our life is what our thoughts make it.” ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Whenever you are about to find fault with someone, ask yourself the following question: What fault of mine most nearly resembles the one I am about to criticize?” ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 

“If someone is able to show me that what I think or do is not right, I will happily change, for I seek the truth, by which no one was ever truly harmed. It is the person who continues in his self-deception and ignorance who is harmed.” ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinion of himself than on the opinion of others.” ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 

 “If it is not right do not do it; if it is not true do not say it.” ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 

 “When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can't tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own - not of the same blood and birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are unnatural.” ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 

“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.” ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 

“Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself in your way of thinking.” ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 

“The best revenge is not to be like your enemy.” ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 

“Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.” ― Marcus Aurelius 

“Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.” ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

 “How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.” ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 

 “When another blames you or hates you, or people voice similar criticisms, go to their souls, penetrate inside and see what sort of people they are. You will realize that there is no need to be racked with anxiety that they should hold any particular opinion about you.” ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 

“The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are.” ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 

 “Do not act as if you were going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over you. While you live, while it is in your power, be good.” ― Marcus Aurelius

 “Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now, take what's left and live it properly. What doesn't transmit light creates its own darkness.” ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

 “Here is a rule to remember in future, when anything tempts you to feel bitter: not "This is misfortune," but "To bear this worthily is good fortune.” ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Look well into thyself; there is a source of strength which will always spring up if thou wilt always look.” ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 

Today's Forecast PURPLE HAZE

Widespread Depression Orchestra

Lincoln Project:We said release the files not the accomplices, idiot.

Bread and Water: I teach breadmaking and swimming

Socrates: Contentment is natural wealth, luxury is artificial poverty.

 “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.” ― Socrates

“The unexamined life is not worth living.” ― Socrates 

 “I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think” ― Socrates 

“There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.” ― Socrates 

 “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” ― Socrates 

 “Strong minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, weak minds discuss people.” ― Socrates 

 “Wonder is the beginning of wisdom.” ― Socrates 

“To find yourself, think for yourself.” ― Socrates 

“Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.” ― Socrates 

“By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you’ll become happy; if you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.” ― Socrates 

“He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have.” 

― Socrates 

  “No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.” ― Socrates 

 “Be slow to fall into friendship, but when you are in, continue firm and constant.” ― Socrates 

“If you don't get what you want, you suffer; if you get what you don't want, you suffer; even when you get exactly what you want, you still suffer because you can't hold on to it forever. Your mind is your predicament. It wants to be free of change. Free of pain, free of the obligations of life and death. But change is law and no amount of pretending will alter that reality.” ― Socrates

 “Sometimes you put walls up not to keep people out, but to see who cares enough to break them down.” ― Socrates 

 “The secret of happiness, you see, is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less.” ― Socrates

 “Know thyself.” ― Socrates

 “Let him who would move the world first move himself.” ― Socrates 

 “Contentment is natural wealth, luxury is artificial poverty.” ― Socrates, Essential Thinkers - Socrates 

 “Death may be the greatest of all human blessings.” ― Socrates

 “Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.”― Socrates 

 “The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our separate ways, I to die, and you to live. Which of these two is better only God knows.” ― Socrates 

 “Do not do to others what angers you if done to you by others.” ― Socrates 

 “The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance.” ― Socrates

 “Every action has its pleasures and its price.” ― Socrates

 “I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world."  [As quoted in Plutarch's Of Banishment]” ― Socrates 

 “Prefer knowledge to wealth, for the one is transitory, the other perpetual.” ― Socrates 

 “I examined the poets, and I look on them as people whose talent overawes both themselves and others, people who present themselves as wise men and are taken as such, when they are nothing of the sort.  From poets, I moved to artists. No one was more ignorant about the arts than I; no one was more convinced that artists possessed really beautiful secrets. However, I noticed that their condition was no better than that of the poets and that both of them have the same misconceptions. Because the most skillful among them excel in their specialty, they look upon themselves as the wisest of men. In my eyes, this presumption completely tarnished their knowledge. As a result, putting myself in the place of the oracle and asking myself what I would prefer to be — what I was or what they were, to know what they have learned or to know that I know nothing — I replied to myself and to the god: I wish to remain who I am.  We do not know — neither the sophists, nor the orators, nor the artists, nor I— what the True, the Good, and the Beautiful are. But there is this difference between us: although these people know nothing, they all believe they know something; whereas, I, if I know nothing, at least have no doubts about it. As a result, all this superiority in wisdom which the oracle has attributed to me reduces itself to the single point that I am strongly convinced that I am ignorant of what I do not know.” ― Socrates 

“We cannot live better than in seeking to become better.” ― Socrates

 “We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.” ― Socrates 

Marcus Aurelius: When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can't tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own - not of the same blood and birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are unnatural.

History has shown that the most terrible crimes against love have been committed in the name of fanatically defended doctrines. Paul Tillich

Paul Johannes Tillich was a German and American Christian existentialist philosopher, religious socialist, and Lutheran theologian who was one of the most influential theologians of the twentieth century. Wikipedia

Born: August 20, 1886, Starosiedle, Poland
Died: October 22, 1965 (age 79 years), Chicago, IL

Carl Jung: Every creative person is a duality or a synthesis of contradictory aptitudes. On the one side he is a human being with a personal life, while on the other side he is an impersonal, creative process… Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument.

Emil Cioran: After so much imposture, so much fraud, it is comforting to contemplate a beggar. He, at least, neither lies nor lies to himself: his doctrine, if he has one, he embodies; work he dislikes, and he proves it; wanting to possess nothing, he cultivates his impoverishment, the condition of his freedom. His thought is resolved into his being and his being into his thought. He has nothing, he is himself, he endures: to live on a footing with eternity is to live from day to day, from hand to mouth. Thus, for him, other men are imprisoned in illusion.

August Strindberg: Not everyone is capable of madness; and of those lucky enough to be capable, not many have the courage for it.

Henry Miller: Political leaders are never leaders. For leaders we have to look to the Awakeners!

Margaret Mead: Never depend upon institutions or government to solve any problem. All social movements are founded by, guided by, motivated and seen through by the passion of individuals.

Leo Tolstoy: People try to do all sorts of clever and difficult things to improve life instead of doing the simplest, easiest thing—refusing to participate in activities that make life bad.

Rosie O'Donnell

 

Hey tangerine trump

First you said I should be stripped of my citizenship

Now you're publicly celebrating that Stephen Colbert lost his job.

You’ve never understood the role of comedy — or the role of truth.

You think silencing a comedian means you’ve won something.

You haven’t.

Stephen stood up to you, like so many of us have.

Not because it was easy — but because it was necessary.

He told the truth with wit and courage, night after night,

while you used your platform to spread fear, lies, and hate.

You don’t want free speech — you want blind loyalty.

But America doesn’t work like that.

We question power here. We laugh at bullies.

And we speak out — it leaves u undone.

Stephen will be fine. So will I.

So will every artist, journalist, immigrant, teacher,

parent, and kid who sees through you

your desperate grasp at relevance ur craving for control

Truth isn’t going anywhere.

Neither are we.

Pavarotti

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“The narcissist is like a bucket with a hole in the bottom: No matter how much you put in, you can never fill it up.” — Dr. Ramani Durvasula

Ryan Daigler Eposing Narcissistic Abuse: To all the scapegoats and survivors of narcissistic abuse who feel alone like no one will ever understand what you’ve been thru, going thru, I see you. I believe you. I know the insane trial you’ve been unjustly put thru to prove your innocence when you are the one who’s been horribly abused and dehumanized. I know how crazy it is. I know you were never the problem. I just want to let you know, you’re not alone.

 

If you cannot find peace within yourself, you will never find it anywhere else. Marvin Gaye

Bertrand Russell “The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.”

In a life properly lived, you’re a river. You touch things lightly or deeply; you move along because life herself moves, and you can’t stop it; you can’t figure out a banal game plan applicable to all situations; you just have to go with the ‘beingness’ of life. Jim Harrison

Identification with one's office or title is very attractive indeed, which is precisely why so many men are nothing more than the decorum accorded to them by society. In vain would one look for a personality behind the husk. Underneath one would find a very pitiable little creature. That is why the office is so attractive: it offers easy compensation for personal deficiencies. Carl Jung

Wednesday, July 23, 2025

Fyodor Dostoevsky

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A Single Bee is Ignored...

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BACKLASH at HOME

Detention of two Italians at ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ sparks backlash at home

Lawmakers called for Italy’s conservative government to do more to secure the repatriation of two nationals held at the new facility in Florida’s Everglades.


The migrant detention facility dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz” in the Florida Everglades on July 4. (Rebecca Blackwell/AP)

The detention of two Italian nationals at “Alligator Alcatraz,” the new immigrant detention center in Florida’s Everglades, is sparking criticism from lawmakers in Italy, who are calling on their country’s conservative government to speak out.

Gaetano Mirabella Costa and Fernando Artese are being held in “inhuman and degrading” conditions at the facility, Laura Boldrini, a lawmaker with the opposition Democratic Party, said on social media, pushing for the men to be repatriated. Angelo Bonelli of the Green Europe party said the two Italians had been “locked in cages, without access to a lawyer, deprived of dignity, water and decent food.”

Former prime minister Matteo Renzi, now a senator who leads the Italia Viva party, accused Giorgia Meloni’s government of deference to President Donald Trump rather than acting to “defend the rights of an Italian citizen.” Meloni, Italy’s most right-wing leader in decades, has one of the better relationships with Trump among European leaders.

A spokesperson for the Italian Foreign Ministry said Italian officials “have been following the case of compatriots Gaetano Mirabella Costa and Fernando Artese since the first report, keeping in constant contact with their families.”

“The Italian Consulate and Embassy are also keeping in contact with the local authorities in order to obtain information about the modalities and timing of repatriation,” the statement added.

Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, confirmed in an emailed statement that the two Italian nationals were being held at the facility. Florida officials and Republican lawmakers who have visited the facility have disputed reports of poor conditions there.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has ramped up arrests in recent months, as Trump seeks to fulfill his campaign promise of mass deportations. The crackdown has prompted concern about civil rights violations and detainees being held in substandard conditions.

“Under President Trump and Secretary Noem, if you break the law, you will face the consequences,” McLaughlin said, referring to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem. “Criminal illegal aliens are not welcome in the U.S.”

According to McLaughlin, Costa overstayed a B2 tourism visa for almost seven years. Artese entered the United States using the visa waiver program, which authorized a stay of about three months, but he remained in the country for about a decade, she said. DHS said both had been arrested over alleged criminal offenses but did not immediately respond to a request for clarification on whether either had been convicted of a crime.

The detention facility, dubbed Alligator Alcatraz by Florida Republicans and the Trump administration, opened July 3 in the state’s wetlands and could house thousands of migrants this year, according to officials.

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) seized the infrequently used Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport in South Florida last month for the state to set up what he called a “makeshift detention space” with tents for detainees, sleeping pods for guards and generators for power.

Detainees and former guards told The Washington Post last week that deliveries of drinking and bathing water were inadequate, that the tents covering detainees’ chain-link cells did not keep out rainwater, and that the facility was infested with mosquitoes.

In a lawsuit filed last week, immigrants rights advocates alleged that detainees had been blocked from accessing attorneys, according to a news release from the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida.

Stephanie Hartman, a spokeswoman for the Florida Division of Emergency Management, disputed the accounts and told The Post that the facility was in “good working order.”

Garbanzo Chick Pea Shortage

I just bought 24 pounds of chick peas because Price Rite was out of them for a few weeks and we live on my hummus.

Chickpea shortages caused by climate change and the Russian war in Ukraine are threatening hummus supplies, experts say.
Data from the Global Pulse Confederation shows that global chickpea production could dip by as much as 20 percent this year. 
Weather conditions this spring meant that farmers in the United States, the fourth-largest chickpea exporter, planted fewer trees as they  prioritised more lucrative crops like corn. source

Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible. Carl Gustav Jung

I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become. Carl Gustav Jung

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed. Carl Gustav Jung

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves. Carl Gustav Jung

An old alchemist gave the following consolation to one of his disciples: No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown friends will come and seek you. Carl Jung

I went everywhere looking for peace, but in the end I found it only in the corner of the room with a book. Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose"

Joyce Carol Oates: In boxing, a dirty fighter is highly dangerous when he is losing, & losing badly; he will flail out blindly, he will foul his opponent with the intent of seriously harming him, he will do as much damage as he can before it's over. #T***pDownForTheEpsteinCount

Pablo Picasso The Kiss

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Food for Thought

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You are free and that is why you are lost. Franz Kafka, Letter to His Father, 1919.

Since love grows within you, so beauty grows. For love is the beauty of the soul. Saint Augustine, 354-430 CE

Imagination should be used not to escape reality, but to create it. Colin Wilson, 1931-2013

Love your characters. Ask yourself what underlay their acts and versions of the past. Sometimes I pray to see people I’m angry at or resentful of as God sees them, which heals both page and heart. Mary Karr

It doesn't work like that

Any practicing novelist will be familiar with the jocular-yet-serious response when someone newly met discovers what you do. "I'd better watch what I say, then, hadn't I?" or, sometimes, "I've got a great story for you." You (well, I) will tend to answer, "It doesn't work like that," because it doesn't. There is nothing more useless than someone else's already highly worked-up anecdote, varnished for eternity.... The whole process is usually much more passive, sponge-like, and haphazard than that. The reader's motive wanting to understand the process of literary creation is, of course, legitimate, but also ultimately futile, since even the most self conscious novelist often cannot properly explain what it is, he or she does, and how it comes about.

Julian Barnes

...the anti-science, misogynist, racist, Dark Enlightenment nonsense coming from the right that seeks to rob you, your children and your grandchildren of a financially and environmentally secure future.

 George Bilgere

Tuesday, July 22, 2025

Barlow Adams: Never thought I’d live long enough to hurt from age-related aches and pains, and they are beautiful, terrible things to me now. Each one an agony of good fortune. Some mornings I feel so lucky I could scream.

Bug Bit Elbow then 2 weeks later I Bumped it and it Became inflamed Bursitis

https://sportsmedicine.mayoclinic.org/condition/elbow-bursitis/

https://sportsmedicine.mayoclinic.org/condition/elbow-bursitis/page/1 

https://sportsmedicine.mayoclinic.org/condition/elbow-bursitis/page/2

https://orthoinfo.aaos.org/en/diseases--conditions/elbow-olecranon-bursitis/ 

Thank God for local URGENT CARE They prescribed antibiotic and pan medicine and gave me a wrap.

UPDATE: 5 days later getting better! 

Socialism is what they called public power. Socialism is what they called social security. Socialism is what they called the growth of free and independent labor organizations. Socialism is their name for almost anything that helps all the people. —Harry Truman, 1952

Alcoholism is a disease. Drunken driving is a dangerous choice.

You already have the precious mixture that will make you well. Use it. Rumi

1969 Old MacDonald Had an Apartment House

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The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it. Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Be teachable you don't know everything and you're not always right. Carl Sagan

Monday, July 21, 2025

Henry Winkler: You can not see your face in boiling water similarly .. you can not see the truth in a state of anger.

Miles Davis: Anybody can play. The note is only 20 percent. The attitude of the motherfucker who plays it is 80 percent.

May 5th 1999

Tibor Kalman, 'Bad Boy' of Graphic Design, 49, Dies

Tibor Kalman, a graphic designer whose innovative ideas about art and society helped change the way a generation of designers and their clients viewed the world, died on Sunday at the Hyatt Dorado Hotel near San Juan, P.R. He was 49 and lived in Manhattan.

Mr. Kalman decided to spend his last days in Puerto Rico after losing a four-year bout with non-Hodgkins lymphoma, his wife, Maira Kalman, said.

The founder of M&Co, a revolutionary New York design firm that became a social prod to his major clients as much as a graphics resource, Mr. Kalman was also the former editor in chief of Colors magazine, an art director and a director of music videos and television commercials.

He was the self-styled bad boy of the graphic design profession and a harsh critic of formulaic or what he pejoratively termed ''professional'' design. He wanted designers to take greater responsibility for how their work influenced the surrounding culture. As the designer Milton Glaser asserted, ''He emerged in such a short amount of time as a major influence on a young generation.''

Mr. Kalman described himself as more a social activist than a designer and constantly sought to use his work to promote causes like environmentalism and economic equality. He opposed products that he considered harmful to the workers who made them, the environment or the consumer and never hesitated to tell his clients what he thought.

After spending almost a decade building a business that he said sold ''design by the pound'' to banks, discount department stores and other institutions, Mr. Kalman reinvented M&Co in the mid-1980's as a conceptually progressive firm doing graphics, exhibitions, books, magazines and film titles primarily for cultural clients that included the rock band Talking Heads, the Times Square Redevelopment Corporation and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

He also founded M&Co Labs, which conceived and manufactured watches and clocks with quirky faces and rearranged numerals, products that helped start a fashion for such designer-made objects.

Tibor Kalman was born in Budapest in 1949 and immigrated with his family to Poughkeepsie, N.Y., in 1957 after the unsuccessful Hungarian uprising against the Communist regime. He spent a year at New York University, where he joined Students for a Democratic Society and traveled to Cuba to pick cotton with the Venceremos Brigade, which took middle-class Americans to help support the Communists.

When he returned to the United States in 1971, Mr. Kalman learned rudimentary graphic design by doing window displays for the Student Book Exchange at N.Y.U., which was owned by Leonard Riggio, who later bought Barnes & Noble and made Mr. Kalman its first creative director. He designed the bookstore's first shopping bag, featuring an antique woodcut of a scribe, which is still used today.

Knowing little about the nuances of typography, however, Mr. Kalman hired young design school graduates to execute his ideas while he retained creative control, a practice he continued throughout his career.

A Sledgehammer And a 'Goofy' Room

In 1979 he was hired as the creative director responsible for signs and displays for E. J. Korvettes, the discount department store. Unhappy in this lucrative job, in 1980 he established M&Co in his Greenwich Village apartment. A year later he moved it to an office on West 57th Street in Manhattan. His first work was designing logos for department stores for a bag manufacturer. But Mr. Kalman was not content working on such commonplace assignments and decided to change his focus.

The firm's enigmatic name was typical of Mr. Kalman's wit. The corporate-sounding cadence was meant to give an aura of mystery and to confuse his more strait-laced clientele, who always wanted to know who the M was. His wife, Maira, a children's book author and illustrator, has the nickname ''M,'' which she donated to the cause.

Mr. Kalman's new office was designed to establish an unconventional aura and featured what he called ''a goofy, triangular-shaped table that fit into a goofy-shaped conference room,'' as well as a hole smashed out of one wall by a sledge hammer for a reception window.

Mr. Kalman's metamorphosis into a progressive design impresario came when M&Co designed a Talking Heads album that featured four digitally manipulated photographs of the group members (before personal computer software made this a common graphic conceit) and a title with upside-down letters. From then on, M&Co received attention in the design trade press for pushing beyond the conventions of design and typography.

Urging Designers To Be Responsible

Mr. Kalman soon moved his office to a downtown loft that he had designed to simulate the interior of an old factory. This was consistent with his passion for vernacular design. He encouraged his designers to apply the handmade signs and common methods used by neighborhood printers who do menus and handbills. Ultimately, vernacularism became a way for him to protest the corporate International Style.

As a frequent lecturer and a writer of acerbic manifestoes, Mr. Kalman urged designers to take more responsibility for their work's impact on society and culture. In 1986 he was co-chairman of the American Institute of Graphic Arts' national conference in San Antonio, called ''Dangerous Ideas.'' It was the first such major event to focus attention on how designers contribute to environmental waste and promote products that harm people or the environment.

M&Co became Mr. Kalman's soapbox. To address homelessness, he sent boxes with the contents of a typical city shelter meal to clients one Christmas season instead of the usual presents, noting that M&Co would match all monetary contributions.

Graphic design was too small a platform for Mr. Kalman. He gradually moved away from graphics as such to editing and creative direction for the magazines Art Forum and Interview. But perhaps his most meaningful job was as editor in chief of Colors, the Italian and English magazine published by the Italian clothing company Benetton, an assignment that forced him to discontinue M&Co temporarily and move his family to Rome.

Colors, founded by a photographer, Oliviero Toscani, was not a typical corporate house organ or fashion magazine, but rather focused on sociocultural issues like racism, AIDS and even sports. Colors was ''the first magazine for the global village,'' Mr. Kalman said, ''aimed at an audience of flexible minds, young people from 14 to 20, or curious people of any age.''

Colors became the main outlet for Mr. Kalman's ideas. An issue devoted to racism had a feature titled ''How to Change Your Race'' and examined cosmetic means of altering hair, features and skin color to achieve some kind of platonic ideal. Also in that issue, ''What If. . .,'' was a collection of manipulated photographs showing famous people racially transformed: Queen Elizabeth and Arnold Schwarzenegger as black; Pope John Paul II as Asian; Spike Lee as white and Michael Jackson with a Nordic cast. ''Race is not the real issue here,'' Mr. Kalman said. ''Power and sex are the dominant forces in the world.''

Mr. Kalman returned to New York in 1997 after three years as Colors editor to battle cancer. He re-established M&Co to produce and design exhibits, videos and books that had social relevance. Among his projects was a photographic series quoting everyday people's relationship to Times Square, which hung on scaffolding during the recent construction of the Conde Nast building in Times Square, and a series of Op Art contributions to The New York Times Op-Ed page.

During his cancer treatments he also taught a pictorial narrative class to graduate students at the School of Visual Arts and directed work on his monograph, ''Tibor Kalman: Perverse Optimist.''

In addition to his wife, he is survived by a daughter, Lulu Bodoni, and a son, Alex Onomatopoeia; his parents, Marianne and George Kalman of Gwyned, Pa.; a brother, John of Horsham, Pa., and a sister, Margie of Bristol, Pa.

In the last months of his life, Mr. Kalman designed the exhibition ''Tiborocity,'' which will open at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in July. It will consist of ''neighborhoods'' representing different aspects of his work as well as the protest posters and graphics that influenced him in the 1960's and 70's. Mr. Kalman told friends he intended the retrospective to be his last testament.

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