juxtablog

A delicious recipe and some delicious healthful advice as well from Karina’s Kitchen:

2. Love is the best thing there is.
And that means all love, Babycakes. Not just one particular legal sanctioned religion supported super-hetero kind of love. I mean all the rainbow love shades in between from red to blue, from indigo to pink and even purple. So if you’re feeling snagged in a cartoon cut-out of your life for your family’s sake, or your church’s sake, or your Aunt Vilma’s sake, listen up, Doll.
Scrape off the Pilgrim tradition and the pressure to conform and the urge to please, fit in and be nice. Nice is overrated. And tradition is really overrated. As is the enduring myth that perfection is attainable. So shake things up. Be bold.
Love whom you love.

Acorn Squash with Green Chiles- and equal love | Gluten-Free Recipes | Karina’s Kitchen

from the comments:

Re: “Who’s to say that their morality is wrong, and ours is right?”

Who’s to say that all the other gods humans have worshipped are false, but yours alone is real?

re: “Self wisdom, self authority, self sufficiency are no longer what the Christian relies on when called of God. We rely on exposure to God’s wisdom and appeal to His authority.”

Really. So are you saying that Christians have all been in clear agreement when it comes to issues like slavery, warfare, killing, torture, monarchy, theocracy, empire, capitalism, corporatism, usurpation, abortion, polygamy, feminism, pacifism, patriotism, separation of church and state, ethnic cleansing and racial purity, guns, drugs, pre-marital sex, dancing, rock and roll, evolution, biblical literalism, faith-healing, transubstantiation, sacerdotalism, indulgences, speaking in tongues, snake-handling, the requirements of salvation, the nature of hell, and the very existence of Satan? Indeed, is there any single issue of ethical human relations for which there is a unanimous Christian position? And are the Christians always alone, or have others reached the same ethical conclusions without benefit of “His authority”?

For an atheist you spend an awful lot of time on religion « How good is that?

If dreams are thwarted, then yearning must take their place, If reunion is impossible, then longing must take its place.

t r u t h o u t | Democracy’s Failing Light

Thank you Brother Sam!

While I am waiting for you to respond in some way, shape or form, I will recite The Atheist’s Prayer:
Our brains, which art in our heads, treasured be thy names. Thy reasoning come. The best you can do be done on earth as it is. Give us this day new insight to resolve conflicts and ease pain. And lead us not into supernatural explanations, deliver us from denial of logic. For thine is the kingdom of reason, and even though thy powers are limited, and you’re not always glorious, you are the best evolutionary adaptation we have for helping this earth now and forever and ever. So be it. (reproduced from friendlyatheist.com)

The Atheist Missionary

He sure doesn’t want to frighten off his campaign donors:

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) also indicated Thursday that his panel’s version of the healthcare reform bill also will include some type of public plan.

    “I do suspect that a version will be there,” Baucus said. “Now, by saying that, I don’t want to frighten people, particularly on the industry side. … All I’m saying is, there are ways to skin a cat. There are ways to find a solution.”

t r u t h o u t | Kennedy Affirms Support for Public Health Care Plan

“Senator Baucus is charging us with ‘disruption of Congress,’” Mokhiber said. “But who”s disrupting what? Here is the architect of health care reform in Congress. And he’s taking hundreds of thousands of dollars from the drug and health insurance corporations. And sixty Americans are dying every day from lack of health insurance. And single payer is the only proven way to save the hundreds of billions of dollars in administrative overhead and profits needed to insure everyone. And the majority of Americans, doctors and health economists support single payer. And Baucus doesn’t even allow one person out of 41 over three days of hearings on health care reform to testify on behalf of single payer? How corrupt is that?”

    Kevin Zeese, another one of the Baucus 13 arrested on May 5, also wanted to question Baucus this morning.

    Zeese is the executive director of ProsperityAgenda.US.

    “Senator Baucus is putting the interests of the insurance industry ahead of the health care of Americans,” Zeese said. “He is living up to his reputation as the ‘Senator for K Street’ and should no longer be considered the senator for Montana.”

t r u t h o u t | Baucus Flees From Single Payer Advocates

    But the first step, as in any 12-step program, is to overcome denial. Job searching is not a job; retraining is not a panacea. You may be poorer than you’ve ever been, but you are also freer – to express anger and urgency, to dream and create, to get together with others and conspire to build a better world.

t r u t h o u t | Use Jobless Time to Build Better World

A full two years after Empire had hatched inside the fetid darkness of the Vice President’s Energy Task Force meeting its plan for war in Iraq and disaster capitalism for the entire Arab and Muslim world — a filthy hatchling now grown swollen with corpses. Mute citizens meantime were being gorged into stupefaction on Fox’s and CNN’s shock-and-awe spectacles and on a multitude of official lies that like piles of spaghetti had no discernible ends or beginnings. A presidential election had been stolen, the theft inscrutably sanctified by the unelected and unaccountable Third Branch. A Nazi-nomenclature-inspired Homeland Security Department had mushroomed overnight into putrid life, eating like acid at the nation’s moral foundation.

I was finally forced awake. I could no longer avoid knowing where and who I was, an American citizen whose taxes and personally voted-for representatives were funding the terrors of Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, Baghram, Diego Garcia — the whole vast and despicable global gulag of extradition, rendition, and death, whose victims, innocent and not, were dumped, dead or half-alive, on the outskirts of the U.S.-led “Free World.”

I became despondent. Enraged. Aha, I thought, I’ll become an ex-patriot. Within days the shade of my living mother fell on me — my biological mother and my link to the land my ancestors had inhabited for almost four hundred years. Why should I leave? I couldn’t leave.

Culture Change – Secession: Why I Support A Second Vermont Republic

6. today it is ten days. last night bush waged war on a man once
openly funded by the
cia. i do not know who is responsible. read too many books, know
too many people to believe what i am told. i don’t give a fuck about
bin laden. his vision of the world does not include me or those i
love. and petittions have been going around for years trying to get
the u.s. sponsored taliban out of power. shit is complicated, and i
don’t know what to think.
but i know for sure who will pay.
in the world, it will be women, mostly colored and poor. women will
have to bury children, and support themselves through grief

please read the rest: First Writing Since

The two characters are the keys to the political analysis Sinclair impresses on the reader. Personal kindness, he says, cannot change poverty, exploitation, war or corruption. J. Arnold Ross helps poor families as he takes their land for wells. He admires and respects his workers, but must stick with the other oil operators when they bring in strikebreakers to bust their union and evict the strikers from their homes. In a not-very-fictionalized account of the “Teapot Dome Scandal,” J. Arnold tells Bunny again and again bribing politicians, even a president of the United States, is simply what is required in order to do business.

    It doesn’t matter whether a capitalist is a good person or a bad one, Sinclair says. It’s the system that grinds one class into poverty, and allows another to reap the benefit. J. Arnold Ross, a loving father and paternalistic employer, commits criminal acts because his social class not only makes it possible, but necessary. His pained justification to Bunny for hiring gun thugs is that, if he doesn’t, the other oil operators will combine against him and drive him out of business. Capital operates as a class.

Source: David Bacon | Bad Capitalists or a Bad System