Rev. J. Walker (@revjwalker) | |
@Hesiod2k11 @thepoliticalcat @JamesMartinSJ Or "You want someone with a wife and kids? Here's a female Unitarian Universalist minister married to a woman, and they're raising five great kids." |
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poetry and politics and assorted odd things
Rev. J. Walker (@revjwalker) | |
@Hesiod2k11 @thepoliticalcat @JamesMartinSJ Or "You want someone with a wife and kids? Here's a female Unitarian Universalist minister married to a woman, and they're raising five great kids." |
Mike Signorile (@MSignorile) | |
Well, folks, you all really helped turn the narrative on @michelleisawolf & the dinner. The Beltway reporters who criticized her have backed off. TV news dropped the story, seeing the backlash. Journalists who were staying quiet at first are now coming out for Wolf. |
Lisa Glass (@LMplusG) | |
Just curious. Are these the folks who think the comedian crossed a line? pic.twitter.com/TZlqmtz4N8 |
Michelle Wolf (@michelleisawolf) | |
Why are you guys making this about Sarah's looks? I said she burns facts and uses the ash to create a *perfect* smoky eye. I complimented her eye makeup and her ingenuity of materials. twitter.com/morningmika/st… |
Ward Q. Normal (@WardQNormal) | |
He's weaponizing his base to hate the free press, the justice system, entire ethnic groups & religions, and educated "elites." He's now conditioning reporters to resist investigating and calling out his lies. This is not a safe situation for our country. |
#Resist 🌊 (@ZaibatsuNews) | |
This Texas family saved their son from a church cult — and now wants to warn the world about them j.mp/2JH6peN pic.twitter.com/chX3NHhCvP |
The Koch Brothers believe that their great wealth entitles them to rule over the many – so, for decades, they've been running a surreptitious assault on the rules that protect the majority of us from their abuse. From whacking our voting rights to busting unions, their plutocratic intent is nothing less than to pull a coup on democracy, installing a government of, by, and for the super-rich.
They've enlisted a secretive cadre of other billionaires who share their extreme kleptocratic belief that 1) property rights of the rich are more important than the people's political rights, 2) that majority rule is not a good form of governing, and 3) that the "Makers" (as the billionaires dub themselves) should be able to overrule collective actions of the lower classes (whom they call "Takers"). They've created a complex, sophisticated web of right-wing front groups that have already corporatized a slew of our most basic laws and institutions, and they've gained a chokehold on nearly every level of government (including our courts and whole states like Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Texas). To carry out their attacks, they've essentially taken over the Republican party.
Enjoying Hightower? How about a weekly email that gives you the full scoop?
Even more shocking than the arrogance of this unprecedented power grab by the conspiracy of billionaires is its quiet success. The Koch Coup crept up on us because it abhorred publicity and couched each move as an independent effort by a separate group. Then the conspirators backed the Supreme Court's outrageous 2010 Citizens United decision, decreeing that unlimited corporate spending is allowed because it's "free speech." Only did Americans begin waking up to the reality that the Kochs were making an assault on democracy itself.
This is Jim Hightower saying… To learn more, check out the extensive Koch web files at the Center for Media and Democracy: www.exposedbycmd.org/koch/.
shauna (@goldengateblond) | |
"how dare that lady comedian be so vulgar" says the crowd that's clearly delicate like doilies pic.twitter.com/wWTRd8XnKF |
First, not to say that the Pens didn't suck against the Caps last night. They played defense like me in my over-40 league as if both of my legs fell asleep and I was pre-loaded with Valium. On top of that, I typically don't like to subscribe to saying the officials suck. That said, guess who the Jagoffs are today?
First, see the tweet from WTAE's Ray Petelin, who is quite proficient with his Jagoff-estrator skills (creating the featured artwork of today's blog post.)
I look at grainy weather imagery to make sense of the atmosphere... Here's my interpretation of grainy, replay imagery... Not that it matters. I will also say, I'm not a hockey official, but I did drive by a Holiday Inn Express one time. #StanleyCupPlayoffs2018 #Pens #caps
— Ray Petelin (@Ray_WTAE)
Hey on-ice officials of the Penguins/Caps game and lazy-pizza-eating-Toronto-based-off-ice officials…not sure what YOU looked at when reviewing the Hornqvist net-stuffer yesterday.
Certainly, the on-ice officials can pass the buck along to the Toronto peeps because that MIGHT have been tough puck to keep track of.. but…to the off-ice-Toronto-based officials… are ya looking at these plays, on your smart phone, while your shopping with your spouse in the middle of a mall?
If ya need a little reference as to what WHITE space looks like, look down at your shirts.. it's the color between the black stripes! Recognize it? Yep, that's what the space looks like between the Hornqvist's puck and the goal line.
In the meantime, at your Toronto desk, put down those nachos, pizza, and Tim Horton donut holes, wipe your greasy lips and hands, put your READERS on and get the calls right, YaJagoffs!
Paralympic Games (@Paralympics) | |
Record numbers around the world are not finding @Paralympics tough to watch. Billions of viewers now take in the Paralympics in hundreds of countries around the world. We hope the US President continues to watch and be inspired by the Paralympics. twitter.com/Paralympics/st… |
Lawrence O'Donnell (@Lawrence) | |
I have comedian friends who've done #WHCD. Many writer friends who've written WHCD jokes. I always advised them precisely on the line they shouldn't cross. I respected the line. They did too but still they made mistakes. Then Trump destroyed the line. THERE IS NO LINE. |
Enjoying a rich, chocolate, ooey-gooey cake has never been easier! This semi-homemade recipe was handed down from a very wise & frugal Grandma!
I just posted the buttery Ooey Gooey Butter Cake a couple days ago. The recipe was so fascinating to me that I immediately had to make it in chocolate!
One thing I do absolutely love about this dessert is the texture. The thin top layer of delicate chocolate flakiness resting precariously over the ooey gooey molten cocoa flavored lava lusciousness is pretty darn amazing. They battle it out in your mouth, the sweet rich velvet like cake and the crispy top layer of crust. Just to be clear, there are no losers in that battle.
5 Unwritten Rules for Ooey Gooey Cake Success:
Make sure you prepare your pan correctly. I use GOOP {Homemade Baker's Spray} and think it's far superior to any product you can buy at the store. If you don't want to make GOOP, grease your pan then line with parchment paper.
Room temperature ingredients is a good idea. Set your butter and cream cheese out a few hours before you plan on making this amazing cake.
Don't under mix ingredients. Whip the cream cheese until it is light and fluffy, at least 3 minutes.
Pan size matters. Or does it? It just depends on your preference for the final product! I baked mine in a 9×3 round cake pan or 9×3 springform pan because I like ooey gooey cakes to have a very gooey center and thicker edges. However, you can absolutely bake this recipe in a 9×13 pan! It will just be much thinner than my pictures show. You can also use a 9×9 or 8×8 square pan. Just make sure your oven is properly calibrated as you don't want hot spots that will cause uneven baking. (Hint: Use bake strips around your pan!)
You are not limited by the flavors in the recipe! Try adapting the Ooey Gooey cake recipe to create any flavor combination. Use vanilla cake in the base and lemon extract for the cream cheese topping. How about coffee extract in the base and cherry flavoring in the cream cheese layer? Or lemon in the base and lemon zest in the topping. Or strawberry in the base and vanilla topping. Try adding fruit to the top which can help cut the sweetness. Try adding chocolate chips to the base and/or the cream cheese layer. Add chopped pecans to the base layer. The possibilities are endless!
Did you know the "magic" version of this recipe? You simply mix all the ingredients in one bowl and then bake. There is no layer separation, but the flavor and texture are still amazing!
This cake is very rich and a little will go a long way. Try serving with a vanilla ice cream to cut the sweetness.
I just want you to know, I am willing to sacrifice time and resources to sample every single one of them. I do it all for you.
Enjoy!
*****
Like Ooey Gooey Cakes? This one is a reader favorite! Ooey Gooey Butter Cake
You may also like my Red Velvet Gooey Butter Cake!
If you would like to try a cake that is JUST as amazing but made FROM-SCRATCH check out my Perfect Chocolate Cake!
God (@TheGoodGodAbove) | |
After all the horrible shit Trump has said, HOW THE FUCK COULD ANYONE BE ACCUSED OF GOING TOO FAR?! He literally JUST made fun of people with disabilities. Pull your heads out of your fucking asses. |
EdgarOfTheMoors (@EdgarOfTheMoors) | |
Speaking truth to power isn't "mean." It's patriotism. Abusing power, harming the poor, persecuting racial and religious minorities, marginalizing the LGBTQ community, subjecting children to gun violence, ignoring suffering Americans in Flint and Puerto Rico... that's "mean." |
Treason Memes (@treasonstickers) | |
My tax dollars pay for a professional makeup artist to apply the perfect smoky eye makeup to a woman who stands in front of America and lies her fucking ass off to protect a treasonous President. I'm OK with a comedian commenting on it. Also, cousin Huckabee should go to prison. |
EdgarOfTheMoors (@EdgarOfTheMoors) | |
You say Michelle Wolf was "mean" to Donald Trump and those who incessantly lie for him? I'm sorry. I couldn't hear your whining over the sound of Trump and his cronies systemically attacking the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. #SundayMorning #WHCD #FreePress |
John Pavlovitz (@johnpavlovitz) | |
#MichelleWolf didn't "stoop to Trump's level" at the #WHCD. When she uses the power of the White House to craft legislation that cripples the poor and marginalized, and assails our environmental protections, civil rights, and Free Press—she'll be stooping to his level. Stop. |
Ryan Knight (@ProudResister) | |
When they go low, we go MICHELLE WOLF. As soon as the president of the United States is not a pussy-grabbing, disabled-mocking, race-baiting, Russian-conspiring traitor then we can go high again. Until then we fight hard, we resist harder and we vote them all out. #WHCD |
Emilia (@PoliticalEmilia) | |
Thoughts and prayers to everyone offended by the #WHCD tonight. You really shouldn't be offended though...Michelle Wolf's takedown of Sarah Huckabee Sanders was nothing but locker room talk. |
Facts Do Matter (@WilDonnelly) | |
Michelle Wolf: "What no one in this room wants to admit is Trump helped all of you. He couldn't sell steaks, vodka, water, college, ties or Eric - he has helped you sell your papers, books & TV. You created this monster and now you are profiting off of him" |
Trinity 🌊 (@TrinityResists) | |
Yes. On August 19, 1934, the Chancellor of Germany was also elected President of Germany in an unprecedented consolidation of power. His name was Adolf Hitler. In 1933, he authorized sterilization for the handicapped. In 1939, he had them exterminated via his euthanasia program. twitter.com/stevesilberman… |
John Lundin 🌊 (@johnlundin) | |
Those of you worried that getting rid of Trump would get us a much worse Pence can take heart - Pence is going down with Trump... #SundayMorning twitter.com/funder/status/… |
John Pavlovitz (@johnpavlovitz) | |
"When the elderly, sick, and vulnerable are left without resources by this Administration, it will be the Progressives, Muslims, Jews, Humanists, and Atheists—not the Conservative Christians who will care for them as Jesus would have." #SundayMorning johnpavlovitz.com/2016/12/11/the… |
TheEnemyWithin (@TheAnalogKid74) | |
All this time I thought I had become part of an anti-Trump movement, a resistance, when in reality, I hadn't actually joined anything at all. I just never stopped being an American. The resisting came naturally. |
Ryan Knight (@ProudResister) | |
OBAMA: "Our Paralympians show the world that no matter what, with perseverence, we can do incredible things." TRUMP: "It's a little tough to watch, but I watched as much as I could." As a proud and patriotic American it's tough to watch this president bring our country down. |
Tony Posnanski (@tonyposnanski) | |
Let me make sure I got this right... Michelle Wolf roasted Sarah Huckabee Sanders on a platform where roasting is expected and she is getting criticism... Minutes earlier Donald Trump threatened a Senator in front of thousands and gets no criticism... This is sad. |
EdgarOfTheMoors (@EdgarOfTheMoors) | |
Dear Everyone Criticizing Michelle Wolf, Your protestations about "mean" comedy can go fuck themselves on the screams of children whose parents are being forcibly hauled away by ICE agents. Every time you screamed "Build That Wall!" you earned every criticism. #FuckYourFeels |
(((DeanObeidallah))) (@DeanObeidallah) | |
Very interesting to attend the #WHCD tonight and watch the event there. Interesting to see Trumpers offended by a comedian when they weren't offended by Trump bragging about grabbing women by the pu**y, his mocking a disabled reporter and demonizing Latinos, Muslims and blacks |
The Rude Pundit (@rudepundit) | |
So, at the same time, a comedian is making snide jokes about people in power and the President is lying repeatedly to rile up a crowd. And we're supposed to be upset about the comedian? Get the fuck outta here. |
Months after his death in a plane crash while traveling to negotiate a ceasefire during the budding civil war in Congo, the Swedish diplomat, economist, and author Dag Hammarskjöld (July 29, 1905–September 18, 1961) was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The second Secretary-General of the United Nations, Hammarskjöld became one of only two people in history awarded the Nobel posthumously. John F. Kennedy considered him the greatest statesman of the twentieth century.
Hammarskjöld left behind a most unusual manuscript, eventually published as Markings (public library) — a compendium of reflections and poems constellating a luminous record of one person's struggle for a foothold of meaning, radiating universal human truth. Partway between young Tolstoy's diaries, Walt Whitman's prose meditations, and artist Ann Truitt's journals, these fragments of thought and feeling embody what it means for a person who has devoted their life to moral action to also have a rich inner life of contemplation — the rare, bountiful marriage of via activa and via contemplativa, as W.H. Auden observes in his admiring foreword to the book. Hammarskjöld contemplates love, justice, devotion, morality, and empathy, united by a larger inquiry into the nature of being, which he explores through the relationship between self and other, self and world, self and self-containing consciousness.
Writing at the peak of WWII, as he is still orienting himself in his own sense of purpose, thirty-six-year-old Hammarskjöld examines the interplay of emotion and the intellect in how we relate to ourselves and to others:
Openness to life grants a lightning-swift insight into the life situation of others. What is necessary? — to wrestle with your problem until its emotional discomfort is clearly conceived in an intellectual form — and then act accordingly.
In another entry from the same period, Hammarskjöld considers the dignity in our human capacity for devoting ourselves to the improbable, the unreasonable, that which is bound to break our own hearts:
It makes one's heart ache when one sees that a man has staked his soul upon some end, the hopeless imperfection and futility of which is immediately obvious to everyone but himself. But isn't this, after all, merely a matter of degree? Isn't the pathetic grandeur of human existence in some way bound up with the eternal disproportion in this world, where self-delusion is necessary to life, between the honesty of the striving and the nullity of the result? That we all — every one of us — take ourselves serious is not merely ridiculous.
Four years later, Hammarskjöld echoes young Borges's insistence on the illusoriness of the self and probes the crux of our self-delusion:
At every moment you choose yourself. But do you choose your self? Body and soul contain a thousand possibilities out of which you can build many I's. But in only one of them is there a congruence of the elector and the elected. Only one — which you will never find until you have excluded all those superficial and fleeting possibilities of being and doing with which you toy, out of curiosity or wonder or greed, and which hinder you from casting anchor in the experience of the mystery of life, and the consciousness of the talent entrusted to you which is your I.
Nowhere does our overinvestment in the I swell to more self-harming proportions than in our relationship with other I's to whom we feel bound by the threads of deep and demanding emotion — threads on which we pull greedily, unreasonably, unlatching the inevitable Rube Goldberg machine of unmeetable expectation, disappointment, and heartbreak. More than half a century before Hilton Als considered the art of receptivity at the heart of love, Hammarskjöld reflects:
When you have reached the point where you no longer expect a response, you will at last be able to give in such a way that the other is able to receive, and be grateful. When Love has matured and, through a dissolution of the self into light, become a radiance, then shall the Lover be liberated from dependence upon the Beloved, and the Beloved also be made perfect by being liberated from the Lover.
Hammarskjöld finds that what mitigates this tension of need between self and self is a surrender to the relationship between self and nature. "After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on," Whitman exulted in contemplating hat gives life meaning, "[and] have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains? Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons — the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night." Generations after Whitman, Hammarskjöld writes:
So rests the sky against the earth. The dark still tarn in the lap of the forest. As a husband embraces his wife's body in faithful tenderness, so the bare ground and trees are embraced by the still, high, light of the morning.
I feel an ache of longing to share in this embrace, to be united and absorbed. A longing like carnal desire, but directed towards earth, water, sky, and returned by whispers of the trees, the fragrance of the oil, the caresses of the wind, the embrace of water and light. Content? No, no, no — but refreshed, rested — while waiting.
In another entry, he considers what it takes to surrender ourselves to Nature's embrace:
The extrahuman in the experience of the greatness of Nature. This does not allow itself to be reduced to an expression of our human reactions, nor can we share in it by expressing them. Unless we each find a way to chime in as one note in the organic whole, we shall only observe ourselves observing the interplay of its thousand components in a harmony outside our experience of it as harmony.
Landscape: only your immediate experience of the detail can provide the soil in your soul where the beauty of the whole can grow.
Like Whitman, Hammarskjöld saw this harmony between humanity and the natural world as inseparable from, and in some deep sense essential for, the harmony within the human world, between human beings. Two years into his post as Secretary-General of the United Nations, he writes:
Salty and wind-swept, but warm and glittering. Keeping in step with the measure under the fixed stars of the task. How many personal failures are due to a lack of faith in this harmony between human beings, at once strict and gentle.
In his fiftieth year, Hammarskjöld echoes Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel's poignant lament about the loneliness of leadership and reflects:
For him who has responded to the call of the Way of Possibility, loneliness may be obligatory.
That year, Hammarskjöld records a kind of personal resolution, governed by the humanistic ideals that became the animating ethos of his public life:
To remain a recipient — out of humility. And preserve your flexibility.
To remain a recipient — and be grateful. Grateful for being allowed to listen, to observe, to understand.
Markings is a singular and singularly rewarding read in its entirety. Complement it with Nobel laureate André Gide's rules of moral conduct and Susan Sontag on what it means to be a decent human being.