Saturday, April 21, 2007

RAWvolution

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Inspired by Laurie's whole food cleansing fast, I finally decided to unpack my food processor and explore RAWvolution. The book was a gift from Tyler's sister and I have read it 100 times, but being a terrific procrastinator, I had not yet tried a single recipe. So, last weekend I filled my grocery cart with the RAW essentials: walnuts, cashews, macadamia nuts, sunflower seeds, almonds, nama shoyu, agave, lemons, coconuts, veggies, fruit, raisins, garlic, raw tahini, and herbs.

The first recipe I made was the Harvest Corn Chowder, a creamy puree of fresh corn cut from the cob, walnuts, pine nuts, garlic, nama shoyu, coconut water, and lemon juice. I also added a touch of chili pepper for heat. Then I made tacos on collard green leaf tortillas with sunflower seed cheese, spicy ground walnut meat, and guacamole. These were BEYOND delicious. I also whipped up Pasta Marinara with Zucchini noodles, macadamia cream Eggless Egg Salad, and No Bean Hummus made with pureed zucchini instead of chickpeas. Everything was incredible!

I’m excited to make a few desserts this weekend….between paper writing (my very last undergrad paper ever!) and sleeping.

Friday, April 20, 2007

Sunday, April 15, 2007

Dinosaurs in Eden

$27 Million Anti-Evolution Museum to Open Soon

By Andy Mead

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Animatronic dinosaurs and people co-exist in the Creation Museum's displays, just as dinosaurs and people did in the Garden of Eden, according to the group behind the museum.

Tyrannosaurus rex was a strict vegetarian, and lived with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

There were dinosaurs of every kind aboard Noah's ark. Some dinosaurs managed to hang around until just a few hundred years ago. The legend of St. George slaying the dragon? That probably was a dinosaur.

Exhibits showing all this and more will be at the Creation Museum, a $27 million religious showcase nearing completion in Northern Kentucky.

The museum, in Boone County near the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport, is being built by a non-profit group called Answers in Genesis. It is scheduled to open on Memorial Day. Museum and Northern Kentucky tourism officials are expecting it to be a boon to the region, bringing in at least 250,000 visitors in its first year.

It already is getting media attention. Newspapers and television stations from Europe, Asia and Australia have visited, and CNN was there Friday.

But mainstream scientists, who have dubbed it The Fred and Wilma Flintstone Museum, say the museum's message is just plain wrong.

The museum is based on a literal interpretation of the Bible: The world was created in six, 24-hour days, some time between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago. Humans appeared on Day 6, and they didn't evolve from anything.

Ken Ham, an Australian who is Answers in Genesis' $120,000-a-year founder and president, says the museum opening will be a significant event in Christendom.

"No one else has ever built a place where you can experience biblical history and merge it with the science," he said.

47 Percent Agree

But Eugenie Scott, a former University of Kentucky anthropologist who is director of the California-based National Center for Science Education, said the information provided in the museum "is not even close to standard science."

Scott visited the museum recently as part of a British Broadcasting Corp. radio program. Although she didn't get a tour, she saw enough to know that the museum will be professionally done. And, she says, that's worrisome.

"There are going to be students coming into the classroom and saying, 'I just went to this fancy museum and everything you're telling me is rubbish,' " Scott said.

Daniel Phelps of Lexington, president of the Kentucky Paleontological Society, says the museum will embarrass the state because of the "pseudoscientific-nutty things" it espouses, and because it portrays evolution as the path to ruin.

But the Rev. Bill Henard, senior pastor of Lexington's Porter Memorial Baptist Church, said that Sunday school classes and other groups from his church are likely to visit.

"I think people will enjoy ... being able to see a different side from what some scientific findings have shown," he said.

Henard said he believes in the literal story of creation, adding that "I think you would be surprised to know how many people hold to a young-Earth creation."

More than a century and a half after British naturalist Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species, which suggested that life evolved over millions of years from one-cell organisms, quite a few people agree with Henard, pollsters say.

When the Gallup Poll asked people about their views on the subject last March, 47 percent of Americans polled said that God created humans pretty much in their present form some time in the last 10,000 years. That belief was strongest among those with less education, regular churchgoers, people 65 and older, and Republicans.

Recruiting Dinosaurs

Like a natural history museum or an amusement park, the Creation Museum will use people's fascination with dinosaurs as a draw.

There will be 80 lifelike dinosaur models, some of which move their heads and tails and roar.

"The evolutionists use dinosaurs to promote their world view; we're going to use that to promote our world view," Answers in Genesis spokesman Mark Looy said.

More than 50 videos will be shown at the various exhibits, and a "special-effects" theater will have seats that shake as visitors are hit with tiny mists of water. The opening show features an animatronic young woman struggling with her belief in God, while two angels that she can't see are on the screen behind her. Ham describes it as the only part of the museum that is "lighthearted" and "edgy."

The museum has a planetarium. But its programs, unlike those at other planetariums, will say that the light from the stars we see did not take millions of years to get here.

There also is a reproduction of a portion of the Grand Canyon. The message there is that it was created very quickly, from the waters from Noah's flood. The fossils in rock layers there and in many other places around the world are of animals that drowned in the flood, the museum says.

Some of the exhibits would be the envy of any natural history museum.

There are, for example, 10,000 minerals from a collection that was donated to the museum, fossil dinosaur eggs from China that Ham says are worth $40,000, and a donated collection of dinosaur toys that has been valued at $50,000.

There also will be an exhibit suggesting that belief in evolution is the root of most of modern society's evils. It shows models of children leaving a church where the minister believes in evolution. Soon the girl is on the phone to Planned Parenthood, while the boy cruises the Internet for pornography sites.

The museum already has generated international publicity and criticism.

Comedian Bill Maher, who often mocks religion, came by last month. Looy said he snuck in for a half-hour interview with Ham, who didn't know who he was.


The museum and Answers in Genesis also are the unflattering subject of a chapter of American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. The book, published last year, is by former New York Times correspondent Chris Hedges.

Tom Caradonio, president of the Northern Kentucky Convention and Visitors Commission, said the museum is expected to bring plenty of people to the region, including religious conventions.

Asked about the contention that the museum will embarrass the state, Caradonio noted that Lexington allows betting on horses at Keeneland Race Course, which some find objectionable.

"I learned a long time ago in this industry that if we had to make moral judgments, we would probably end up selling nothing," he said.

Saturday, April 14, 2007

I am not a regal princess...

Holy shit.

I guess a daughter's sexuality is property of her father? Gross.

May I recommend a showing of this at the next Purity Ball?








Monday, April 9, 2007

our future now

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Saturday, April 7, 2007

back to babyhood

I'm moving to Missouri in October.

Please visit me!

The Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage is an Intentional Community committed to environmental sustainability and egalitarian living. Feminism and cooperation are two fundamental philosophies of this living community project.

In 1997, the founding members purchased 280 acres of land in rural Missouri. The Dancing Rabbit is currently home to 19 people and three dogs. The community has a flexible structure and allows for multiple living arrangements including sub-communities, cohousing, and individual households. The goal of the project is to create a self-reliant society of 500 – 1000 residents. The long-term goal is to create a village made up of smaller communities, formed by individuals or groups, within the village. There are already two active sub-communities in the village, organizing small organic business cooperatives and group income sharing.

While social diversity is promoted through the development of these sub-communities, all members must agree to the basic covenants of the larger village. These six basic rules include, no use of automobiles other than the biodiesel powered vehicles available through the on-site cooperative, no use of fossil fuels, all agriculture/horticulture must be produced organically, all power consumed by the village must derive from renewable and sustainable sources, no lumber harvested from outside of the bioregion (unless it is reused/reclaimed) may be used in the community, and all members must adhere to the waste disposal system of reclaiming organic and recyclable materials.

Dancing Rabbit uses a self-defined feminist/egalitarian committee-based system to reach group consensus. The process for making decisions that affect the entire village has changed over the years. The village required full group consensus for all decisions during the early period of development. It soon became apparent that many members preferred ceding some of the power of full consensus to smaller committees. This reduced the amount of time each individual spent in meetings, while creating specialized groups to work on specific issues. However, every village member is guaranteed the opportunity to provide input and no decision is finalized unless each member can agree to the terms of a committee’s proposal. This often requires debate and compromise, as the village members believe that each person offers “a piece of truth” to the discussion. Through this system, everyone is empowered to make a direct contribution to the development of the project.

To stimulate the local village economy and reduce dependency on the larger US economic structure, community currency is being produced in hour value denominations. This helps to foster an equalizing effect on the importance of each individual’s contribution to the village. In this system, one hour of childcare is equivalent to one hour of biodiesel production. Jobs created within the village do not rely on conventional gender role expectations found in the larger patriarchal culture. Individuals of any gender identity are encouraged to pursue work that interests them. This, of course, is also a reflection of the project’s core feminist ideals. As a way to reduce the cost of living, the village also participates in the Conservation Reserve Program. The community has a contract with the federal government that pays an annual stipend to “perform erosion-control measures, plant trees, and encourage wildlife conservation.”

So, I'm selling my shit and heading west by foot. If any of you would like to join me, I'm going to start a sub-community called Froogins.

This is a dancing rabbit...
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This is also a dancing rabbit...
http://www.dancingrabbit.org/

egg cycle

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