Farewell

Dear Friends, Family, and Blog Sibs---

After a long period of reflection, I have to admit that I simply can't blog for now. Whether this will turn out to be a permanent situation or just a need for a long break really doesn't matter; the effect is the same. I don't have the energy or the heart to tackle the criminals ruining my country or the eloquence and intellectual organization needed to lay it out. I flounder in despair when I think too hard on the events of the last 5 years, which is pretty useless for blogging purposes. I want to put my energy into changes at work, helping my husband with his activism, and toward physical and mental exercise aimed at helping me heal and re-group. My work was never very widely read anyway, and only a handful of people (but some of the very best readers and bloggers around, so quality certainly made up for quantity) ever noticed it. I'm not a very social animal by nature, and the furious networking so endemic to finding an audience on the internet has been hard for me to do. I also thought that a little break after NOLA would be all I needed to get back to the keyboard. That little break turned into a month, and then till the end of the year, and yet still, after almost 3 months, I still feel tired and overwhelmed at the thought of slipping back into the old writing routine.

So I ask your understanding in accepting this bow-out. I am so grateful to have met all of you, either in person or by ether, and hope to maintain some kind of contact over time. I am thankful to those of you who bore my intermittence with such patience, and have allowed me to continue to post on your sites with no strings attached. But I am unreliable and distracted, and to maintain any further pretense that I am an active member of the blogging community is ridiculous, and unfair to others who have counted on me in the past.

I will be posting this farewell on my own site, and will probably keep it up until I either decide to come back to blogging, or say "The hell with it" and tear it all down. I don't want to burn ALL my bridges.

I will be reading your posts and comments. Be well.

Riggsveda

Tantra For The Tongue

Thanks to NYTimes

For the last 7 days, the 2nd-3rd most e-mailed story in the NYTimes has been about macaroni and cheese. Not only macaroni and cheese, but cats. Do you need any further evidence that our nation's people are paralyzed by the deepest clinical depression since 1932? I cried at Brokeback Mountain, I freaked over Terry Gilliam's dispatch of an adorable kitten in The Brothers Grimm, yet I sit here hardly lifting a finger as my country goes down the tubes and we skate ever closer to genuine facism. I am Exhibit 1 for the case for public depression.

So as long as we're going to be depressed, let's wallow in it. Below is the recipe I got for mac and cheese from a former co-worker. It is better than the NYTimes recipes for mac and chees. It is better than any mac and cheese I've ever had, and may well be a tantric meditation leading to one's final entry into heaven when eaten.

(BTW, the "Out of Iraq" event went rather well, and we hope to do more and similar events in the future. Thanks to those who came or spread tyhe word. Stay tuned.)

BW's Macaroni and Cheese

• 2 blocks each of Kraft sharp, extra sharp, and mild cheddars, shredded
• Big box of Velveeta
• 4 eggs
• 3 cans evaporated milk and a little whole milk
• 3 1/2 one-pound boxes of elbow macaroni
• Salt to taste
• Breadcrumbs if desired

In saucepan combine canned milk with Velveeta. Stir till melted, add salt.

Cook macaroni.
In large pot or dish, combine macaroni, shredded cheese, and cheese sauce.

Add eggs.

Put in casserole, top with shredded cheese and breadcrumbs.

Bake at 350 degrees about 1 1/2 hours.

This should feed 40. If you have any left over, give me a call.

The Constitution Under Fire: Making War on Democracy to Make War in Iraq

For those of you in the greater Philadelphia area, here's a chance to join a dialogue on the Iraq war and the evisceration of the Constitution that made it possible, as well as the danger arising from the current expansion of executive power that threatens to throttle the safeguards originally built into the "balance of powers". The event is part of a nationwide “Out of Iraq” effort co-sponsored by Progressive Democrats of America, Democrats.com, AfterDowningStreet.org, Gold Star Families for Peace and others. It all starts this Saturday morning.

The framers of the Constitution understood that one of the most consequential powers of a government is the ability to wage war. They intentionally made that option difficult to exercise by leaving the various states responsible for maintaining fighting forces in the form of militias and requiring an Act of Congress to declare war.

Lately, however, it seems we find our nation in a perpetual state of war and constantly putting our troops in harm's way, be it in Granada,Panama, Vietnam, Afghanistan or Iraq.

How has the Constitution been manipulated by recent administrations to provide seemingly unlimited power to the president to wage war and suspend basic civil rights such as habeus corpus and due process? To begin to answer this question and find out how we can change the current course of events, we'll hear from some experts on the subject.

Mark Crispin Miller, Professor of Political Science at NYU and author of numerous books including The Bush Dyslexicon and Cruel and Unusual, will speak through his film A Patriot Act, a chilling indictment of the stealth movement within the Bush administration to subvert the US Constitution and replace American democracy with their own peculiar set of religious values.

Chuck Pennachio, Professor of American History at Philadelphia's University of the Arts and candidate for US Senate, will attend and has been asked to speak about the national security apparatus and how its abuse has created the potential for a police state that threatens our privacy and liberty.

Joe Hoeffel, former US Congressman from Montgomery County and 2004 candidate for US Senate will talk about recent news that the President of the United States has ordered wiretaps and email intercepts of US citizens without proper court oversight.

Date: Saturday, January 7, 2006
Time: 9:00 AM

Location: United Food and Commercial Workers #1776
Address: 3031 Walton Road, Plymouth Meeting, PA 19462

Click here to RSVP.

Click here for map.

A $5 contribution to defray costs will be requested but no one will be turned away.

Special 2 for 1 "Bring a Friend" coupons are available here.


If you would like to help organize this event or join the host committee as a sponsor, please Email the Host

Sponsored by Montgomery County Democracy for America