Quick & Easy Bread Crumb Making Tip: Freedom Kitchen Mantra #19 – Video

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Quick Easy Bread Crumb Making Tip: Freedom Kitchen Mantra #19
Freedom Refined Sunflower Oil presents Freedom Kitchen Mantra with Chef Puneet Mehta! In this episode of Kitchen Mantra, Chef Puneet shows us how easy it is to dry slices of bread in a microwave...

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Quick & Easy Bread Crumb Making Tip: Freedom Kitchen Mantra #19 - Video

March to freedom, peace, development

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We were deeply honored and very proud indeed to have been invited to keynote yesterdays (11 April) Capas Freedom March to our National Shrine at the site of the World War II Concentration Camp in ODonnell, Capas, Tarlac for Bataan Death March survivors. This was made possible through the partnership of the Department of National Defense, Department of Tourism, and the Automobile Association of the Philippines to honor our Filipino heroes of World War II.

It was the first sizeable, national-level re-enactment of the northern end-portion of the 101 km-long Death March with the secondary purpose of raising funds for a future Capas POW Camp replica.

THE SPIRIT OF BATAAN

To emphasize the occasions importance, let us recall the stirring tribute to the Filipino-American defenders of Bataan composed by then Captain Salvador Lopez later UP President and secretary of foreign affairs and broadcast over the Voice of Freedom by Lieutenant Norman Reyes on 09 April 1942:

BATAAN HAS FALLEN.

WITH HEADS BLOODY BUT UNBOWED, WE YIELD TO THE ENEMY.

THE WORLD WILL LONG REMEMBER THE EPIC STRUGGLE.

WE HAVE STOOD UP UNCOMPLAINING.

BESIEGED ON LAND AND BLOCKADED BY SEA,

WE HAVE DONE ALL THAT HUMAN ENDURANCE COULD BEAR.

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March to freedom, peace, development

Steve Nelson: Religious Freedom Claims Take the Cake

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The excitement over religious freedom in Indiana and Arkansas was near ecstatic. Such fervor over cakes, flowers and pizza! A fine phrase, albeit a bit trite, characterizes the various iterations of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act: a solution desperately seeking a problem.

The solution sought by Indiana and Arkansas (and other states) legislators is clear: Protect the much-beleaguered faithful from the constant liberal assaults on their religion. The problem is that there is no problem. And therein lies the rub. Whether one believes any particular legislative solution wise, there first must be a religious freedom problem to correct.

And there is not. This issue has been a public relations triumph for the religious right. Even the name of the bill is pure politics: Religious Freedom Restoration Act implies a loss of religious freedom that must be legislatively restored. Such a loss never occurred. If anything, the principle under insidious attack in America is secularism.

I could understand legislation that protected religious freedom if: Christians were being prevented from going to church; stopped from crossing themselves before free throw attempts; fired for wearing a crucifix; or jailed for singing Christmas Carols on Main Street. I could also understand religious freedom legislation if the faithful were being constrained from doing actual Christian things: addressing poverty; loving thy neighbor as thyself; doing unto others as wishing would be done unto them.

I could really understand the need for religious freedom legislation if any religious folks were being compelled to do something prohibited in their faith tradition: orthodox Jews forced to eat bacon; Catholic women required to take birth control pills; Muslim women made to wear bikinis in public.

But how does baking a cake or delivering flowers or pizza prevent or inhibit religious expression? The baker might have a good argument if prevented from reciting the Lords Prayer while frosting the cake. The pizza maker might well object if told to remove her crucifix when delivering the pizza to Adam and Steves wedding reception. But I fail to see the repression of religious freedom in the expectation of a business providing service to everyone.

Even the Hobby Lobby decision makes more sense than this. While I find Hobby Lobby and the Supreme Court position constitutionally untenable, there is at least the idea that indirectly providing birth control is to be vaguely complicit in an act that violates the conscience. Of course, this reasoning carried to a logical conclusion would relieve me of paying taxes, as I deeply object to the various wars waged on my dime, but logic has no place at this table.

The parallel to Hobby Lobby reasoning would be if the baker were expected to deliver condoms with the cake or the florist were expected to deflower the groom. But the connection between the provision of service and the violation of values in the Religious Freedom Restoration Act is not even up to the Hobby Lobby standard, and that is a very low bar indeed.

This recent flurry of legislative and judicial activity has been the religious rights tactic all along. They complain and litigate when children cant pray every morning in public school, as though that is a repression of religious expression, notwithstanding the unfettered right of the child and family to spend nearly all waking hours, outside of school, in fervent prayer if they wish. They insist on placement of the Ten Commandments in public spaces as though there is simply no other location available for demonstration of fidelity to God. The religious already have God on currency and in the speeches of nearly every politician. Legislative sessions begin with prayer. The Pledge of Allegiance, under God and all, is mandatory in almost every school in America. Yet its not enough for them.

Heres the truth: Those behind the various religious freedom laws are bullies. They are not fighting desperately to preserve their own religious freedom. They have, and have always had, complete freedom to practice their faith as much as they wish, without interference from anyone.

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Steve Nelson: Religious Freedom Claims Take the Cake

Materialism and the Devaluing of Life Part 1

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April 10, 2015|10:03 am

Materialism focuses attention on material security and quality of life in this world, yet the continued consistent application of the ideal of a high quality of life finally results in a devaluing and loss of life. That was the message of speakers at the L'Abri Fellowship conference on Life and Liberty, held Feb. 13-14 in Rochester, Minnesota, in two presentations that focused particularly on euthanasia and the history of the American eugenics movement.

Henk Reitsma of the L'Abri Fellowship's Dutch facility discussed the deterioration of respect for life in the Netherlands under the impact of the legalization and acceptance of euthanasia. Reitsma said we should not think that "we're on the safe side of the ocean, [that] this is not really a topic which is so relevant to us today." This is because the Dutch "serve as a window for the rest of the world." The beliefs now common in the Netherlands transcend borders in the Western world, and they are "painfully relevant." Indeed, these ideas of quality of life affect faithful Christians who may not at all agree with the radical departure from Christian morality now so common, because we are "children of our culture." He noted that for Francis Schaeffer, concern with the right to life was "a logical extension of his apologetic," not simply an "add-on." Reitsma said that a loss of belief in God affects how we deal with other people, and to "a loss of life and meaning."

Reitsma's own grandfather was killed involuntarily at a home for the elderly in the Netherlands. While a traditional Christian belief in the sanctity of life precludes euthanasia, people today want to know why we don't put people out of their suffering just as we do with animals. The contemporary world is "profoundly out of touch with what it is that makes it so special to be human." But we are different. "We think about how people will perceive and remember what we are doing." Each human life is endowed with "a weight of glory," Reitsma said.

A problem for this traditional understanding of the worth of humans is the utilitarian ethic. Pleasure is identified with good, pain with evil. But Reitsma said, "for outcomes in a human life meaning is more important than the presence or absence of pain." He pointed out that the Bible says that "if God should will it so, that you suffer for doing what is right rather than for doing what is wrong" (I Pet. 3:17). He also noted that the word "compassion," in its historic formulation, includes the meaning of "to hold on," or "to endure." True compassion, Reitsma said, is "to come alongside your fellow [suffering] human being[s], and hold on to them." For human life, "the presence or absence of pain is not all-defining." He spoke of an elderly frequent visitor to the Dutch L'Abri facility, noteworthy for her acute thinking, who declined to take sedatives to relieve the pain of her illness because they would cloud her mind. But Reitsma pointed out that ironically, in general, the more we have sedatives available in the Western world, the less remaining pain we are willing to accept.

In the utilitarian ethical context of the contemporary West, the meaning of compassion has been altered by the reigning doctrine of moral autonomy. Now it means, "providing someone with the space in which they can be fully autonomous, and do their own thing." Pro-euthanasia movies carry the message that "because your life is not perfect, it's not worth living when the immaterial fades, and the material becomes all-defining, the definition of what it is to be compassionate shifts. Then physical pain avoidance, and freedom in terms of immediate physical longings and lusts, becomes dominant."

The "quality of life" commitment of the Western elite has had perverse results in Asia, Reitsma said, where pre-natal sex identification technology and abortion have resulted in the loss of 160 million girls, with a resulting sex ratio of 122 boys to 100 girls in China and 112 boys to 100 girls in India. This catastrophic ratio is different from that of the past, when wars at times resulted in an imbalance of females over males. The latter imbalance was accommodated at times with polygamy. But a male over female ratio results in a more violent society, with rape common.

With philosophical materialism and utilitarian ethics coming to the fore as Western society becomes more secular, euthanasia is a "concept on the move," according to Reitsma. Whereas in the Netherlands, statistics once distinguished between active and passive euthanasia, now only cases of lethal injection are considered euthanasia, passive measures to effect death, and even physician assisted suicide, are no longer counted. Thus, Rick Santorum's claim that 10% of Dutch deaths are the result of euthanasia may be correct, or approximately correct, although by the current Dutch definition it was inaccurate.

Yet the rapidly rising rate of actively killing patients by lethal injection was made possible by the acceptance of passive measures, such as "continuous deep sedation," which keeps patients presumed to be near the end of life unconscious to avoid pain. In a world such as are emerging, people not only choose death for themselves (which remains wrong), but also for the weak and vulnerable that may not have chosen it for themselves. Such people may be eliminated for the good of society, which is caring for them, as well as their own suffering, according to the emerging utilitarian ethic. Reitsma mentioned the case of his own grandmother, who had a home for the elderly within 5 kilometers of where she lived, but moved instead to a conservative Christian home many hundreds of kilometers away, in a community where she knew no one, for fear that at the local home, she would be put to death. Against such an emerging secularist society, Reitsma said "to be human is to care for the vulnerable and the weak." It means that compassion involves much continuous care for those who may be suffering greatly, with little hope of a return to normal life. But it is what the Biblical doctrine of man in the image of God requires, and is a sure guard against the cancerous growth of a culture which chooses death over life.

The same choice of death over life, the essential part euthanasia, is also involved in eugenics, which has as its objective a more perfect life and the elimination of imperfections. This was discussed in a presentation by Dr. Christopher Hook, reviewed in a subsequent article.

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Materialism and the Devaluing of Life Part 1

Inside the New York hamlet that once was home to a pro-Nazi camp

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Yaphank in Long Island was founded in part by the German American Bund, a pro Nazi group that flourished in the 1930s They established Camp Siegfried in 1935 as a place for like-minded Aryans to drink beer, hold military demonstrations and learn about eugenics Yaphank remains a town in Long Island, but gone are the roads once called Adolf Hitler Street, Goebbels and Goering

By Dailymail.com Reporter

Published: 00:28 EST, 10 April 2015 | Updated: 06:34 EST, 10 April 2015

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Nestled in eastern Long Island is a sleepy little town called Yaphank where the streets have cozy names like Oak and Park, names that hide a dark past: they once bore signs like Hitler andGoebbels Streets.

Yaphank, in the 1930s, appeared as a haven for Americans--most of them of German heritage--who sympathized with the causes of the Third Reich.

In fact, it was largely founded as a Nazi camp, one of several scattered across the U.S., where the children in the German American Bund (AKA American Nazis) could fish, swim, hunt and learn about things like eugenics.

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Inside the New York hamlet that once was home to a pro-Nazi camp

Stamp duty: why does the UK commemorate so few writers?

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Wheres the author? Stamps from the Royal Mails Alice in Wonderland series. Photograph: Royal Mail

Maya Angelou led the way in knowing why the caged bird sang, but she apparently wasnt the first to assert enigmatically that a bird doesnt sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song. Nevertheless, the US Postal Service went ahead this week with issuing a stamp bearing these words alongside a sizeable, smiling image of the author. An unruffled spokesman did have an answer when the problem was drawn to his attention, saying the quote may have come originally from Joan Walsh Anglund, a childrens writer, but it was often attributed to Angelou, notably by Barack Obama.

For connoisseurs of such cock-ups, the misattribution will perhaps be most reminiscent of East Germanys 1956 blunder in issuing a Robert Schumann stamp with a score in the background that happened to be by Schubert. Normally, though, literary stamp controversies tend to involve objections to whos chosen as worthy of the honour, and sometimes whos implicitly deemed unworthy.

So when an anorak-clad, wand-firing Harry Potter began gracing US letters two years ago, there were all kinds of protests: patriots disliked having to lick a foreigners backside, progressives accused the Postal Service of cashing in on a film franchises success (as opposed to rewarding merit, in the yearly literary arts series the Angelou stamp belongs to), and hardcore Christians denounced the fting of fantasy and witchcraft. Other rows have involved the private lives of authors selected, or their views (Marie Stopess support for eugenics).

Related: Maya Angelous misquoted stamp - and other famous lines we all get wrong

Sets of stamps have also come in for criticism, as when Australia Post rather guilelessly chose as its Australian legends of the written word in 2010 Peter Carey, Bryce Courtenay, Thomas Keneally, David Malouf, Colleen McCullough and Tim Winton all white, and all bar one male, it was immediately pointed out.

The UKs Royal Mail has largely managed to avoid such philatelic fiascos, but not necessarily because its more rigorous its way of staying row-free seems to be to issue as few such stamps as possible, aided by two factors: the ban on depicting living figures other than the sovereign up to 2005 (when Ashes cricketers appeared, followed in 2012 by Olympians but not so far living writers), and artists discernible reluctance to put a second head on a stamp that automatically has one already.

The latter factor means that, whether the authors are living or not, their characters will usually be shown rather than their faces, as seen (following recent issues similarly honouring, among others, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Ian Fleming, Roald Dahl and JK Rowling) in this years Alice anniversary set, offering a choice of 10 scenes from the book but no image of Lewis Carroll.

Look at a list of British writers who have appeared on stamps and the gaps are consequently glaring and the number remarkably small roughly the same as the 27 in the USs literary arts series, produced by a nation with only a 240-year history. The great British literary stamp scandal? Its that they so rarely celebrate authors themselves in the way that the Maya Angelou stamp splendidly does.

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Stamp duty: why does the UK commemorate so few writers?