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ADD MY NEW LJ PLEASE

IT'S TIME FOR A NEW CHAPTER :)

Vegan Barbecue Ribz
Submitted by Lucky

HOW GOOD DOES THIS LOOK?????

Ingredients:

* 2/3 cup of water
* 2 Tbl spoons soy butter
* 3 Tbl spoons peanut butter
* 8 Tbl spoons wheat gluten
* 7 Tbl spoons nutritional yeast
* 9 Tbl spoons whole wheat flour
* 1 cup BBQ sauce
* spices to taste (onion powder, garlic powder, paprika, etc)

Directions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

Heat soy butter and add the peanut butter, mixing it so that it's consistent throughout.

Mix the wheat gluten, nutritional yeast, wheat flower and spices in a dry bowl. Add the water and knead until almost all of the dry powder is absorbed. Do not over-knead. This dough is really sticky.

Form the dough into a flat shape about one-half inch thick. Add one-half of the peanut butter mixture to the top of the flattened dough. Use your fingers to poke the peanut butter mixture deeply into the dough. Do this for about 30 seconds. Turn the dough over and pour the remaining half of the peanut butter mixture onto the dough, again using your fingers to poke into the dough.

Use a pizza cutter to cut one-half inch strips of dough. Make them as long or as short as you like them. Lay out on a lightly oiled baking pan. Bake for about 10 minutes.

After 10 minutes, use a spatula to turn the "ribs" over. Spoon or brush on BBQ sauce and return to the oven.

Bake for another 5 minutes. Remove and turn the ribs over again. Spoon or brush on some more BBQ sauce.

Bake for another 5 minutes. Remove and enjoy your hot, sweet and sticky "ribz!"

Makes enough for four.

I feel very proud of myself right now. I love moments like these. They are re-affirming.

An organization on our campus, a sorority, is having a event entitled "womanless beauty pageant"
It is to raise money for relay for life which supports the american cancer society. Good cause yes, bad fundraiser.

On their event page on facebook it said something like for you men who like to act like women, haha
and also some men come out and embarrass yourselves and girls you know you wanna watch

I posted last night that I was offended by the statements. There is nothing embarrassing about female illusionists, drag queens, those who defy gender, those who refuse to claim a gender, those who do not fit the "normal" gender roles, expectations, norms that we as society have sadly placed on everyone, or even those who just want to dress in "the opposite" sexs clothes ( even though that is highly desiginated as what is expected of a male or female).

My comment was deleted as well as a few other members of Allies who were also ofended and hurt by the event, some of them which are female illusionists/ drag queens themselves.

Today in our meeting for the drag show that we hold every year on campus that raises money for the hiv/aids population we discussed this. Apparently, now faculty members on campus are aware of it and are discussing actions to take. We have spoken to several of these people individually about our feelings including two program board members who are also managers or presidents of the board, who are also highly upset and offended about it. They drafted up a letter to tons of other faculty members making them aware of this event and the damage it could do. We are not so sure what will become of this event. I just made our advisor for Allies aware of it so that her her voice could be heard.

The event has been reworded and also now includes an apology to those she has offended. They said there intention was not do so, if we do not support or are "opposed by it" then we should not go ( "but she understands") she says but the event will go on....
So i guess we are just simply supposed to not go and let this event become an atmosphere and environment be an okay place where people can laugh, ridicule, and poke fun of gender benders, genderless, drag queens, glbt individuals, "effeminate males", masculine women, female illusionists.... I THINK NOT

she said that she does not feel like we should detest ast or its participants where we never once said that we detested them just that we were disappointed offended and upset. We have all responded professionally. I made sure to let them know that I never attacked them, just their idea/event, and wanted to bring awareness and education about this because as she said she did not intend for it to offend anyone, problem is that many people do not know that this is offensive. I am a social justice advocate. I refuse to keep my mouth shut when there are opportunities for education and awareness and advocacy anywhere, especially on campus,

Even if the event is going to go on, our voices will be heard and the campus as well as faculty members and adminstrators will know that this is hurtful, offensive, and demeaning, that only enforced untrue, rude, and negative stereotypes

i posted this sometime ago on my myspace. i forgot who wrote it
it is exactly what i am searching for and forget about sometimes.

The lives we lead, and the lives we wish we led.

This world, the so-called "real world," is just a front. Pull back the curtain and you'll see the libraries are all filled with runaways writing novels, the highways are humming with escapees and sympathizers, all the receptionists and sensible mothers are straining at the leash for a chance to show how alive they still are. . . and all that talk of practicality and responsibility is just threats and bluffing to keep us from reaching out our hands to find that heaven lies in reach before us.

You can taste it in the shock and roar of a first, unexpected kiss, or in the blood in your mouth that instant after an accident when you realize you're still alive. It blows in the wind you feel on the rooftops of a really reckless night of adventure. You hear it in the magic of your favorite songs, how they lift and transport you in ways that no science or psychology could ever account for. It might be you've seen evidence of it scratched into bathroom walls in a code without a key, or you've been able to make out a pale reflection of it in the movies they make to keep us entertained. It's in between the words when we speak of our desires and aspirations, still lurking somewhere beneath the limitations of being "practical" and "realistic."

When poets and radicals stay up until sunrise, wracking their brains for the perfect sequence of words or deeds to fill hearts (or cities) with fire, they're trying to find a hidden entrance to it. When children escape out the window to go wandering late at night, or freedom fighters search for a weakness in government fortifications, they're trying to sneak into it—for they know better than us where the doors are hidden. When teenagers vandalize a billboard to provoke all-night chases with the police, or anarchists interrupt an orderly demonstration to smash the windows of a corporate chain store, they're trying to storm its gates.

When you're making love and you discover a new sensation or region of your lover's body, and the two of you feel like explorers discovering a new part of the world on a par with a desert oasis or the coast of an unknown continent, as if you are the first ones to reach the north pole or the moon, you are charting its frontiers.

It's not a safer place than this one—on the contrary, it is the sensation of danger there that brings us back to life: the feeling that for once, for one moment that seems to eclipse the past and future, there is something real at stake.

Maybe you stumbled into it by accident, once, amazed at what you found. The old world splintered behind and inside you, and no physician or metaphysician could put it back together again. Everything before became trivial, irrelevant, ridiculous as the horizons suddenly telescoped out around you and undreamt-of new paths offered themselves. And perhaps you swore that you would never return, that you would live out the rest of your life electrified by that urgency, in the thrill of discovery and transformation—but return you did.

Common sense dictates that this world can only be experienced temporarily, that it is just the shock of transition, and no more; but the myths we share around our fires tell a different story: we hear of women and men who stayed there for weeks, years, who never returned, who lived and died there as heroes. We know, because we feel it in that atavistic chamber of our hearts that holds the memory of freedom from a time before time, that this secret world is near, waiting for us. You can see it in the flash in our eyes, in the abandon of our dances and love affairs, in the protest or party that gets out of hand.

You're not the only one trying to find it. We're out here, too . . . some of us are even waiting there for you. And you should know that anything you've ever done or considered doing to get there is not crazy, but beautiful, noble, necessary.

Revolution is simply the idea we could enter that secret world and never return; or, better, that we could burn away this one, to reveal the one beneath entirely.

MSNBC has a long trend-piece about how increasingly younger girls are getting bikini waxing. How young? Well, Wanda Stawczyk, who runs Wanda's European Skin Care on West 57th Street, offers discounts for clients as young as 8, and she says pre-teen business is booming, telling the Post that "in 10 years waxing children will be like taking them to the dentist or putting braces on their teeth." Her company’s website says it all:

"Virgin-waxing for children 8 years old and up who have never shaved before. Virgin hair can be waxed so successfully that growth can be permanently stopped in just 2 to 6 sessions. Save your child a lifetime of waxing... and put the money in the bank for her college education instead

And leave it to the Post to enlighten those readers “interested in whether there's even hair to wax. Pre-puberty hair, called ‘velus,’ is a fine, light pigmented hair. When a child hits puberty - which these days is happening to kids as young as 9 - the hair coarsens and darkens.” And must be torn out by the roots if you don't want the other girls to laugh at you! Of course some people, like child psychiatrist Candida Fink, think “this is another example of how younger and younger girls are being sexualized and objectified.” And Dr. Diane Levin, co-author of the book So Sexy So Soon, tells MSNBC that “girls are learning the worst possible lessons about body image and body hair. Keep your bodies like little girls’ because that’s what men like.” Anyway, better you hear about all this here, in a safe place, instead of from your creepy co-worker. Or did we just become your creepy co-worker?
*/

From here - http://gothamist.com/2008/08/15/virgin_bikini_waxing_now_popular_fo.php


And now they're doing it to little girls.

This salon offers "'Virgin'-waxing for children 8 years old and up who have never shaved before. Virgin hair can be waxed so successfully that growth can be permanently stopped in just 2 to 6 sessions. Save your child a lifetime of waxing... and put the money in the bank for her college education instead! Ask about our special children's prices."

The Post reports that salons all over the city are seeing hundreds of moms signing up their daughters for this procedure. And according to this extensive story in Philadelphia, it's happening there, too, where pediatricians can't remember the last time they saw pubic hair on pubescent girls, and narcissism is getting a leg up on the next generation.

So I am in The Vagina Monologues again this year. It's different cos last year I directed it, I am just performing in it. It just means a lot to me. Plus the money raised goes to Shenandoah Women's Center, which is where I am interning this year, so it is even more special this year. I am doing My Vagina Was My Village" this year. And trying out for Eve Ensler's new written spotlight monologues entitled Baptized. I hope that I get it. If not, it is okay. Anyways, you should really watch this video below.
It is performed by Sarah Kramer who is a sweet vegan cook who has lots of cute vegan cook books out. This is the funniest version of CUNT i have ever seen! It will make you laugh so do it!

Video of killing on link below. This makes my fucking blood boil. It's so fucking scary.The update is also on the link below. Police take the time to urge Jerry Brown to take this case and continue to look into BART
killings.

Dear friend,

On New Year's Eve, Oscar Grant was shot execution-style by a transit police officer in Oakland, California. He was shot in the back while face-down on a subway platform--unarmed and posing no threat.

Twelve days later--despite several videos showing exactly what happened--the officer who killed Grant hasn't been arrested, charged, or even questioned. He quit the force and has refused to speak. The District Attorney has done nothing.

It's time to demand that California Attorney General Jerry Brown take over the case and arrest Grant's killer, and to ask that the US Department of Justice launch an independent investigation into the conduct of local authorities.
Please join me:

http://www. colorofchange. org/oscar/?id=2147-533699

Oscar Grant is the third man murdered by BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) police in the past 17 years. All three victims were Black and none posed a serious threat. In each case, BART and county authorities have failed to hold the officers accountable.

In the previous cases, BART's internal investigations concluded that the officers felt threatened by the victims and were justified in pulling the trigger.
It's unbelievable given the circumstances of the killings:

- In 1992, 19-year-old Jerrold Hall was shot in the back by a BART officer as he tried to leave the parking lot of a station. The officer was responding to reports of an armed robbery and said he suspected that Hall and a friend were involved. The officer tried to detain the two, Hall ran and then the officer shot him in the back and killed him. Hall was unarmed, but the officer said he thought Hall was on his way to get a gun and return for a showdown.

- In 2001, a mentally ill man named Bruce Seward was the next victim of the rogue force. Seward, 42, was naked and had been sleeping on a bench outside the BART station when an officer approached him. Seward did grab the officer's nightstick at one point, but there were several options for subduing him. Instead, the officer shot and killed him.

In addition to BART's internal investigation, Alameda County's District Attorney is also investigating Oscar Grant's murder--but the office's record on investigating police killings is horrible too. In both cases just described, the District Attorney bought BART's argument that the officers felt threatened. As a result, the cops were cleared of any wrongdoing.

In the case of Grant's murder, the DA has already let 12 days pass while doing essentially nothing--the officer who killed Grant is able to travel and leave the state, and he's free to talk with other officers and attempt to construct a story to justify his killing of Oscar Grant.

The problem with Alameda County's DA goes beyond BART police murders. In the past two years alone, there have been 11 fatal police shootings in Oakland (not including that of Oscar Grant). When asked, the officials at the District Attorney's office could not remember a single case in the last 20 years where an on-duty cop had been charged in a fatal shooting in Alameda County. It gives the clear appearance that the District Attorney's office just doesn't have the will to prosecute police crimes.

California's Attorney General needs to step in now and arrest Oscar Grant's murderer. And the US Department of Justice should investigate the failure of the authorities in Alameda County to act. It's the first step towards justice. After that, we will push for systemic changes to create public accountability for BART and other police departments. Creating those structural changes will be a much longer fight, but Oscar Grant's tragic death is a wake-up call that should give us a real chance to help prevent this from happening again.

Please join me in demanding justice, and then ask your family and friends to do the same:

http://www. colorofchange. org/oscar/?id=2147-533699

Thanks.

Uncritical Exuberance?
Judith Butler

Very few of us are immune to the exhilaration of this time. My friends on the left write to me that they feel something akin to "redemption" or that "the country has been returned to us" or that "we finally have one of us in the White House." Of course, like them, I discover myself feeling overwhelmed with disbelief and excitement throughout the day, since the thought of having the regime of George W. Bush over and gone is an enormous relief. And the thought of Obama, a thoughtful and progressive black candidate, shifts the historical ground, and we feel that cataclysm as it produces a new terrain. But let us try to think carefully about the shifted terrain, although we cannot fully know its contours at this time. The election of Barack Obama is historically significant in ways that are yet to be gauged, but it is not, and cannot be, a redemption, and if we subscribe to the heightened modes of identification that he proposes ("we are all united") or that we propose ("he is one of us"), we risk believing that this political moment can overcome the antagonisms that are constitutive of political life, especially political life in these times. There have always been good reasons not to embrace "national unity" as an ideal, and to nurse suspicions toward absolute and seamless identification with any political leader. After all, fascism relied in part on that seamless identification with the leader, and Republicans engage this same effort to organize political affect when, for instance, Elizabeth Dole looks out on her audience and says, "I love each and every one of you."

It becomes all the more important to think about the politics of exuberant identification with the election of Obama when we consider that support for Obama has coincided with support for conservative causes. In a way, this accounts for his "cross-over" success. In California, he won by 60% of the vote, and yet some significant portion of those who voted for him also voted against the legalization of gay marriage (52%). How do we understand this apparent disjunction? First, let us remember that Obama has not explicitly supported gay marriage rights. Further, as Wendy Brown has argued, the Republicans have found that the electorate is not as galvanized by "moral" issues as they were in recent elections; the reasons given for why people voted for Obama seem to be predominantly economic, and their reasoning seems more fully structured by neo-liberal rationality than by religious concerns. This is clearly one reason why Palin's assigned public function to galvanize the majority of the electorate on moral issues finally failed. But if "moral" issues such as gun control, abortion rights and gay rights were not as determinative as they once were, perhaps that is because they are thriving in a separate compartment of the political mind. In other words, we are faced with new configurations of political belief that make it possible to hold apparently discrepant views at the same time: someone can, for instance, disagree with Obama on certain issues, but still have voted for him. This became most salient in the emergence of the counter Bradley-effect, when voters could and did explicitly own up to their own racism, but said they would vote for Obama anyway. Anecdotes from the field include claims like the following: "I know that Obama is a Muslim and a Terrorist, but I will vote for him anyway; he is probably better for the economy." Such voters got to keep their racism and vote for Obama, sheltering their split beliefs without having to resolve them.

Along with strong economic motivations, less empirically discernible factors have come into play in these election results. We cannot underestimate the force of dis-identification in this election, a sense of revulsion that George W. has "represented" the United States to the rest of the world, a sense of shame about our practices of torture and illegal detention, a sense of disgust that we have waged war on false grounds and propagated racist views of Islam, a sense of alarm and horror that the extremes of economic deregulation have led to a global economic crisis. Is it despite his race, or because of his race, that Obama finally emerged as a preferred representative of the nation? Fulfilling that representative-function, he is at once black and not-black (some say "not black enough" and others say "too black"), and, as a result, he can appeal to voters who not only have no way of resolving their ambivalence on this issue, but do not want one. The public figure who allows the populace to sustain and mask its ambivalence nevertheless appears as a figure of "unity": this is surely an ideological function. Such moments are intensely imaginary, but not for that reason without their political force.

As the election approached, there has been an increased focus on the person of Obama: his gravity, his deliberateness, his ability not to lose his temper, his way of modeling a certain evenness in the face of hurtful attacks and vile political rhetoric, his promise to reinstate a version of the nation that will overcome its current shame. Of course, the promise is alluring, but what if the embrace of Obama leads to the belief that we might overcome all dissonance, that unity is actually possible? What is the chance that we may end up suffering a certain inevitable disappointment when this charismatic leader displays his fallibility, his willingness to compromise, even to sell out minorities? He has, in fact, already done this in certain ways, but many of us "set aside" our concerns in order to enjoy the extreme un-ambivalence of this moment, risking an uncritical exuberance even when we know better. Obama is, after all, hardly a leftist, regardless of the attributions of "socialism" proffered by his conservative opponents. In what ways will his actions be constrained by party politics, economic interests, and state power; in what ways have they been compromised already? If we seek through this presidency to overcome a sense of dissonance, then we will have jettisoned critical politics in favor of an exuberance whose phantasmatic dimensions will prove consequential. Maybe we cannot avoid this phantasmatic moment, but let us be mindful about how temporary it is. If there are avowed racists who have said, "I know that he is a Muslim and a terrorist, but I will vote for him anyway," there are surely also people on the left who say, "I know that he has sold out gay rights and Palestine, but he is still our redemption." I know very well, but still: this is the classic formulation of disavowal. Through what means do we sustain and mask conflicting beliefs of this sort? And at what political cost?

There is no doubt that Obama's success will have significant effects on the economic course of the nation, and it seems reasonable to assume that we will see a new rationale for economic regulation and for an approach to economics that resembles social democratic forms in Europe; in foreign affairs, we will doubtless see a renewal of multi-lateral relations, the reversal of a fatal trend of destroying multilateral accords that the Bush administration has undertaken. And there will doubtless also be a more generally liberal trend on social issues, though it is important to remember that Obama has not supported universal health care, and has failed to explicitly support gay marriage rights. And there is not yet much reason to hope that he will formulate a just policy for the United States in the Middle East, even though it is a relief, to be sure, that he knows Rashid Khalidi.

The indisputable significance of his election has everything to do with overcoming the limits implicitly imposed on African-American achievement; it has and will inspire and overwhelm young African-Americans; it will, at the same time, precipitate a change in the self-definition of the United States. If the election of Obama signals a willingness on the part of the majority of voters to be "represented" by this man, then it follows that who "we" are is constituted anew: we are a nation of many races, of mixed races; and he offers us the occasion to recognize who we have become and what we have yet to be, and in this way a certain split between the representative function of the presidency and the populace represented appears to be overcome. That is an exhilarating moment, to be sure. But can it last, and should it?

To what consequences will this nearly messianic expectation invested in this man lead? In order for this presidency to be successful, it will have to lead to some disappointment, and to survive disappointment: the man will become human, will prove less powerful than we might wish, and politics will cease to be a celebration without ambivalence and caution; indeed, politics will prove to be less of a messianic experience than a venue for robust debate, public criticism, and necessary antagonism. The election of Obama means that the terrain for debate and struggle has shifted, and it is a better terrain, to be sure. But it is not the end of struggle, and we would be very unwise to regard it that way, even provisionally. We will doubtless agree and disagree with various actions he takes and fails to take. But if the initial expectation is that he is and will be "redemption" itself, then we will punish him mercilessly when he fails us (or we will find ways to deny or suppress that disappointment in order to keep alive the experience of unity and unambivalent love).

If a consequential and dramatic disappointment is to be averted, he will have to act quickly and well. Perhaps the only way to avert a "crash" – a disappointment of serious proportions that would turn political will against him – will be to take decisive actions within the first two months of his presidency. The first would be to close Guantanamo and find ways to transfer the cases of detainees to legitimate courts; the second would be to forge a plan for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq and to begin to implement that plan. The third would be to retract his bellicose remarks about escalating war in Afghanistan and pursue diplomatic, multilateral solutions in that arena. If he fails to take these steps, his support on the left will clearly deteriorate, and we will see the reconfiguration of the split between liberal hawks and the anti-war left. If he appoints the likes of Lawrence Summers to key cabinet positions, or continues the failed economic polices of Clinton and Bush, then at some point the messiah will be scorned as a false prophet. In the place of an impossible promise, we need a series of concrete actions that can begin to reverse the terrible abrogation of justice committed by the Bush regime; anything less will lead to a dramatic and consequential disillusionment. The question is what measure of dis-illusion is necessary in order to retrieve a critical politics, and what more dramatic form of dis-illusionment will return us to the intense political cynicism of the last years. Some relief from illusion is necessary, so that we might remember that politics is less about the person and the impossible and beautiful promise he represents than it is about the concrete changes in policy that might begin, over time, and with difficulty, bring about conditions of greater justice.