Mmmmm – matcha green tea and sweet adzuki bean paste – a flavor combination we love add a Japanese twist to an American classic. Just the thing with piping hot green tea after a cold morning of birding.

Matcha green tea powder and adzuki beans may not be in everyone’s pantry, but they are always in ours. If you’ve been following this blog, you know that this flavor combination makes a regular appearance in our kitchen. When a friend gave me a recipe for maple bars, I couldn’t help imagining them stuffed with sweet adzuki bean paste (directions to make the paste here), and changing up the frosting recipe to include the zip of spiced matcha tea along with maple syrup. I think the original maple bar recipe somehow reminded me of cinnamon rolls. I’d made a version of cinnamon rolls where the adzuki bean paste was spiraled into a dough which in…

A drone was flying over this man’s property, so he shot it down.

And he was the one arrested!

He sounds like a reasonable person to me.  He didn’t shoot it down when it was farther away…but after it crossed his property lines, he felt within his rights to shoot it down.

Merideth told WRDB: “Well, I came out and it was down by the neighbor’s house, about 10 feet off the ground, looking under their canopy that they’ve got under their back yard. I went and got my shotgun and I said, ‘I’m not going to do anything unless it’s directly over my property.’

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Notice how the writer characterizes his method as “draconian”.  Since when is protecting one’s family draconian?  It wasn’t like he shot a person.

And homeowners do own the airspace above them…so yeah, he was well within his rights to defend his family and his…

“Hope Springs Eternal–The Ghost Dance,” by Howard Terpning

By Zig Zag, Warrior Publications, December 23, 2016

Over the last few months there’s been a lot of noise made about the power of peaceful prayers and ceremonies in resisting the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota. According to many participants, it was this emphasis on prayer that stopped the pipeline dead in its tracks, and paved the way for a historical victory.

Michigan billionaire Betsy DeVos is President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for US secretary of education.

America would do well to learn all it can about her and about the DeVos influence in the privatization of public education in Michigan, particularly the ed privatization Petri dish of Detroit.

The following are excerpts from a rather extensive, December 23, 2016, Truthout article, “The Great Unwinding of Public Education: Detroit and DeVos,” by retired professor and writer, Joseph Natoli, about the effects of “gentrifying investors seek[ing] to put price tags on what was previously public domain.” DeVos is a key player in such privatization games.

The excerpts illustrate how the games work. America needs to pay attention.

Bankruptcy following the collapse of the jobs that fueled the “Motor City” has exposed Detroit to the dynamics described by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine. A crisis, either arranged or accidental, precipitates a rush to…

Friends of Derya Okatan have confirmed for Scathing Purple Musings that she is in her 9th day of a hunger strike. She was jailed before Christmas for alleged connections to Redhack, a group claiming to be behind the leaked emails of a Turkish minister.

Banner drop during football game in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Jan 1, 2017.
by Levi Rickert, Native News Online, January 2, 2017
MINNEAPOLIS – The #NoDAPL movement received some publicity on Sunday afternoon at the NFL game between the Minnesota Vikings and Chicago Bears when two protesters hung a banner from hundreds of feet above the playing field. The banner included a US Bank logo, the word “divest” and #NoDAPL.

FreePress, a blog published in Europe, posted comments from a colleague of jailed journalist Ahmet Sik and brought some new details to light. Alican Uluda works with Sik at Cumhuriyet, a daily newspaper the Erdogan government considers an opposition publication.

He has continued to criticise the stance of the current government about the Kurdish issue and the Syrian crisis. I believe the real reason behind his detention is something else, although it is said that the reason is his criticism.

He was so close to reaching all the details required for the piece. My opinion is that his tweets aren’t the reason for his detention. The real goal is to prevent him from publishing the piece he has been working on. If the piece was to be published, there would be an upheaval within the ruling party (AKP). Ahmet Şık, who was put in jail for an unpublished book in 2011, has…

This just goes to repeating — so absolutely beautiful — musically and spiritually.

I am still reeling from yesterday’s post.  So I’m a jumble of mixed feelings today — hard to be positive in so much darkness.

If you’re feeling like me, just remember The Message: Do Unto Others As you Would Have Done to you — it’s in every major religion, as I’ve posted here >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

God Bless all of us that feed the Light and keep the Faith even in dark times such as this.